And then I found it: the emergency ejection code. If the physical body of these robots got too damaged, they were programmed to eject their central personality core right out of that body. Not just “eject;” the thing was flung like a mortar, to put it as far away as possible.

Of course, by itself that really wouldn’t do a lot. But I found the other thing a few moments later, in the on-board computer’s boot tables. I couldn’t believe it, in fact; it was such a big security hole that I spent a good minute or so checking to make sure it wasn’t some kind of honeypot. But no, apparently whoever programmed this computer had just borrowed the code from somewhere else and slapped it together without fully auditing it for backdoors.

On reboot, in the absence of a “main” controlling personality core, the computer would automatically elevate the next available core to full command. Even if that core was not actually ever meant to run the show.

So, all I needed was to trigger an eject, then a reboot.

Piece of cake.