I assume that New Eden has very good expert systems (such as AIMEDs, the AI doctors). So, a Rogue Drone might well have repurposed some kind of a command interface for simple communication, but that is not yet proof of sentience. Even systems like VILAMO (in "that book") aren't probably having human-level capabilities in general, while their abilities in limited areas might well be superhuman.
So, a simple AI doctor might be able to diagnose a wealth of diseases (we already have that kind of medical expert systems, except that they still require a human to operate), but it probably does not have the capabilities to talk about the weather. Similarly, a rogue drone might be capable of asking the reason why it is being attacked, but even if it got an answer, is it capable of processing that? (Well, ingame not of course. In fiction? Perhaps, depending on how it is programmed and whether or not that programming has been overwritten.)