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1 I’ve had clients who thought they needed an absurd level of security. (And I’m talking absurd even by my standards, and my code was developed by a bond company known for intense xenophobic paranoia, tempered only by desperate greed.) I’ve also had clients who thought they didn’t need any security at all, right up until something ate them. (That’s mostly a metaphor. My uneaten client stat is high.) Dr. Arada, who is what her marital partner Overse calls a “terminal optimist,” was somewhere in the comfortable middle zone. Dr. Thiago was firmly in the “Let’s investigate the dark cave without that pesky SecUnit” group. Which was why Arada was pressed against the wall next to the hatch to the open observation deck with her palms sweating on the stock of a projectile weapon and Thiago was standing out on said observation deck, trying to reason with a potential target. (That’s “potential” per the earlier conversation where Dr. Arada said Oh SecUnit, I wish you wouldn’t call people “targets” and Thiago had given me the look that usually means It just wants an excuse to kill someone.) But then, that was before the Potential Targets started to brandish their own large projectile-weapon collection. Anyway, those are the kind of things I think about while I’m swimming under a raider vessel that’s attempting to board our sea research facility. I swam out from under the stern, careful to avoid the propulsion device. I broke the surface quietly, stretched and caught the railing, and pulled myself up. The daylight was bright, the air clear, and I felt exposed. (Why couldn’t the stupid raiders attack at night?) I had drones in the air, giving me camera views of both decks of this stupid boat, so I knew this part of the stern was empty. The superstructure above me was triangular, angled back in a way to make it faster or something, I don’t know, I’m a murderbot, I don’t give a crap about boats. The upper deck wrapped around the bow where the forward weapon emplacement was.
It gave the stupid boat a lot of blindspots, which were someone else’s security nightmare. It was more sophisticated than the other boats we’d seen on this survey, with better tech. Of course that just made it vulnerable. I was also monitoring our outer perimeter and the scattered islands surrounding us, in case this was a distraction and there was a second boarding attempt planned. And of course I had a camera on the unfolding shitshow on the observation deck. Thiago stood out there nearly four meters from the hatchway, not even wearing his protective gear, very much like a human who didn’t trust his SecUnit’s situation assessment. The apparent leader of the Potential Targets stood at the edge of the deck, barely three meters away, casually pointing a projectile weapon at Thiago. I was more worried about the six other Potential Targets scattered around on the stupid boat’s bow deck, and the nozzle of the weapon mounted above the bow deck currently trained on the upper level of our facility. Some of the Potential Targets weren’t wearing helmets. There’s a thing you can do with these small intel drones (if your client orders you to, or if you don’t have a working governor module), when the hostiles are dumb enough to get aggressive without adequate body armor. You can accelerate a drone and send it straight at the hostile’s face. Even if you don’t hit an eye or ear and go straight through to the brain, you can make a crater in the skull. Doing this would solve the problem and get me back to new episodes of Lineages of the Sun much more quickly, but I knew Arada would make a sad face at me and Thiago would be pissed off. I would probably have to do it anyway. Unfortunately, Potential Target Leader was wearing a helmet. (Thiago is a marital partner of Dr. Mensah’s brother, which is why I gave a crap about his opinion.) Also, I had no intel yet on how many hostiles were inside the boat where the controls to the large weapon were.
Prematurely eliminating the visible targets (excuse me, potential targets) on deck might just tip us out of incipient shitshow into full-on shitshow. There was sort of a chance that Thiago might actually talk our way out of this. He was great at talking to other humans. But I had a drone waiting just inside the hatchway with Arada. (Overse would be upset if I let her marital partner get killed, and I liked Arada.) Still managing to sound calm despite everything, Thiago said, “There’s no need for any of this. We’re researchers, we’re not doing anything to hurt anyone here.” Potential Target Leader said something that our FacilitySystem translated through our feed as, “I showed you I’m serious. We’ll take what we want, then leave you in peace. Tell the others to come out.” “We’ll give you supplies, but not people,” Thiago said. “If you have nice supplies, I’ll leave the people.” “You didn’t have to shoot anyone.” Heat crept into Thiago’s voice. “If you needed supplies, we would have given them to you.” Don’t worry, the “anyone” who got shot was me. (Thiago, while violating the security protocol everyone agreed to IN ADVANCE, had walked out to the observation deck to greet the strangers on their stupid boat. I followed and pulled him back from the edge, and so Potential Target Leader shot me instead of him. Got me right in the shoulder. I managed to fall off the observation deck and miss the water intake. Yes, I was pissed off. “SecUnit, SecUnit, are you there—” Overse, in the facility’s command center, had shouted at me over the comm interface. Yes, I’m fine, I’d sent her over the feed. It’s a good thing I don’t bleed like a human because hostile marine fauna was about all this situation needed. I’ve got everything under fucking control, okay. “No, it says it’s fine,” I heard her relaying to the others on our comm. “Well, yes, it’s furious.”) I swung over the railing and dropped to the deck. I’d tuned my pain sensors down but I could feel the projectile wedged in next to my support framework and it was annoying.
Staying low, I crawled down the steps into the first cabin structure. The human inside was monitoring a primitive scanner system. (I’d jammed it even before I got shot, feeding it artistic static and random reports of anomalous energy signatures to keep it busy.) I choked her until she was unconscious and then broke her arm to give her something else to worry about if she revived too soon. I didn’t take her projectile weapon but I did pause to break a couple of its key components. The room was stuffed with bags and containers and other human crap. There were neat storage racks but everything was jumbled on the deck. We had seen eleven groups of strange humans in water boats from a distance, and had been contacted by two of them. Both had been what Thiago called “unusually divergent” and some of the others had called deeply weird. Both groups had taken the same elaborate precautions to show they were approaching in a non-hostile manner and had not displayed any weapons. Both groups had wanted to trade supplies with us. (Arada and the others had wanted to just give them what they needed, but Thiago had asked them to trade their stories of why they were here on this planet.) So okay, maybe Thiago had reason to suppose this group would also be non-hostile. But the earlier groups had given me a chance to develop a profile of local non-hostile approaches/interactions and this group hadn’t fit. Nobody fucking listens to me. Potential Target Leader and their friends aboard Stupid Boat were also dressed better than the other humans we’d encountered, in clothing that looked newer if not cleaner. There was no planetary feed (stupid planet) but Stupid Boat had its own rudimentary feed that was heavy with games and pornography but light on anything that might be helpful for a security assessment, like who these people were and what they wanted. Even the individual humans’ feed signatures only contained info about sexual availability and gender presentation, which I didn’t give a damn about.
I slipped through into a grimy metal corridor, then a human stepped out of the next doorway. I disarmed them and slammed their head into the floor. The door to the next compartment was closed, but one of my drones had landed on the roof earlier, flattened itself to a window, and got me some good scan and vid intel. That was kind of important, because this was the compartment with the control station for the large boat-busting projectile weapon that was currently pointed at our facility. According to the drone’s video, one small human sat in the weapon station, their attention on a primitive camera-based targeting screen. Three large humans, all armed, sat around casually on battered station chairs, though the other stations had missing or badly jury-rigged or outdated equipment. They were chatting, watching Thiago and Potential Target Leader on the screen, la la la, just another day at work. The compartment was a bulbous structure set to the right of the bow, and reinforced with metal to protect and support the large weapon. The six hostiles near the bow casually pointing projectile weapons at the facility’s observation deck were too far away to hear as long as I didn’t overdo it. So I snapped the lock and didn’t slam the door as I went through. I hit Target One at the weapon station with an energy pulse from my left arm, throat punch to Target Two as the others came to their feet, pivot and smash kneecap of Target Three, slap Target Four’s weapon aside and break collarbone. I’d already had FacilitySys prepare a translation for me, the only sentence I figured I’d need. I said, “Make a noise, and everybody dies.” Target One slumped unconscious over the weapon control station, wound steaming in the damp air. The other three stayed on the deck, whimpering and gurgling. One of the hostiles outside had glanced around, but didn’t change position.
Thiago, who was unexpectedly good at stalling, had avoided the question of whether the other researchers were going to come out on the observation deck so Potential Target Leader could decide if he wanted to abduct them or not. Thiago was now listing all our supplies and pretending to stumble over FacilitySys’s translation advice. (I knew he was pretending; he was a language expert among other things.) My drone view showed me that Potential Target Leader enjoyed watching Thiago sweat, and that maybe Thiago had noticed and was playing it up a little. He was pretty smart. Okay, okay, I admit that it was a little upsetting that Thiago didn’t trust me. (He and Mensah had had a conversation about me, back on Preservation Station when Arada was planning this survey. Transcript: Thiago: “I know I’m in the minority here, but I have serious reservations.” Mensah: “Arada is in charge of this survey, and she wants SecUnit. And frankly, if it isn’t the one providing security, I’ll withdraw my permission for Amena to go.” (Amena is one of Mensah’s children and yes, she is on our facility right now. No pressure!) Thiago: “You trust it that much?” Mensah: “With my life, literally. I know what it will do to protect her, and you, and the rest of the team. Of course, it has its faults. In fact, it’s probably listening to us right now. Are you listening, SecUnit?” Me, on the feed: What? No. I’d missed the rest. I’d thought it was better to shut down my tap on the room’s comm access and get out of there.) Target Two whispered something, which FacilitySys rendered as “What are you?” I said, “I’m a Shut Up or Get Your Head Smashed.” So that was two sentences I’d needed. I had to get out there because Target Leader had started to walk toward Thiago and avoiding a hostage situation was important to my risk assessment module’s Projected Schedule of Events Leading to a Successful Resolution.
(In company terms that’s a PSELSR, which is a terrible anagram.) (I don’t mean anagram, I mean the other thing.) Thiago backed away, saying, “You don’t want to do this. You really don’t want to do this.” Yeah, well, it was a little too late for them to run away. I stepped to the outside hatch and told my drones to get into position. Two of the hostiles had helmets and body armor, and one had a helmet but the face shield had been removed. I hit the hatch release and gave the order. (At the last second, I changed the drones’ instructions from head or face kill-hits to disabling wound-hits in exposed patches on arms and hands, even though it was the hostiles’ own stupid, stupid fault for attacking us. Thinking of Arada’s sad face made me too uncomfortable.) The stupid hatch (I hate this boat) was slow and all six targets had turned toward me by the time it opened. My drones struck just as I dove out onto the deck. I hit one target with an energy burst from my right arm, kneecapped the second, two dropped from drone strikes and the last one went down flailing, hand closing convulsively on his weapon’s trigger and shooting me right in the chest. For fuck’s sake. By that time, Target Leader had Thiago’s arm, weapon pointed at Thiago’s head. I sacrificed six more drones to turn the weapons scattered around me into useless heaps of metal, then shoved to my feet. I walked up the boarding ramp onto our observation deck. I said, “Let him go.” I didn’t really feel like negotiating. I have a module on it, somewhere in my archive. It was never much help. Target Leader’s eyes had a lot of white showing, and he was exhibiting multiple signs of stress. So was Thiago. A drone view showed me what I looked like, water dripping from my clothes, my jacket with the Preservation survey logo and shirt showing projectile weapon holes, stained with fluid and a little blood. I circled them as if heading for the hatch. Target Leader dragged Thiago around to stay facing me, then yelled, “Stop!
Or I’ll kill him!” He was right, I’d been trying to make him move, setting up a shot. He had stopped with the observatory bubble behind him, not a good angle for me. “You can still get out of this,” Thiago gasped. “Just let us go. You can take me as a hostage—” Oh, right, that’ll help. I said, “No hostages.” “What is that thing?” Target Leader demanded. “What are you? You’re a bot?” Thiago said, “It’s a security unit. A bot/human construct.” Target Leader didn’t seem to believe him. “Why does it look like a person?” I said, “I ask myself that sometimes.” Over the comm loudspeaker, Dr. Ratthi said, “It is a person!” In the background, I heard Overse whisper, “Ratthi, get off the comm!” While that was going on, I did a quick search of my archived video and pulled an episode of Valorous Defenders. It’s not a bad show but this is a terrible episode where the characters are attacked by evil SecUnits. (That’s like the opposite of an oxymoron, since in the media, there’s no such thing as a non-evil SecUnit.) (Is there a word for the opposite of an oxymoron?) I grabbed the three-minute sequence where the SecUnits swarm the base and slaughter the helpless refugees. I uploaded it to stupid boat’s porn feed and set it to play on an endless loop. I’m fast, so I’d finished by the time Target Leader shook Thiago and said, “Order it to back off.” Thiago made a noise suspiciously like a derisive snort. “I wish I could! It doesn’t listen to me.” I listen to you plenty, Thiago. “Who does it—” Target Leader wisely gave up on that tack. “Listen, whoever controls this thing, I’m taking this one on my ship—” “I’ve destroyed your engine,” I said. I really should have done that. Well, too late now. Glaring with fury, Target Leader jerked Thiago and Thiago stumbled and leaned away from him. And I saw the hole blossom in Target Leader’s upper arm, in the scant few centimeters of clothing and skin exposed between the joints of the badly fitting armor.
I lunged forward and grabbed Thiago, slung him aside, then ripped the projectile weapon away from Target Leader. I knocked him lightly in the stomach and chest with the stock and he dropped to the deck. Arada stepped out of the hatch, the projectile weapon sensibly pointed down even though my scan showed she had already engaged the safety. She said, “Are you all right? Thiago? SecUnit?” I said earlier that I was trying to set up a shot; I didn’t say whose. Arada had taken a course in weapons use after the whole thing with GrayCris. I guess having a bunch of murderers chasing you around a planet so they can suppress your research by murdering you would tend to make you more cautious, even if you are a terminal optimist. On the feed, I said, Dr. Thiago, Dr. Arada, get inside. I grabbed Target Leader and tossed him onto the deck of his boat, where the other targets were crawling around trying to get to their hatch. My scan picked up a power surge in the boat’s weapon system. That’s what happens when you don’t have time to clear your hostile vehicle. I said over the comm, “Overse, now would be good.” The thing Overse and the others had been doing while all this was going on was preparing our facility for launch. Under my boots, the deck rumbled and vibrated and our outer supports heaved out of the water, sending waves crashing into the boat as we lifted up. I don’t think the raiders had realized the facility was mobile. The force of displaced water as our drive kicked in shoved the boat sideways, and the raiders lost their targeting lock. Our outer supports folded in and we lifted further above the surface. The comm loudspeaker broadcast a siren and a translated warning about minimum safe distance and I guess the raiders believed it because their engines revved frantically. I recalled my drones and they shot down toward us to stream in through the hatch. I walked in after them and let the hatch close behind me as the launch protocols started.
2 I told myself it wasn’t as much of a shit ending to my first time as Survey Security Consultant While Not Pretending to be a Human and/or Faking the Existence of a Human Supervisor as it could have been. Everybody was alive, they had all their sampling and scans done. Our original schedule actually had us leaving in six planetary days, but since we had finished early Arada had moved that up to three planetary days, that’s why most of the facility had already been prepped for launch. But we’d been lucky, and I hate luck. Standing in the access corridor I settled my drones, tasking four to stay with me and sending the others to take up various positions around the facility and go dormant. Then I checked the feed for alerts. The team members who weren’t busy piloting the facility up through the atmosphere were yelling at each other on the comm. Arada came down the corridor. She didn’t have her weapon anymore and my safety protocol check showed she’d unloaded and secured it back in the locker. “SecUnit, you need to get to Medical!” I checked the feed again; still no alerts. “What happened in Medical?” “You happened, you got shot.” Oh, right, that. Arada was gesturing at me so I followed her down the corridor to the main ramp. I poked through the hole in my jacket and shirt and upped my pain sensors a little. The projectiles were still in there. (Sometimes they pop out on their own.) Medical was at the top of the ramp, a small compartment on the same level as the crew lounge area and galley. The quarters, labs, and storage were on the two levels below and the control deck was above. Ratthi was there waiting for us, standing beside the MedSystem. “Are you all right?” he demanded. “You better lie down!” I didn’t want to bother with it. “No, I’m fine. Just give me the extractor.” “No, no, you were in the water, you need decontam and an antibiotic screen. When the system is prepped, you lie down.” He pointed emphatically at the narrow platform and pulled one of the emergency kits down from the rack.
“Thiago has some scrapes on his neck,” he told us, “but otherwise he’s fine.” Ratthi went out with the kit. The yelling on the comm had calmed down but I could hear tense voices from the rec room. Preservation-controlled facilities like this don’t have SecSystems recording everything and cameras everywhere because privacy blah blah blah but I could eavesdrop through the comm and my drones. If I wanted to, which I didn’t, not right now. Arada said, “Ratthi’s right, SecUnit, you should let the system make sure the wounds aren’t contaminated.” She hesitated. “Did I…” She took a sharp breath. I just stood there because I didn’t understand the question yet. She added, “Was there any other way…” She didn’t finish again but this time I knew what she was asking. “No. If you’d waited any longer, I would have had to try to use a drone. He’ll probably survive, if the others give him medical attention.” She really hadn’t wanted to shoot anybody, and had told me she had to force herself to learn how to use the weapon. I hadn’t particularly wanted her to learn, either. (Humans have a bad tendency to use weapons unnecessarily and indiscriminately. Of the many times I had been shot, a depressingly large percentage of hits had come from clients who were trying to “help” me.) (Another significant percentage came from clients who had just wanted to shoot something when I happened to be standing there.) Arada rubbed her eyes and her mouth pulled in at one side. “Are you trying to make me feel better?” “No.” I actually wasn’t. I lie to humans a lot, but not to Arada, not about this. “I wouldn’t try to make you feel better. You know what I’m like.” She made a snorting noise, an involuntary expression of amusement. “I do know what you’re like.” Her expression had turned all melty and sentimental. “No hugging,” I warned her. It was in our contract. “Do you need emotional support? Do you want me to call someone?” “I’m fine.” She smiled. On the feed, the MedSystem signaled it was ready.
“Now you make sure you’re fine, too.” She stepped out of the compartment and set the privacy filter on the doorway. I stripped off my clothes and dropped them in the decontam bin and got onto the platform. It would run a check for contaminants and pop the projectiles out of my shoulder and chest. The process only took three minutes, just long enough to finish the scene of Lineages of the Sun I’d had to pause when Thiago had decided to get me shot. The MedSystem tried to cycle into the therapy and post-treatment options and I stopped it and climbed off the platform. The feed told me we had made orbit and were in the process of rendezvous with our baseship. My clothes now smelled like decontam fluid but they were dry and clean. I got dressed and opened the privacy shield. Thiago stood in the corridor. Oh, joy. He looked angry and upset, which I could tell, even though I was looking just to the right of his head. He said, “Did you kill those people?” I’d been angry enough to tear them all into tiny little pieces. The company who had owned me had protocols for these situations that would have required kill-shots, at least for the armed hostiles out on the deck. Plus I’d already been shot once, and the hostiles had been clear about their intent to kill and/or abduct my clients. But the company didn’t own me anymore and the only human here I was answerable to was Arada, and only in limited ways determined by a contract that Pin-Lee had negotiated for me. But the whole point of hacking my governor module was that no one got to tell me to kill a bunch of humans if I didn’t feel like it. (Or even if I did feel like it.) I said, “I’ve reported to my contracted supervisor.” (I know, I know, I could have said no, I didn’t kill anybody. I could have said that even SecUnits under company protocol use minimum force necessary because the company hates paying survivor damage bonds, and also because SecUnits are not rabid murderers unless humans specifically order them to be.
I could have said that I had risked his life not using kill-shots on the armed targets because I knew Arada didn’t want me to.) He pressed his lips together. “I could ask her.” I said, “You should definitely do that.” He glared at me and the brown skin on his cheeks showed pronounced signs of a rise in temperature indicating anger, embarrassment, and possibly other emotions. I was pretty sure he was just pissed off, though. Then he hesitated and said, “Look, I—I didn’t mean to get you shot. I’m sorry.” If you had meant to get me shot, Thiago, we would be having a different conversation. Because I was still mad, I said, “The security protocol all survey members agreed to is available on the facility feed.” His face did the thing humans do when they’re trying not to show how annoyed they are. (Mission accomplished.) He said, “I made a mistake. But I had no reason to assume those people were hostile.” I had reason. I could have thrown together a quick excerpt of my Threat Assessment Report of the approaching boat and why it had been 72 percent likely to attack. I could have pointed out that THEY HAD SHOT ME FIRST when for all they knew I was just another unarmed human. But I didn’t have to answer to him. He didn’t like me, I didn’t like him, and that was fine. It was absolutely fine. I walked away down the corridor. HelpMe.file Excerpt 1 (File detached from main narrative.) Since I’d decided to stay (temporarily) on Preservation Station, Dr. Mensah had asked me to go places with her seven times. Six of those times were just relatively short boring meetings on ships in orbit or in dock. The seventh was when she had asked me to go down to the local planet’s surface with her. I don’t like planets but she lured me there by explaining that it was for an Art Festival/Conference/Religious Observation that would include “a lot of” live performances. After checking to find out the definition of “a lot of” was eighty-seven plus, I agreed to go.
Some of the live performances were demonstrations or seminars I wasn’t interested in, but I managed to fit in thirty-two plays and musicals while Mensah was at meetings or doing things with her family members. (I used drones to record the performances that were overlapping or scheduled against each other. They were all being recorded for the local planetary entertainment feed, and the popular ones would be reconfigured as video productions, but I wanted to see all the versions.) One evening a play was interrupted when Mensah tapped my feed and asked me to please come get her. The request was so abrupt and out of character I replied with the code phrase we had come up with in case she was being held against her will. She said she was just tired. That was even more out of character. I mean, I could see she got tired, she just hated to admit it. I left a drone to record the rest of the play and slipped out of the theater. It was night and the crowd in the street was beginning to thin out, but the big open pavilion across the plaza where the party was being held was still bright and noisy. If you had to be in a crowd of humans, the crowds at this festival weren’t bad, since they were the distracted kind where all the humans and augmented humans are talking to each other or on comm or feed or hurrying to get places. The downside was a lot of humans were waving sticks with lighted objects or spark-emitting toys, or tossing colored powders that popped and emitted light. (I have no idea.) But whatever, with all that going on, nobody noticed me. Plus, it was Preservation and there were no scanning drones, no armed human security, just some on-call human medics with bot assistants and “rangers” who mainly enforced environmental regulations and yelled at humans and augmented humans to get out of the way of the ground vehicles. In the pavilion, I located Mensah near the edge of the crowd talking to Thiago and Farai, who was one of her marital partners. I stopped next to Mensah and she grabbed my hand.
Right, it’s usually a good idea to warn bot/human constructs who call themselves Murderbot before making grabby hands, except during a security incident when you would expect/need the human you’re trying to extract from lethal circumstances to grab you and hold on. And this read as the latter; like Mensah needed me to save her. So I didn’t react except to shift closer to her. Thiago was saying, “I don’t know why you can’t just talk to us.” I heard him clearly, since I was looping my ambient audio to lower the level of the music from blaring down to a pleasant background soundtrack level. The glance Thiago threw at me was annoyed, like I had interrupted their conversation. Hey, she called me. I have a job here, I get paid in hard currency cards and everything. “I told you why,” Mensah said, and she sounded normal, calm and firm. Except that was also how she sounded when humans were trying to kill us, so. I had the whole pavilion covered by my drones, and weapons scan was negative. (Weapons weren’t even permitted on the planet except in designated wilderness areas where hostile fauna was a problem.) Voices were loud, but my filters showed they were still well within the range of happy-intoxicated-interested emotional tones. But Mensah’s grip on my hand told me how tense her arm muscles were. Situation assessment: I have no idea. Farai said, “Thiago, no. She asks for space, you need to give that to her.” She smiled at me politely. I never know how to react to that. She leaned in to Mensah to kiss her, and said, “We’ll see you at the house.” Mensah nodded and turned, and I let her tow me out of the pavilion. We made it outside to the pedestrian plaza and I asked her, “Do you need a medic?” I thought she might be sick. If I was a human and I’d had to be in the pavilion with all those other humans for the past two and a half hours, I’d be sick. “No,” she told me, still sounding calm and normal.
“I’m just tired.” I sent a feed request to the ground vehicle (which on Preservation was called a “go-cart” for some reason) (some stupid reason) to meet us at the nearest transportation area. The plaza and streets were lit with little floating balloon-lights, and the dirt and temporary paving painted with elaborate designs in light-up paint (fortunately it wasn’t the marker paint that broadcasts on the feed, which would have been a nightmare). As we walked through the crowd, people recognized Mensah and smiled and waved. Mensah smiled and waved back, but didn’t let go of my hand. On the fringe near the transport area, an intoxicated human wandered toward us with a handful of glitter dust but veered off when I made deliberate eye contact. Our vehicle was waiting for us and I handed her in, and climbed into the other seat. I told it to head for the family camp house, which had been erected in a habitation area on the outskirts of the festival site. The vehicle had a limited bot-driver, which would take humans all over the campground and festival site but knew not to go into the designated no-vehicle sections. It hummed out of the court and into the dark, along the path that led through high grass and scrub trees. Mensah sighed and opened the window. The breeze was still warm and smelled like vegetation, and the guide-lights along the way were low enough not to obscure the starfield. All the humans and augmented humans staying here for the festival made it a heavily populated area, but we were traveling through the section reserved for humans who actually wanted to sleep. The temporary housing (pop-up shelters of all shapes and sizes, camping vehicles, tents and collapsible structures that looked more like art installations) were all mostly dark and quiet. The camp area for humans who had to be loud was on the far side of the grounds with a sound baffle field to deflect the music and crowd noise. She said, “Thank you.
I’m sorry I interrupted your evening.” I recalled my drones except for the one that was recording the play and the detachment I had designated to keep tabs on the family still at the party. (Another detachment was at the camp house, maintaining a perimeter and keeping watch on the two adults and seven children who had gone back earlier.) I wasn’t sure how to react. Mensah wasn’t acting like I had rescued her from certain death, but she wasn’t acting like we were heading back to the habitat after a boring but successful day collecting samples, either. I said, “I recorded the plays. Do you want to see them?” She perked up. “I never get to see the performances at this thing. Did you get the one— Oh, what was it called? The new historical by Glaw and Ji-min?” The difference between “calm and normal” and actual normal was measurable enough that I could have made a chart. I just said, “Yes. It’s pretty good.” Something was bothering her, and it wasn’t just that her family was clearly as weirded out by me as I was by them. They had assumed I would stay in the camp house, which, no. Mensah had told them I didn’t need any help or supervision and could find my own way around. (Quote: “If it can infiltrate high-security corporate installations while people are shooting at it, it can certainly handle a domestic festival.”) It wasn’t that her family was phobic about the scary rogue SecUnits the entertainment media and the newsfeeds were so fond of, or that they didn’t like bots. (There were “free” bots wandering around on Preservation, though they had guardians who were technically supposed to keep track of them.) It was just me-the-SecUnit they didn’t like. (That didn’t apply to the seven kids. I was illicitly trading downloads via the feed with three of them.) I think if I had been a normal bot, or even like a normal SecUnit, just off inventory, naive and not knowing anything about how to get along in the human world or whatever, like the way humans would write it for the media, basically, it would have been okay.
But I wasn’t like that. I was me, Murderbot. So instead of Mensah having a pet bot like poor Miki, or a sad bot/human construct that needed someone to help it, she had me. (I told this to Dr. Bharadwaj later, because we talked about a lot of things while she was doing research about bot/human relations for her documentary. After thinking about it, she said, “I wish I thought you were wrong.”) (Farai was a possible exception. Up on the station, when Mensah had first introduced me to her family, she’d had a conversation with me. Or a conversation at me, you could say. Transcript: Farai: “You know we’re grateful for how you returned her to us.” I did know, I guess. What do humans say in this situation? A quick archive search came up with some variation on “okay, um” and even I knew that wasn’t going to cut it. (Just a heads-up, when a murderbot stands there looking to the left of your head to avoid eye contact, it’s probably not thinking about killing you, it’s probably frantically trying to come up with a reply to whatever you just said to it.) She added, “I wanted to ask what your relationship to her is.” Uh. In the Corporation Rim, Mensah was my owner. On Preservation, she was my guardian. (That’s like an owner, but Preservation law requires they be nice to you.) But Mensah and Pin-Lee were trying to get my status listed as “refugee working as employee/security consultant.” But I knew Farai knew all that, and I knew she was asking for an answer that was closer to objective reality. And wow, I did not have that answer. I said, “I’m her SecUnit.” (Yes, that’s still in the buffer.) She lifted her brows. “And that means?” Backed into yet another conversational corner, I fell back on honesty. “I don’t know. I wish I knew.” She smiled. “Thank you.” (And that was that.) Mensah’s family were also weirded out by the idea that I would be providing security, and were afraid I would be, I don’t know, scaring legitimate visitors and killing people, I guess.
And granted, while I have been a key factor in certain clusterfucks of gigantic proportions and my risk assessment module has serious issues, my threat assessment record is pretty great, like 93 percent. (Most of the negative points came from that time I didn’t know that Wilken and Gerth were hired killers until Wilken tried to shoot Don Abene in the head, but that was an outlier.) Mensah’s family also thought they didn’t need security, which, maybe before GrayCris, that had been true. But as it was, during the festival I only had to deal with five incursions, four by outsystem newsfeed journalists with recording drones. I took control of the drones (I can always use a few more) and notified the local Rangers who drove off the human journalists. The fifth incursion was the one that got me in trouble with Amena, Mensah’s oldest offspring. Since the festival had started, I had been taking note of a potential hostile that Amena had been associating with. Evidence was mounting up and my threat assessment was nearing critical. Things like: (1) he had informed her that his age was comparable to hers, which was just below the local standard for legal adult, but my physical scan and public record search indicated that he was approximately twelve Preservation standard calendar years older, (2) he never approached her when any family members or verified friends were with her, (3) he stared at her secondary sexual characteristics when her attention was elsewhere, (4) he encouraged her to take intoxicants that he wasn’t ingesting himself, (5) her parental and other related humans all assumed she was with her friends when she was seeing him and her friends all assumed she was with family and she hadn’t told either group about him, (6) I just had a bad feeling about the little shit. You might think the obvious thing to do was to notify Mensah or Farai or Tano, the third marital partner. I didn’t. If there was one thing I understood, it was the difference between proprietary and non-proprietary data.
So, on the night when Potential Target invited Amena to come back to his semi-isolated camp house with him to “meet some friends,” I decided to come along. He led her into the darkened house, and she stumbled on a low table. She giggled and he laughed. Sounding way more intoxicated than he actually was, he said, “Wait, I got it,” and tapped the house’s feed to turn on the lights. And I was standing in the middle of the room. He screamed. (Yes, it was hilarious.) Amena clapped a hand over her mouth, startled, then recognized me. She said, “What the hell? What are you doing here?” Potential Target gasped, “What—Who—?” Amena was furious. “That’s my second mother’s … friend,” she said through gritted teeth. “And her security … person.” “What?” He was confused, then the word “security” penetrated. He stepped away from her. “Uh … I guess … You’d better go.” Amena looked at him, and then glared at me, then turned and stamped out the door and down the steps to the path. I followed her, and he backed away as I passed him. Yeah, you better. On the dirt path, lit by the low floating guide-lights, I caught up with her. (Not so much intentionally, but my legs were longer and she was putting more energy into stamping her feet than gaining distance.) She said, “How did you know where I was? What were you doing, hiding under the porch?” She thought I wouldn’t get the domestic animal reference. I said, “Wow, that was rude. Especially considering that I’m your second mother’s”—I made ironic quote marks—“‘friend.’ Is that how you talk to your bot-servants?” My drone cam showed her expression turn startled and then a combination of sulky and guilty. “No. I don’t have bot-servants! I didn’t know—I never heard you talk.” “You didn’t ask.” Had I not been talking? I had been talking to the kids on the feed, and to Mensah. Maybe with the rest of the family it had been easier to pretend to be a robot again. I added, “No one else approached that house.
He lied about meeting other humans there.” She stamped along in silence for twelve point five seconds. “Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not some kind of idiot, and I don’t fuck around. If he’d done anything I didn’t like, I was going to leave. And if he wouldn’t let me leave, I have the feed, I can call for help whenever I want.” She was scornful, and way overconfident. “I wasn’t going to let him hurt me.” I said, “If I thought he was going to hurt you, I’d be disposing of his body. I don’t fuck around, either.” She stopped and stared up at me. I stopped but kept my gaze on the path ahead. I said, “Mensah is a planetary leader of a minor political entity that has managed to get the angry attention of major corporates. Her situation has changed. Your situation has changed. You need to grow up and deal with it.” She took a breath to say something, stopped, then shook her head. “He wasn’t a corporate spy. He was just someone…” “Someone you don’t know who showed up out of nowhere at a massive public festival attended by half the continent and whatever offworld humans happen to be wandering through.” I knew he wasn’t a corporate spy (see above, disposing of bodies) but she sure didn’t. She was quiet for sixteen seconds. “Are you going to tell my parents about this?” Is that what she was worried about? I was insulted and exasperated. “I don’t know. I guess you’ll find out.” She stamped away. So, in retrospect, I could see that hadn’t gone so well. * * * Our vehicle rumbled through the dark, up the low hill to the camp house, which was a pop-up two-story structure with broad covered balconies off both levels. It had been placed near a couple of large trees with frilly leaves that curved over the roof. It had been built by Mensah’s grandfather, while her grandmothers and other assorted family members had been working on the original planetary survey and terraforming.
The colonists who hadn’t been living in orbit on their ship had all stayed in temporary structures at that point, that were moved seasonally to avoid destructive weather patterns in the parts of the planet that had been habitable at that time. There were other pop-ups, large and small, planted all over the hills around us, the nearest twenty-seven meters away. Lights were on inside the house and one light floated above the beacon spot for the vehicles. I would have worried about the lack of lighting if I hadn’t had thirty-seven drones on patrol in the immediate area. (Drones had picked up previously identified humans and augmented humans returning to the other houses or passing through the area, and I’d conducted safety checks on unidentified humans encountered for the first time. I was cataloguing power signatures on some small mobility devices used by non-augmented humans for medical reasons; I hadn’t seen these anywhere in the Corporation Rim, though maybe that was because I hadn’t spent much time hanging out on planets with human populations not exclusively engaged in corporate slave labor. (The entertainment media showed planets that weren’t all corporate slave labor, I had just never been on one.)) (The drones had also tracked the five younger kids on a completely illicit expedition to a nearby creek where they had performed some kind of ritual that involved jumping out at each other from behind bushes and rocks. They returned to the house without being caught by the adult humans or older siblings and were now collapsed in their upstairs bunk room, watching media.) (The house actually had secure sealable window and door hatches, WHICH NO ONE USED, but at least this made it easy for my patrol drones.) As the vehicle settled into its spot, Mensah said, “I’m just going to sit outside for a bit. Why don’t you go on back to the festival? There’s a few more plays tonight, aren’t there?” I try to avoid asking humans if there’s anything wrong with them.
(Mostly because I don’t care.) (On the rare occasions where I did care, it would have meant starting a conversation not directly related to security protocol, and that was just a slippery slope waiting to happen, for a variety of reasons.) But humans asked each other about their current status all the time, so how hard could it be? It was a request for information, that was all. I did a quick search and pulled up a few examples from my media collection. None of the samples seemed like anything I’d ever voluntarily say, so before I could change my mind I went with, “What’s wrong?” She was surprised, then gave me a sideways look. “Don’t you start.” So there was something wrong and even the other humans had noticed. I said, “I have to know about any potential problems for an accurate threat assessment.” She lifted a brow and opened the vehicle door. “You never mentioned that on our survey contract.” I got out of the vehicle and followed her toward a group of chairs next to the house, scattered around in the grass under the trees. The shadow was deep so I had to switch to a dark filter to see her. “That was because I was half-assing my job.” She took a seat. “If that was you half-assing your job, I don’t want to see what you’re like when…” The smile faded and she trailed off, then added, “But I suppose I did see you when you were doing your best.” I sat down, too. (Sitting down with a human like this would never not feel strange.) Her expression wasn’t upset, but it wasn’t not upset, either. But I could tell my smartass comment had taken us down an awkward conversational avenue where I hadn’t wanted to go. I wished I was ART, who was good at this kind of thing. (The thing being getting you to talk about what it wanted you to talk about but also making you think about what it wanted you to talk about in different ways.) (I wasn’t kidding when I said ART was an asshole.) “You didn’t answer the question.” She settled back in her chair.
“You sound worried.” “I am worried.” I could feel my face making the expression whether I wanted it to or not. She let her breath out. “It’s nothing. I’ve been having nightmares. About being held prisoner on TranRollinHyfa, and … you know.” She made an impatient gesture. “It’s completely normal. It would be odd if I wasn’t having nightmares.” I hadn’t seen much of the recovery phase of trauma (my job was to get the client to the MedSystem before they died; it took care of all the messy aftermath, including the retrieved client protocol) but in the shows I watched, recovery was featured a lot. There was a trauma recovery program that Bharadwaj had used in the Station Medical Center, and the big hospital in the port city had one, too. I wasn’t the only one who thought Mensah should go get the trauma treatment. I was probably the only one who knew she hadn’t. (She hadn’t exactly lied; it was more a way of letting the other humans assume she had.) But the treatment wasn’t like a one-time thing with a MedSystem; it took multiple long visits, and I knew she had never made time for it in her schedule. I said, “Is that why you’re afraid to go off-station without me?” So there were two positions on whether the Preservation Planetary leader needed security. The first was the one 99 percent of the population shared, that she did not unless she went on a formal visit to somewhere like the Corporation Rim. And to a large extent, they were right. The crime stats on Preservation Station and the planet were pitifully low, and usually involved intoxication-related property damage or disturbances and/or minor infractions of station cargo handling or planetary environmental regulations. Mensah had never needed on-station or on-planet security before this, except for the young Preservation Council–trainee humans who followed her around and kept track of her appointments and handed her things occasionally.
(And they did not count as security.) The other 1 percent was composed of me, Mensah’s survey team, all the humans working in Station Security, and the members of the Preservation Council who had seen the GrayCris assassins try to kill her. But that incident had been kept out of the newsfeeds, so hardly anyone thought Mensah needed a security consultant let alone a SecUnit. But GrayCris was not doing so hot now due to their hired security service Palisade making an extremely bad decision to punch my ex-owner bond company in the operating funds by attacking one of its gunships. (The company is paranoid and greedy and cheap but also ruthless, methodical, and intensely violent when it thinks it’s being threatened.) Relations between the two corporates had deteriorated since what we call The Gunship Incident, with GrayCris assets getting mysteriously destroyed a lot in supposedly random accidents and its executives and employees getting blown up or found stuffed in containers way too small for intact adult humans and so on. And once GrayCris had started to cease to exist, even my threat assessment had dropped drastically, but Mensah had still wanted me to continue to provide security. I thought she was humoring me, and taking the opportunity to pay me in hard currency cards which I would need if/when I left Preservation, and giving me practice in being around humans in a setting where I was not categorized as a tool and/or deadly weapon. (Yeah, I assumed it was about me, but humans assume everything is about them, too. It’s not an uncommon problem, okay?) But for a while now I had been thinking it was about something else. Her mouth twisted a little and she looked away, over the dark hills and fields toward the lighted windows of the other camp houses and tents. She said, “I suppose it was obvious.” I said, “Not obvious.” Not to most of the humans, anyway. I had a feeling that Farai and Tano knew, but weren’t sure what to do about it. She shrugged a little. “It’s hardly surprising that I feel safer with you.
It’s also easier to be around people who understand what happened, what it’s like to be in that situation. That’s you and the rest of the survey team.” She hesitated. “Farai and Tano understand, but I haven’t explained to my brother and sister and Thiago and the others why I can’t just rely on them for emotional support about this, as usual.” Her face turned grim. “They don’t understand what it’s like to be under corporate authority.” That I got. Humans in the Preservation Alliance didn’t have to sign up for contract labor and get shipped off to mines or whatever for 80 to 90 percent of their lifespans. There was some strange system where they all got their food and shelter and education and medical for free, no matter what job they did. It had something to do with the giant colony ship that had brought them here, and a promise by the original crew to take care of everyone in perpetuity if they would just get on the damn thing and not die in the old colony. (It was complicated and when I watched their historical dramas, I tended to fast forward through the economics parts.) Whatever, the humans seemed to like it. But she was right, these humans had no concept of what it was like to live under corporate authority. And they really didn’t know what it was like to be the target of a corporate entity that wanted to kill you. I replayed my recording of Mensah talking to Thiago and Farai at the party. Mensah had been abducted from Port FreeCommerce at a meeting for the relatives of the murdered survey members. Maybe the noisy party, where the other humans who would normally help her had been distracted, had just started to feel too similar. I said, “You need to get the trauma treatment.” Her voice sharpened. “I will. But I have some things to finish first.” She turned toward me. “And I want you to go on that survey mission with Arada. They need you. And it’s a wonderful opportunity for you.” It was too dark for her to see my expression.
I’m not sure what it was but you could probably describe it as “skeptical.” (Ratthi says that’s how I look most of the time.) With that confident planetary leader I am totally convincing you of this tone, she added, “And you know Amena and Thiago are going, too. I’ll feel better if you’re there to keep an eye on them.” Uh-huh. “What about you?” She took a breath to say she’d be fine. I knew her well enough to know those exact words were about to come out. But then she hesitated. The drone I had watching her face increased magnification, its low-light filter rendering her features in black and white. Her expression was intense and fierce and she was biting her lower lip. She said, “I hate feeling so weak. I just need to stop. And I need to stop leaning on you. It’s not fair to you. We need to be apart so I can … stand on my own feet again.” I didn’t think she was wrong, but I still wasn’t used to things that were unfair to me being a major point of consideration for humans. It also sounded vaguely like the break-up part of the romance scenes on the shows I watched, most of which I usually skimmed over. I said, “It’s not me, it’s you.” She huffed a laugh. And then I sort of blackmailed her. * * * Part of my problem now was that Mensah, who was way too honest about this kind of thing, had later told Amena that she had asked me to keep an eye on her, which Amena interpreted in some hormone-related human way I’m not sure I understood. Thiago, who is not an adolescent and has no excuse, interpreted it as Mensah not trusting him to take care of his niece. Amena is on the survey because her education requires an internship in almost getting killed, I guess. Due to our previous interaction, she really didn’t want me specifically tasked to watch her. (Possibly I had been too emphatic with her about Potential Target.
After spending my entire existence having to gently suggest to humans that they not do things that would probably get them killed, it was nice to be able to tell them in so many words to not be so fucking stupid. But I didn’t regret doing it.) An attempt by Amena to go around Mensah and appeal to Farai and Tano had failed spectacularly, in a three-way comm call that became a four-way when Farai had called Mensah to join in on the discussion. (I’m not sure what happened past that point. Even I hadn’t wanted to watch it.) So that was what had happened before the survey. Now we’re here, ready for the next major disaster. (Spoiler warning.) 3 We docked with our baseship with no problems, and Arada and the others transferred control to the baseship crew. (The facility wasn’t wormhole capable and was basically just a big, awkward lab module that could land and take off under its own power.) It was only four standard Preservation day-cycles back to Preservation via wormhole, and I meant to use the time to finish watching Lineages of the Sun. It was a long-running historical family drama, set in an early colony world, with one hundred and thirty-six characters and almost as many storylines. I’d watched family dramas before, but I’d never spent much time around human families before coming to Preservation. (Data suggests family dramas bear a less than 10 percent resemblance to actual human families, which is unsurprising and also a relief, considering all the murders. In the dramas, not Mensah’s family.) When the company owned me and rented me out for surveys, my security protocol included datamining, which meant monitoring and recording the humans every second for the duration of the contract, which was excruciating in a lot of ways. Pretty much all the ways. (All the ways involving sex, bodily fluids, and inane conversations.) It would never stop being novel to be around a bunch of humans in a relatively confined space and be able to close a door between me and them and not have to care what they were doing.
Which didn’t mean the humans left me alone. Ratthi came to my cabin. I didn’t have to let him in, so I did. (I know, I was still getting used to the idea of not minding the fact that a human wanted to talk to me.) He sat on the folding seat opposite my bunk and said, “Thiago will come around, you’ll see. He just doesn’t…” Ratthi was reluctant to finish the sentence, so I did. “… trust me.” Ratthi sighed. “It’s all the corporate propaganda about SecUnits being dangerous. He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know what you’re really like.” This would be annoying, if Ratthi didn’t genuinely believe it. He’s never seen me kill anyone close up and I’d like to keep it that way. “And he didn’t know why it was so important that Mensah be protected on station.” He waved a hand at me though I hadn’t said anything. “I know, the more people who knew, the more chance of the newsfeeds finding out. And there was nothing else we could have done, really.” After Ratthi left, Overse came. When I told the door to open, she just stuck her head in and said, “I don’t want to interrupt, I just wanted to thank you. This is Arada’s first time as a survey lead, and you’ve been really supportive and I know that’s made a difference, and helped her confidence.” I had no idea how to react to that since I wasn’t sure what being supportive entailed. My job wasn’t to make the humans obey Arada, that wasn’t how Preservation worked. Besides, that hadn’t been a problem. The survey team was grumbly occasionally, but everybody had done their job to a reasonable level. The chance of a mutiny was so low it was registering as a negative number. I’m not sure the word “mutiny” could even apply to any situation that might occur with this survey team; most of them had to be begged to complete the required self-defense certification before we left. And this was what Preservation called an academic survey, where the data collected was going into a public database.
(If the planet had been in the Corporation Rim, it would be open to exploitation, but out here nobody wanted it for anything.) I defaulted to, “Arada contracted with me.” “Yes, and we both know that you’re very capable of making it clear when you think someone doesn’t know what they’re doing.” She smiled at the drone I was using to watch her. “That’s all.” She left and I replayed the conversation a couple of times. I trusted Arada’s judgment to a certain extent. She and Overse had always been firmly in the “least likely to abandon a SecUnit to a lonely horrible fate” category, which was always the category I was most interested in. They were my clients, that was all. Like Mensah, like Ratthi and Pin-Lee and Bharadwaj and Volescu (who had opted to retire from active survey work, which gave him the award for most sensible human) and yes, even Gurathin. Just clients. And if anyone or anything tried to hurt them, I would rip its intestines out. * * * When we came through the wormhole into Preservation space, I was watching episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon again, since there wasn’t time to start anything new before we reached the station. (Being interrupted isn’t nearly as annoying when I already know the story.) I was worried about Mensah, if everything had been okay while I was gone. I wasn’t sure exactly what “okay” would involve, but I was willing to settle for “unmurdered.” I was just finishing a rewatch of episode 137 when the ship’s alarm sounded through the comm and feed. It might just be a navigation anomaly, like another transport in the wrong place. We were in a commonly used approach lane and Preservation tended to be visited by lots of non-corporate transports with no bot pilots who wandered all over the place trying to figure out where the hell they were, or at least that was how I interpreted the constant litany of complaint from Preservation Station Port Authority that Mensah had involuntary access to.
With no bot pilot on our baseship, I couldn’t get direct system updates, but I tapped the comm system to let me listen in on the bridge. Transcript: Copilot Mihail: “It came out of nowhere! Nothing on comm.” Specialist Rajpreet: “That’s a docking approach. I’m reading active weapons.” Pilot Roa: “That’s it, raise the Station and tell them—” Mihail again: “Copy, but there’s no responders near us—” Well, shit. I rolled out of the bunk and pinged the team feed, and sent to Arada: Dr. Arada, we’re being approached by a potentially hostile vessel. A boarding attempt may be imminent. A potentially— Oh no! Arada responded. Again? Overse asked. I let them deal with the other team queries coming in as I opened my code-sealed locker. I pulled out the projectile weapon, checked the load and charge, then woke my dormant drones. They all activated their cameras at once and I had to take a few seconds to sort and process the multiple inputs. I’d changed out of the survey uniform before we’d entered the wormhole and back into the clothes I liked (human work boots, pants with lots of pockets (good for storing my small intel drones), T-shirt, and soft hooded jacket, all dark colors) because I didn’t like logos, even the Preservation survey logo, which was just a variation on the planetary seal, and not a corporate logo. I had a deflection vest from Station Security Operations designed to provide some protection from inert blades, slow projectiles, fire, acidic gas, low energy pulses, and so on. I hadn’t been wearing it because it was a) worthless for the kind of firepower usually deployed against me and b) it had a logo on it. (I know, I need to get over that.) I made myself put it on under my jacket. I might need all the help I could get. By this point the Potential Hostile had continued to approach. Pilot Roa was now making a general announcement which was pretty much the same thing I’d already told Arada. As I left the cabin, my drones converged on me in a cloud formation.
I needed more direct info from the baseship so I sent one ahead, and it whizzed past me as I started down the corridor toward the access. I had a plan, but it was mostly “keep the hostiles off the ship,” which is not so much a plan as a statement of hopeful intent. This could be really bad. I know, I know, I’m Security, I should already have a plan in place for a boarding action. But I was used to having a human supervisor come up with the plans and … Okay, right, I just hadn’t bothered because the chances of an attack while en route to and from the mission site were so slight it wasn’t worth taking the time off from viewing media. I’d put all the work into coming up with attack and defense scenarios for the facility while on planet. (None of which I got to use during the one actual attack on the facility, but though it was tempting, “advance planning sucks” seems to be the wrong lesson to take from that whole incident.) Anyway, SecUnits were shipped as cargo on company transports and I didn’t even have any old procedure documents for ship-based actions in my archive. The only ship-to-ship attack I’d participated in had been viral, and I’d almost destroyed my brain during it. Speaking of which, my alert monitors on comm and feed weren’t picking up any attempts by the hostile to make contact. That might just mean they already knew there was no bot pilot to attack with killware or malware. I went up the ramp past the crew lounge toward the control deck. My drone had zipped ahead up into the baseship and through the passage to its bridge. When the bridge hatch opened to let Rajpreet out, it slipped in. Now I had a camera view of the sensor display surfaces floating above the control boards. Mihail sat in a station chair, sweat plastering their light hair to their forehead. Roa was on his feet pacing, dark brow furrowed in thought, one hand pressed to his feed interface. It looked like a clip from an action series, right before something drastic happened. Then something drastic happened.
The hit wasn’t at all like the way they show ship combat in the media. I felt something more like a power surge than anything else. Gravity fluctuated just enough to thump me against the bulkhead and the ramp lights flickered. A flood of automated warnings came from the facility engineering pod and then the feed and comm cut out. I scrambled to pick up the baseship’s feed, then gravity fluctuated again as the facility’s drive went offline and we switched to reserve power for life support. My drones scattered as the gravity flux interfered with their propulsion, then pulled back into formation. On the baseship bridge, my drone watched as Roa and Mihail froze, like a scene on pause. Then Roa said, “That was an impact.” Mihail’s voice was hoarse as they cycled through displays. “On the facility’s drive housing. A locator missile. Attacker must have fired it when they spotted us leaving the wormhole.” Oh, shit. Seriously: oh, shit. My organic parts had a reaction that reminded me how lucky I was not to have a digestive system. We didn’t blow up in the next ten seconds so I pushed off from the bulkhead and kept going toward the facility control deck. I stepped through the hatch. It was a small hub-shaped control area, with the stations for attaching lab modules and everything else the facility needed to do when it was sitting on a planet. Overse was in the pilot suite though right now the baseship had control. Ratthi was hanging on to the back of the comm chair. Both looked frantic. From the flashing displays, frantic was the right reaction. “I can’t reach Roa on the comm or feed,” Ratthi was saying. “It’s all down,” Overse reported. “Arada—” she began, and then grimaced as she remembered there was no feed, no one outside the compartment could hear her. “Damn it!” I told my drone in the cockpit to establish a connection between Overse’s and Arada’s interfaces and the baseship’s feed. I said aloud and on the feed, Baseship, I’ve reestablished a temporary connection to the interfaces on the facility control deck.
Roa replied, What, SecUnit? Can Arada hear me? She’s not— Overse began, then Arada swung through the hatch on the far side of the control deck. Overse’s face twisted with relief and she bit her lip hard, then added, Here she is. I hear you, Roa, Arada said, her mental voice hurried but calm. She reached to squeeze Overse’s shoulder, and nodded to Ratthi and me. Can we tell where the attacker means to board? The words “means to board” made something uncomfortable happen to my organic parts again. Maybe similar to what Ratthi, who had just made a little “urk” noise, felt. This would have all been a lot easier if I wasn’t so worried about the stupid humans. Roa’s voice stayed calm but my baseship bridge drone saw his expression as he said, Looks like they’re heading for the lower level facility hatch, the lab level. I’ve sent Rajpreet down there. Ratthi and Overse exchanged horrified expressions. Arada set her jaw and told Roa, Understood. She looked up at me. “SecUnit, could you please…?” I said, “On my way.” I ducked back out to the corridor, telling one of my drones to stay in the control deck as a relay. The center foyer was just around the curve, and above it the gravity well access to the baseship. Safety protocols had engaged an air barrier, which allowed solid objects (like humans and SecUnits) to pass through but blocked air flow, so the atmosphere couldn’t rush out if a seal breached. Leading down from it was a second gravity well that had ladders and a set of stairs for use when the facility was sitting on a planet. Without fluctuating power to worry about, I could have just stepped in and floated down to the lowest facility level, but getting smashed to pieces against a bulkhead wouldn’t be handy just now so I swung down the ladders instead. Ozone and smoke that the scrubbers couldn’t handle hung in the air and the lights fluctuated.
Via my control deck drone, I saw Arada tell Ratthi, “With the feed and comm down we’re going to need a head count to make sure everyone’s accounted for after that hit.” “Right, right, I’m on it!” Ratthi hurried out the hatch toward the living quarters. From the bottom of the well I took the central ramp around and came out into the junction for the lower lab level hatch. The smoke here was thick enough for me to pick it up on visual. Specialist Rajpreet was already there, having climbed all the way down the gravity well from the baseship. She had a sidearm—there were a couple in the bridge emergency kit—ready to defend the hatch from a boarding attempt. It’s always nice when a human looks relieved to see you. Her voice was mostly steady when she said, “I don’t think we have much time.” I used one of my drones to add her to my feed relay, and she reported, Roa, Dr. Arada, can you hear me? SecUnit’s here at the lock. I said, What’s our status? Arada said, Overse has comm partially active. On cue, the comms emitted a burst of static and Overse’s voice said, “To all facility crew, comm and feed are not responding, please report to the facility crew lounge immediately and wait for further instructions.” Roa said, SecUnit, I need to make an announcement, can you relay me through the facility comm? Sure, I don’t have anything else better to do. I said, Go ahead. Over the comm, Roa said, “The incoming transport has fired on us and is now making a docking maneuver aimed at the facility’s lower level. Station has dispatched an armed ship and two free merchant transports have broken off station approach and are responding as well, but they’re all eighty-four minutes out at best. SecUnit, can you—” The hesitation was long. “Can you repel a boarding attempt long enough for help to arrive?” Every human on the baseship and the facility was listening. It was a tricky question. It came down to how many raiders were violently determined to come aboard and what kind of weapons they had.
(That scenario could turn out any way from “we thought this was an easy target, let’s run away” to Rajpreet making a desperate last stand with her sidearm over the pieces of what was left of my body.) If they sent an EVAC-suited boarding party down the outside of the hull and came in through one of the hatches in the baseship as well as this one— But that wasn’t what my clients needed to hear right now. On comm, I said, “Yes.” Rajpreet’s throat moved as she swallowed, and she muted her feed. She said aloud, “Just tell me what you need me to do.” I would definitely do that, as soon as I knew. Assuming worse-case scenario (and coincidentally getting her out of my way so I didn’t have to worry about saving a human while I was trying to kill/maim/discourage a bunch of other humans), it was best for her to take up a guard position at the entrance to the gravity well, to at least buy the baseship some time. I was about to tell her to do that. A jolt vibrated through the deck and a sudden uncompensated surge of acceleration knocked Rajpreet flat. I hit the bulkhead and slid down as my drones scattered. The lights fluctuated again and the life support cut out, then back in. Oh, this is not good. My plan (make that “plan”) depended on holding the intruders back until the armed station responder or the angry raider-hating merchants got close enough to scare them off. But my bridge drone was reading displays that indicated the hostile had grabbed the facility with the tractors transports use to attach and detach modules. It was pulling us close, intending to clamp us onto its hull and drag us into the wormhole with it. From their frantic cursing, Roa and Mihail agreed. I got upright and caught Rajpreet’s flailing arm to help her stand. The facility’s comm came back online with a static-obscured warning alarm. Yes, great, that’s really helpful right now. A survey member, Adjat, staggered into the foyer from the corridor that led to the facility’s lowest storage and lab space.
Rajpreet told them, “Get up to crew level, hurry!” Adjat nodded, heading for the corridor. “Hatches are jammed to labs 3 and 4, I don’t know if anyone’s trapped—” “They’re doing a headcount up there,” Rajpreet said, pushing them on toward the access. I had an idea, though it had its downside. On the feed, I said, Roa, can the baseship jettison the facility? The baseship itself was just a small carrier, with bridge, drives, and living space for the five-person crew. Most of its bulk was designed to be able to grab or deploy the facility module. Mihail replied, calm but breathless, He’s working on it, checking sensor view to see if our clamps are clear— So they had already thought of it. It was nice working with smart humans. Now if I could just keep them all alive. A lot of my attention was on the hatch two meters away from me. I was scanning for any attempt to breach it, either physically or via the hostile’s feed. I tried a breach of my own through the feed, but the hostile’s wall was so solid I couldn’t get any kind of read off it. On my feed relay, Arada said, We can remote-jettison from here—the facility command center—if you transfer control. But we need to get the rest of the team up to the baseship. Ratthi added, I’m doing a headcount now, but with the feed and comm not responding— Roa broke in: Our clamps are clear, we can jettison. Arada said, Roa, will they be able to scan us? If they can tell we’ve abandoned the facility— Roa replied, They may be able to. They would definitely be able to. Before anybody else could butt in, I said, They may fire on the baseship once the facility is jettisoned. That was the downside I mentioned. It just depended on how anxious the hostile was to get to the wormhole with the facility before the responder and merchants arrived, whether they were ordinary assholes or huge assholes, if they wanted the facility or the humans in the facility, if they were afraid of retaliation by Preservation or just didn’t care.
The survey team members still trying to talk on the relay feed all shut up. Roa said, Yes, that’s … Yes. Dr. Arada, we don’t have a lot of time, do we evacuate and jettison or—? Still sounding calm, Arada said, SecUnit, do you agree we should jettison? Oh right, I was the security team head. If I/we were wrong about this, the hostile would fire on the helpless baseship and we would all die. If we stayed with the facility, there might be a chance for rescue. If the hostiles didn’t drag us into the wormhole, overwhelm me, and kill all the humans or do other terrible things to them. The cheap education modules the company gives SecUnits had never mentioned this kind of dilemma, so I didn’t have anything strategic to go on. Ugh, self-determination sucks sometimes. I reminded myself I had always wanted humans to listen to my advice. I said, Jettison. Arada said, We jettison. Ratthi, confirm head count and send everyone up to the baseship. She sounded calm and certain. Much more so than Roa. “Attacker is still pulling us toward the wormhole,” Mihail announced on comm, not sounding too much like someone who was restraining the urge to scream a little. On the relay, I heard Ratthi yelling at people to get moving and I got sporadic drone views of survey team members hurrying into the gravity well. Roa took a breath. “Facility control, prepare for separation.” Overse announced, “Facility module will seal in two minutes and counting.” Drone audio picked up someone arguing but I had to prioritize Roa and Mihail and Arada, who were all telling different humans to do different things. My bridge drone’s view of the sensor display started to show more interpretable detail. That big wobbly thing was the wormhole. The two blips way off (way way off) in the distance were our potential rescue ships. There was no blip for the hostile because it was too close. Another vibration traveled through the deck but this one was more familiar. Rajpreet’s gaze was on the hatch display, her eyes wide.
She whispered, “They attached to our lock.” Whispering may have been an irrational impulse, but I could definitely sympathize. I said on the feed relay, Hostile has matched locks. Overse said, Ratthi, I need a confirmed head count, now. My gravity well drone picked up two stragglers, Remy and Hanifa, scrambling up the ladders to the baseship and Ratthi, for fuck’s sake, coming back down. I started to tap his feed but I picked up something on audio. It was scraping, vibrating through the outer hatch. Okay, that’s definitely happening. I sent on the feed, Hostile is attempting to breach the hatch, boarding may be imminent. Roa said, Rajpreet, SecUnit, get out of there. I told Rajpreet, “Go, I’ll be behind you.” Rajpreet backed toward the corridor access. If the hostiles chose this moment to board, before we could seal off and separate, we were screwed. I heard Ratthi yell, “No, No!” through my drone audio. His voice was harsh with fury, fear. The impulse to run to him made me flinch, but I needed to hold my position. Something had gone wrong up there. On the feed, I said, Dr. Ratthi, report. Ratthi, of all my humans except Dr. Mensah, listens to me the most carefully. Probably it has something to do with the time he was about to step out of the hopper to retrieve some equipment and if he had, he would have been eaten by giant predatory fauna. Sounding simultaneously frustrated, angry, and terrified, Ratthi said, Amena and Kanti aren’t here. Thiago is looking for them. They aren’t in the quarters or the upper labs, they must be down in the lower level somewhere. Well, shit. I had audio and visual of the baseship access through my drones, so I was able to see when it exploded. (No, not physically exploded. Emotionally exploded.) Humans yelling and waving their arms and other unhelpful things. You know, it’s not like I’m having a good time either right now.
I told Rajpreet, “Get to the gravity well access,” and started down the corridor toward the labs and sample storage, where Adjat had tried to tell Rajpreet about jammed doors. I ordered a drone to stay near the hatch so I would have some warning if anything came through it. I split the rest of the formation, sending two-thirds up the access to take a guard position with Rajpreet and telling the rest to follow me. On the feed, I said, calmly, Acknowledged, I’ll find them. SHIT. I’d made a stupid mistake. Feed access in the facility was down unless your interface was in range of one of my drones, so the connection could be relayed to the baseship, and the comm was patchy and unreliable. We, me and the humans, were too used to the feed, which made it impossible to lose track of someone, to leave them behind. With an active feed, even if you were unconscious, your interface could be used to track your location. Arada said over the feed, We’re holding for you, SecUnit. Get to the baseship, Arada, I sent back. It was amazing how fast our mostly orderly retreat had turned into a disaster. My drone formation formed around Rajpreet, who was waiting anxiously at the bottom of the gravity well. At the top, baseship crew and survey team members gathered, clutching handweapons they barely knew how to use. I just hoped nobody accidentally shot themselves or anyone else. I tapped my drone relay and saw Arada, Overse, Ratthi, and damn it Thiago waiting at the facility access junction. Arada was talking on the feed to Roa and trying to shove a resisting Overse into the gravity well. I started to tell them—I don’t know what I was going to tell them, but it was going to involve the words “I can’t do my job if none of you fucking listen to me” but then interference blotted out the connection and I lost all my drones in the baseship. I reached a hatch to lab 3 that was stuck partly open, just a few centimeters from the deck.
I hit the floor and directed my scan under the hatch, but I couldn’t pick up any indication of a human body, living or otherwise. But drone audio detected a muffled human voice, coming from farther up the corridor. I shoved upright and slammed around the curve and oh right, that must be the hatch Adjat had seen. The bulkhead was crumpled along the top of the seal, and the panel with the manual release had been blown in a power surge. The plastic parts were melted and the whole hatch assembly was dripping with fire suppressant foam where the automated emergency system had engaged. The facility’s systems in this area must be down or cut off, and the emergency report had never reached the control deck. My audio picked up a muffled voice from the blocked compartment, but it was too faint for human hearing. My first impulse was to blow the hatch. Fortunately my second impulse was to grab the manual release and pull. It didn’t give, but I could feel the seal was broken. At least some of the locks that held it shut had been disengaged. Which meant someone had already triggered the manual release inside but something was jammed. I ripped the panel open and found crumpled metal pinning the release mechanism. I shoved my sleeve back, tuned the energy weapon in my right arm down to the lowest setting, and burned through it. The hatch clunked as it released and I dragged it open. Kanti jolted forward and I caught her. “It wouldn’t open,” she gasped. She clutched the kind of tool used on surveys for chipping rock samples and her hands were bloody. The power inside was out, the only light from the emergency glows along the walls, and equipment and sample cases were jumbled everywhere. Amena was across the compartment, her leg pinned under a lab bench that had collapsed when the bulkhead crumpled. She was conscious and struggling to free herself. My hatchway drone showed the warning lights blinking around the lock. Yikes. I pulled Kanti out into the corridor and took the tool away from her.
“Get to the gravity well, now.” On what was left of the feed I told Rajpreet, I’m sending Kanti to you. Kanti hesitated, eyes wide and glazed over. Blood trickled down from a cut above her hairline. Behind me, Amena yelled, “Kanti, go!” Kanti pulled away and ran erratically down the corridor, bouncing off the bulkhead. I ducked into the compartment and went to Amena. Tears streamed down her face, her nose running in that gross “badly upset human” way. She banged on the lab bench. “Here, here, we couldn’t pry it up!” I felt under it carefully, where the support strut had pinned her leg. There wasn’t blood, though it had to hurt. I felt marks on the metal from the tool Kanti had been clutching. She had had it in the right spot, but didn’t have the leverage needed to pry up the strut. I wedged the tool back in place and leaned on it. My drones met Kanti at the end of the corridor and formed a protective cloud around her as she stagger-ran through the foyer toward the gravity well. The strut bent back and Amena tried to wriggle out and yelped in pain. I said, “Just take it slow,” and managed to sound like we had all the time we needed. (We did not.) My hatchway drone relayed the rising energy readings from the airlock where something was trying to override the security seal. In the access tube, Rajpreet had grabbed Kanti and was climbing with her up the gravity well, both surrounded by my cloud of drones. Amena wriggled some more, wincing, then reached for my arm and said, “Just pull really hard!” I took her arm and tugged and she slid out from under the bench. I stood, pulled her with me, and picked her up in one arm. I’d lost contact with Rajpreet but my drones confirmed she wasn’t in the gravity well anymore. I told Amena, “Hold on,” and ran down the corridor. I couldn’t make anywhere near my top speed; there was too much debris, the corridor too narrow and curving. I made it almost to the end of the corridor just as the hatch blew with a loud pop. The smell of melted metal and ozone filled the corridor.
My hatch drone sent me a view of hazy smoke and movement inside the lock. Time for a split millisecond decision—could I sprint through the foyer, past the breached hatch, up the ramp to the gravity well, and climb up into the baseship so we could close the hatches and separate before the hostiles stormed inside? Uh, maybe? Then my input from the hatch drone dissolved in an abrupt burst of energy. I took a silent step backward, then another, keeping the motion smooth and slow. I started a quick analysis of the drone’s last transmitted intel. On the feed, I sent, Hatch is breached, hostiles onboard, seal and jettison now. I didn’t pick up any acknowledgment and couldn’t tell if it went through or not. Amena was silent, holding herself stiffly immobile against my side, her heart pounding. I eased back around the curve in the corridor, and stepped into the first open hatch. I set her down and mouthed the words “No noise.” She nodded, gripped the hatch’s safety rail to stay upright, and looked up at me with wide eyes. I wanted to use my drones to look at her, but while that was calming for me, it wouldn’t be for her. If I was going to get her out of this alive, keeping her calm and communicating accurately was going to be important. I put my face in an expression that I hoped would convey reassurance, then changed it to intense concentration and stared at the bulkhead. The image analysis finished and I reviewed it. The drone had caught a sensor ghost of something that was emitting energy and floating about two meters above the deck. I included Amena’s interface in my relay and said, Close the hatches, Arada, do it now. They have drones. Amena caught her breath and bit her lip, but didn’t say anything. Still no acknowledgment. I didn’t know if they could hear me, if they had already jettisoned, what the hell was going on up there. We had to be close to the wormhole by now.
(It sounds like I was calm, but I had no idea what the hell I was going to do.) I felt feed static like a drill through the back part of my head, and then Overse saying, SecUnit, SecUnit, can you hear me? We’ve jettisoned the facility from baseship and are in the safepod, about to launch. Can you get to the EVAC suits in the lower secondary lock? The baseship can catch you in their tractor. I almost said aloud, “Why are they in the fucking safepod and not in the baseship?” but managed not to. Amena watched me with a not reassuring combination of fear and exasperation. The EVAC suit thing … was not a bad idea at all. Copy, we’ll go for the EVAC suits, I told Overse. If there was an acknowledgment, I didn’t hear it. I held out an arm and Amena grabbed my jacket. I picked her up and sent half the drones ahead to scout our path. There was no sign of any hostile movement yet. I stepped out into the corridor and headed away from the main hatch foyer to the junction to the engineering pod. It looked worse than the lab corridor. Lights were down to emergency levels and the deck had buckled. Fortunately we didn’t have far to go, just straight through the pod. My audio picked up a banging and grinding noise—maybe the intruder’s drones trying to get through a hatch somewhere. We reached the engineering outer hatch foyer, light from the emergency markers pointing to the EVAC suit locker. These were a different model than I’d used before, more expensive, where you could step into them and pull them up with an assist from the suit’s own power supply. I set Amena down and she rapidly tied her hair up, then did a one-legged hop into the suit. I ordered my drones to land on me and go dormant, and had my suit on by the time she was fastening her helmet. Something vibrated deep in the deck; was it the safepod launching? My organic parts didn’t feel good about this. If that was the safepod, I think they’d waited too long.
Human actions often seem way too slow to me because of my processing speed, but I didn’t think this was one of those times. The suits also had secure feed connections, so I could check to make sure Amena’s was working and sealed properly, and access its controls. Don’t use your comm, I told her over the secured feed. They could be scanning for any kind of activity and it was easier for me to mask our feed than the comm. Got it, she replied. Her feed voice was nervous but not panicky. The suit was supporting her injured leg, letting her stand upright. I’m ready. I told her suit to follow me and opened the airlock. 4 Going out in space in an EVAC suit was not something I did before I hacked my governor module. (One reason was because there’s always a distance limit on a contract. So if you, being a SecUnit, go more than, say, a hundred meters from your clients, your HubSystem uses the governor module to flashfry your brain and neural system. That doesn’t mean a client won’t order you to do something that would cause you to violate your distance limit, it just means they’ll have to pay the company a penalty for destroying their property.) But the EVAC suits I’d used since then had such good instruction modules that it was almost like having an onboard bot pilot. This one was no exception, plus being new enough to not smell like dirty socks. (Right, I should probably mention that I find 99.9 percent of human parts physically disgusting. I’m also less than thrilled with my own human parts.) I came out of the airlock first, towing Amena behind me, and pulled us along the facility’s hull. One of the first things I’d discovered about space was that it was boring when there were no pretty planets or stations or anything to look at. This space was empty of planets but not boring. The EVAC suit had scan and imaging capabilities but I didn’t need it as something huge moved out from below us.
(I designated that direction as “down” because it was toward where my feet were currently pointed.) It was the baseship, falling slowly away. The hostile was above us, clamped to the facility, a big scary blot on the suit’s scan. I tapped the baseship’s feed and without the interference from the dying facility, they heard me. Roa said hurriedly, We’ve got you on visual. I’m sending coordinates and Mihail will pull you in with the tractor. I downloaded the projected path, then said, Where is Overse? She reported that she was in the facility safepod with other survey team members. Roa said, Copy that, we’re contacting them now. Contacting them now? If the safepod had launched it should be on the baseship by now. But I couldn’t do anything about it, I had to get Amena to the baseship first. Amena said, What does that mean? Is Overse and everyone okay? I was about to trigger the suits’ maneuvering system when scan picked up an energy surge. My suit’s imaging went down and the helmet plate went dark, protecting my eyes against a flash. (I didn’t need the protection, but the EVAC suit didn’t know that.) Amena made a startled noise. Static blotted out the feed connection, then Mihail said, That was a miss, repeat, attacker fired and missed— Rajpreet’s fainter voice said, Are they aiming at the safepod? The rest was lost in static. I ordered my suit to clear the visor and swung around so I could see the hostile. I don’t know why—my suit wasn’t armed. I just wanted to see what was after us as something other than a sensor blot. It was almost as dumb an impulse as some things I’ve seen humans do. I saw a big dark hull, reflecting light from Preservation’s distant primary. There was still nothing coming from it, no feed, no comm, no beacons, so it was like a giant inert object. (A giant inert object dragging us toward the wormhole.) The EVAC imaging system came back online to add in sensor data and give me a more accurate outline, making the hostile show up as part dark shape, part schematic.
It was odd, since the configuration looked just like— The EVAC scans found a registry designation embossed on the ship’s hull and rendered it for me. And I recognized it. I didn’t even have to search my archive. I recognized it from a transport embarkation schedule on the station I had gone to after leaving Port FreeCommerce. “That’s—” That’s ART, I almost said on the feed, like an idiot. It was so shocking and so weird, my performance reliability dropped and I lost circulation to my organic parts. And not weird = violating norms in an annoying way but weird = eerie, like in Farland Star Roads, the story arc with the haunted station with ghosts and time-shifting. Or weird like I was having memory failure again, mixing up archival memory with current data collection. That was a terrifying thought. That’s what? Amena asked, then the ship—the hostile—ART fired again. The EVAC suit tracked it this time as a spark across my scanner. It went wide, so wide I thought it must be aimed at the station responder but it was so far away, what would be the point? I pulled the data the suit had collected about the first shot and saw it had gone wide, too. On our feed, Roa said, It’s another miss! No damage. Mihail said, The vector was way off, I don’t even think— Maybe a warning shot. Maybe I wasn’t having memory failure. I said, Baseship, are you still ready to catch us? Roa said, Mihail, are you— Then, Yes, yes, SecUnit, go, we’re ready! The trajectory Mihail had sent was still good, we just had a little longer to go. With Amena’s suit in tandem with mine, I launched us off the facility’s hull. Twenty seconds later, something grabbed my suit and tugged it. It was fairly gentle and wouldn’t have seemed like a disaster at all except for my suit’s emergency alarms and Mihail cursing frantically on the baseship feed. The ship—the hostile—ART had us in a tractor and pulled us toward its hull. I was facing the wrong way and my suit gave me a sensor view.
It was bringing us toward a large lock in the port hull, not that I could do anything about it. I saw ART’s lab module was in place, which meant it wasn’t acting as a cargo transport, but as a research vessel. Her voice high with distress, Amena said, They’ve got the facility, why do they want us? I said, I don’t know. I don’t know anything. * * * As the tractor pulled us into the large airlock, Roa’s voice yelled over the feed, It’s accelerating toward the wormhole! We’re losing it—as the hatch slid shut. The baseship feed dropped. I made an attempt to reconnect, but hit a wall as solid as … I don’t know, but it was solid. I hadn’t been in this lock before but it still had the clean, well-kept ship look that matched my memories. If I could trust my memories. If this was real. I really needed to run a diagnostic but there was no time. The lock cycled, air whooshing in, and the hatch slid open. It sure looked real and my EVAC suit scan matched what I was seeing/scanning. No feed, no comm activity. The wide corridor beyond the lock was empty, lights tuned to medium-strength, blue bands on the bulkheads serving no function except decorative. A transparent locker built into the bulkhead held a row of empty EVAC suits, dormant and ready for emergencies. The corridor was quiet, empty on visual, scan, and audio. The lights brightened for us, which was typical for crewed ships, which adjust the lighting based on what the humans are doing and on request. My suit read the air system level as full, which meant normal for humans and augmented humans. When ART ran as an uncrewed cargo transport, it kept its support level on minimum, though it had upped it for me. There were too many ways to kill us using the airlock, so I stepped over the seal into the corridor. I pulled Amena’s suit with me, to make sure there was no opportunity to separate us. The lock cycled closed behind us. On our suit comm, Amena was saying, “Where are the crew? Why did they do this?
What do they want with us?” Then, in a smaller voice, “Please talk to me.” I still had a client, even if I was damaged and hallucinating. If this was a memory failure, I had to tell her. I wished she was Mensah, or any human I trusted to help me. Even Gurathin would have been better in this situation. If I told her that indications suggested that I was having some bizarre memory crash, she would never trust me and I needed her to trust me to get her out of this alive. Except could she trust me when I couldn’t even tell if what I was seeing/scanning was real or not? And if this was really ART, then where the hell was it? I sent a ping. It was almost like it echoed in the empty feed, like the giant presence that should be here was just absent, like the heart of the ship was hollow. Amena was breathing harder with building panic, and I needed to say something. What came out was pretty close to the truth: “I think I recognize this ship, but it’s not supposed to be here.” Saying it aloud made it seem a lot less like a memory failure, and more like something that was actually happening. Amena made a sniffing noise. She said, “What—what ship is it?” Then I had a brilliant idea that I should have had earlier. I said, “What do the patches on those EVAC suits say?” Mensah and most of the others would have realized immediately that something was wrong; I never asked clients for in formation if I could help it. (For a lot of reasons but close to the top was the all-too-common suicidal lack of attention to detail humans were prone to.) Amena stepped closer to the transparent locker. There were two rows of suits visible, one above the other, so if a suit was removed from its slot another would slide down to replace it. The patches were throwing a localized broadcast into the feed in multiple languages, readable by interfaces and our EVAC suits even while ART’s feed was inaccessible, the same way marker paints worked. Amena said aloud, “Perihelion.
Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.” That was ART’s designation and registry. Okay, so. Good news: I’m not having some kind of memory or system crash, this was really ART. Bad news: what the fuck? I sent another ping. Amena turned back to me. “This must be a stolen survey ship.” Her voice was firmer, less breathy with incipient panic. “I guess the raiders armed it.” “It was already armed.” I thought, It’s my friend. It helped me because it wanted to, because it could. I couldn’t say any of that. I hadn’t told anyone about ART. “It’s a deep space research and teaching vessel with a full crew and passenger complement. Between missions it travels as a bot-piloted cargo vessel, but Preservation isn’t on its route.” “Research and teaching vessel,” Amena repeated. “If the raiders had a ship this big, with weapons, why bother with us? Maybe they thought we had something valuable on board? Or they just go around attacking research ships? They hate research?” She was being sarcastic but I knew of raiders who had done things like this for reasons almost as stupid. But this wasn’t a memory ghost/hallucination, which meant it was still a statistically unlikely coincidence, and that was … statistically unlikely. “Wait, you know this ship.” Her voice turned suspicious. The statistically unlikely part must have occurred to her, too. “Did you do something to them? Are they here after you?” “Of course not.” That was a total lie, because ART had to have come here after me, though knowing that didn’t make this any less baffling. It wasn’t like ART’s crew came here for revenge because the murderous rogue SecUnit— Hold it, could they be here for revenge? I hadn’t hurt ART or anything onboard, unless you counted some power and resource usage that ART had expunged from its logs. That seemed a weird thing to shoot up an unarmed survey ship over. I mean, they could have just sent Dr. Mensah an invoice. Unless somebody had managed to get aboard after I left and do something to ART, and blamed me for it.
One big problem with that scenario, no wait, two: 1) getting aboard without ART’s cooperation and 2) doing something to ART without getting violently murdered. (I knew of forty-seven ways that ART could kill a human, augmented human, or bot intruder, and the only reason I didn’t know more is because I got bored and stopped counting.) And where the hell was ART? Where was its feed, its drones, its comm, its humans? Why wouldn’t it answer my pings? I didn’t forget that I had one of ART’s comms tucked into the pocket under my ribs. (Okay, I did forget until three minutes and forty-seven seconds ago, but it wasn’t like I’d needed to access the information until now.) The comm had been deactivated and inert since I left ART on RaviHyral’s transit ring. If ART wanted to call me, it could have used it as soon as we were in range. But that was assuming that ART was still in control of itself. Was something else—bot or human or augmented human—controlling ART’s ship-body? I was starting to panic. I didn’t want ART to be hurt, and anything that could hurt ART could destroy me and Amena. This wasn’t helping. Start with the assumption that ART was still here, intact but under some sort of constraint I didn’t have time to speculate about but would anyway. Had ART been able to use the deactivated comm to track me after our survey ship arrived through the wormhole? Yes, probably. But why? Why come to Preservation space after me? ART loved its crew, like, a lot. It would do anything to help them. Including betray me? Was something forcing ART to do this? Did it want the facility, or was that collateral damage? As soon as it had me and Amena in its tractor, it had increased acceleration toward the wormhole. We had to be in the wormhole by now, heading away from Preservation. The responders wouldn’t be able to track us. At least that meant that Overse and whoever was with her in the safepod could be picked up by the baseship. I needed to get rid of my EVAC suit.
In gravity they made movement cumbersome, and could be hacked if I wasn’t careful, and I wasn’t sure how much protection the suit would give Amena from projectiles or other weapon fire. It wasn’t like it would be a good idea to go outside now, and freedom of movement was more important. I got the EVAC suit to open its helmet and released my drones. I told two to take up guard positions at the entrance to the corridor and sent the others to make a cautious sweep through the ship … through ART. Then I opened my suit and stepped out. Amena said, “Is that a good idea?” I really didn’t need to be second-guessed by an adolescent human right now. “Do you have any other suggestions?” “I guess we can’t stay in these things forever,” she muttered, and opened her suit. I waited for her to climb out. She was shaking a little, and sweating, and favoring her injured leg. I needed to get access to the medical suite. Whatever was going on here, it would be easier to deal with if Amena wasn’t hurt. I moved toward the corridor, gesturing Amena to stay behind me. My scan still picked up nothing but background interference from ART’s systems. My drones were seeing empty corridors, closed hatches. I directed them toward the control deck, specifically the crew meeting area under the bridge. Somebody had to be here, bot or human or augmented human. This time I pinged the comm system. The ship’s comm chimed, an automatic response. Amena flinched at the sound. Keeping my voice low, I told her, “That was me.” “Why?” She managed to whisper this in a way that sounded very demanding. Then she grimaced in frustration. “Right. I guess they know we’re here, since they kidnapped us.” So far my drones hadn’t detected any crew. There was no response to the comm, and I moved toward the corridor. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Maybe go up to ART’s bridge and bang on the shield over its control core? This was one of the corridors I had walked up and down, working on my pretending-to-be-a-human code, where ART had critiqued my performance.
Maybe that made me less cautious. That and the fact that my drones had just passed through here seconds ago. As I stepped into the corridor, something moved in my peripheral vision. This is why we have drones. Unfortunately, whatever this was, my guard drone hadn’t registered its presence. I didn’t see it until it moved, and that was too late. I took the hit right in the side of my head and got body-slammed against the bulkhead. Performance reliability catastrophic drop. Shutdown. Restart. I was lying in a heap on the deck, a broken fragment of something grinding into my cheek. I knew I’d had an emergency shutdown. (I miss my armor all the time, but particularly at times like this.) I need the organic parts inside my head, but they have much better shock absorption in there than inside a human skull. You can hit a SecUnit hard enough to make our performance reliability drop so fast and so low it triggers a temporary shutdown. (Operative word: temporary.) But it’s really not a good idea. Not if you want to keep your internal organs inside your body and not smeared on the bulkheads of your stolen transport. Oh, it’s on now. My drones had gone dormant and my systems weren’t online to access them yet. My audio kicked back in and I picked up sound coming from down the corridor. A voice, Amena’s voice, too low for me to make out the words. I tapped the input for my drone relay feed; it was a passive connection and still transmitting. Amena’s voice was hard with what was clearly false bravado: “You’ve made a big mistake. There are armed ships minutes away. They’ll be here—” “Oh, little child, we’re in the bridge-transit. No one will ever find you again.” The voice (Unidentified: One) was light, arch, with an echo caused by an out-of-date pre-feed translator system. “Now tell us about the weapon.” Amena’s bravado was turning into real anger. “Our survey facility wasn’t armed.
If it was, you’d be blown to pieces.” (Note to humans and augmented humans: no one likes being patronized.) Unidentified One sounded even more amused. “You had better have the weapon we were told of, or I’ll take your ribs out one by one and break them in front of your little face.” I saved that for future reference. Unidentified One seemed to have gone to some trouble with the wording of that threat, it would be a shame if they never experienced it firsthand. Another voice (Unidentified: Two) said, “I hate lying, all these things lie.” It sounded almost identical to Unidentified One, except it was slightly deeper in tone. Amena said, “I’m not lying, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A little of her fear leaked through. I think she was beginning to realize she wasn’t talking to an intelligence that was open to rational argument. Unidentified One said, “You lie, it lies, everything’s lying. Don’t think we don’t know better.” Tinged with desperation, Amena said, “I can’t do anything about that.” The rest of my parts were checking in as functional and my performance reliability was climbing. The temporary shutdown had flushed a lot of stress toxins secreted by my organic parts and I actually felt better. Scan showed the fragments under my cheek were from components shielded by a case that read as stealth material. I’d been hit by a drone, maybe the same type I’d caught an image of in the facility before EVACing. It had hit me so hard it had knocked itself to pieces. None of ART’s drones—at least the ones it had let me see—had stealth construction. And maybe the forced restart had definitely done me some good because I was an idiot to not think of this before. If there were drones receiving orders, there had to be a feed active inside ART, just not on any of the standard channels. As my legs and feet came back online and I eased slowly upright, I tweaked my receivers to scan the whole range for activity. My projectile weapon lay on the deck in pieces, like someone had used a tool to pound it apart.
My saved schematic of ART’s interior layout came in handy as I mapped the direction of Amena’s voice. Down this curving corridor, to a cross corridor, to a crew lounge area. I didn’t make any noise. By the time I got to the first curve in the corridor, I found their drone control feed. It was on an encrypted channel, like a military feed. Clever, except their encryption was practically ancient, in bot terms if not human. My last update of my ex-owner bond company’s proprietary key-breaker was 8700+ hours out of date, but it snapped their encryption like a twig. Their feed was almost empty, no voices that I could detect, just drone commands. If their encryption was old, their drone codes might be, too. I pulled the oldest version of my drone key files and started cycling through them. My own drones were still in standby as I rebuilt my inputs and connections, but they were semi-useless at the moment, since the stealth material prevented them from scanning the hostile drones. The doorway to the lounge where I’d detected Amena’s voice was open, brighter light falling into the half-lit corridor. I meant to wait until I was back up to at least 90 percent performance reliability but I heard Amena say, “There’s no weapon, you got the wrong ship.” The fear in her voice was more obvious and I was suddenly in the room. (Impulse control; I should try to write a code patch for that.) The compartment was large, with padded couches and seats built against the bulkheads, a few low tables that were designed to fold down into the deck, and various display surfaces, now inert, floating above them. Occupants included one client: Amena, backed up against the far wall, disheveled and wide-eyed but no apparent new damage. Two potential targets/possible casualties: both backed toward the far end of the compartment, past Amena. They had visible bruises and shocked/frightened expressions. Both casualties wore red and brown uniforms, disheveled and torn, with corporate logos. Another anomaly, since ART’s crew uniforms were dark blue.
Two Targets faced Amena and the casualties: possibly augmented human; scan results null. Both Targets turned toward me. They looked like tall, thin augmented humans, with dull gray skin. (Injury, illness? Or an uncommon skin augment/cosmetic modification?) They both wore form-fitting protective suits and partial helmets that left a surprising (surprisingly stupid) amount of the face bare. Narrow human features, dark brows standing out against the smooth gray skin. Both smiled with colorless lips. Accusingly, one said (Unidentified One = Target One) to the other, “You said this one was dead.” They weren’t quite identical. Target One was slightly taller and had broader shoulders. “Poor thing was dead,” Unidentified Two = Target Two responded, and laughed. Poor thing. I think a capillary just burst inside one of my organic parts. Three drones hovered behind the Targets, of a model that didn’t match anything in my archives. They were round, as big around as my head, the apertures for cameras or weapons hidden despite their size. The stealth material interfered with my scan, but not with the image in the organic part of my brain. It gave me an uneasy kind of double vision, where my scan insisted there were floating anomalies that wouldn’t appear on my camera, yet I had a clear image in my temp data storage, supplied by my organic nerve tissue. I knew the targetDrones weren’t slow, but they looked cumbersome. I needed intel before proceeding. I said, “What did you do to ART?” That wasn’t the intel I needed. But it was the intel I wanted. Target One cocked its head inquiringly and bared sharp teeth. Another possible cosmetic modification or genetic variance. Target One said, “You’re babbling, poor thing.” Target Two, in almost the same tone, said, “These creatures seem to have no control over their vocalizations.” I was aware of Amena, watching me with wide eyes, both hands pressed to her mouth. Casualties One and Two, still behind her, stared at me in confusion. I clarified, “This transport.
What did you do to the bot pilot?” ART was so much more than a bot pilot but I didn’t have a word for what it was. Target Two sighed and folded its arms, like I’d asked a stupid question. Target One grinned at me, maliciously. It didn’t know who I was, what I was, it might not even know who ART was, but it knew I cared, and it was going to enjoy what it said next. “We deleted it, of course.” I felt my face change. The muscles were all stiff, and not from the hit I’d taken. I’m still not great at controlling my expressions, and I had no idea what I looked like. Behind her hands, Amena whispered, “Oh shit.” “Oh, this one looks angry,” Target One said. Target Two said, “How boring. Angry, then afraid, then dead. Boring boring boring.” Target One began, “You belong to us now, all of you. This is what’s going to happen. You will tell us—” I grabbed Target One’s face. Not my best strategic attack, but the quickest way to shut it up. Using its face as a handle, I slung it sideways into the couch built against the bulkhead. TargetDrone One came at my head. It was fast but I was ready this time. I ducked sideways and as it stopped and reversed to come back at me, I put my fist through it. I slammed it against the side of the hatch to break the remnants off my hand as I turned. Target Two actually looked at the other two targetDrones at this point, obviously wondering why they hadn’t responded. The good thing about being a construct is that I can have a dramatic emotional breakdown while still running my background search to find the drone key commands. I’d had a hit and a responding ping from the targetDrones right when Target One had called me boring. (Irony is great.) I sent the order to power down and they dropped to the deck with two loud thunks. Target Two’s gray face went surprised, then furious. It was kind of funny. This was a point where if I was a human (ick) I might have laughed. I decided to go with my first inclination and kill the shit out of some ass-faced hostiles instead.
I told the Targets, “Angry, then afraid, then dead. Is that the right order?” Casualty One whispered, “Oh deity, that’s a—” Target One, flailing on the couch, reached for something that was clearly a weapon, clipped to the suit plate on its thigh. I lunged forward and had its wrist before it could close around the weapon. This turned out to be a trick, because it slapped its free hand on my shoulder and I felt a stab of pain from an energy weapon. Target One grinned at me with its whole face. Projectiles hurt but energy weapons just piss me off. I crushed the wrist I was holding and twisted, caught the arm with the energy weapon and snapped it. (The arm. The weapon, a clunky tube-shaped device about ten centimeters long, clattered to the deck.) Target One shrieked in a combination of rage and disbelief that did not make me any less mad. Target Two, with what I have to say was an entirely misplaced confidence, stepped in and shoved another energy weapon at my chest. I was moving so fast that later I had to run my video back to analyze my performance. I shoved Target One away and smashed an elbow into Target Two’s face. I tore the energy weapon out of Target Two’s hand along with a few fingers, stabbed the weapon into its chest (it didn’t have a sharp end but I made do) and ripped a large hole. Then I used the weapon, and the large hole, to lift Target Two up and slam it into the upper bulkhead. Three times. Fluid and pieces went everywhere. That was satisfying. I think I’ll do it again. But I’d taken too long and it gave Target One time to scramble up and bolt for the hatch. I started to follow but then registered that Amena was bellowing “SecUnit, look!” at me. I looked. On the deck, the two remaining targetDrones were flashing awkwardly placed lights; they were powering up. I sent a power down order but the key wasn’t working anymore. I stomped the first one with a boot and then caught the second as it lifted off. I smashed it on a chair, accidentally taking out a display surface in the process.
The two casualties were yelling agitatedly at Amena and I had to run back my audio to understand. Casualty One grabbed Amena’s arm and said, “You have to come with us! We have to get away, try to hide!” This close, though ART’s primary feed still wasn’t working, I could pick up some info from her interface. (Feedname: Eletra, gender: female, and an employee ID from a corporation called Barish-Estranza.) Casualty Two (Feedname: Ras, gender: male, and another Barish-Estranza employee ID.) “Quick, before they send more drones!” He threw a look at me. I knew that look. “With your SecUnit, we have a chance.” Amena turned to me. “We should go with them.” I’d already sent a restart command to my dormant drones. Target One wasn’t hard for them to track since it was wounded, leaking fluid, and shrieking. (You know, if you don’t want to be manually eviscerated with your own energy weapon then maybe you shouldn’t go around killing research transports and antagonizing rogue SecUnits.) I told Amena, “I have something I need to finish off.” “There are too many drones,” Eletra insisted. Her gaze went from Amena to me and back again. She wasn’t sure who she had to convince. “You have to come with us!” Amena took a step toward me, wincing as she put weight on her damaged leg. “Are they right? Can you tell if the drones are coming for us?” Target One ran through the hatch into the crew meeting area below the bridge. The crew meeting area where I’d spent most of my time with ART, where we watched World Hoppers. My drones caught video of another hostile already in there (designated Target Three) standing on the steps that led up to the control deck. The hatch into the meeting area started to slide down. Eight of my drones reached the hatch in time to dart under just before it closed. The humans weren’t wrong about the targetDrones, which weren’t responding to my key commands anymore.
(Which meant there was a highly motivated controlling system somewhere that had pushed through a quick security update.) I still had access to the Targets’ feed, and from the encrypted traffic, somebody was telling the targetDrones to do something. Which most likely involved converging on our position to kill us. I said, “Probably.” Amena waved her hands impatiently. “Then let’s go!” I tried cutting off the targetDrones’ control feed. It confused some but others still seemed to be receiving orders. There were obviously parts of this system I couldn’t access. Working within it was like trying to operate a projectile weapon when someone had shot half my fingers off. All the data needed to be converted to other formats, nothing was right, it was a pain in the ass. To take full control of it I was going to have to start at the beginning, with penetration testing. Exasperated, Ras said, “Just give it an order!” Amena snapped, “It doesn’t take orders.” I’d wanted to do this up close and personal but that wasn’t an option. The eight drones now inside the control deck with Targets One and Three were on standby near the floor, in surveillance positions. Target One had collapsed against a padded station chair, panting, both damaged arms hanging uselessly. Target Three stepped down to an inactive display surface and activated it with a hand gesture. Weird to see a human or whatever these were do it manually. They hadn’t set their non-standard encrypted feed to access ART’s systems yet. Target Three said on the all-ship comm, “Intruders, escapees, slice them open like—” The translator fizzled on the last few words so I guess I’d never know what I’d be sliced open like. I cut one drone out of the swarm of eight to observe, and gave the others their instructions. With the protective suit and the partial helmets, I needed to aim for the exposed face. Target Three had time to make a gurgling noise and Target One a gaspy scream. My seven drone contacts winked out one by one.
Drone Eight continued to record, sending me video of the bodies jerking helplessly, then finally dropping in leaking sprawls to the deck. “But that’s a SecUnit—” Ras protested. Eletra, her expression increasingly desperate, listened to the comm announcement and its abrupt end. “We have to go!” Amena limped forward another step. She grabbed my arm and glared up at me. “Listen to me!” I looked down at her and made deliberate eye contact because she had almost all my attention right now and the last person/target who had done that was still dripping down the bulkhead behind me. She was too self-absorbed or brave or some combination of both to realize what she was doing was not smart. She set her jaw and said, “We have to go with them. Now.” I gently peeled her small hand off my jacket and said, “Never touch me again.” Amena blinked and pressed her lips together, then turned to Eletra and Ras. “Let’s go.” Eletra stepped toward the hatch. “This way—” Ras said, “Is that thing going to listen—” I stepped past Eletra and out the hatch in time to catch the targetDrone waiting there. I slammed it into the bulkhead and shook the remnants off my hands. Following ART’s schematic, I said, “This way.” They followed me. 5 I called in most of my drones to take scouting positions ahead and cover positions behind us. I was taking the long way around toward Medical. The dim corridor lights brightened as we went by, an autonomic reflex. For a human, it would have been like seeing a dead body twitch. ART wasn’t here, there was no sign of its drones, but some of its lower-level functions were active, the code running even without the controlling intelligence. An intruder system, probably some kind of bot pilot, had changed the security key for the targetDrones. And it must be guiding the ship through the wormhole. Transports just can’t do that on autopilot, at least according to World Hoppers and all the other shows about ships that I’d watched. That ART had wanted to watch. I designated the intruder as targetControlSystem.
I hoped it was sentient enough to hurt when I killed it. I had a lot of work to do before that point. And the image of the steaming bodies of Targets One and Three inside ART’s pristine control area was taking up way too much processing space. I had a few scout drones still in the corridors near the control area and I told them to start mapping any motion and anomalous activity and plot it to my copy of ART’s schematic. I had to find a way to advance-detect the targetDrones. A drone (designated: Scout Two), parked on the ceiling of the foyer outside the crew meeting area, picked up activity. More Targets converged on the foyer and tried to get the hatch open, but Target Three had apparently used a manual emergency control to seal it from the inside. The new Targets—let’s call them Four, Five, and Six—fumbled around with the controls but didn’t seem to know how to undo the seal. And whatever was going on with their weird feed and targetControlSystem, they couldn’t seem to access ART’s systems with it. ART was dead. I wanted to stop and lean my head against the bulkhead, but there was no time. Behind me, my drones saw Eletra had an arm around Amena’s waist, helping her walk. Ras limped, too, trying to watch behind us and keep an eye on me at the same time. All three were either shivering or sweating from what was probably shock. Right. Humans. Humans with needs. Mensah’s juvenile human, and the two new humans who were obviously hurt. Murderbot, you need to get your act together. “Do you know how many Targets are aboard?” I said. “Targets?” Ras repeated. “It means the gray people,” Amena said, gritting her teeth as she put weight on her bad leg. “I’ve seen five, but I don’t know if that’s all,” Eletra said. “At least five,” Ras agreed. “They had a lot of those bots, drones, whatever they are. We should try to get to the engineering module. Tell your SecUnit—” “It doesn’t listen to me, I told you,” Amena said, exasperated.
I’d already identified six total Targets, with three still active (counting the messily dead ones), so the humans’ intel was useless. (Not a surprise.) I arranged the drone scouts in front of us into a cloud formation and sent them ahead with their scan functions tuned all the way up. Scout Two showed me that Targets Four, Five, and Six had stopped ineffectually poking at the hatch. They were hastily adjusting their protective suits, sliding plates reconfiguring their helmets to cover their whole heads. That was a problem. Seven drones to kill two Targets had been overkill (Though one Target had already been wounded. Say seven to kill one and a half Targets.) especially when my supply of drones was limited. I had no real intel on how good their armor was at deflecting drones, and trying to find out might mean wasting another squad. I needed the drones as an early warning system for the targetDrones, which with targetControlSystem, might be a much worse threat than the squishy Targets. Plus three of my drones scouting in the main section near ART’s control area had disappeared in the last ninety-seven seconds, which meant they had encountered stealth targetDrones. I was losing my eyes in the rest of the ship and that was really not an ideal situation. It sucked, basically. Even my risk assessment module thought so, and I knew what its opinion was worth. We reached the hatch into the quarters section and I stepped to the side to let the humans through, then hit the manual release. The hatch slid shut and I pulled the panel, then used the energy weapon in my right arm to melt a couple of key components. Behind me, this was going on: “Why is it doing that?” Ras asked Amena. She stared blankly at him, then said, “SecUnit, why are you doing that?” Checking ART’s schematic had let me pick a couple of access points. I could close off the living section—containing the quarters, medical, galley, classrooms, and crew lounges—from the rest of the ship by sealing two more hatches.
It wasn’t the best choice, but trying to cross over to engineering or the lab module wasn’t feasible at the moment, and the humans would need the supplies here. I was betting the targetDrones had no arm extensions to repair the hatches. The Targets themselves could, but I’d have warning and time to get there first. (And the Targets could get to us via an outer hatch, but they’d have to take the EVAC suits out across the hull while we were in the wormhole and from what I’d seen in the entertainment media, that was a bad idea.) “I’m trying to create a safe zone.” Amena turned to Ras and said, “It’s trying to create a safe zone.” As he looked from her to me and back again, I stepped past and started down the passage. Then three drones in my scout formation winked out of existence at the corridor junction ahead. I threw myself forward, rolled into the junction, and shot the two targetDrones waiting there with my left arm energy weapon. One dropped to the deck, the second wobbled in the air. I came to my feet and smashed it against the bulkhead. My drone Scout Two in the control area foyer recorded the Targets pounding on the sealed hatch again. Did they think we—or someone—was inside? They weren’t using translators with each other and I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I told my drone cloud to continue down the corridor toward the medical suite to make sure it was clear. I told the humans, “Hurry.” None of them argued, and they limped after me rapidly. Down two corridors, then a turn and we were there. The MedSystem’s platform was quiet and powered down, the surgical system folded up into the ceiling, no sign of the medical drones. It was weird (not bad weird, just weird) seeing this place again. This was where ART had made the changes to my configuration, to help me pass as a human, where it had saved my client Tapan. Ugh, emotions.
I checked the space, scanning the restroom and shower compartment, the morgue, and the other enclosed areas to make sure there weren’t targetDrones, Targets, or any other as yet unknown hostile lurking. The humans stood in the middle of the room, watching me anxiously. I finished my sweep, told them, “Stay here.” I left one drone to keep my feed relay with Amena active and walked out, shutting the hatch behind me. I sent my drone cloud ahead and sprinted after it, heading toward the hatch at the opposite end of the module. If the Targets had figured out what I was doing, this was the closest hatch to the control area foyer where they were still gathered. As I reached the hatch I needed to seal, I risked a look down the short module passage into the next section. My organic nerve tissue detected movement and I hit the hatch release to shut it. I sealed the manual controls, left a drone sentry, and took off for the last hatch. Inside the medical suite, the humans were still huddled together. Eletra whispered, “Can you tell what it’s doing?” Amena said, “It’s sealing the hatches, like it said it would.” Ras looked frustrated and impatient, but didn’t argue. The third hatch led to a connecting section which was a secondary pathway into the engineering module. This hatch was already closed and sealed, but I fused the manual control anyway. I’d lost all but four drone scouts in the rest of the ship: one (Scout One) was still locked in the control meeting area with the two dead Targets. Scout Two was in the foyer ceiling watching the Targets gathered at the sealed hatch, and Three and Four had tucked themselves up under supporting rib structures in nearby corridors. I started back toward Medical, letting my surviving drone cloud spread out a little more. Bits of me hurt enough that I needed to tune down my pain sensors. At the Medical corridor, I split my drones into two squads and positioned them at opposite ends of the access.
I needed to clear this section and make sure I hadn’t trapped us in here with anything, but there were things I needed/wanted to know first. When I stepped inside, Ras said, “What’s going on?” He glanced at Amena, still unsure who to talk to. “Are we safe here?” I knew ART’s normal crew size; the command crew alone was at least eight members, with a rotating complement of instructors and students. I knew from my brief sweep that there was no sign anyone had been treated in the medical suite recently, no dead humans in cold storage. Which was good, except that the bodies could have been spaced. I knew how ART would have felt about that. I said, “Where’s the crew of this ship?” Again, Ras looked at Amena. Amena’s brow furrowed and she said to me, “I thought they were the crew.” “No,” Eletra said. She seemed confused, too. “Our ship was a Barish-Estranza transport.” Amena turned to Ras and Eletra. “So where are the crew of this ship?” Ras shook his head in annoyance. “Look, I can see you’re young. I’m guessing this SecUnit was ordered to protect you but—” Amena made a derisive huff. “It doesn’t even like me.” Admittedly I am tired of the whole concept of humans at the moment, but that was unfair because she didn’t like me first. “If you tell it to take orders from us,” Ras tried again, “this will be a lot easier.” Eletra nodded. “It’s for the best. It doesn’t seem like you know how to control it—” Amena waved her hands in exasperation. “Look, that’s not—” I see I have some operational parameters to establish. I crossed the room, grabbed Ras by the front of his uniform jacket and slammed him down on the med platform. I said, “Answer my question.” Behind me, Eletra had flinched and backed away. Amena said, “SecUnit! My mother will be angry if you hurt him!” Oh, we were going to try that tactic, were we. I said, “You obviously don’t know how your mother actually feels about Corporates.” Eletra said frantically, “We don’t know where the crew is!
Ras, just tell it we don’t know.” Ras rasped out, “We don’t know!” I said, “Is that the truth or is that the story you’re going with?” “It’s the truth,” Ras managed. “We don’t know what happened to them.” “We really don’t,” Eletra added, urgent enough to be convincing. “We haven’t seen anyone else since we were brought aboard. Just … those people.” I let Ras up and he scrambled away from me, over to Eletra on the far side of the room. His expression was frightened, incredulous. “Stop being so mean,” Amena hissed at me. I lowered my voice and I sounded absolutely normal and not like I was upset at all. “I am trying to keep you alive.” “I appreciate that, but—” She squinted up at me. “You look really bad. Are you sure you’re all right? That drone hit you really hard.” Yeah, well, I can’t do anything about that right now. I said, “You need to take care of your leg. But do not activate the MedSystem. It was controlled by…” For nearly ten seconds, I’d forgotten. “By the bot pilot. It was compromised before it was … destroyed or it would have killed the intruders itself. Something is still running the ship, taking us through the wormhole, and whatever it is may have control of the MedSystem.” Amena threw a worried look at the silent medical platform. So did Ras and Eletra. Amena said, “I didn’t know bot pilots could kill people.” “They’re almost as dangerous as humans.” I know, of every argument I could try to start right now, that one is in the top five most stupidly pointless. Amena gave me a baffled glare, but said, “Right, so no MedSystem. There’s got to be some manual med supplies here somewhere.” “Use one of the emergency kits in that locker. I need to finish clearing this section.” I hit our private relay and added, I’ll leave you some drones. I cut a squad of eight out of my cloud and told them to stay with her. Her eyes widened and she hesitated. For three seconds I didn’t understand why. She hadn’t been afraid when I’d grabbed Ras; her expression had been more annoyed than anything else.
Then I realized she didn’t want to separate. She took a sharp breath and said, “All right.” On the feed relay, she added, Good, drones. That’s what I’ve always wanted. I could have said “Don’t say I never gave you anything” and we could have had reassuring sarcastic banter, like one of my shows. But I was walking around in ART’s corpse and nothing felt reassuring. I just said, I’ll stay in contact. I walked out, headed for the quarters section. Scout Two in the control area foyer was still watching a confused/agitated conversation among the Targets. Wait, something was different again about their helmets. I ran back the video and spotted it: the color had changed from a dull blue-gray to the same patterned stealth material as the targetDrones. The Targets noticed when it happened, pointing at each other and commenting on it, but they didn’t seem to find it surprising or unusual. Another security update by targetControlSystem. That’s all I fucking need. My drone targeting would be completely thrown off. Fortunately the update hadn’t been—or more probably couldn’t be—loaded to the rest of their body armor. But killer drone strikes might be completely off the table now. I wondered why the Targets had been pounding on the hatch. If Targets One and Three could come back from the dead, Scout One hadn’t recorded any sign of it. Huh. Depending on how targetControlSystem collected data from the targetDrones, how they recorded and transmitted video, the three remaining Targets might actually have very little idea of what had happened to Targets One, Two, and Three. They knew Amena and I had been brought aboard, they had to. But they seemed focused on the sealed control area. They hadn’t gone to the lounge where Target Two’s body still was. Maybe, despite the targetDrones and targetControlSystem’s updates, they didn’t have access to surveillance data? TargetControlSystem obviously knew physical impacts had killed the Targets or it wouldn’t have coded the updates—was it not sharing that information with the Targets?
It was a strange idea, I know. And if correct, it was more proof for the theory that the Targets had little to no access to most of ART’s onboard systems, even though targetControlSystem was running helm and presumably weapons. Though ART didn’t have feed-accessible security cams like a normal transport. ART. I pulled together a simple code for penetration testing and started to run it in the background, on all the channels where I thought there might be targetDrone activity. I was going to break into targetControlSystem and do terrible things to it. And if the Targets were that confused about what had happened and where we were, I could use that. I started another process to pull recorded audio out of my archive. (If I had a plan at the moment, which I did not, it would involve stalling a lot. We were in the wormhole and whatever our destination was, it would take several day-cycles at least, probably more, possibly a lot more, to get anywhere. I had to seize control of the ship (ART) before then.) In the medical suite, my drones watched Eletra pull an emergency kit out of the locker. Amena sat down heavily on a bench as Eletra got the kit open. Ras glanced warily up at my drones, which were in a circulating formation in the upper part of the compartment. He said, “That … your SecUnit is really going to protect us?” “Sure,” Amena said, distracted as Eletra handed her a wound pack. Eletra opened a container of medication tabs with a groan of relief. “My back is killing me. They let us have ration bars from an emergency supply pack, but no meds, nothing else.” Ras persisted, “You said your family owns it?” “No, I didn’t say that.” Amena wrapped the wound pack around her injured leg. Then she almost fell over as it shot drugs for shock and pain right through her torn pants. I told her, Tell them I’m under contract to the Preservation Survey. “It’s under contract to the Preservation Survey.” Amena shoved herself upright again. That’s true, so why are you telling me to say it like it’s a lie?
Because “under contract” means something completely different to them. In the Preservation Alliance, it meant I’d agreed to work for the survey for a specifically limited amount of time in return for compensation. In the Corporation Rim, it would have meant the survey had rented me from an owner, the same way you’d rent your habitat or your terrain vehicle, except humans usually had warm feelings toward their habitats and terrain vehicles. Ras seemed confused by Amena’s answer, but he just said, “We need something that will take out those drones.” He started to search through the emergency kit, and pulled out a container of fire suppressant. “This might work.” Eletra slid down to sit on the floor. She offered Amena the medication container. “I don’t think I’ve heard of the Preservation Survey. Is that a subsidiary of another corporation or…?” While Amena explained the concept of a non-corporate polity to Eletra (and how many polities did actually have surveys and stations and cities and so on and weren’t just people in loincloths screaming at each other), I reached the quarters and started a quick search. Some cabins were clearly unused, mostly the ones with multiple bunks that were meant for students. The beds were still folded up in the walls and there were no personal possessions in sight, just like the last time I had been here. Other cabins showed recent habitation: beds and furniture deployed, bedding in place but disarrayed, clothing and personal objects and hygiene items lying around. Like the crew had just been here, had just stepped away right before I looked in. It was creepy, with no movement except the air system making the fabric tassels of a wall decoration flutter. Still no sign of any bodies. I sent to Amena, Don’t tell the corporates that you’re Dr. Mensah’s daughter. I’m not stupid, she shot back. They were past the explanation of what Preservation was and were finally exchanging actual information, including their names and what the hell was going on.
Amena said, “This ship attacked us right after we came out of the wormhole. How did you get aboard?” “It attacked us, too. We were on a supply transport, supporting the main expedition ship, an explorer, when this ship started to fire on us. We escaped in a shuttle, then we were pulled aboard. At least, that’s what I think happened.” Eletra shoved her hair back and looked exhausted. “They did something that knocked us unconscious in the shuttle. One moment we were there, the next we were lying on the deck in this ship, and those gray people were laughing at us. I don’t know what happened to the others.” I wondered if the shuttle was still aboard. If ART’s shuttles were still aboard. Without access to ART’s systems, I couldn’t tell without a physical search, like I didn’t have enough to do right now. Speaking of which, I tapped Scout One, which was still trapped in the bridge/control area, and told it to do a systematic scan of any active displays it could find. “We don’t know why they took us,” Ras said. “They locked us in a cabin and just left us there. We don’t know what they want, they wouldn’t tell us.” “The explorer was much faster,” Eletra said. “It might have gotten away.” “I think our baseship got away,” Amena said slowly. “SecUnit was trying to get us over to it and they grabbed us and pulled us into their lock.” There were too many places in ART that I hadn’t searched yet where the bodies of the crew might be stashed. Maybe I do watch too much media, because in the empty corridors, passing empty but recently used rooms, I had an image of finding Mensah’s family camp house like this. Empty, no humans, just their possessions left behind and no trace in the feed, no cameras, no way to find them. This was no time to be an idiot. “Is there any food or water in here?” Eletra said. She rested her head in her hands. “I’ve got a terrible headache.” Ras pushed to his feet, wincing. “There’s a restroom with a water tap.” In the next set of quarters I started to find the anomalies.
One cabin I was pretty certain was the one used to lock up Ras and Eletra. A crumpled jacket that matched their uniforms lay on a bunk. The cabin didn’t have an attached restroom, but didn’t smell as bad as I would’ve expected. (Humans trapped for multiple cycles with no access to water or sanitary devices is usually harder on the furniture.) The Targets must have been letting them out periodically. My process to select some audio (a series of conversations between two of my favorite recurring characters on Sanctuary Moon) finished. I stripped out music and effects, lowered the volume, and cut the sections together into an hour and twenty-two minutes, then relayed it to Scout One inside the sealed control area. It started to play the audio. I’d constructed the query to search for conversations where the two characters were whispering, or speaking in low agitated voices. The effect would be even better with Scout One roaming the control area looking for display surface data. I continued to search the quarters. I thought the Targets must have been using these cabins, too (they didn’t exactly strike me as beings who would respect other beings’ personal space) but the odd smell was the first indication I was right. Human living spaces tend to smell like dirty socks, even when they’re clean. But this smell was oddly … agricultural, like the growth medium used in food-producing systems. According to Scout Two in the control area foyer, all the Targets now had their helmets pressed up against the hatch, trying to hear the conversation inside. Despite everything, it was a little funny. “So were you on a survey, too?” Amena asked. I could tell she was trying to sound casual, but it may have been less obvious to the other humans. “No. Well, in a way,” Ras said. He had filled some water containers from the restroom tap and brought them back for the group. “It was a recovery.” “An attempted recovery,” Eletra said. She took a long drink from a container and wiped her mouth.
“Our division was assigned to work on lost settlements.” She hesitated. “I’m not … It’s proprietary information…” “I’m a junior survey intern and I’m not even from the Corporation Rim,” Amena pointed out. “I’m not going to tell anybody.” Ras didn’t seem as reluctant to explain as Eletra. “We were on an assignment to recover a viable planet. In one of the systems that were mapped before the Corporation Rim formed. Do you know about those?” “Of course.” Amena’s brow was furrowed in confusion. I didn’t get it, either. My education modules have gaps you could fly a gunship through but I knew from the entertainment media that there had been exploration surveys Pre–Corporation Rim. (Corporations didn’t actually invent space and planets, despite the patents the company had tried to file.) Eletra shifted, winced, then took a breath. “The locations to a lot of systems were lost before wormhole stabilizing tech was developed, but researchers find them sometimes in reconstructed data troves. If a corporation can find the planet’s location, they can file for ownership, then they’re free to establish a colony.” “There was a lot of this type of speculation forty or fifty years ago,” Ras continued. “Of course, a lot of corporations overextended and went bankrupt over it, too, and the colonies were lost.” “Lost?” From Amena’s expression, she understood now, but she didn’t like it. “You mean abandoned colonies, settlements where the first arrivals were just left to fend for themselves.” I understood now, too. This was in Preservation’s historical dramas and documentaries. It had been settled by survivors of a colony which had been seeded and then began to fail as supplies were cut off. In Preservation’s case, an independent ship had arrived in time and managed to take the colonists to a more viable planet. (The story was popular in Preservation media. There’s al ways a dramatic rendition of Captain Consuela Makeba’s speech about not leaving a single living thing behind to die.
Mensah has a clip from one of the most popular ones on a display surface on the wall of her station office.) (If there’d been a SecUnit in the colony, there probably would have been a compelling reason why it had to stay behind on the dying planet.) (I don’t actually believe that.) (Sometimes I believe that.) “Reclaiming the lost colonies is big business now,” Ras said. He finished his water and set the container aside. “The terraforming equipment is usually still in place, as well as habitats and other salvage.” Amena’s expression was flat and stony. She pretended to need to fiddle with her wound pack, so she didn’t have to look at them. “So did you find a lost colony?” “We were attacked on the way there,” Eletra said, as Ras was drawing breath to answer. I found a larger cabin that looked like it had been deliberately trashed. Clothing lay trampled on the floor, some of it in the blue of ART’s crew uniform. Hygiene items had been opened and dumped or smeared around on the small attached restroom. A couple of actual static art pieces and a holographic print of humans playing musical instruments had been thrown on the floor and broken. Someone had tried to break a display surface, but hadn’t managed it, and it floated sideways, still showing a static image of two male humans, not young, maybe Mensah’s age or older, but that was as much as I could guess. (I was no good at judging human ages.) One had dark skin and no hair on the front half of his head, and the other was lighter, with short white hair. They were both smiling at the camera, with an embossed version of ART’s logo on the wall behind them. I could look them up in my archive of ART’s crew complement, but I didn’t want to. I felt something build in my chest. I pulled the recording of my conversations with ART, the way it said “my crew.” It was bad enough that ART must be dead, it wasn’t fair that the humans it had loved so much were dead, too. I wanted to find a bunch more algae-smelling gray snotty assholes and kill the shit out of every single one.
A sudden 5 percent dip in performance reliability made my knees go shaky and I leaned on the cabin hatch. For twelve seconds it seemed like a good idea to slide all the way down to the deck and just stay there. But I should get back to Amena. Also, after the Targets had rampaged through here, the deck was pretty disgusting. In the medical suite, the conversation had moved back to me. (Oh goody.) Eletra was saying, “You really have to be careful. That SecUnit seems to have been altered to make it look less like a bot, but that doesn’t change their programming.” “Hmm,” Amena said, not looking at her, still picking at the wound pack on her leg. Ras put in, “I know you think it’s trying to protect you—” “It’s not trying.” Amena’s tone was clipped. “It’s protecting me.” “But they’re not reliable,” Ras persisted. “It’s because of the human neural tissue.” Well, he wasn’t wrong. Ras added, “They go rogue and attack their contract holders and support staff.” Amena bit her lip and squinched up her eyes in a way that said she was suppressing an emotion, but I couldn’t tell what. “I wonder why that is,” she said in a flat voice. On the way to medical, I walked through the galley and the classroom compartments, and swung by a supply locker and grabbed a pre-packed emergency ration bag. They had an awful lot of supplies in here for planetary exploration, not what you’d expect on a ship whose jobs were mapping and teaching and cargo. As I turned down the corridor, I tapped Amena’s feed to tell her I was coming back and started reviewing my archive, comparing the time I had been aboard ART before with what I saw now. Did I actually know what ART and its crew did? I had never bothered to ask; Deep Space Research sounded boring. Almost as boring as guarding mining equipment. In the medbay, Eletra was saying, “You’re very lucky it didn’t turn on you while you were being held on this ship. You must have been locked up here with it for days and days.” Wait, what? Great, were the humans having problems perceiving reality?
Even more than the usual problems humans have perceiving reality? That was all I needed. Amena was just going to have to deal with it, because I was busy. Amena was baffled. “No, no, we just got here. Just a little while ago. Right before the gray people dragged me into that room.” Ras rubbed his face, either concealing his expression or just genuinely unwell. Eletra looked pitying. “I think you’re confused.” Amena’s expression scrunched up again, but she shook her head. “Look, SecUnit’s coming back, so you need to stop saying all this stuff about it. I know you believe it, but you’re wrong, and I don’t want to hear it. And I think maybe we’re both confused because—” Maybe staring at space and teaching young humans to stare at space wasn’t all ART’s crew did. Maybe ART had let me think that. Right, so I had drone input from the medical bay but I wasn’t paying attention to it. I was searching for images of stored supplies to compare and look for anomalies, missing items, other clues. So I only had a 1.4-second warning when I stepped through the hatch and Ras fired a weapon at me. For a human, his aim was great. 6 Fortunately it was an energy weapon and not a SecUnit-head-busting projectile. It still fucking hurt. I flinched and rammed into the side of the hatch (ow) and dove sideways to avoid the second blast. Except there wasn’t one, because Ras was flailing instead of aiming. Amena had jumped on his back and was trying to choke him out. (It was a good effort but she didn’t have the leverage to really clamp down with her forearm.) Eletra stood nearby, waving her arms and yelling, “Stop! What are you doing? Stop!” which was frankly the most sensible thing I had heard a human say in hours. It also told me this wasn’t a planned attack, which is what stopped me from putting a drone through Ras’s face. (Also, I was running out of drones.) If I sound calm, I was actually not calm. I thought I’d had control of the situation (sort of control, okay? don’t laugh) and then it had unraveled rapidly.
I pushed off the hatch and walked over to pick up the weapon Ras had dropped. It was like or possibly identical to or possibly actually was the tube-like energy weapon Target Two had used on me. Ras must have picked it up while I was distracted by having an emotional breakdown. (Yeah, that was a huge mistake.) It had caused pain in my organic tissue but it hadn’t disrupted any processes so I knew it would be no use on the targetDrones. But at least it should work on the Targets. I put it in my jacket pocket. Then I stepped in, kicked Ras in the back of the kneecap, and caught Amena around the waist. He hit the floor and I set her on her feet. Amena was almost as angry as I was. “What’s wrong with you?” she shouted at Ras. She glared at Eletra, who made a helpless, baffled gesture. You know, if Ras was going to turn on me, he might have at least warned Eletra first so she wasn’t standing around wondering what the hell was going on. Ras shoved to his feet and said, “You can’t trust—any of them! It could be any of them—They control them—” He staggered back away from us. His eyes were unfocussed. “You don’t—any of them—” Amena’s furious expression turned confused. “Any of what?” That was a good question. I’d seen humans do irrational things (a lot of irrational things) and encounter situations that made them act in ways that were counterproductive at best. (This was not the first time I’d been shot in the head by a human I was trying to protect, let’s put it that way.) But this was odd, even granting the fact that I’d physically intimidated Ras earlier. Eletra winced and pressed a hand to her head. “Ras, that doesn’t make sense, what—” Then her eyes rolled up and she collapsed. Amena made a grab for her, then flinched away when Ras folded up and hit the floor. Then Eletra started to convulse. Amena threw herself down on the deck, trying to support Eletra’s head. Ras lay in a tumble, completely limp. Amena looked frantic. I was a little frantic, too. “They took some medication from the emergency kit,” she said.
She jerked her head toward the open kit and the container beside it. “They’re supposed to be analgesics—could they be poisoned?” It wasn’t a bad suggestion, but if this was something in the medication, I thought the reaction would involve bodily fluids and be way more disgusting. Amena wasn’t affected, so it wasn’t something spread by contact or transmitted through the air system or the water containers. Eletra looked more like her nervous system was being jolted by a power source. Ras looked … Ras looked dead. I stepped over to the emergency kit still sitting on the bench. It had some limited autonomous functions and had expanded and opened new compartments, responding to the humans’ distress. I took the small medical scanner it was trying to hand me and pointed it at Ras. It sent its report to my feed, with scan images of the inside of Ras’s body. A power source had jolted through the upper part of his chest, destroying the important parts there for pumping blood and breathing. It looked, oddly, like what being punished by a governor module felt like— Now there’s a thought. I checked Scout Two in the control area foyer. The Targets had stopped listening at the sealed hatch and were gathered around Target Four, who now held a strange, bulky device. It was twelve centimeters across and a millimeter thick, with a flat old-fashioned solid-state screen. (I’d seen them on historical dramas.) All the Targets seemed excited about whatever it was showing them. If it was something that made the Targets happy, it couldn’t be good. My scan detected a tiny power source on both Eletra and Ras. It hadn’t been there earlier so something had activated it, most likely a signal from Target Four’s screen device. There was no time for finesse; I jammed the whole range. Eletra slumped, limp and unconscious. If there’d been a last-ditch destroy-the-brain function, there was nothing I could do about it. Scout Two now showed Target Four poking angrily at the screen as the others watched in obvious disappointment. Hah.
Amena, in the middle of yelling, “Will you stop just standing there and do something—” halted abruptly. The rest came out as a startled huff. She added, “Did you do that?” “Yes.” I crouched down and lifted Eletra out of Amena’s lap. “This was caused by implants.” I carried Eletra over to the nearest gurney and carefully set her down. Amena scrambled up and went to Ras. She reached for his arm and I said, “He’s dead.” She jerked her hand back, then fumbled for the pulse in his neck. “What—How?” I sent the medscanner’s images to her feed and she winced. “You said it was an implant? Is that like an augment?” “No, it’s like an implant.” Augments were supposed to help humans do things they couldn’t otherwise do, like interface with the feed more completely or store memory archives. Augments that weren’t feed interfaces were meant to correct physical injuries or illnesses. Augments are helpful; implants are like governor modules. I pointed the medscanner at Eletra. It found a raised temperature, increased heart rate, and increased respiration rate. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded bad. “When this happened, I had a drone view of the Targets in the central section using an unknown device.” Amena pushed to her feet and stood beside Eletra’s gurney. She was accessing the medical scan data and her expression had that vague look that humans get when they’re reading in their feed. “That looks like an infection. Eletra said her back hurt.” Her face scrunching up with worry and fear, Amena carefully moved the dark hair away from Eletra’s neck, then half-turned her. She had to pull down the back of Eletra’s shirt to find it. Yeah, there was the implant. Amena sucked in a breath. “That looks terrible.” It was a metal ring, 1.1 centimeters wide, visible against the brown skin between Eletra’s shoulder blades. It sat in the middle of a rictus of swollen flesh that looked painful even to me, and that was saying something.
Normal external interfaces for humans were designed to look like all kinds of things, from carved natural wood to skin tones to jewels or stones or enamel art pieces to actual plain metal with a brand logo. And why would Eletra, who was an augmented human with an internal interface, need a second external one? And any remote chance that this was some kind of botched attempt at a medical or enhancement augment was outweighed by the fact that no human would put up with this when any MedSystem could fix it in a few minutes at most. And botched was putting it mildly; it looked like a bad human medic had jammed it in with their toes. Amena was working the problem. “Why didn’t they tell us? We could have … Unless they didn’t know it was there. They said they were unconscious when they were brought aboard.” The consternation in her expression deepened. “Did Ras’s implant tell him to attack you? Or just make him so confused that he shot at the first person who walked in the door? These implants are obviously supposed to incapacitate them if they tried to escape, to keep them under control—” “I’m familiar with the concept,” I told her. (One of the indispensable benefits of being a rogue SecUnit: not having to pretend to attentively listen to a human’s unnecessary explanations.) “I had one in my head.” “Right.” She flicked a startled look at me. I love it when humans forget that SecUnits are not just guarding and killing things voluntarily, because we think it’s fun. “Then why did it take the gray people so long to activate the implants? Why didn’t they do it right after we escaped?” Yeah, about that. I hadn’t kept her updated on my intel. “I don’t think the surviving Targets knew what happened when we were captured.” Amena argued, “But that one Target got away.” “I used my drones to kill that Target and a third one, after they locked themselves in the ship’s control area.
The other Targets have been trying to get through the sealed hatch and seem to think we’re inside.” I sent Amena a section of my drone video from the control area foyer. “They may think Eletra and Ras are in there with us. Or they activated the implants to try to figure out where they are.” Amena’s gaze went vague as she reviewed the clip on her feed. “Is that why they’re listening to the hatch?” I checked the input. Yeah, they were back to that again. “My drone is playing a recording of a conversation.” Amena lifted her brows. “Right, that’s really clever. Can you use the drones to threaten them and—” I showed her the clip of the change to the Targets’ helmets. “No. This security update prevents that.” Amena grimaced and rubbed her brow. “I see. So how do we get to the bridge?” You know, it’s not like I’m half-assing this, I am actually trying my best despite the fuck-ups. I absolutely did not sound testy as I said, “I don’t know. I have a scout drone in the control area but it can’t access any of the systems.” Amena stopped and looked at me with an incredulous expression. “So we’re locked out of the bridge and the bot pilot is gone and we don’t know what’s flying the ship.” The good thing about being a construct is that you can’t reproduce and create children to argue with you. This time I did sound testy. “I’m working on it.” I turned the medical scanner’s image so I could see what was under Eletra’s implant. I really expected the shitty primitive governor module to have filaments extending directly into the human’s nervous system, like a normal augment. But there were no filaments; the images the scanner sent to our feed connection showed the implant was self-contained, narrowing to a blunt point. Amena held up her hands. “Fine! Wow, you’re so touchy.” She added, “Okay, so if they knew these things were implanted, they would have asked us to help them. Even if they didn’t trust us…” Her brow furrowed again. “I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have.” I agreed.
They hadn’t even asked about the MedSystem, or the medical equipment in the emergency kit. If I was a human and I had this thing jammed in me and I happened to run into a fully stocked medical suite to hide, it would have been at the top of my to-do list. “We have to get this thing out before it kills her, too.” Amena studied the diagrams and images the scanner sent into our feed. “It’s really primitive. It must have been causing the confusion and pain, but that wouldn’t make them forget it was there.” I rotated the images so I could make sure I was right about the depth. “No. Something else did that.” “It’s not very good, for what it’s trying to do.” Amena made a violent jabbing motion at her own neck. “If you knew it was there, and you could get away from the person trying to zap you, you could pop it out with a knife.” Note to self: Make sure Amena has no reason to jab at her own neck with a knife. “Not if you thought it was interwoven with your neural tissue.” At least when I dealt with my governor module, I’d had access to my own schematics and diagnostics. Amena wasn’t listening. She went over to rummage in the emergency kit. “Her vital signs are getting worse.” She found a laser scalpel case and brandished it. “I’m going to try to take the implant out.” “You have medic training.” It was worth asking. “Basic training, sure.” I was making an expression again because she grimaced. “I know, I know! But you said we shouldn’t use the MedSystem and we have to do something.” She wasn’t wrong. The kit was transmitting increasingly plaintive warnings. There was a lot of technical medical data to process but the conclusion was obvious that the activation had caused damage to Eletra, if not as much as it had to Ras. The kit was demanding we intervene soon. Most of my medical knowledge came from watching MedCenter Argala, a historical drama series that had been popular twenty-seven corporate standard years ago and was still available for download on almost every media feed I had ever encoun tered.
Even I knew it was inaccurate. I also found it kind of boring, so I’d only watched it once. I held my hand out for the scalpel. Amena hesitated. Did she think I was going to kill Eletra? I’d put up with way more annoying humans, including some that she was related to. Then she handed the scalpel over, her expression a mix of relief and guilt. “I could do it if I had to.” Huh. Amena wanted to help, maybe to prove herself. I said, “I know you could.” She hadn’t been bluffing about the neck-jabbing thing, I could tell. But if we were wrong and removing the implant killed Eletra, at least this wouldn’t be my first accidental murder. Also, my hands don’t shake. Amena got another wound seal pack out and engaged the emergency kit’s sterile field. I followed its instructions to spray anesthetic prep fluid. Then with the occasional pop-up help hint from the kit’s feed, I used the scalpel to cut through the damaged tissue. I had a drone view of Amena watching the hand scanner, her brow furrowed in half-wince, half-concentration. I avoided the bits that would bleed a lot (not something a human trying to do this to their own body could have managed, so there, Amena) and the implant popped out. And Eletra woke up. She gasped a breath, her eyes open, staring without comprehension at Amena’s stomach. I stepped back and Amena hastily fit the pack over the wound before too much blood leaked out. It powered up and snugged in close to Eletra’s skin; her eyes fluttered closed again. From the report on the emergency kit’s feed, the pack had delivered a hefty punch of painkillers and antibiotics. I put the implant in the little container the emergency kit offered, and the kit dutifully sprayed it with something. (I hope the kit knew what it was doing, because I sure didn’t.) “It’s okay, it’s okay, we’re helping you,” Amena was telling Eletra, patting her hand. Ras’s body was there in the middle of everything and that just felt wrong. I picked it up and carried it to a gurney on the far side of the room.
In a supply cabinet I found a cover to put over him, but before I did I pulled down his jacket and shirt to look at his implant. It was on his shoulder blade, surrounded by damaged tissue, much thicker and more swollen than Eletra’s. I wondered if he had known it was there, at some point. If he had jabbed at his back with something trying to get it out, before the Targets made him forget about it again. (It was still a stupid thing to do, but I understood the impulse. I understood it a lot.) Then the emergency kit blared an alarm through our feed as Eletra’s pulse and respiration rate dropped. The kit flashed a handy annotated diagram of what we should do into the feed. Amena swore a lot and helped me roll Eletra over. I started chest compressions, being extremely careful with the amount of pressure I was exerting. Amena frantically grabbed for the resuscitation devices. The kit was trying to be helpful but it was nothing like a MedSystem sliding into my feed with everything I needed to know right there. It was urging me to start rescue breathing, but I couldn’t. My lungs work in a completely different way than human lungs do. It’s not only that I need much less air but the connections are all different. Aside from the utterly disgusting thought of putting my mouth which I talk with on a human (ugh), I didn’t think I could expel enough air for what the kit wanted me to do. Amena ran over and started the rescue breathing herself, but it wasn’t working. I told her, “We need the mask.” Amena gave up with a gasp of frustration and went back to the kit. She found the mask and wrestled with its sterile packaging, trying to rip the plastic with her teeth, and I couldn’t stop compressions to help her. (Yes, I did just realize we should have thought of this possibility earlier. They never showed hu mans getting the tools ready on MedCenter Argala, it was all just there.) Then from across the compartment, the MedSystem made a soft clunk and its platform lights turned violet. It had just powered on.
Amena stopped, the mask in her hand finally. She spat out a piece of plastic wrapper and demanded, “Did you get it turned on?” “No.” That was ART’s MedSystem, but without ART. Its reactivated feed said it was operating at factory standard. It could be one more weird anomaly in this unending cycle of what the fuck. Or it could be a trick, TargetControlSystem trying to get us to put Eletra in there so it could kill her. Except that Eletra was dying anyway so why bother? And I tried not to see this as some remnant of ART still in the ship acting to save a human. Well, fuck it. I stopped compressions, scooped up Eletra, and carried her to the MedSystem’s platform. I set her down and the surgical suite dropped over her immediately, a pad settling over her chest to restart her heartbeat and a much more complicated mask apparatus lowering to work on her respiration. In six seconds it had her breathing on her own and her heartbeat stabilized. The platform contoured to roll her onto her side. Delicate feelers peeled away the wound pack and tossed it onto the deck, then started to knit the raw bleeding spot in her back. On the gurney, the emergency kit beeped once in protest, then shut up. Amena let out a long breath of relief, then wiped her face on her sleeve. She started to gather the scattered pieces of the kit’s resuscitation gear. Trying to fit them back into their containers, she said, “So what turned the MedSystem on—” I said, “I know as much as you do about what is happening on this ship.” Which was why I put the unknown corporate human who was dying anyway in the possibly compromised MedSystem and not, say, Amena or myself. I didn’t like that Eletra had nearly died, despite the fact that we had followed all the instructions carefully. I didn’t like that Ras had died before we could do anything. I especially didn’t like that the Targets had killed him. He wasn’t my human but he had popped off right in front of me and I hadn’t been able to do anything about it. They’re so fucking fragile.
Amena glared, then eyed me speculatively. “Are you sure you’re not hurt? You did get shot in the head, again. And didn’t that gray person shoot you before you tore their lungs out?” I hadn’t felt any lungs while I was rummaging around in Target Two’s chest cavity, but I’m sure they were in there somewhere. “It was just an energy weapon.” “It was just an energy weapon,” Amena muttered to herself, in a very bad imitation of my voice, while determinedly trying to fit the mask attachment with the oxygen nodules into the wrong slot. “If you weren’t so angry at me, you’d realize I was right.” For fuck’s sake. “I am not angry at you.” Okay, that’s a lie, I was angry at her, or really annoyed at her, and I had no idea why. It wasn’t her fault she was here, we were here, she hadn’t done anything but be human and she wasn’t even whiny. And her first reaction to another human shooting me had been to jump on his back and try to choke him. Amena gave up on the mask and gave me her full attention. “You look angry.” “That’s just something my face does sometimes.” This is why helmets with opaque face plates are a good idea. Amena snorted in disbelief. “Yes, when you’re angry.” She hesitated, and I couldn’t interpret her expression, except that it wasn’t annoyed anymore. “I should have said more, when they were talking about you. It was just like my history and political consciousness class. I didn’t think the instructors were making things up, but … it was just like the examples they used.” They had been talking about me as a SecUnit the way humans always talked about SecUnits, and it had been pretty mild, compared to a lot of things I had heard humans say. If I got angry every time that happened … I don’t know, but it sounded exhausting. Talking about this was exhausting. “I’m not angry about that.” Amena demanded, “If you’re not angry, then what’s wrong?” I was definitely glaring now. “How do you want the list sorted?
By time stamp or degree of survivability?” Amena said in exasperation, “I mean what’s wrong with you!” There’s that question again, but I assumed she didn’t want to discuss the existential quandary posed by my entire existence. “I got hit on the head by an unidentified drone and shot, you were there!” “Not that! Why are you sad and upset?” That was the point where even I could tell that Amena was terrified as well as furious. “There’s something you’re not telling me and it’s scaring me! I’m not a fucking hero like my second mom or a genius like everybody else in my family, I’m just ordinary, and you’re all I’ve got!” I wasn’t expecting that. It was so far from what I thought she had meant, and she was so upset, that the truth inadvertently came out. “My friend is dead!” Amena was startled. Staring blankly at me, she asked, “What friend? Somebody on the survey?” I couldn’t stop now. “No, this transport. This bot pilot. It was my friend, and it’s dead. I think it’s dead. I don’t see how it would have let this happen if it wasn’t dead.” Wow, that did not sound rational. Amena’s expression did something complicated. She took a step toward me. I backed up a step. She stopped, held up her hands palm-out, and said in a softer voice, “Hey, I think you need to sit down.” Now she was talking to me like I was a hysterical human. Worse, I was acting like a hysterical human. “I don’t have time to sit down.” When I was owned by the company, I wasn’t allowed to sit down. Now humans keep wanting me to sit down. “I have a lot of code to write so I can hack the targetControlSystem.” Amena started to reach out for me and then pulled her hand back when I stepped away again. “But I think you’re emotionally compromised right now.” That was … that was so completely not true. Stupid humans. Sure, I’d had an emotional breakdown with the whole evisceration thing, but I was fine now, despite the drop in performance reliability. Absolutely fine. And I had to kill the rest of the Targets in the extremely painful ways I’d been visualizing.
I needed to check Scout One’s data to see if I could tell where we were going in the wormhole and how long it would take us to get there. And it occurred to me there might not be a destination, if whatever was controlling ART’s functions knew I’d killed three Targets and had decided to revenge them by trapping us in the wormhole forever. I said, “I am not. You’re emotionally compromised.” (I know, but at the time it seemed like a relevant comeback.) Amena, like a rational person, ignored it. She said persuasively, “Won’t it be easier to write code if you sit down?” I still wanted to argue. But maybe I did want to sit down. I sat down on the floor and cautiously tuned up my pain sensors. Oh yeah, that hurt. Amena knelt down in front of me, angling her head so she could see my face. This did not help. She said, “I know you don’t eat, but is there anything I can get you, like something from the kit or a blanket…” I covered my face. “No.” Right, so say, just theoretically, I was emotionally compromised. A recharge cycle which I actually didn’t need right now wasn’t going to help with that. So what would help with that? Taking over targetControlSystem and hurting it very, very badly, that’s what would help with that. My drone view showed Amena getting up and pacing slowly across the room, her shoulders drooping. Then on the platform, Eletra stirred and made bleary noises. Amena hurried over to her, saying, “Hey, it’s all right. You’re okay.” Eletra blinked and peered up at her. She managed to say, “What happened? Is Ras all right?” Amena leaned against the platform, and from the high angle she looked older, with lines on either side of her mouth. Keeping her voice low, she said, “I’m sorry, he died. You had these strange implants in your back, that were hurting you, and his killed him. We had to take yours out and it almost killed you. Did you know they were there?” Eletra looked baffled. “What? No, that’s … I don’t understand…” I checked my penetration testing, but there were no results. That was annoying.
If a system won’t communicate with me, I can’t get inside it. And apparently targetControlSystem was operating as a single system. Stations and installations use multiple systems that work with each other as a safety feature. (Safety is relative.) I usually went in through a security system function and used it to get to all the others. (Technically, I am a security system, so it was easy to get other security systems to interact with me, or to confuse them into thinking I was already part of them.) There are still ways to get into heavily shielded systems, or systems with unreadable code, or unfamiliar architecture. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I needed to use the most reliable method: get a dumb human user to access the system for me. Ras’s implant had ceased functioning, probably having destroyed its own power source to kill him. Eletra’s implant was still in the emergency kit’s little container, where it thought anomalous things removed from humans needed to be stored. It was now covered with a sterile goo but was still capable of receiving. I dropped my jamming signal. Via Scout Two in the control area foyer, Target Four had set the screen device aside on a bench. All the Targets were talking, ignoring the control area hatch. They looked agitated and angry. They might have figured out that we weren’t locked in the control area, finally. I was glad I hadn’t had the chance to kill all of them, since there was a possibility now that they might actually come in handy. (I had no idea where the targetDrones were, but logic and threat assessment said they should be congregated up against the hatchways sealing off my safe zone. That was going to be a problem.) I checked on Scout One’s progress, searching through the images of the floating display surfaces it had captured. Lots of shifting diagrams and numbers that might as well have been abstract art as far as I was concerned. These screens were meant to be interpreted through ART’s feed, and without it to explain and annotate the data, it was all a mess.
Couldn’t anything be simple, just for once? I can fly low atmosphere craft but nobody ever thought it was remotely rational to give murderbots the modules on piloting transports. Wait, okay, there was a display with a schematic of ART’s hull, with a lot of moving wavy patterns around it that probably would make sense if I knew anything about what happens in wormholes. There was a time counter on it, but nothing indicated what it was timing. So, not helpful. What would have been helpful was an episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Or World Hoppers. Or anything. (Anything except MedCenter Argala.) But media would calm me down, and I wanted to stay angry. I couldn’t sit here and wait, there had to be something else I could do. I stood up. “Oh, you’re up.” Amena was sitting on the edge of the platform next to a half-conscious Eletra so she could hold her hand. She eyed me dubiously. “Already. I thought you were going to rest.” “Do these make any sense to you?” I sent her the display images from ART’s bridge. Amena blinked rapidly. “They’re navigation and power information, like from a pilot’s station.” She took in my expression and waved a hand in exasperation. “Well, if you knew that, why didn’t you say so?” Fine, that one was on me. “They’re from my drone sealed in the control area. Do you know how to read them?” Amena squinted at nothing again, but slowly shook her head and groaned under her breath. She glanced down at Eletra, who was unconscious again, and carefully untangled their hands. “From what she said, I doubt she was on the bridge crew.” Then she lifted her brows. “Do you know if there’s an aux station in engineering?” I didn’t know that. “An aux station?” “It’s like an extra monitoring station for the engineering crew. You can’t take control of the bridge unless the command pilot transfers the helm—at least you couldn’t in the ones I’ve seen—but you can get displays for the rest of the ship’s systems.
We have them on some of our ships but I don’t know how common they are.” She admitted, “We might have them because our ships are an older design.” It wasn’t the kind of thing that would be needed on a bot-piloted transport, but it couldn’t hurt to check. My performance reliability had leveled out at 89 percent. Not great, but I could work with it. I still hadn’t identified the source of the drop. I’d taken multiple projectile hits without having that kind of steady drop. I took Ras’s energy weapon out of my jacket pocket and set it on the bench. “Keep this just in case. It’s not going to work on the targetDrones but it should work on the Targets.” I hate giving weapons to humans but I couldn’t leave her without something. “I’ll go to engineering.” “Hold it, wait.” Amena hopped off the platform. “I want to go with you.” I had a confusing series of reactions to this. Not in order: (1) Exasperation, at her, at myself. (2) Habitual suspicion. On my contracts for the company, the clingy clients were the ones most likely to (a) get me shot (b) advocate loudly for abandoning the damaged SecUnit because it would take too long to load me in the transport. (And humans wonder why I have trust issues.) (3) Overwhelming urge to kill anything that even thought about threatening her. “Someone has to stay here with the injured human.” She grimaced. “Right, sorry.” Then she looked away and rubbed her eyes. And I’d made her cry. Good job, Murderbot. I knew I’d been an asshole and I owed Amena an apology. I’d attribute it to the performance reliability drop, and the emotional breakdown which I am provisionally conceding as ongoing rather than an isolated event that I am totally over now, and being involuntarily shutdown and restarted, but I can also be kind of an asshole. (“Kind of” = in the 70 percent–80 percent range.) I didn’t know what to say but I didn’t have time to do a search for relevant apology examples.
(And it’s not like I ever find any relevant examples that I actually want to use.) I said, “I’m sorry for … being an asshole.” That made Amena make a noise like she was trying to express her sinuses and then she covered her face. “No. I mean, it’s all right. I haven’t exactly been nice to you, so we’re probably even.” I’m going now, right now. Right now. I was at the hatch when she said, “Just don’t stop talking to me on the feed.” I said, “I won’t.” HelpMe.file Excerpt 2 (Section from interview Bharadwaj-09257394.) “I noticed a thing about your transcript.” “Was the font wrong?” “No, the font was lovely. But whenever the company is mentioned you edit out the company and change it to the company.” Checks session recording. “In fact, you’ve just done it now.” “That’s not a question.” “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.” pause “Is it the logos? You’ve mentioned them before. I did think at the time, that you wouldn’t have known they were impossible to remove if you hadn’t already tried.” “That’s one of the reasons.” “We’ve talked a little about trauma recovery treatments. I wonder if you’ve ever thought about taking one yourself.” :session redacted: 7 I gave Amena a view of what I was doing via my main video input, so she would know I was still there and I didn’t have to think what to say to her. (Also, if there was an engineering aux station and it showed we were trapped forever, then she could see it for herself and I wouldn’t have to tell her.) As I went down the corridor, Amena said, Why is the vid so jumpy? Is it from a drone? It’s from my eyes. Oh. I’d left the task group of eight drones with her, and I could see her via their cameras. She sat on the platform next to Eletra, elbow propped on her knee. This is creepy, she said. I was passing a lounge attached to the galley, with blue padded couches along the walls. Three cups with ART’s university logo sat on a low table, and a gray jacket, one of the kinds humans wore for exercise, was draped over the back of a chair.
The way everything looks so normal. Like somebody could walk in any second. She wasn’t wrong. Except for those few cabins in the living quarters, I hadn’t seen any areas that were trashed, or where it looked like a struggle had occurred. Is there anything about this situation that isn’t creepy? Hah, she replied. If I think of something I’ll mention it. I reached the sealed hatch that accessed the passage to the engineering module, then had to work on the panel to bypass the damage I’d done to delay anyone opening it from the other side. Breaking the safe zone I’d established might not be a great idea, but my sentry drones on the other two sealed hatches had registered no activity, so as a calculated risk it wasn’t nearly as dumb as some other things I could think of. And the Targets in the control area foyer still hadn’t picked up the screen device, and I couldn’t sit around and wait for them to get off their asses. Right, I could, but I wasn’t going to. Amena said, Everybody in the survey team must be really worried about us. I’m glad … I mean, I’m not glad you got caught, too, but if I was here alone … It would have been really bad. My uncle Thiago is probably relieved that at least you’re with me. The hatch opened onto an empty corridor, no targetDrones. I sealed it again and left a sentry drone on this side to alert me if anything tampered with it. Then I sent the rest of my cloud ahead down the corridor. I knew Amena was trying to compliment me. But it was strange that her view of Thiago’s opinion of me was so different from the objective reality. Your uncle Thiago doesn’t trust me. Not that I was upset about that or cared about it at all. She made a snorting noise that came through the feed and my drone audio. Sure he does. You saved him from those people who attacked the facility. That was beside the point. I’d saved a lot of humans and the number who had trusted and/or noticed me as anything other than an appliance attached to HubSystem afterward was statistically insignificant.
He didn’t like the way I did it. She sighed and rubbed at a dark stain on her shoe. He’s still getting over what happened with second mom getting abducted after her survey. Things like that don’t happen on Preservation. It was a big shock. And … maybe he’s a little jealous. She can talk to you about what happened to her, but she can’t talk to us. Mensah had said that, too. I didn’t understand why they wanted her to talk about it. Couldn’t they just read the report? That’s not what we talk about. Most of the time. Amena hesitated. They wouldn’t really have killed her. They couldn’t get away with that. That sounds incredibly naive, but Amena and Thiago and the rest of Mensah’s family and 99 plus percent of Preservation’s population still didn’t know about the other assassination attempt. If GrayCris had managed to cut a deal with the company, they would have. They would have taken the ransom from Preservation and killed her, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin, and no one would have been able to do anything about it. My scout drones encountered a closed safety hatch into the main engineering module section. This was a good sign: if the targetDrones had been circulating through here, it would have been open. I reached it and hit the manual release. As soon as the hatch started to slide upward I sent my drone cloud under the gap, directing it to spread out into the corridor ahead. No lost contacts, and their cameras and scans detected no movement. So far so good, though I was picking up a vibration just on the edge of my perceptible range. Maybe it was normal? I hadn’t spent any time here when I’d traveled with ART before. My drone cloud didn’t encounter any targetDrones as it followed the circular corridor around to the engine control access, which was a relief. The last thing I needed was to be whacked into an involuntary restart again. Figuring out a countermeasure for the stealth material on the targetDrones and on the Targets’ helmets was on the long list of stuff I needed to do so we could survive.
But none of the things on the list would matter much if the targetControlSystem had sent us into the wormhole with no destination. I’d seen shows about humans and augmented humans trapped in wormholes indefinitely. They ranged from bleakly depressing (due to an excess of realism) to highly unlikely (due to an excess of optimism). At least the humans in the shows knew they were on a potentially endless trip, and not just a long one. I hadn’t seen any sign of damage or disturbance up to this point, but then I came around the curve into a foyer where quiescent display surfaces floated along the walls above specialized control interfaces. The weird thing was that the stations were active, though in standby mode, and not shut down. Even I knew you didn’t mess with the engines while they were actually making the transport go. These stations would be for fine-tuning or altering or something, which should only be done while the transport was in dock. Also, one station chair was twisted around to face the entrance, and near it one of ART’s repair drones lay smashed on the deck. My drones are tiny intel drones, but most of ART’s were larger, with multiple arms and physical interfaces so they could perform maintenance and other specialized tasks. This drone had six of its spidery arms deployed when something had knocked it out of the air, and it was splayed and flattened to the deck like something had stepped on it. I wanted to pick it up and have an emotion over it like a stupid human. But I smelled growth medium again. Amena said, This is such a different set-up from the ships I’ve seen. Can you look for a display somewhere with— Oh, I had a bad feeling about this. I followed the smell. It led me through the next hatch and down a short gravity well where blinking caution markers floated in the air.
(The gist was that various component manufactories and shipwrights and the University of Mihira and New Tideland did not want you to come down here without a Class Master Engineering License or Local Jurisdictional Equivalent and if you felt you just had to then really don’t fucking touch anything.) Amena had stopped talking, and her assigned drone camera showed her squinting in concentration as she watched the scene through my eyes. At the bottom of the gravity well, there was a platform where I could look down through the transparent shielding bubble over the engines. Confession: I didn’t know what the engines were supposed to look like, exactly. I’d never had to guard a transport’s engines and they were usually too boring to show on the entertainment media. But I knew whatever was down there wasn’t supposed to have a large organic mass on top of it that smelled of algae and growth medium. Amena said softly, What … What the … What is that? Believe me, it was the question occupying 92 percent of my attention right now. Organic neural tissue can be melded with inorganic systems (Example A: the squishy bits inside my skull) so there was an outside chance (it was so outside I couldn’t estimate a percentage) that this organic mass was a normal part of ART’s systems, maybe something unique and proprietary. But then why did it smell like the Targets? I got an alert from Scout Two in the control area foyer. I checked its input and saw Target Five stride over and pick up the screen device where it lay on a chair. (Why the hell does everything have to happen at once? But at least the freaky thing on ART’s engines wasn’t trying to crawl up here and kill us yet.) As Target Five tapped his fingers on the solid-state screen, I widened my input range to pick up any active channel. In 2.3 seconds, I caught a data transmission. More importantly, .2 seconds later, I caught targetControlSystem’s response. Got you, you piece of shit. But something about the view from Scout Two bothered me.
It had been bothering me for a while, but I had been too agitated to pay attention. A lot of my ability to do threat assessment (like pick potential hostiles out of crowds or tell which stupid boat is full of raiders instead of curious locals) is based on pattern matching off a database of human behaviors. The Targets were anomalous, but they weren’t so anomalous they didn’t exhibit the same basic types of behaviors as other humans. And something was off about their behavior in the control area foyer, something that couldn’t be accounted for by their overconfidence or the fact that they were all assholes. Scout Two watched the Targets waiting impatiently, standing around the control area foyer as Target Five tapped at the screen. Standing. Even after they had apparently realized that the noise from the sealed control area was a decoy, after their security update made them much less vulnerable to drone attacks, they had stood around and waited. (SecUnits weren’t allowed to sit down, ever, but humans and augmented humans did it every chance they had.) They hadn’t tried to search for us, they had stayed in the foyer, sending their targetDrones into the surrounding corridors but no further. We were hostiles trapped in an enclosed space with them, moving through it at will as far as they knew. Why weren’t they trying to protect themselves by making their own safe zone? Why hadn’t they at least found a compartment to lock themselves in? Were they relying completely on the targetDrones? Or were they waiting for outside help, because they knew they hadn’t long to wait? They hadn’t even bothered to sit down. It’s not like I didn’t already think this situation was really fucking bad, but I was beginning to think it was way fucking worse. Wormhole travel takes multiple cycles. The trip from our survey site back to Preservation had taken four Preservation Standard cycles (which were defined as twenty-eight Preservation Standard hours each) and it was considered a short trip, just to the edge of Preservation territory.
There was no way we could be at our destination yet. Or any destination yet. I tapped Scout One, locked up in ART’s control area, and told it to look again at that display that showed ART’s hull, the wave patterns, and the time countdown. Scout One zipped back up to that console. The countdown was at two minutes fourteen seconds. Oh yeah, this … is an issue. I forwarded the input to Amena. Amena’s drone squad watched her eyes narrow in disbelief. That really looks like it’s counting down to a wormhole exit but that can’t be right. I was somewhat desperate for it not to be right. Wake Eletra and ask her how long the ship was in the wormhole, how long it took them to get from the system where they were captured to Preservation territory. Amena scooted around to touch Eletra’s shoulder. After long seconds Eletra stirred. Amena asked the question. Eletra blinked, more aware, and her expression turned puzzled. “We never left the system. We’ve been here the whole time.” “No, you came through a wormhole to Preservation where we were captured. Now we’re going somewhere else. Remember the gray person said we were in the bridge-transit?” Amena tried to persist, but Eletra’s eyelids were drooping and she didn’t respond. Amena sent to me, She’s still really confused. Earlier they both thought we’d been captured before they were, and they didn’t believe me when I tried to tell them we weren’t. I told her, This thing on the engine housing is an alien remnant. I think it’s taking us through the wormhole at a much faster rate. Much faster. Not hours instead of cycles, but minutes instead of cycles. ART’s engines had been compromised by a device that was using the wormhole in a completely different way, allowing travel faster than any transport technology that I’d seen in media, or heard about on the newsfeeds. Faster than any human transport technology. I think we’re about to come out into normal space. Amena shook her head. No, that’s bonkos. The timer must be damaged.
We’ve only been in the wormhole for a few hours, we can’t be anywhere yet. The closest inhabited system outside Preservation territory is fifteen days from Station at least— And then the engines made a noise somewhere between a groan and a clunk. A new display sprung up in front of Scout One: a view of normal space. We had just come out of the wormhole. Amena froze, staring at the feed view of the new display. Her eyes widened in alarm. Then she said, What should we do? That was a really good question. My first thought was to try to destroy the alien remnant. Fortunately instead of doing that I went on to the next thought. (I don’t know anything about transport engines but I know you shouldn’t shoot at them, okay? They’re near the top of the long list of things it’s just obviously not a good idea to shoot at.) I needed more intel before I could do anything about this. I didn’t like the idea of saying “I don’t know” to Amena because humans panic and I almost don’t blame them because right now I feel like panicking and I was not in control of this situation and I could see at least ten instances now where I’d made wrong decisions and being in control of the situation was really important because otherwise it was in control of me and that felt like a short step to being back in the company’s control. And maybe I just had to trust Amena, who had tackled a much larger human because she had thought she needed to save me. I told her, I don’t know. Amena sat up straight, biting her lip. Then she whispered to herself, “All right, all right. Let’s think.” On the feed, sounding much calmer than she looked, she said, Can you make that drone in the control area move around? If we can see a display that will tell us where we are, or if there’s a station or someplace we can try to send a distress signal … That … wasn’t a bad idea. I exited the platform and went back up through the gravity well, telling Scout One to do a sweep of any active display surfaces.
As its input filled with images, I pulled my archived video of its previous survey and ran a comparison. I was able to isolate five displays with significant changes. I enlarged them and set the images up in our feed so we could page through them. This one, Amena said immediately, this is local navigation. There’s info on the star … it doesn’t say if we’re close to the station … or if there’s a station at all … I reached the monitoring area with its poor dead repair drone. I could see the display Amena was interpreting, but I’d found another diagram of ART on a new display. An indicator showed something attached to the outside of ART’s hull, on its lab module. Looking at the specifications … For fuck’s sake, it couldn’t be. I’d shut off our comm because I didn’t want the Targets using it to track us, plus it wasn’t like anybody could contact us while we were in the wormhole. I reactivated it and checked the channel our survey had used. It was active. Yeah, this was happening. I pinged the channel and got an immediate response, and transferred it to our feed relay. Amena clapped a hand to her head in shock. “What—” A familiar voice said, SecUnit, Amena, can you hear me? It was Arada. Amena gasped, Oh, we’re here, we’re here! Where are you? Arada said, We’re in the facility’s safepod, attached to the hull of the raider ship. You’re onboard, correct? We saw you pulled toward the airlock. Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. They were supposed to be safe on the baseship, arriving at Preservation Station by now. I said, Who’s we? SecUnit! Arada said, clearly happy to hear from me. Oh, Overse is here, and Thiago and Ratthi. We weren’t able to reach the baseship after jettison and were dragged into the wormhole with the attacker. Should we try to get to you? Amena asked. She hopped off Eletra’s gurney and bounced on her toes. We’ve got an injured person with us. Arada said hastily, No, no, the pod’s too damaged.

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