Split (1)

train · 22.5k rows

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We didn’t expect— Someone in the background, probably Overse, yelled something urgent, but it was muffled and I’d have to analyze the audio to understand it. Arada changed whatever she was about to say to, What’s your situation there? Oh, there was a lot Arada wasn’t telling us. But I was estimating a 70 percent chance that if we hadn’t exited the wormhole so absurdly early, Arada and the others wouldn’t have survived much longer. So now I had four more humans to worry about. Fantastic. Amena was giving Arada a rapid but somewhat garbled report on all the fun we’d been having, and warning her about the Targets. (The Targets couldn’t be alien, could they? No, that wasn’t possible. Aliens couldn’t look that much like humans.) (Could they?) I sent Arada a schematic of the outside of ART’s hull with the airlock in our safe zone highlighted. Arada, can you get to this lock? There was a pause which told me that their situation was even worse than Arada was implying. I estimated the hesitation was just long enough for her to check the air reserves in the EVAC suits they were probably already wearing due to damage to the pod. Then Arada said firmly, Yes, we can make that. ETA, say, three minutes. I’ll meet you there, I told her, and started out of the engineering monitoring area. I should have at least two point five spare minutes, so I went ahead with the hack of targetControlSystem. The thing that had protected it so far was the fact that it didn’t interact with the feed or with interfaces the way every other system I’d ever encountered had. But Target Five had accessed targetControlSystem and been responded to, so that told me what channel to concentrate on and what kind of transmissions it would accept. And it also told me I was going to need to go old school to break this fucker. I tossed together a code bundle that duplicated the signal sent by the Targets’ screen device, copied it a hundred times, made it self-replicating so all my copies were copying themselves, then sent the whole thing to targetControlSystem.
ART would have laughed at an attack like that. (Actually, ART would have laughed at the part where it sent back a code bundle that would have eaten my face.) But I had a theory that the reason the Targets weren’t trying to access most of ART’s systems was that their targetControlSystem lacked the ability to effectively use ART’s architecture. Then I got an alert from a sentry drone. It was on the hatch into the quarters module, the first hatch I’d sealed to create our safe zone. It couldn’t get a visual of any targetDrones, but an energy build-up near the hatch indicated a weapon or tool was being used on the controls. Uh-oh. I started to run, following the curving corridor back out of the engineering module. I checked Scout Two in the control area foyer, just in time to see Targets Five and Six race out of its camera range. When I said everything kept happening at once, it had mostly been an exaggeration, but now everything was actually happening at once. Something must have alerted them to the safepod on the hull. I had an option, but it was a terrible idea. But it was also the only way to get Arada and the others inside in time. Amena, our safe zone is about to be compromised and I need to deal with it. Can you get to the airlock to cycle Arada and the others in? I was assuming targetControlSystem wasn’t going to be cooperative about admitting visitors. Plus, it was a little busy right now. Amena had been pacing Medical, anxiously listening in on the hurried conversation in the safepod as they prepared to abandon it. She stopped, muted her comm, and said, Yes, can you give me a map? I sent her our safe zone map with the fastest route to the airlock highlighted. You’ll have your squad of drones ahead of you. I’ll send an alert and another route if they encounter anything. Understood. She started for the door, then stopped to pick up the Targets’ energy weapon and tuck it into her jacket pocket. Then she dodged sideways and grabbed a container out of the pile of supplies on the bench.
I meant to enlarge the image to see what she’d taken but I had intel coming in from the sentry drone that the safe zone hatch had just been breached. At the engineering module exit, I took a different route, through the hatchway into the cargo handling station and out to the corridor that ran down the outside of the central module toward the quarters hatch. If I couldn’t get in front of them, I had to come up from behind. There were three possible reasons the Targets might have acted now: (1) they had received intel from targetControlSystem that the safepod was on the outside of the hull and interpreted its presence as an attack, (2) now that we’d left the wormhole and were presumably at our destination they knew their reinforcements would be coming soon and felt it was now relatively safe to attack us, or (3) they were expecting a supervisor to arrive at any moment and wanted to look proactive. With my luck, it was a combination of all three. My drones zipping ahead of me, I reached the far end of the central module and ducked through two connecting corridors. I lost three drone contacts as they reached the passage to the quarters hatch but I didn’t slow down. I’d gone low in the last two encounters, and with combat drones, even weird unfamiliar ones, it was best to assume there was an active learning component. So I accelerated and as I rounded the corner I ran up the bulkhead. Two targetDrones waited for me near the deck and I landed on one before it could change position. I smashed the second as it jolted toward my head. The hatch had been cut open, the locks drilled and partially melted. I ordered my drones to drop back; I hadn’t had time to work on countermeasures for the Targets’ protective suits and I knew I was going to regret that. I lost one of Amena’s drone contacts and sent her an alert. She was in a corridor near a junction she would have to cross to get to the airlock and there was no alternate route. I told her, Go back to Medical.
No time, Amena said, and stepped back to press herself against the bulkhead. I think something’s wrong with the safepod. I could have argued about that but there wasn’t time and she was right. And I’d finally gotten a view of the container she’d taken from the emergency supplies, the one she was currently holding clutched to her chest. It was the fire suppresser Ras had pointed out. I slammed through the connecting passage and out into the next corridor. Targets Five and Six spun to face me, pointed their clunky square energy weapons at me. Four targetDrones hovered beside them. Two turns beyond was the junction Amena needed to pass through, so I needed to a) keep them here or b) kill them. Let’s go with option b. Amena’s drones clustered protectively around her as she hit the release on the fire suppresser. The chemical blast shot out and Amena hit what she aimed at because suddenly my drones could see the approaching targetDrone. The burst of chemical wash had coated the targetDrone’s casing and disrupted the camouflage. (File under save-for-later: this confirms the camouflage is a physical effect, something in the design visible on their casing, not an unknown type of transmitted interference.) The targetDrone wavered sideways, then lurched down the corridor, probably with its propulsion and sensors damaged. Amena ducked around the corner and sprinted toward the junction. Staring at me, Target Five said something in that language with no translation. Target Six made a dismissive gesture and started to turn back toward the foyer I absolutely had to keep them away from. As Target Five lifted his weapon and the targetDrones shot forward, I moved. My drones couldn’t see the targetDrones due to the stealth material, but I could. I pulled an estimate of the coordinates from my scan and sent a drone toward each targetDrone with orders to make surface contact. One overshot and had to loop back but all four managed a landing.
With the contact drones for a reference, the rest of my drones could approximate the targetDrones’ positions. As the targetDrones reached me, I told my drones to attack at will. While this was going on, and Target Five was lifting his weapon, I ducked and dove forward. The first blast went over my head, then a targetDrone banged into my shoulder and knocked me into the bulkhead. Then a thing happened. The comm hidden in the pocket under my ribs, the comm ART had given me when I left it on RaviHyral’s transit ring, pinged my internal feed with a message. It was a compressed packet, a type meant to be sent in-system, not carried via transports through wormholes. Which meant it had originated with ART’s internal comm array. It was tagged with the name “Eden.” My drones hulled two targetDrones but the third already had a fix on me. It tried to slam me in the head but it had to back up first to build up speed, which gave me a chance to grab it. I shoved it sideways in time to block a blast from Target Five’s energy weapon. Heat blasted over the targetDrone, which was a factor I hadn’t anticipated. This was different from the weapon dead Target Two had used on me; instead of just being a pain-causing annoyance, this blast was meant to destroy tissue and incapacitate permanently. Even with the targetDrone between us, my hands took damage. Three of my drones got caught in the blast and dropped to the deck. Eden. Eden was the name I used on RaviHyral, when ART had helped me. This had to be a trick, except that targetControlSystem was drowning in the code bundles I’d sent; it shouldn’t have the ability to send me a packet now. But something on board ART had sent it. I started an analysis of the transmission. I kept hold of the targetDrone and used my feet to shove off the wall, swung my body around on the deck and hit Target Five’s legs with my legs. He fell sideways into the bulkhead, then down to the deck. I couldn’t get up yet but at least we were both down here now.
On the channel where I’d been following Amena’s progress, I saw she had passed through the foyer and on into the corridor beyond, and found the airlock. She was breathing hard and sweating as she tapped the cycle command on the pad. “I hope this is right,” she muttered to my drones hovering around her. Then the warning lights flashed, a sign that the outer lock had received the command and was preparing to open. “Yes!” Amena waved her arms and did a little dance. My analysis of the packet finished and I checked the results: no killware or malware detected and the file type indicated it was a video clip. It also indicated that it was a delayed message, sent sometime earlier but trapped when ART’s feed and comm had gone down. The fact that a message stuck in the comm’s store and forward buffer had finally been delivered meant that as targetControlSystem failed, some of ART’s more complex systems were beginning to restart. It could still be a trick. It was exactly the kind of tricky shit SecUnits could do. And I knew so many ways someone could use an intense visual stimulus to temporarily trash my scan, visual sensors, neural tissue, etc., but. I had to play it. Maybe I was desperate for some sign ART was still here somewhere, but the fact that it was a video clip felt like a communication method only someone who knew me would choose. I played it. Target Six ran up and aimed his energy weapon at me, but I let go of the targetDrone and pulled Target Five on top of me. With all the flailing and screaming going on (Target Five, not me) Target Six couldn’t get a clear shot. I was firing both the energy weapons in my arms but the Targets’ protective suits seemed to be deflecting the bolts, at least to some extent. (With all the screaming, it was hard to tell.) Another targetDrone swung in but my surviving drones slammed it sideways and it hit Target Six’s helmet. There was a lot going on, but I really needed to get off the floor.
Amena and her drones scrambled back as the airlock cycled open and Arada, Overse, Ratthi, and Thiago stumbled out. Ratthi went down in a heap of singed EVAC suit; I couldn’t tell if he’d been hurt or had just tripped on the lock’s raised seal. Then Thiago staggered sideways and Overse caught his arm, and I knew my first theory had been correct and that the safepod had taken extensive damage. The compressed video clip in the packet was from the serial World Hoppers, from a story arc climax episode, when a secondary main character’s mind had been taken over by a sentient brain-virus (I know) and the story was really much better than it sounds but it was the moment when the character said, I am trapped in my own body. I really needed to get up to ART’s bridge. I really needed to keep Targets Five and Six and their drones away from my humans who were unhelpfully still wandering around in the airlock foyer exclaiming at each other. And I had to do both at once. I got my knees up, lifted, and threw Target Five at Target Six. They both fell backward and I rolled to my feet. A damaged targetDrone slammed through what was left of my drone cloud. It clipped my shoulder as I threw myself back toward the quarters module hatch. I needed to make sure both Targets followed me, so I yelled, “I’m going to blow up the transport and kill all of you, you pieces of shit!” It was lame, but I was in a hurry. As I ran, the Targets yelled in response, high-pitched, furious, and incomprehensible. A damaged drone managed a last set of images, verifying that both Targets charged after me. I headed up the corridor toward the control area. That was the point where I realized I hadn’t discontinued the channel I was using to send my visual input to Amena. She probably hadn’t been able to pay attention to it since she had left Medical (humans, even augmented humans, can’t process multiple inputs like I can) but it was still playing in her feed. Her drone escort showed her standing in the airlock foyer (still?
what the hell?) with Arada while Overse and Thiago dragged Ratthi out of his damaged EVAC suit. Arada had her suit half off and looked frazzled and to put it mildly, concerned. On my feed, Amena shouted repeatedly, Where are you going? What is happening? Under the circumstances, they were reasonable questions. Get to Medical, I told her. I didn’t want to answer any reasonable questions. If I was wrong, I’d probably be dead, and that was bad enough. Being stupid and dead would just be that much worse. But what— Amena began, and I backburnered the channel. 8 Running through ART’s corridors, I didn’t have a lot of time to plan. The way the MedSystem’s platform had activated in response to Eletra’s medical emergency told me the ship’s operational code, or at least large fragments of it, was still intact. And targetControlSystem was going down under my barrage of contacts, allowing more of ART’s systems to come back online. This was technically a good time to try to breach the control area, but I’d be doing it even if I had to fight through an entire task group of Targets and their stupid semi-invisible drones. I took the corridor up through the central module and passed a targetDrone bobbing in midair and one bumping along the lower bulkhead. As targetControlSystem went down, it was flooding them with garbage code. Back in the quarters module, Amena and the others were finally clumping down the corridor toward Medical. They encountered the targetDrone that Amena had disabled with fire suppressant, still floating aimlessly, and Overse bashed it with a cutting tool brought from the safepod. Scout Two showed me the control area foyer, barely three meters ahead, was empty which meant I’d lost track of Target Four. I just had time to run back its video to see Target Four leave through the forward doorway. Then an energy/heat blast hit me from behind. It struck me in the lower back and I lost traction and fell forward and slid halfway across the deck toward the control area hatch.
My performance reliability dropped to 80 percent. In the corridor outside Medical, Amena jerked to a halt and yelled, “No, no!” “What?” Arada demanded. “They got—They shot—” Amena waved wildly at the Medical hatch. “Stay here with them!” and bolted away. Her drone squad careened after her. I’ve been hit by projectile and energy weapons a lot more times than I can remember (literally, because of the memory wipes) and it’s not that it doesn’t hurt. But I had tuned down my pain sensors earlier, so it was a surprise when I rolled over and saw the big smear of blood and fluid on the deck. I could only last so long like this. I needed to move faster. But at least this solved the problem of how I was going to get the hatch open. Target Four ran toward me because assholes love to see your face when they kill you. He stopped what he thought was far enough away and fired, but I rolled onto my side so the blast hit the deck next to me. I shoved with my feet, used my hip as a pivot, and spun myself around so I could grab his ankle. He shrieked and fell backward, and I climbed up him and snapped his neck. Targets Five and Six were almost here and I only had three drones left in the corridor. As I shoved to my feet and took Four’s energy weapon, I ordered my surviving drones to run interference for me and take hits if they could. Between the stealth material helmets and the protective suits, the drones didn’t have much chance of kill strikes, but hopefully they’d provide a distraction. Hefting the big square weapon was hard and I knew I’d lost a lot of muscle and underlying support structure in my back. With my free hand, I popped the panel beside the control area hatch and then fired a short burst at the mechanism inside. The blast of heat convinced the sensors that the ship was experiencing an emergency condition (the sensors weren’t wrong about that) and it reactivated the manual controls. I hit the manual release and the hatch slid open. I stepped through and hit the close and seal sequence.
One of my drones managed a shoulder hit on Target Five but the other contacts disappeared. As the hatch slid closed, I knew I didn’t have long. I’d had no time to replace the outside hatch panel and while I had some strong evidence to suggest that what the Targets lacked in personality they also lacked in brains, they were sure to try shooting at the controls and sooner or later it would work. I’d cut Amena’s visual access to my feed, but her drones told me that Arada and Thiago ran after her through the corridors, headed here. (Yeah, I probably should have cut Amena’s input before this. But I’d wanted her to know what my status was if I couldn’t respond.) Scout Two was still in the foyer on sentry so I sent its video to Amena’s feed, so she’d be able to see where the Targets were. I saw her slide to a stop and clutch her head, trying to focus on the new input. I was already stepping past the messily dead Targets One and Three and climbing the stairs to the upper control area and I didn’t have time to help her. Scout One was there, still monitoring displays. It greeted me with a ping as I set the energy weapon down in the nearest station chair. I needed an interface with the ship’s data storage. The bond company that used to own me made a lot of its gigantic piles of currency by datamining its customers. That’s recording everything everyone says and then going through it for information that could be sold. Part of my job had been to help record and parse and protect that information until it could be transferred back to the company, and if I didn’t do it in a timely manner indicating complete obedience I got punished by my governor module. (Which was like being shot by a high-grade energy weapon, only from the inside out.) The raw audio and feed streams make for huge data files, and they had to be moved around a lot and often got saved to unused storage areas on other systems. (This is also a way to destroy data.
If you don’t completely hate your clients or you’re feeling particularly disgusted at the company at any one particular moment or you’ve hacked your governor module and need to cover your tracks, you can move data into the buffer of the SecSystem right before it’s due for an update. The files are overwritten and it looks like an accident.) But my point is, ART was a big transport with a lot of interactive processes and systems working in concert, which meant there were a lot of storage spaces that would not be obvious to human intruders. Or to hostile operating systems like targetControlSystem that seemed unable to use most of the architecture. Storage spaces where you could save a compressed backup copy of a kernel. Possibly your own kernel, if you were an advanced sentient control system who was very smart and very sneaky. I still couldn’t make feed connections with any of the operating stations so I tapped the pad below the display surface that looked the most like an internal systems monitor. The display floated upward and opened into an array of small data sources. Taking in information visually rather than through the feed felt horribly slow. I pulled up the manual interface and then had to pull the non-corporate-standard coding language out of my archive and load it into my internal processor. I got my query constructed and then flicked through the floating interfaces to get it loaded. After a subjective eternity that was actually 1.2 seconds long, the system started to display the data storage areas currently holding large and possibly anomalous files with structures that didn’t match the protocol for the area where they were stored. I had been betting on the procedural storage for the med platform, but the first possibility my query turned up was in the galley, in a data storage area hidden in a layer under the usual space for food production formulas. But when I searched on it, it read as empty. You know, I really don’t have time for this.
A loose chunk from my back was sliding down in the station chair and it was hard to hold myself upright. I was leaking a lot, and I hate leaking. I checked my targetControlSystem channel, just for the satisfaction, and saw multiple failure indicators through my barrage of contacts. Yeah, don’t let the hatch close on you on your way down, fucker. Scout Two in the control area foyer sent me video of Targets Five and Six, banging away at the open panel beside the hatch. In a corridor just out of sight of the foyer, Amena’s drone group showed me her, Arada, and Thiago having a tense whispered conversation. Amena waved the fire suppressant container urgently and Arada had the captured energy weapon. It was exasperating. Amena, get out of there. You know these people are dangerous. She flinched and grimaced. Where are you? I can’t see what you’re doing anymore! Are you all right? Sort of, not really. I just have to do this one thing. I didn’t feel so good and it was hard figuring out the language to expand the query’s search. I ran it again, and again it turned up the food production data storage reserved space. Huh. TargetControlSystem went down, my contacts pinging an empty void. I didn’t discontinue my code attack, just in case it was a trick. The query wasn’t faulty, there was something in the food production data storage, no matter how firmly the reader said it was empty. The display station feeds were starting to come back online, so I could access their functions directly via my feed interface, which was a huge relief. I initiated a deep analysis scan of the reserved space in the food production storage, and immediately hit a request for a passcode. Well, shit. In the corridor, Amena whispered to Arada, “I think it’s dying.” Arada took the fire suppressant away from Amena and handed it to Thiago. She told him, “Be ready.” If this was really what I thought it was, the video clip was a clue. I replayed it into the request field and got no response.
I ran a quick list of all the character, ship, and place names from World Hoppers. No response. And no time. Eden, the clip had been directed to Eden, a fake name I’d used for human clients, a name ART had never called me. My name, my real name, is private, but the name ART called me wasn’t something humans could say or even access. It was my local feed address, hardcoded into the interfaces laced through my brain. It was worth a shot, I guess. I submitted it to the request field. It was accepted and the storage space opened to reveal a large compressed file. Attached to it was a short instruction document with a few lines of complex code I couldn’t parse. But the instructions were clear. They said, “In case of emergency, run.” I pulled the code into the operating station’s processing area and ran it. All the lights in the control area went dark, then blinked back to life. Simultaneously all the display surfaces around me flickered, went to blank, then flashed reinitialization graphics. And ART’s feed filled the ship. In the pleasant neutral voice that systems use to address humans, it whispered, Reload in progress. Please stand by. Below, the hatch slid open. The Targets started to step inside but Scout Two saw Thiago run into the foyer, bellowing and spraying fire suppressant at them. Target Five turned toward Thiago while Six shoved forward into the control area. Then Arada stepped out from the hatchway and shot Target Five with the energy weapon. Which left Target Six still armed, with a clear shot at Thiago through the open hatchway. I grabbed Target Four’s energy weapon and shoved out of the chair, but my legs wouldn’t work right. I collapsed, rolled toward the edge of the platform, and shot Target Six. The blasts hit his chest and face and he staggered back into the bulkhead, then fell over Target Three’s sprawled body. Target Five staggered and swayed but he pointed his weapon at Arada. Then ART’s voice, ART’s real voice, filled the feed. It said, Drop the weapon.
Arada dropped her energy weapon and Thiago dropped the fire suppressant. Both held up empty hands. I told it, Don’t hurt my humans. Target Five shouted something incoherent, then dropped his weapon and lurched sideways, clutching his head. Oh wow, ART must have been able to access Target Five’s helmet, via the code used by targetControlSystem. Target Five fell over and convulsed once on the deck, then went limp. Thiago started to put his hands down and then reconsidered. He said, “We mean no harm. We’re here because we were attacked by—by that person and others.” Arada added, “Who are you?” ART said, You are aboard the Perihelion, registered teaching and research vessel of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. Then it added, I’m not going to hurt your humans, you little idiot. Arada lifted her brows, startled, and Thiago looked boggled. I said, You’re using the public feed, everyone can hear you. So are you, ART said. And you’re leaking on my deck. Amena ran through the hatch, shied away from the pile of dead Targets, then ran up the stairs. She dropped to her knees beside me and yelled, “Hey, we need help! We need to get to Medical!” ART said, I can hear you, adolescent human, there’s no reason to shout. I’ve dispatched an emergency gurney. I’ve always thought that everything ART says sounds sarcastic. If you were a human, I’m guessing it also sounded more than vaguely menacing. Arada stepped into the control area. Thiago was checking to see if Target Five was alive. (He wasn’t.) ART said, The intruder is dead. “Uhh…” Thiago glanced up at the ceiling. “But who are you? Are you a crew member, or—” Arada reached the top of the stairs and leaned over me, frowning worriedly. She had a cut above her left eyebrow, a first degree burn on her cheek, and her short hair was singed. She said, “Don’t worry, SecUnit, we’ll get you to Medical.” She squeezed Amena’s shoulder.
I guess Amena had never seen a SecUnit hit with an energy weapon that caused them to lose 20 percent of the body mass on their back and expose their internal structure, because she seemed really upset. I was losing all my inputs but there was one thing I had to say before the gurney got here. “ART,” I said aloud, because ART could silence my feed if it wanted to. “You did this. You sent those assholes to kidnap my humans.” Of course not, ART said. I sent them to kidnap you. Then my performance reliability bottomed out and— Shutdown. Delayed restart. * * * So, that was another catastrophic failure. (Physically, that is. I was going to make a joke about catastrophic failures in other contexts for the second half of that sentence, but it just got too depressing.) Waiting for my memory and archive to come back online, at least I knew I wasn’t in a company cubicle. Even with no feed or visual input, I knew that because I was warm, which meant I was in a MedSystem for humans. Once I could access it again, I checked my buffer to see what had happened. Oh right, ART happened. The last conversation I had picked up on feed/ambient audio was: Amena, her voice a worried whisper, said, “Are you sure it’s going to be all right?” ART, whispering back to her on a closed feed channel and somehow managing not to sound sarcastic or menacing at all, said, Completely. The damage to its organic tissue and support structure is easily repaired. Some systems were operating at suboptimal parameters due to repeated energy weapon strikes. The restart should correct that. I said, “Stop talking to my human.” ART said, Make me. I don’t know if I tried to make ART stop but that was when I lost all input again. Now I was at 34 percent performance reliability and climbing steadily, lying on my side on ART’s medical platform. My jacket and deflection vest were gone and the surgical suite had cut away my shirt to get to the burned parts.
I was sticky from all the leaky fluid and blood and parts falling off (yes, it’s just as disgusting as it sounds). But I didn’t feel nearly as bad as I had the last time I’d been here, when ART had altered my configuration. ART. ART, you manipulative fucker. Whatever was going on, there was nothing I could do about it now, and that just made me more furious. So I watched five minutes of episode 174 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Did that work? No, no, it didn’t. Tentatively, I checked my inputs. (Tentatively, because I wanted to talk to a human right now about as much as I wanted to lose a couple of limbs and have a conversation about my feelings.) The drones I’d assigned to Amena had managed to survive. Following my last instruction to stay with her before they’d lost contact with me, they had adopted a tight circular formation a half-meter above her head. They had been collecting video the entire time I was out, and I ran it back to see what had happened. I forwarded through the boring parts with Amena being upset because of the whole me-lying-in-a-pool-of-steaming-blood-and-fluid thing and Arada trying to tell her this actually wasn’t unusual for me, then the gurney arriving. (It was a medical assistance device, designed to either bring casualties to the MedSystem or to carry them off a damaged ship, so its power and functions were autonomous. It was sort of like a big maintenance drone, capable of a certain range of actions, built in the shape of a rack with expandable shelves and arms. How it had survived the purge of ART’s other drones, I don’t know. Unless the Targets just hadn’t known what it was when it was folded up in its inert state.) It zipped in from the foyer, angled itself up the stairs, scooped me onto itself and clamped me down. (I hate being carted around like equipment, even though technically I am actually equipment.) As it started back down, Amena tried to follow it and Arada grabbed her arm.
Looking up the way humans did when they were trying to talk to something they couldn’t see, Arada said, “Hello, your name is Art? Can you tell me if there’s anyone else aboard this ship?” ART said, There is an additional unidentified human in Medical, but she appears to be an injured noncombatant. I assume the two other humans present there are part of your group. All the intruders are accounted for. Amena wiped her nose (humans are so disgusting) and said, “That’s Eletra, she was a prisoner when we got here. Ras is there, too, but he’s dead.” She pulled away from Arada to follow the gurney down the stairs. Arada, with an expression somewhere between thoughtful and alarmed, trailed after her. Arada said, “Thank you, that’s a relief to hear. But can you tell us who you are?” Amena followed the gurney into the foyer. “That’s the ship. It’s SecUnit’s friend.” She threw a glance upward. “That’s you, right? You’re the transport?” Thiago knelt over dead Target Six, turning the helmeted head to see the face. He looked up, startled. “The transport?” ART said, Correct. “But bot pilots don’t talk like this,” Thiago said to Arada, keeping his voice low. “It can’t be a bot.” Hah. Arada didn’t bother to comment on that. “Transport, what happened here?” she asked. “Why did you attack our survey facility?” ART said, I am still reinitializing after a forced shutdown and deletion. I have prioritized restoring the MedSystem to full function. Amena’s drones caught an image of Arada and Thiago exchanging a brow-lifted look before she followed the gurney. Yeah, I think they had both noticed that ART had deliberately not answered the direct question. (Pro tip: when bots do that, it’s not a good sign.) I had to forward again through all the back and forth of getting me to Medical. Arada and Thiago stayed in the control area, and Overse went to join them, but Amena’s drones didn’t see a lot of that. She was sitting in Medical watching the surgical suite work on me and trying to tell Ratthi what had happened.
It was confusing, with the humans talking on their comms, but I didn’t care enough to filter the raw video and separate out the different conversations. The only part that was new was about the safepod. It had been damaged when they separated from the facility. The decision to clamp onto what at the moment had been a hostile ship hadn’t been a voluntary one; the safepod’s guidance system had been damaged and had directed it toward the nearest functional transport before Overse could stop it. Then we were in the wormhole and it was too late to escape. By the time we had exited the wormhole, Overse and Arada had already had to cannibalize four of the EVAC suits aboard while they were trying to repair the failing life support, and they had estimated that they would last another seventeen hours, if that. All four of the humans needed treatment for toxic air inhalation, plus Ratthi had damaged a knee when a gravity fluctuation had slammed him into a bulkhead. At one point, Amena and Thiago had this conversation over the comm: “Are you sure you’re all right?” This was the fourth time he had asked her that and I was beginning to understand why she was so annoyed with authority figures all the time. “Those people, they didn’t hurt you?” “Uncle, I’m fine.” She said that in the normal human adolescent exasperated and borderline whiney tone. (That’s actually statistically normal for human adults, too.) Then she hesitated and added, “When we got here, they hit SecUnit with one of those big drone things and knocked it out and I thought it was dead and I was alone with them. The corporates, Eletra and Ras were there, but they were so scared and I knew … I was in a lot of trouble. Then SecUnit was just suddenly in the room and—and I knew we were going to fight these people, and we were going to win.” She leaned her hip against the med platform and folded her arms, tucking her hands up in her armpits like she was cold. “Are you sure SecUnit’s going to be all right?
The transport said it was, but … it looks bad.” “I’m sure,” Thiago told her, sounding all warm and confident. Liar, you’re not sure. The others, who had seen me in way worse shape than this, they were sure. “Do you still have those drones over your head? Why are they there?” She glanced up, brow furrowed like she had forgotten them. “SecUnit gave me these when it had to go search the area and make sure there weren’t hostiles in our safe zone.” Sitting on the bench with a wound pack wrapped around his knee, Ratthi smiled. “That’s SecUnit. I’m glad it kept you safe.” Thiago sounded like it just made him more worried. He said, “What exactly were you doing?” I checked all my video inputs. Scout One was still in the control area, watching Arada and Overse, who sat in ART’s station chairs, flicking through its displays. Scout Two was still in the foyer with a view of Thiago, who had searched Target Six’s suit and was trying to get the Targets’ screen device to work. Everyone was listening. Amena wiped her face impatiently. “We had just found the alien remnant tech on the engines, right before we came out of the wormhole into this system. We think that’s what let us get here so fast. SecUnit realized there was something wrong about the story Eletra and Ras told us, like they had only been captured a couple of days ago, which wasn’t nearly long enough for a trip to Preservation from even the nearest wormhole. We were trying to figure out what to do about it when we got the signal from you.” “Alien remnant tech?” The look Ratthi threw at Eletra was suspicious. Her eyes were open now and tracking, though she still looked confused. He had tried to talk to her earlier, but while she had blinked and shifted position occasionally, she hadn’t seemed aware of her surroundings. Ratthi was probably thinking about past evidence of corporations collecting illegal alien materials and how great that had turned out. On the comm, Overse said, “Is it dangerous?
Should we try to remove it from the drive?” On the general feed and comm, audible to the whole ship, ART said, The foreign device detached from my drive and ceased to function when the invading system was deleted. Further interference is not advisable. That was definitely not menacing. Oh no, not at all. On a private feed channel to ART, I said, You set me up, you fucker. I was still catching up on archived drone video and fifty-four seconds behind actual time, so ART ignored me. Right, hear me out. The message packet with the World Hoppers video clip had been sent through ART’s internal comm before it went down, presumably not long after ART hid a backup copy of itself passcode-protected by my hard feed address. ART had been expecting me to be aboard at some point to run its emergency code, which would uncompress the backup and reload it into its hardware. Which meant it had sent the Targets to find me in Preservation space and given them the ability to track me via the comm I had stashed in my rib compartment. Which meant ART had been conscious and capable of affecting events during the attack on our facility and baseship. ART’s sudden and obviously intentionally dramatic reentrance into the general feed and comm conversation had made the humans tense. It startled Eletra into awareness. “Who’s that?” she asked, looking from Ratthi to Amena. “It’s the … the transport,” Ratthi told her, watching the ceiling warily. “I don’t suppose you could call it a bot pilot.” I don’t suppose you could, ART said. Listening from the control area, Arada’s brows drew together. She asked Overse, “Could we get a display link to Medical?” ART said, It’s better if I do it, and a holo display of Arada and Overse in the control area blossomed in the center of Medical. Scout One showed me that a corresponding display of Medical had unfolded in the control area. There was an attached sidebar in both displays showing Thiago out in the foyer area, sitting in a chair with the Targets’ screen device in his lap. He looked wary.
Okay, so: (1) I had never been able to access cameras aboard ART, except through its drones. It saw the interior of the ship through its internal sensors, which provided data (heat, density, angles of motion, etc.) that didn’t translate into visual images, at least not visual images useful to humans. I thought it didn’t have cameras in most areas. This was proof it had been holding out on me AGAIN. (2) The video effects were smoother and more polished than anything I could have done and that just made me more furious. This was a vid conference link for humans trying to figure out how screwed they were, not a professional newsfeed production. ART had dissolved the edges and corrected the color just to show off. Next it would be providing theme music and a mission logo. My performance reliability hit 60 percent and I could talk again. I said, “Fuck you, ART.” Amena leaned over the platform, watching me worriedly. “SecUnit, how are you doing?” “I’m fine.” Parts of the surgical suite were withdrawing and I could see her with my eyes now instead of just the drones. “Except that I’m being held prisoner by a giant asshole of a research transport.” Ratthi hobbled over and stopped outside the sterile field. “Do you need anything?” Amena said, “I saw what happened. I mean, I still had the view through your eyes when—” She stopped and swallowed. “That was intense.” That was one word for it. I sat up as the rest of the suite pulled away. The skin on my back felt new and itchy. I hate that. “I need my jacket.” ART said, It was damaged and is being repaired in the recycler. It was very hard to say evenly, “I am not speaking to you.” Ratthi lifted his brows. “So … how well do you two know each other?” In the control area, Arada stood up. “Uh, Ratthi, let’s take that up later. Transport, will you answer our questions now?” ART said, That depends on the questions. I said, “The humans think I’m an asshole, wait till they get to know you.” I thought you weren’t speaking to me.
Ratthi muttered to Amena, “I admit I’m a little worried right now.” Amena told him, “SecUnit said bot pilots can kill people.” ART said, SecUnit exaggerates. Arada’s brow was furrowed. “Transport, where are we? We’ve accessed your sensors and we’re not receiving any contacts indicating a station. Is this an uninhabited system?” This system has a numerical designation assigned by a corporation which was investigating it for salvage. It was the site of at least two attempts at colonization. The latest attempt was abandoned when the company funding it was destroyed in a hostile takeover, and the colony’s location was lost. ART paused for 8.3 seconds for no reason I could think of except to make the humans think it wasn’t going to answer the question. I have evidence indicating that it is inhabited. Arada has a lot of expressions, even for a human. The one she was wearing now involved squinting one eye and twisting her mouth around and biting one corner of her lip. I didn’t know what it meant, except that she must be worried by what she was hearing. “It’s inhabited by these people—the hostiles?” Circumstances suggest it. Yeah, that was sarcastic. Arada stopped biting her lip but her eye got more squinty. “What is your operational status? You said the alien remnant detached from your engines? Can we leave now via the wormhole?” I am currently still in reinitialization mode and my normal-space maneuvering functions are not responding, possibly due to damage caused when the foreign device was installed on the wormhole drive. When reinitialization completes, I can begin self-repair. But I have absolutely no intention of leaving this system until I get what I want. Oh, here we go. Ratthi made a faint “oof” noise. Thiago’s jaw started to drop but he stopped it in time. Amena folded her lips in and glanced worriedly at me. Overse grimaced and rubbed her eyes. Arada looked like she wasn’t exactly surprised. She did a quick silent-communication expression thing back and forth with Overse, then she said evenly, “I see.
What do you want?” I want my crew back. Arada’s brows lifted, like she was relieved it wasn’t something worse. “What happened to them?” The hostiles stole them, forced me to cooperate by threatening their welfare, infected my engines with interdicted alien remnant technology, installed adversarial software, and then deleted me. I was still mad, right? But there were a lot of keywords there that invoked involuntary responses. Thiago kept his expression neutral. “But how are you talking to us if—” I saved a backup copy and hid it where only a trusted friend could find it. I was looking at the wall, watching everyone and the display with Amena’s drones. Trusted friend? “Oh, fuck you.” That still counts as speaking. Arada and Overse looked at each other again. Overse widened her eyes and did a slight shoulder movement. Arada’s mouth set in a grim line, then she took a breath and asked, “Is SecUnit right, did you plan to attack our facility?” It was not my plan. Overse’s eyes had narrowed. She said, “But it was your idea.” I said, “Don’t humor it.” Arada’s tone was still even. “It wasn’t your plan, but you made it happen. You sent those people after us—after SecUnit.” ART said, I did. Of course it did. “You knew where we were?” Ratthi frowned. “How?” When I arrived through the Preservation wormhole, I sent messages inquiring after humans who I knew were associated with SecUnit. The Free Preservation Institute of Discovery and Engineering was most helpful when I asked for a possible meeting with Survey Specialist Arada. They sent me complete information on your itinerary and team. Of course they had. I had heard ART pretend to be human on the comm before, on the RaviHyral transit station. Ratthi groaned and covered his face. Arada and Overse stared at each other incredulously. Overse muttered, “We have got to talk to them about that.” Arada rubbed a spot over her left eye like it hurt. She said to ART, “So you knew when we’d be coming back to Preservation space.” You were early. Arada was sticking to the point.
“But why did you want to kidnap SecUnit?” I needed someone who could kill the hostiles. Everyone looked at me. I dug my fingers into the edge of the med platform. The skin on them itched, too, where the surgical suite had fixed the burned parts. “You told them I was a weapon, that they could use.” I built a trap, they entered it of their own accord. “But who are they?” Amena said, frustrated. “Where did they come from? Are they supposed to look like that? Did something happen to them to make them this way?” ART said, I don’t know the answers to any of those questions. Thiago looked down at Target Six. “There’s a possibility their appearance is the result of genetic or cosmetic manipulation. But…” Ratthi finished, “But we have an alien remnant on the drive, that does suggest possible contamination…” That’s why humans and augmented humans are so cautious around alien remnants that even corporations mostly try to be careful. Strange synthetics are usually harmless, emphasis on the “usually.” But organic elements can be really dangerous, where “really” means everyone dies horribly and nobody can ever go to the planet again. Thiago’s mouth tightened. “If any of these people had been left alive, perhaps we could have asked them.” I thought that was a shot at me, but ART apparently didn’t take it well. It said, If you’ll put that one on the medical platform, I can cut it open and see. I was unimpressed, having heard ART’s “villain of a long-running mythic adventure serial” voice before, but all the humans got quiet. Amena shifted uncertainly and looked at me. Then Ratthi whispered, “Was that a subtle threat?” I said, “No. It wasn’t subtle.” Amena hugged herself, then said, “How did the gray people steal your crew?” ART said, There was a catastrophic event when my crew and I first entered this system. My memory archive was disrupted and I’m still attempting to reconstruct it. Oh, fantastic. I said, “Is your comm shut down?” It was not an attack launched via the comm, because I’m not an idiot.
“And I’m not the one who got taken down by a viral malware attack, so maybe you are an idiot,” I said. Yeah, I was all over the place with that one. ART said, It was not a viral malware attack, it was an unidentified event. “That’s fucking reassuring.” “Hey, hey!” Amena waved an arm, snapping her fingers. “Please don’t stop telling us what happened! So your crew were taken prisoner by these gray people, correct? And are the gray people from the lost colony that Eletra’s ship was looking for?” Everybody turned to look at Eletra, who stared blearily back. ART said, Those are logical assumptions, though I have no direct evidence to support them. I know that we arrived in this system in response to a distress call from a corporate reclamation expedition. At some point, I experienced a catastrophic system malfunction that caused me to reinitialize. After the reinitialization, I found the intruders aboard. They said they were holding my crew hostage, and demanded weapons. I offered a weapon. Everybody looked at me again. Arada did the lip-biting thing. “You brought them to SecUnit. Because you knew SecUnit would be able to handle the situation.” I did. “The attack on our baseship could have killed all of us,” Thiago said, some heat creeping into his voice. No shit, Thiago, you think? Ratthi hissed under his breath, but before he could tell Thiago to shut up, ART said, That was a chance I was willing to take. Oh, okay. I was either having a processing error, or something that the shows I watch call a “rage blackout,” or another emotional collapse. So I pushed off the med platform, walked out of the sterile field and into the restroom, and slammed my hand on the hatch close control. 9 After twenty-seven minutes and twelve seconds, Ratthi tapped on the hatch and sent me the feed message: Can I come in and talk to you? I sent back, Do you have my jacket? There was a pause. I was keyword-monitoring my inputs, the way I used to back when I was rented out on contracts, to make sure no one was screaming for help.
But with ART back online, it was unlikely. Unless ART had decided to murder everybody in which case shit was going to get real. But that was also unlikely, because ART kept trying to contact me and I doubted it was planning a mass murder while also composing messages about how I was ungrateful and also wrong and being a sulky dumbass (not in those exact words but that’s what it meant) and why wouldn’t I fucking talk to it and you get the idea. Then Ratthi said, I’ve got it. He meant the jacket. Then you can come in. There was another pause. Then Ratthi asked, Can Amena come in, too? I thumped my head back against the wall. I was sitting on the counter next to the sink and running episode 237 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon in background so I could pretend to be watching it during the 400+ times ART had pinged me. (You may have noticed, my processing capacity allows me to think about a lot of things and do a lot of things at the same time, more than humans, augmented humans, or lower function ing bots can. ART’s processing capacity made me look like I was moving in slow motion. This made ART capable of both enormous patience and also of becoming furious when it didn’t get what it wanted immediately. It was one of the few ways I could successfully mess with it.) I had cleaned off all the blood and fluid with the hygiene unit but was too angry to take a shower. (Showers are nice and I wanted to stay angry.) One of ART’s long-sleeved crew T-shirts had fallen out of the recycler at one point. My first impulse was to throw it away, but I needed it, so I pulled it on over my head and threw what was left of my shirt on the floor. Now I was sitting with my boots on the polished counter surface. I hoped it was annoying ART. I was assuming it had a sensor view in here if not a camera view. I didn’t want to upset Amena any more than I already had, so I sent, Yes. The hatch slid open and Ratthi and Amena stepped in. Ratthi had gotten his knee fixed and wasn’t limping anymore.
He shut the hatch and Amena went to the other end of the sink counter and boosted herself up to sit on it. She curled her legs up, watching me worriedly. I said, “It can hear anything you say anywhere aboard.” Ratthi handed me my jacket with a smile. “Yes, but I’m used to that.” (Yes, I got that that was about me.) The jacket had been recycler-cleaned and the material rewoven to fix the burned parts and holes. Ratthi sighed, leaned against the wall and said, “So, you have a relationship with this transport.” I was horrified. Humans are disgusting. “No!” Ratthi made a little exasperated noise. “I didn’t mean a sexual relationship.” Amena’s brow furrowed in confusion and curiosity. “Is that possible?” “No!” I told her. Ratthi persisted, “You have a friendship.” I settled back in the corner and hugged my jacket. “No. Not—No.” “Not anymore?” Ratthi asked pointedly. “No,” I said very firmly. ART had stopped pinging me but I knew it was listening. It’s like having a malign impersonal intelligence that is incapable of minding its own business reading over your shoulder. Ratthi’s expression was doing a neutral yet skeptical thing that was really annoying. He said, “Have you made many friends who are bots?” I thought about poor dead Miki, who had wanted to be my friend. There was a 93 percent chance Miki had wanted to be everybody’s friend, but Miki had said to me “I have human friends, but I never had a friend like me before.” I said, “No. It’s not like that. Not like it is between humans.” Ratthi was still skeptical. “Is it? The Transport seems to think differently.” I said, “The Transport doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about, plus it lies a lot, and it’s mean.” A minute, undetectable in the range of human eyesight, fluctuation in the lights told me ART had heard that. “Why do you call it ART?” Amena asked. “It said its name was Perihelion.” I told her, “It’s an anagram. It stands for Asshole Research Transport.” Amena blinked.
“That’s not an anagram.” “Whatever.” Human words, there’s too many of them, and I don’t care. “Regardless,” Ratthi said, “I think that while you and Perihelion know how to have relationships with humans, neither of you is quite sure how to have a relationship with each other.” It still sounded disgusting. “Do you have to call it a relationship?” Ratthi shrugged one shoulder. “You don’t like the word ‘friendship.’ What else is there?” I had no idea. I did a quick search on my archives and pulled out the first result. “Mutual administrative assistance?” The lights fluctuated again, in what I could tell was a really sarcastic way. I yelled, “I know what you’re doing, ART, stop trying to communicate with me!” Amena looked around the room, trying to see what I was reacting to. Ratthi sighed again. He said, “I don’t know if you’ve been listening to what we’ve been doing outside this restroom, but Arada and Thiago have been negotiating with Perihelion and have come to an arrangement. We will help locate and hopefully free its crew, and it will give us any assistance needed to return to Preservation space.” “That’s not an arrangement,” I said, “that’s just doing what it wants.” “We know.” Ratthi made a helpless gesture. “But we don’t have any other choice. Even if it would let us send a distress beacon through the wormhole to the nearest station, that station would be in Corporation Rim territory. And we’re in a so-called ‘lost’ system that has been claimed as salvage by a corporate, which makes us in violation of a lot of their laws, plus we’re in a transport that had alien remnant technology installed on its drive. Telling whoever responds to the call that the transport was modified against its will is not going to get us anywhere but buried under massive fines, and it might be even worse for Perihelion’s crew and their university.” He was right about all that but it was actually worse than he thought. “This is not like Preservation Alliance territory.
You can only get a station responder when you’re inside a station’s defined area of influence, and they won’t forward distress beacons and they don’t send responders through wormholes. At most, they’ll pass the call to a local retrieval company, which would contact us and contract to rescue us. We’d have to pay them up front, and probably end up owing the station for passing the call along, though that depends on local regulations.” Amena’s jaw dropped. “We’d have to pay someone to rescue us?” Ratthi rubbed his face and muttered, “Oh, I hate the Corporation Rim.” “Really? Me too,” I said. (Yes, that was sarcasm.) And I had just thought of something that I should have noticed earlier. Amena was clearly trying to work out all the possible repercussions. “And if corporates did show up, would you be okay? Because you’re a construct?” “I’m fine,” I told her. It is amazing what the people on Preservation don’t know about how the Corporation Rim operates. “SecUnits are legal here. Your mother is my registered owner and you’re her designated representative.” And it was definitely Amena and not Thiago. Amena looked appalled. “My mother doesn’t own you.” “Yes, she does.” Dr. Bharadwaj had told me how Preservation-based humans don’t understand these concepts and I had believed her, mostly, but seeing it in action was always different. Amena looked at Ratthi for help. He nodded grimly. “Arada, Overse, and I all have certified copies of the legal document stored in our interfaces, just in case. If we do fall into the hands of corporates, Amena, you must assert legal ownership of SecUnit.” Amena waved her hands. “But that’s—Ugh!” “I don’t like it, either,” I told her. Ratthi said, “That aside, Perihelion says it will be some time before it can make repairs to its engine systems so we’re able to start the search, and we have preparations and plans to make.” He clapped his hands briskly. “So will you come out of the bathroom now?” “Yes.” I pushed myself off the counter and pulled my jacket on over ART’s stupid T-shirt.
“Because ART is lying.” This time when the lights fluctuated, it wasn’t sarcastic. * * * I walked out into Medical. The view of the control area was still active, with Arada seated in a station chair and Thiago now standing next to her. They were cycling through engine status data on ART’s alien-remnant-augmented wormhole trip, occasionally making little horrified noises. Overse was in Medical now, with the implant we had removed from Eletra on a sterile work surface. She was examining it using an imaging field. The magnified scans of the individual parts floated in it, rotating. Eletra was sitting up on a gurney near Overse, peering uncertainly at what she was doing with the implant. Overse pulled out of her feed to look over at us inquiringly. “Is, uh, everyone ready to talk now?” “Not exactly.” Ratthi sounded concerned, which was totally unfair. I said, “Arada, this transport did not come to this system in answer to a distress call.” Thiago turned around to watch me suspiciously. Arada pushed back her station chair. Someone had brought her some supplies from the emergency kit, because the burn on her cheek had been treated. “SecUnit, I think we have a working arrangement with Perihelion for now. Unless this is something that could endanger us, are you sure you want to … confront it just at the moment?” I said, “I am absolutely sure.” Ratthi threw his hands in the air and went over to sit next to Overse. With a “let’s get this over with” expression, Overse asked, “SecUnit, how do you know there wasn’t a distress call?” I said, “This is a teaching and research vessel. The student quarters and classroom compartments aren’t in use, and the lab module was inactive, and there was no cargo module attached. So what was it doing when it got this distress call?” All the humans looked up at the ceiling. ART said, And this is your idea of being helpful. I said, “This is my idea of the opposite of being helpful. I am here against my will and you are going to regret that.” Arada pressed both hands to her face.
“Maybe you should go back in the bathroom and think about this a little more.” “I’m done thinking,” I said. ART said, That’s obvious. I know, I walked into that one, which oddly enough, did not make me any less mad. I said, “You came here for a reason, and it wasn’t a distress call. What was it?” On the side of the room to my right, this was going on: (Eletra whispered to Overse and Ratthi, “Why are you letting your SecUnit … do this?” Overse’s jaw tightened. She said, “It’s not our SecUnit, it’s—” Ratthi squeezed her wrist and gave her what I recognized as a “don’t trust the corporates” look. He told Eletra, “It’s normally very responsible.”) Thiago was eyeing me through the conference image, frowning. He said, “It is a good question.” (Of course, none of the sensible humans are supporting me now, it has to be the one who never agrees with me when I’m not being an idiot.) I said to ART, “Why were you here? What do you really do? Deep space research, teaching humans, cargo hauling, none of those are reasons to be here, in the system where corporates were trying to salvage a dead colony.” ART said, Everything that occurred before my crew was captured is irrelevant. It is none of your business. I said, “You made it my business when you kidnapped me.” You are not here against your will. Leave whenever you want. You know where the door is. That sounded just as sarcastic and mean as you think it did. Also possibly really threatening to the humans. Arada and Ratthi were both waving at me, making gestures which I interpreted as urgent requests for me to shut up now. But I had gotten ART to lose its temper again and be threatening, and that was what I wanted. I folded my arms and said, “You’re upsetting Amena.” I’d noted that ART’s tone when it spoke to Amena was completely different than it was to the other humans. I didn’t think it would hurt the others, but it wasn’t careful of their feelings the way it was of Amena’s.
Whatever else ART was, the classroom space and bunkrooms said it was actually, on a regular basis, a teaching vessel. And before this when I was stupid and we were still friends it had talked about human adolescents in an indulgent way. Amena took a breath, probably to object, based on her whole “despite being a relatively sheltered adolescent from the most naive human society in existence, I feel a need to pretend that none of this is bothering me” thing. I looked at her and tapped our private feed connection. Be honest. She let the breath out. She prodded the deck with the toe of her shoe and admitted, reluctantly, “The gray people were terrifying. And being shot at, and … I’d really like to know what’s going on, not just a convenient story.” There was a long silence. I felt a lot of human eyes looking at me, and the sense of weight and attention through the feed that was ART. Finally ART said, I have to violate my crew’s confidentiality agreement in order to answer that question. I said, “You kidnapped me and my humans. That violated my contract. A contract I made with them, myself.” Not a company contract, I meant. A me contract. And ART had got me dragged into this and messed everything up. ART said, I will consider it. Then it put up a connection schematic, which showed it had just cut Eletra’s active connection out of the general feed. On a closed channel with me and my five humans, ART said, This information must be kept private. If any of you reveal anything I tell you to the corporate representative, I will kill her. I had a release of adrenaline from my organic parts. Uncomfortable, and weird. I wasn’t attached to Eletra, who seemed like the typical human client I had had with the company. (Not too dumb, not too smart, and only 53 percent likely to do something that ended up with me (1) shot (2) abandoned on a hostile planet.) But she was adjacent to my humans and I didn’t like the idea of anybody dying anywhere in that neighborhood. The humans clearly had a moment of tension.
There were a lot of gazes all intersecting each other and attempts to conceal worried expressions. Then Arada said, Agreed. We won’t tell her anything. She cleared her throat and said aloud, “Maybe we can use your cabins, to clean up and rest?” ART said, on the general feed, Of course. * * * Ratthi and Overse helped Eletra get settled into one of ART’s bunkrooms (an unused one that the asshole gray people didn’t manage to get their growth medium odor all over). There was an attached bathroom and Ratthi brought self-heating meal boxes and beverage containers for her so she didn’t have an excuse to wander around. I put a drone sentry outside the door because I don’t trust anybody with security, particularly ART. My humans went to the galley, which was far enough from the bunkroom that Eletra wouldn’t hear the conversation, even if she walked out into the corridor. The humans were eating meals, too, and Thiago had made a hot liquid for them in the galley’s prep unit. ART put up another unnecessarily elaborate split display, with a view on Eletra, who had finished eating, taken the medication ART’s MedSystem had recommended, and curled up to sleep. Arada, still eating her meal, said, “Perihelion, are you ready to answer SecUnit’s questions now?” (Actually first she said, “SecUnit, will you stop pacing and sit down?” I said, “No.”) ART said, I am a teaching vessel, and a research vessel for deep space mapping, and I sometimes haul cargo. All that is true. My crew also gathers information and takes actions for anti-corporate organizations that operate as part of and are supported by the polity of Mihira and New Tideland, and administered by the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. These actions are often dangerous. Arada nodded, exchanging a look with Overse. Arada said, “So you came here because of this lost colony.
To examine it before the corporates arrived?” We received information that a database reconstruction contracted by a consortium of corporations involved in salvage and reclamation had turned up coordinates to a colony seeded approximately thirty-seven corporate standard years ago. “An abandoned colony.” Amena stirred the goop on her plate, glaring. “A bunch of people left to die, like our great-grandparents.” Amena wasn’t wrong, it was similar to what had happened to the colonists who had eventually founded Preservation. They had been “seeded” (that actually means “dumped”) on a mostly terraformed planet with the idea that supply ships would return through the wormhole at frequent intervals until the colony was self-supporting. This was exactly how corporates established colonies now. Except sometimes the corporates went bankrupt or were attacked by other corporates and the wormhole data was destroyed or the wormhole itself destabilized or all record of the colony’s existence was just lost in a database that ended up locked due to legal battles over ownership. And so no supply ships came and all the humans starved or died when the cheap shitty terraforming failed. I’d seen movies and shows that used this as a plot, but I hadn’t known they weren’t just stories until I came to Preservation. (Most had depressing endings and were part of a whole “awful things happening to isolated groups of helpless humans” genre that was not my favorite.) ART said, The colonies are abandoned and cut off due to corporate bankruptcy or negligence, yes. Dead, not necessarily. Some manage to survive. Arada had finished eating and was folding up her plate for the recycler. “Didn’t you say this site had two colonies?” Yes. Historical sources recorded the existence of a former Pre–Corporation Rim colony on this site, but no other information. ART put the colony report, what there was of it, in the feed. It looked like it was put together from fragments, as if someone had deleted the original and this was a reconstruction.
Most of it was what ART had already told us: original Pre–Corporation Rim colony site, which nobody knew crap about or if they had none of the data had survived to make it into this report. Corporate colony seeded by a company called Adamantine Explorations, partial terraforming. No info on number of colonists, terrain, weather, habitats, equipment, illegal genetic experimentation, very illegal alien remnants, nothing. The only interesting new info was from one of ART’s crew members, an augmented human named Iris, who had added some newsfeed archives about the hostile takeover of Adamantine Explorations after the colony had been established. There were three different articles from news sources that said an undetermined number—anywhere from four to twenty-four—Adamantine Explorations employees had died in a firefight, holding off the corporate takeover long enough for their database of wormhole coordinates to be deleted. The only reason the physical data storage still existed was that the attackers had broken in and killed the techs before they could vaporize it. Iris’s note ended: Tempting to think that they were trying to deliberately protect? conceal? the colony. Possible? Just not likely. I didn’t think it was likely, either. But like Iris, I thought the fact that three different news sources had reported versions of the story indicated that the incident or a variation of it had actually occurred. All the humans were quiet as they read the report. (Yes, it feels like it takes them forever. I sorted through my media storage but I knew they would finish before I could get anything started.) “That’s strange,” Overse said softly. “Were they trying to protect the colony? Or just their investment?” “You just like a mystery,” Arada told her, most of her attention on the report. “I like mysteries in fiction, not in our lives,” Overse retorted. ART ignored them.
My crew’s mission was to ascertain whether the colony was still inhabited, and if so, attempt contact, and prevent interference and exploitation by salvage corporations, whether by evacuating the inhabitants or, if the colony is actually viable, providing assistance. Amena leaned her elbows on the table. “But why do you have to do that? If people from the colony survived, then there’s nothing another corporation could do, right? If the original corporation that sent the colony is gone, then the people are free.” “Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works here,” Overse told her. Her expression had that grimly frustrated quality that was common when my humans talked about the corporates. “Another corporation could move in and take over.” Amena was skeptical. “Take over? But people are living there. I guess they could settle a second colony somewhere on the planet but they couldn’t take over the existing colony. Could they?” “They could,” Overse assured her. “They have.” Amena’s expression turned horrified. “But that’s like—I don’t know what it is, but it’s at least kidnapping.” “That’s how it works in the Corporation Rim,” Thiago told her, stirring his liquid. “The planet is considered property, someone’s property that can be salvaged if the original owner is gone. The colonists, or their descendants or whoever is living there now, don’t have any claim.” “Perihelion, what do you do about it? How do you help the colonists?” Ratthi asked. ART said, The University has the means to produce the colony’s original charter documents, which often contain clauses specifying that if the originating corporate body has ceased operations, then ownership of the planet is ceded to the colonists or their issue or successors living on the original site. I’d heard the key words “means to produce” as opposed to “archival copies.” I said, “You and your crew collect the necessary survey data from the colony and the University forges the documents.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I mean, I was mad at ART, but the overall mission sounded great in a “screw a corporation sideways” way. “Is that right, Perihelion?” Ratthi asked. ART ignored us. A contract between the colony and an independently operated transfer station is then facilitated. Once the station has established a presence, then the colony is relatively secure from the worst excess of corporate predation, and free to accept other forms of assistance offered by non-corporate entities. Arada’s mouth was twisted. “Eletra said there were two corporate ships here, correct? Did you arrive in this system before or after they did?” Before. With my crew held hostage, I was forced to comply with their captors’ orders to fire on a Barish-Estranza support carrier. But my memory archive of that period is damaged and I don’t know what happened to the vessel or the crew. “So the gray people could also have these corporate crews as prisoners.” Ratthi looked like he was trying to figure out just how many humans we might have to rescue. “Do you know why they brought Eletra and the other corporate onboard … you?” He made a vague gesture over his shoulder. “Why they put the implants in them?” “I thought it was to torture them for fun,” Amena said darkly. ART hesitated, though not long enough for the humans to notice. They may have wanted their shuttle. It’s still docked in my secondary cargo module slot. That hesitation would have been suspicious, but I also thought ART might honestly not know. Which was strange, because it should know. Maybe the memory archive issue was worse than ART had implied. But my two landing shuttles are also still in place, so that’s unlikely. Arada propped her chin on her hand. She was exhibiting sev eral behaviors indicating that she was deep in thought. “Perihelion, did the rest happen as you explained, that when you came back online your crew was gone?” Yes. There was a tone to that word. Not ART’s base level of sarcasm. It had an edge that echoed in the feed. I didn’t react.
ART had kidnapped me to get me here, put my humans in danger. I was not going to feel sympathy for it. Absolutely not. Ratthi’s expression was dubious. “Any luck remembering what happened when they disappeared?” I am still reconstructing damaged archives. “Could SecUnit help you with that?” Amena asked, very casually, not looking at me. I folded my arms and glared at the side of Amena’s head. ART very obviously did not answer. Overse leaned back in her chair, not comfortable. “We need to try to put together a timeline of when things happened.” By the time I opened my mouth to say I had a chart, ART had said, Obviously, and threw a chart up next to the split screen. It showed the times (1) ART knew it had first arrived through the wormhole into the colony’s system, (2) when ART’s memory disruption occurred, (3) when it had reinitialized to find intruders aboard and its crew gone and an alien remnant installed on its drive, (4) the attack on the corporate supply carrier, (5) the moment the deletion occurred, and (6) the moment ART’s backup restarted. All except for Point One were estimates as ART’s onboard timekeeping had been disrupted. (Yes, it had actually left out the whole part about telling the Targets that I was a weapon they could use and bringing them to where they could attack our baseship, and using the comm code to locate me. That was fucking incredible.) Amena was telling the others, “Before everything got weird—weirder—Ras tried to tell me about the colony reclamation project, but Eletra cut him off and changed the subject.” Thiago looked at the view of the bunkroom, where Eletra was hidden under blankets. He said, “Is it possible that these people—the gray people—” He shook his head. “We know influence—terrible effects—from alien remnants are possible. Could the gray people have come from either the recent colony or the original one? Or are the corporates likely to use genetic manipulation on their colonists?” Undetermined, ART said, like it honestly didn’t give a crap.
And honestly, it probably didn’t. The Targets had attacked ART’s crew. It wasn’t interested in the mystery, it just wanted its crew back. When no one else could answer the question, Ratthi leaned his elbows on the table. “I think the corporates would do anything they could get away with. Obviously these gray people—what do we call them?” “Targets,” I said. Thiago did a thing with his eyes that was like an eyeroll but not quite. Ratthi continued, “The Targets must have brought the alien remnant tech that was installed on the wormhole drive.” Overse tapped her fingers on the table, thinking. “Those implants weren’t alien remnant tech. In fact, they were old. Much older than thirty-seven years, when the corporate colony was established.” “Yes, there must have been usable but outdated tech left behind on the site of the earlier colony, the Pre–Corporation Rim one.” Ratthi poked absently at the food left on his plate, then slid it over to Arada so she could finish it off. “That solid-state screen interface, I’ve seen those in historical displays.” Amena nodded, waving a hand at me. “And you know, they called the wormhole a ‘bridge-transit.’ I’ve never heard that before.” Thiago seemed intrigued. “Did they speak a standard language?” “No, but there was a translation at first, then it stopped when SecUnit woke up and the fighting started,” Amena told him. Since ART didn’t have any usable video or audio, I pulled some examples and sent them into the general feed. The humans listened with puzzled expressions. Then Thiago nodded grimly to himself. “That’s a mix of at least three Pre–Corporation Rim languages.” “That certainly matches their tech,” Overse said. Thiago added, “And many of the really deadly alien contamination incidents were Pre–Corporation Rim.” “What sort of incidents?” Arada asked. Thiago said, “Preservation’s archives only have detailed information on one, that took place on a moon that was being converted into a massive base of operations for one of the early Pre-CR polities.
Over seventy percent of the population was killed. The only reason anyone survived was because a recently activated central system managed to lock off the living quarters and keep it sealed until help arrived.” He glanced at me. “So they were saved by a machine intelligence.” I know what a central system is, Thiago. (It was more outdated tech, like a HubSystem that did everything, with no subordinate systems. I hadn’t ever encountered one that wasn’t part of a historical drama.) Overse leaned forward. “So how were the people killed? The ones who were affected by the contamination attacked the others?” Thiago wasn’t nearly as annoying when he was being smart like this. He said, “Yes, though that sort of violent reaction to remnant contamination appears to be rare. But since so many of these incidents, historical and contemporary, are suppressed, we don’t actually know whether it is or not.” Ratthi nodded agreement. “With the corporates being so secretive, it’s hard to tell.” Overse said, “The only laws they all seem to recognize are about alien remnant discovery and interdiction, and the licensing restrictions for use of strange synthetics.” “But why would alien remnants affect people like that?” Amena asked. “Is it intentional? Is it something that’s protecting the site, where the aliens didn’t want anybody else to take what was there?” Ratthi took a breath, then let it out again. “I never thought so. I think it’s the same as if an alien person who had never seen anything like a terraforming matrix accidentally touched one and was poisoned. There’s no intentionality. Sometimes the contamination effects are as if different priorities are loaded into the affected person’s brain, like alien software running on human hardware. The result is chaos.” He gestured with a utensil. “But do we think the Targets are from the Adamantine colony? Or descendants of the Pre-CR colony? Or could they have come from outside this system?” All indications suggest they came from within this system, ART said.
I said, “You’re having memory archive issues, how do you know who was or wasn’t onboard you? There could have been hundreds of corporate salvage groups and raiders and colonists and aliens—” “SecUnit—” Arada started at the same time as Ratthi said, “I don’t think—” ART interrupted, SecUnit’s earlier statement that I “lie a lot” was untrue. I obviously cannot reveal information against the interests of my crew unless circumstances warrant. Arada nodded. “Right. We understand. I think SecUnit is looking out for our interests—” ART said, I want an apology. I made an obscene gesture at the ceiling with both hands. (I know ART isn’t the ceiling but the humans kept looking up there like it was.) ART said, That was unnecessary. In a low voice, Ratthi commented to Overse, “Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don’t have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.” ART was suddenly in my feed, on a private channel. I did what I had to do. You should understand that. I said aloud, “I’m not talking to you on the feed! You’re not my client and you’re not my—” I couldn’t say it, not anymore. All the humans were staring at me. I wanted to face the wall but that felt like giving in. I suddenly had views all over the ship. ART had given me access to its cameras. I snarled, “Stop being nice to me!” Then Amena said aloud, “I think you need to give SecUnit some time.” Right, that’s all this situation needed. I asked her, “Is it talking to you on a private channel?” Amena winced. “Yes, but—” I yelled, “ART, stop talking to my human behind my back!” You know that thing humans do where they think they’re being completely logical and they absolutely are not being logical at all, and on some level they know that, but can’t stop? Apparently it can happen to SecUnits, too. Arada got up from the table and held up her hands. “Hey, now, let’s stop this. It’s unproductive. Perihelion, you need to stop pressuring SecUnit. I know you’re upset about your crew and being deleted and this has all been terrible and confusing.
But SecUnit is upset, too. Yelling at each other isn’t going to help.” ART said, I was not yelling. “Of course you weren’t,” Arada agreed, in the same reasonable tone Mensah’s marital partners Farai and Tano used when they talked to their younger kids. She faced the others. “We need to work this situation. Perihelion, if you could give us access to any other information your crew had on this colony, we’d really appreciate that. In the meantime, Overse and I are going to start collecting data on this alien thing that was on Perihelion’s drive and see if we can’t help get the normal-space drive online any faster. Ratthi and Thiago, I want you to check out the deceased Targets and do some pathology scans. We also need a translation of what they were saying in SecUnit’s recordings. If we can confirm they’re descended from one of the two groups of human colonists, I think—Well, I think we’ll be able to make more effective plans. Amena, I’d like you to try to talk to Eletra again, see if you can get any more information out of her. I think it’s clear she’s been holding back, and now that she knows about the implants, she might be more forthcoming. SecUnit, maybe you could figure out what caused Perihelion’s first reinitialization and how the Targets got aboard? I think we can all agree that having mysterious intruders invade Perihelion again is something we really need to avoid. Is everyone good with that? Perihelion, are you all right with this plan?” ART said, For now. 10 Well, this was just great. The humans started to disperse, Arada and Overse toward engineering, Ratthi going back to Medical to get the pathology suite ready. Amena helped Thiago clear the meal trays off the table. He touched her shoulder. “My daughter, are you sure you’re all right to speak to this corporate?” “I’m fine, Uncle.” She was exasperated and did this shrugging shoulders-flopping arms thing that illustrated that very well. “I don’t think Eletra would try to hurt me. And she knows SecUnit is here. And ART.” She glanced at me, guiltily.
“It said I could call it ART.” Of course it did. I felt the hinge of my jaw grind. Thiago squeezed Amena’s shoulder. “Just be careful.” “I will,” Amena told him, already heading back into the prep area where the nearest recycler was. “I’m going to get her some fresh clothes, it’ll give me an excuse to go in there.” Thiago looked at me and I looked at the wall. He said, “I want to thank you for everything you did for Amena.” Was it grudging or was I just in a terrible mood? I don’t know, I have no idea, so I didn’t respond. Amena came out with a packet of clothing from the recycler and I followed her down the corridor toward Eletra’s bunkroom. From ART’s camera view, Eletra had gotten up to get another container of water from the bathroom, so it was a good time for Amena to casually stroll in and offer the clothes. Then ART secured a private channel with me and said, I don’t need your help. That’s not what you thought when you kidnapped me, I told it. I meant, you don’t have to speak to me if you don’t want to. Fine, whatever, I don’t care. I said, Do you want the fucking help or not? ART dumped its archive on me and I was immediately drowning in the giant mound of data that comprised its second-by-second status checks. Fortunately, after keeping track of the company’s shit-tons of mined data, I knew how to deal with it. I started by defining what the gap in ART’s memory archive might look like, which I was guessing would be a giant interruption in the constant incoming reports from subsystems like life support, navigation, etc. It was tricky, because for ART these were not like discrete reports from connected systems, but more like the sensory input I would get from the pads on the tips of my fingers. It was a lot more complicated than the way my own archives stored data. But once I had an idea of what I was looking for, I constructed a query. I stopped at the top of the bunkroom corridor and let Amena go on alone.
I didn’t want Eletra to see me or to realize I was lurking out here, since I thought that might impede Amena’s ability to get her to talk. Amena reached the hatch and sent Eletra a note on the feed: Hello, I brought you some spare clothes, can I come in? While Eletra opened the hatch with the feed control and they sorted through the clothes, I checked my inputs for the others: Arada and Overse had stopped in the corridor that went toward the engineering module. Arada hugged Overse, and Overse kissed her and said into her ear, “You can do this, babe. You’re a bulkhead.” “I’m a wibbly bulkhead,” Arada muttered. (The wibbliness was why I trusted Arada. Overconfident humans who don’t listen to anybody else scare the hell out of me.) Arada stepped back and smiled at Overse. “Got to get to work.” ART had dispatched the medical gurney earlier and it had been moving methodically around the ship picking up messy dead Targets. Now it floated into Medical where Ratthi waited, Thiago following it in. There was a lot of congealing blood and fluids. “Oh, this is not going to be fun,” Ratthi muttered. “No,” Thiago agreed grimly. “I’ll get the biohazard gear.” ART added to its action list: Repair and reactivate drones. Collect targetDrones for examination and destruction. In the bunkroom, Amena was asking, “How are you feeling?” “Better.” Eletra folded a jacket in her lap. “I know you’re going to ask, but we didn’t know those implant things were in us. I don’t remember that at all.” Interesting, ART said. I was still mad, right? But it was interesting. I said, Because you have a gap in your memory archive? Yes. It can’t be the same cause, of course, but it’s the same operational approach. Take a prisoner, cause a memory disruption. I hate it when ART is right. It was the same operational approach and we really needed to find out if the Targets had used alien remnant tech to cause the memory disruptions or not.
I said, The mix of outdated human technology and alien remnant could mean the stupid Pre–Corporation Rim humans established a colony on an interdicted alien remnant site. Not necessarily, ART said. Before I could argue, it added, The site might have been undiscovered, not interdicted. ART had a lot stricter standards about what constituted evidence than humans did. It was always wanting to prove things actually existed before it would make plans for what to do about them. (Yes, it was annoying.) ART said, It’s possible to theorize that something from the original Pre-CR colony may have remained on the site when the Corporate colonists arrived. But it seems strange that the later colonists would preserve and use outdated tech. I didn’t want to admit it, but ART wasn’t wrong about that, either. This tech wasn’t useless, but I’d taken targetControlSystem down with an attack that was practically from ancient history. (That’s how I’d known about it, from watching historical dramas.) So the facts we know are: that there was a human site in existence before the corporate colony. And that somebody found alien remnants at some point. ART created a feed graphic (yes, another one) labeled Perihelion and SecUnit’s Initial Suppositions with an access list that included all the humans except Eletra. The first bullet point was: Fact (1) Corporate colony was established on an early Pre–Corporation Rim human occupation site. Questions: Are alien remnants present? If yes, were they original to the site or introduced later? Was the Pre-CR site established because of the presence of alien remnants? Was the corporate colony established because of the presence of alien remnants? The humans all paused to read it. Amena, listening to Eletra talk about her family, covered her moment of distraction with a cough. (Eletra’s family was in a hereditary indenture to Barish-Estranza and was trying to build up enough employment credit to get her and her siblings and cousins transferred into management training.
I knew Amena well enough by now to recognize she was feigning polite interest to disguise horrified interest.) My queries on ART’s status data started returning results, and I backburnered everything to check them. Huh. ART had said it had one forced shutdown and reinitialize, when its crew disappeared and the Targets showed up. Then a second forced shutdown when the targetControlSystem had deleted it. So when had targetControlSystem been loaded into ART’s systems? Presumably its invasion of ART’s systems had caused that first forced shutdown. Except there were more gaps than that. I wished Pin-Lee was here. And, though I hated to admit it, I wished Gurathin was here, too. Both were analysts, and while I was way better at it than they were, at least I could have shown them what I was looking at. I said, ART, look at this. I was aware enough of ART to know that it was doing several things at once: helping Arada and Overse collect scans from what was left of the alien remnant on its drive, directing the MedSystem’s pathology unit for Ratthi, working on the translation of the Targets’ language with Thiago, guiding the reinitialization and diagnostics of its damaged propulsion systems, plus monitoring all its other ongoing processes. But I suddenly had 86.3 percent of its attention. (For ART, that was a lot.) It examined my query results. A human in this situation would have said, “That’s not possible.” ART said, Intriguing. I needed to put these in a timeline. I looked for major events like wormhole entrances and exits and navigation changes so I would know what they looked like in the status data. ART pulled generic examples for me and I started another query set. In the bunkroom, Amena had been cautiously working around to the subject of the colony. With a serious expression, she said slowly, “Look, I know you don’t want to reveal things that your … corporate supervisors or whoever don’t want you to, but we really need to know about this lost colony.” Eletra bit her lip.
“It’s proprietary information.” For fuck’s sake. On our private feed connection, Amena sent, I’m not sure what she means by this. Somebody owns the information? Yes, I told her. She’s afraid of her salvage corporation. She needs to be more afraid of being recaptured by the Targets. Amena said, “I understand that but the Targets—those gray people—they could show up again. Especially because no one knows how they got on this transport in the first place, or what happened to the crew.” She lifted her hands helplessly. “Whatever happened to them could happen to us. And it’s more likely the longer we’re stuck here.” Eletra put her hand on her own shoulder, as if trying to reach for the place where her implant had been. “I thought the new people were the crew?” ART butted in with, Tell her they are. Amena nodded earnestly. “Sure, yes, they are, but we’re—they’re missing the crew members who were here when the Targets took over the ship.” Eletra’s frown deepened. “Why can’t we leave the system?” “The normal space engines aren’t working yet. But even if we could get to the wormhole, the transport won’t let us go. You heard it. It’s programmed not to leave without its crew, the rest of the crew. And it’s really mean, and determined.” On the feed, Amena said, Sorry, ART. Apology accepted, ART said. I felt its attention shift in the feed. (Imagine it staring meaningfully at me.) (It could stare all it wanted, I’m not apologizing.) Amena added, “And we already know about some things, like the alien remnants around the Pre–Corporation Rim colony.” Both ART and I shut up (I know, I was surprised, too) and waited to see if that would work. “Oh.” Eletra slumped a little. “I don’t know very much. Ras and I are—were—both environmental techs, and everything was need-to-know. Our briefing said the colony was originally seeded by an early polity, probably via cold sleep ship. It was discovered about forty years ago and re-seeded through the wormhole by a company called Adamantine Explorations, that kept the location private.
Then they went down in a hostile buyout and the databases were destroyed—” Amena looked confused and Eletra helpfully explained. “Somebody was probably trying to force the incoming management to pay for the code keys to get the data. But you know, that’s not a very good idea. They might take it out on the seized assets. And it’s bad enough being bought out like that without the management coming in with a grudge against you.” Amena blinked a lot, apparently as an attempt to control her expression. (I’ve tried it, it doesn’t work very well.) On the feed, she said, When she says seized assets, she means the employees, right? The people? Correct, ART said. Eletra continued, “But anyway, the storage media was saved and Barish-Estranza bought it at some point later and they were able to re-create the data, and they launched this salvage project.” She hesitated. “There were rumors about alien remnants. Supposedly some of the recovered data referenced them. But that could have just been rumors.” Amena said, “So what was Barish-Estranza going to do about the alien remnants, if they were there? You have to have a special license to recover them, right, even in the Corporation Rim?” “That’s above my pay level.” Eletra touched the back of her neck uneasily. Physical reactions are supposed to be useful for determining whether humans are telling the truth or lying or are secretly planning to murder their whole survey team, etc., and sometimes they were. But also sometimes humans just secreted agitated brain chemicals for no apparent reason, or because something was physically wrong, like their digestive systems malfunctioning. But ART’s scan of Eletra showed she was experiencing signs of physical distress when she talked about the implants. “Was that what was in us?” she said. “Those implants? Did they have strange synthetics? Your coworker took one apart.” I pulled a preliminary report from Overse’s feed, mostly just the raw data she had collected for the scan. She hadn’t had time to write up any notes from it.
“No, she said it was very simple tech.” Amena bit her lip, trying to look like she was thinking and not reading the feed. ART had completed the report and noted that the implants had no alien components but that they might be receivers for a more esoteric transmitter. It had added “examine all Target technology” to the group worklist and added the line (2) primitive human technology designed to work with alien power sources or strange synthetic materials to Perihelion and SecUnit’s Suppositions chart. “She thought it could have been connected to alien remnant tech.” Eletra slumped and looked sick. My query results for establishing a timeline of ART’s forced shutdowns returned and I matched them with the gaps I’d already identified. That was when I hit the first oh shit moment. ART, I said. ART took in my report. The moment of shock lasted less than .01 second but subjectively it seemed much longer. Then ART did what I should have done first and spoke to Amena on our private feed connection: Amena, leave that compartment. I added, Now, Amena, it’s potentially dangerous. Amena was agitated, but channeled it into squinting thoughtfully and pushing at her hair. She looked more like a human who had forgotten to do something rather than one who had just been told they were in danger. “Oh, my Uncle’s calling me on the feed.” She pushed to her feet, backing toward the hatch. “I’ll check back with you later.” Eletra just nodded wearily. Amena let the hatch close and then ran down the corridor to me. “What is it?” she whispered. I took her arm and guided her around the corner. I was having a release of adrenaline from my organic parts and I felt weird and cold. There was no way an implant could have been put into Amena, she’d never been out of my and ART’s sight, but I scanned her again anyway. “ART encountered the Barish-Estranza transports before its first forced shutdown,” I told her. “Whatever attacked it and kidnapped its crew, came from one of their ships.” Amena’s eyes widened.
“Oh shit.” * * * We had another meeting, this one in the feed, again with Eletra’s connection cut. This time ART let me do the video conference image but I was too rattled to make it fancy. Arada and Overse were still in the engineering pod, Ratthi and Thiago were still in Medical. Amena and I ended up sitting in the hatchway of the galley, so I could be close if Eletra decided to do something other than lying in the bunkroom like a traumatized recovering human. Which she might still be, even though we had evidence indicating against it. Amena was nervously eating processed imitation vegetable fragments out of a container from the galley. (She had asked me to let her listen in on the conference but to mark her feed as on private. She told me, “If you need me to do something, I’ll do it, but a lot of things have happened and I just need a minute.”) (Thiago asked where she was and I said, “In the restroom,” and she glared at me. I am not your social secretary, Amena, you want a better lie, make up one yourself.) I had converted my timeline into a format humans and augmented humans could read, annotated it, and put it up in the feed. It showed that ART’s initial arrival in this system via the wormhole was its last substantiated memory. After that, everything was a reconstruction based on the status data. It looked like: 1. ART’s arrival in the system. 2. ART receives a distress signal with a Barish-Estranza Corporation signature. Sensors show one contact, a configurable explorer ship. There is no sign of the second B-E vessel, the supply transport, that Ras and Eletra said they were aboard when they were attacked. The distress call is marked as a request for medical assistance. 3. ART tractors the B-E explorer’s shuttle into its module dock. 4. Unsubstantiated but probably bad stuff happens. 5. B-E explorer then links up with ART’s module dock, presumably to take ART’s crew prisoner and leave the Targets onboard, if the Targets hadn’t already boarded via the shuttle.
(I’d taken a look at the shuttle via ART’s cameras, and going down to search it was next on my action list.) 6. ART leaves the system via the wormhole. 7. ART exits the wormhole at Preservation Station, after a trip barely lasting an impossible three hours, telling us the alien remnant tech was definitely in place on its engines at that point. 8. After sending and receiving communications from Preservation Station, ART goes into standby for five ship-cycles. ART then targets our facility when it arrives, firing multiple times, missing spectacularly due to supplying faulty targeting data to its own weapon systems. (I couldn’t tell exactly when targetControlSystem had been uploaded to ART’s systems, but it was before this point because the status updates told the story of a subtle but intense battle over the weapons. ART’s crew had been held hostage for its good behavior, but it hadn’t been willing to kill our survey team even after it knew it had me in its tractor. TargetControlSystem must have figured out who was jogging its arm every time it tried to fire, because that was when ART had been deleted, causing the equivalent of a giant seismic event in its status updates.) I could see the others on ART’s cameras, digesting the information with increasingly concerned expressions. Overse said, “So the memory Perihelion had of firing on a corporate transport never actually took place?” ART didn’t answer. I think it was upset. I was also upset, but somebody had to be the adult here. (I was used to ART being the adult.) I said, “From the navigation, sensor, and status data I reviewed, weapons were not fired until ART encountered our facility in Preservation space. And there is no archival video or interior sensor data of the docking with the B-E explorer, or of the arrival and docking of the shuttle Eletra and Ras said they were aboard.” I didn’t like to say it aloud, but I had to. “ART was compromised not long after the first contact with the explorer and its shuttle.
Something first removed and then significantly altered sections of its personal memory.” The humans were quiet, taking that in. Then Ratthi said, “Poor ART. Excuse me, poor Perihelion.” Arada grimaced in agreement. “It’s disturbing. The B-E explorer must have arrived in the system first and was attacked. Taken over? By our friends the Targets. But if the supply transport actually exists, where is it now?” Overse frowned. “It might have been destroyed. We have to assume Perihelion’s crew are being held prisoner on the explorer.” “Is the explorer armed?” Ratthi asked worriedly. “I hate being shot at.” Again, ART didn’t answer. I said, “Probably.” For a reclamation project in a technically uninhabited system, it would be easier for Barish-Estranza to afford a license and bond for an armed ship. Thiago paced in front of the med platform, his arms folded. “Perihelion and I have translated the speech that SecUnit recorded and it was … confusing at best. The Targets—and we are going to have to come up with something else to call them—spoke of a need to complete their mission, but never said what the mission was.” Ratthi added, “And they all have implants like Eletra’s.” The other humans looked like they didn’t know what to think about that. I didn’t know what to think about it, either. Arada said, “But could you tell if there was alien remnant exposure?” “The scan isn’t showing anything that matches the list of known strange synthetics or organic alien remnants.” Ratthi glanced at Thiago for confirmation. “But that doesn’t eliminate the possibility.” Thiago said, “Statistics suggest there are many undiscovered alien remnant sites, and many others that no one has been able to get close enough to to analyze their component materials. And the scan is turning up traces of unidentifiable elements in their bodies.
We can’t tell if they’re naturally occurring elements or strange synthetics until we have planetary survey data to compare them to.” Ratthi gestured and sent some scan results into the feed for the others to look at. “And those suits they’re wearing do have a factory code stamped on them. I can’t read it and Perihelion’s database can’t identify it, though that might be because of the reinitialization or the memory archive issues. But I suspect they came in the supplies for one of the two colonies, either the original one or the corporate colony seeded by Adamantine.” Thiago said, “What we do know for certain is that the Targets were altered to look as they do. We don’t know if they did it to themselves or if it was an accidental exposure to a dangerous alien remnant. If they weren’t all dead, we could ask them.” Yeah, that was aimed at me. “If they weren’t all dead, they’d be trying to kill us, or stick implants in us,” Amena grumbled, still off-feed and crunching vegetable matter. Overse spread her hands. “Where does this leave Eletra? Were SecUnit and Amena meant to rescue her and her friend? Were they meant to be … spies, possibly?” “I think that’s too far-fetched.” Arada’s forehead scrunched in thought. “The Targets couldn’t have any idea SecUnit would be capable of seizing control of the ship when they brought it aboard. They thought they were looking for a weapon, not a person, so why set an elaborate trap with spies?” Overse slumped in her chair, frustrated. “Right, that’s true.” She looked tired. I suspected it was a bad idea to have a meeting when all the humans were running out of brain capacity. Ratthi added, “I think Eletra is telling the truth, that her memories were altered, just like Perihelion’s were.” “You just want to believe the best about everyone,” Overse said, still a little skeptical. Ratthi snorted. “No, that’s Thiago. I’m optimistic but a realist.” Thiago looked mildly insulted. “No, that’s me,” Arada corrected, and smiled at Overse.
“I’m an optimist.” “We know, honey.” Overse squeezed her shoulder. Thiago said, “Amena, are you back on the feed? What is your opinion of Eletra? Do you think she told you the truth, that she didn’t remember what happened?” Amena seemed surprised to be asked for an opinion, but she swallowed what she was eating and said on the general feed, At first I thought so. They were both so worried about proprietary information and getting in trouble, that seemed real to me. Now … I don’t think she’s afraid enough. She was frustrated, trying to think how to explain. I think she’s either lying, or something has messed with her mind so much that she doesn’t know what happened, and now she’s afraid to admit it. Arada looked up at the ceiling. “Perihelion, can you tell us anything else? What do you think happened?” ART hadn’t said anything, and that was beginning to worry me. ART likes to give its opinion and I’m not even sure “likes” is the right word there, but basically, ART gives its opinion whether you like it or not. It was beginning to feel strange that it hadn’t weighed in yet to tell the humans they were missing something obvious or weren’t approaching the problem the right way or whatever. When it still didn’t respond, I said, “ART is trying to reassemble its log data right now. It’ll be out of contact for a short time.” Amena squinted suspiciously at me. “Is that true?” she whispered. I made a gesture I was hoping she would interpret as “Please don’t tell them I’m lying.” Arada said, “Thank you, SecUnit.” She scratched her fingers through her short hair, like she was trying to get her thoughts together. This was definitely a problem; the humans needed to recharge or sleep or whatever or their decision-making abilities would be even worse than usual. She continued, “So, right, none of this fundamentally changes our objectives.
We still need to find Perihelion’s crew, but at least now we know our first step is to track down the explorer.” I was hoping ART would comment, even if it was going to say something like “or else,” but there was nothing. Thiago had been looking thoughtful, which I tried not to see as a bad sign. He said, “Arada, I’d like to get Eletra back into Medical for a thorough neurological scan. Also, that will give me a chance to speak to her myself. I’ll review Amena’s full report and then see if I can get us any more information.” Arada told Thiago, “Good idea. Optimism aside, we need to know if she’s lying and plotting something or if she genuinely thinks she’s telling the truth. Let’s try to get as much information as we can before … before anything else happens.” I established a private connection to Arada’s feed and told her, You all need a rest period. Arada hesitated, then she winced and rubbed her temple. You’re probably right about that. I’ll talk to the others. I put the vid display back on standby. Amena scraped the last vegetable matter out of the container and said, “Is ART really working on something?” “Sure,” I said. She stared at me. “Maybe.” I secured a channel just for the three of us, me, ART, and Amena. I sent, ART, answer me. You’re scaring Amena. Ugh, I needed to be honest or this wouldn’t help. I added, You’re scaring me. It was a relief when ART said, I’m continuing the repair of my normal space drive and examining long-range system scan data to determine possible search patterns for the explorer. “Are you okay?” Amena asked. No, ART said. I hadn’t expected ART to admit it. Really hadn’t expected. Right, so, that isn’t good. Amena took a breath, visibly regrouping, and nodded. “Sure, I can see that. But we’re not any worse off now than we were before you two figured this out. In fact, we’re better off, because now we’re helping you find out exactly what happened. And it’s always better to have more information to act on.” Her glance at me was wry.
“My second mother says that.” ART pinged me for a private connection and I let it establish one. It said, My crew. What if they never left? I knew what it meant. I said, ART, there was nothing indicating that humans were killed or injured onboard. I checked. It was the first thing I checked for in the quarters module. There was nothing. And you’ve scanned yourself. The Targets trashed some cabins and left debris and their own fluids, they wouldn’t have cleaned up after a … I hesitated but I had to be completely honest about what I thought or ART would know. They wouldn’t have cleaned up after a mass murder. I’ve seen mass murders, ART, they leave a lot of mess. It didn’t reply, but I could feel it listening. I said, Once we get your drones fixed, we can have them check again for bio traces, but I don’t think we’ll find anything. I think that whatever happened, your humans were fine when they left here. ART said, Is that an indication they left voluntarily? It was a point to consider. Doing what ART would normally do (if it wasn’t emotionally compromised) and looking at just the verifiable data, we didn’t know if the crew had been abducted, left voluntarily, or escaped. Since ART’s two shuttles were still docked, we knew the crew hadn’t used them to leave. (Or the crew could have tried to escape and been spaced. I wasn’t going to mention it, because ART had to know that it was a possibility. But it might have eliminated it from its decision tree, knowing it couldn’t function otherwise. There was no point in considering it, not now. We had to search until we found an answer. If that was the answer … we’d deal with it then.) I said, We need to do a full inventory, particularly of your hand weapons storage. If your crew had to abandon you when the Targets compromised your systems, they may have forced their way onboard the explorer. The pause was long, 3.4 seconds. Then ART said, Agreed.
And it hit me then that ART had been desperate and terrified since the moment the Barish-Estranza explorer had sidled up and done whatever it had done. It had tricked its captors into taking it to me not because it had some kind of grand strategy but because it needed me. I hate emotions. On the private channel between ART and me, I said, I apologize for calling you a fucker. It said, I apologize for kidnapping you and causing potential collateral damage to your clients. Amena was watching me, her brows drawn together. “Are you two talking?” “Yes.” I had to look at the wall now. Amena was still worried. “Are you fighting again or are you making up? Because it looks exactly the same from the outside.” We’re making up, ART told her. “Good.” Amena looked relieved. “Good, right. What’s next on our list?” * * * I went to search the Barish-Estranza transport shuttle. I wasn’t expecting to find anything but it was on the action list, so why not. ART had notified Arada that while it was working on the engines, it was also prepping a squad of pathfinders just in case we had to search the colony planet. (I hope it didn’t come to that. I don’t like planets.) Pathfinders are like drones for space, basically, active scanners that would zip around the planet collecting environmental information and terrain imaging, plus looking for comm signals, possible energy sources, and whatever might be planning to kill us. It’s the kind of thing that my ex-owner bond company did via satellite when they prepared to issue safety bonds for a newly opened survey planet. Except the company satellite would mainly be mapping the entire planet, and the pathfinders would be looking for potential locations where ART’s crew might be. They were really expensive, not something normal survey teams had access to. Arada was impressed. (You couldn’t rent pathfinders from the company, not only because of the cost.
They made planetary exploration safer and more targeted, so therefore less need for massive bond companies to rent you all sorts of expensive planetary exploration gear and sell you expensive safety bonds.) I was monitoring Thiago’s casual conversation with Eletra while the med platform was doing a deep scan on her. Overse was in the maintenance bay reassembling the repair drone I had found in engineering so it could start repairing the other damaged drones. Arada was reviewing the scans of the alien engine remnant, but everything that was left of it seemed to be melting or decomposing so most of the data was garbage. (As Overse pointed out, the thing was illegal to have anyway so if it melted completely it would be for the best, but it looked like it was still going to leave a residue that would have to be scraped off ART’s engines.) Ratthi was shepherding a biohazard cleaning unit through the corridors and picking up pieces of dead targetDrones. Amena followed me to the shuttle, dragging her feet. (She really needed to sleep. I hadn’t heard anything from Arada about it so I put Humans need to take rest periods on the general action list. Up in the central corridor, Ratthi saw it and muttered, “Please, yes, soon.”) I did a brief visual check on both of ART’s shuttles, just to verify that they were empty and hadn’t been tampered with. The Barish-Estranza shuttle was parked inside the same docking module, attached to a module lock, which had an extendable tube to enclose the hatch. ART had said there was no one inside the shuttle, and no active bot pilot, but I made Amena hang back down the corridor with her assigned drones while I approached. The hatch was sealed, but not code-locked, which made sense when we thought Eletra and Ras were telling the truth about being captured trying to escape from their doomed transport. (Now that we were certain it hadn’t happened that way, who the hell knew?) ART had cut the shuttle off from the feed. I touched the lock cautiously.
(Considering the inactive state of its onboard systems, I wasn’t expecting alien killware or a sentient virus or something else unspecified to leap across and infect me, but the fact remained that something had happened to ART despite all its protections, and alien killware was still a possibility.) I still couldn’t pick up any feed activity, so I pushed up one sleeve and adjusted my energy weapon to deliver a pulse that caused the seal to disengage. The hatch slid open, releasing a puff of slightly stale air. It didn’t have the algae/growth medium smell associated with the Targets; in fact, it had traces of the dirty sock smell associated with humans. But then an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Or past absence. Whatever, you know what I mean. I used my own scan, making sure there was no movement or active weapons inside, and stepped in. The shuttle wasn’t a model I had been in before, but the configuration was similar to a standard transport shuttle. It was small, sized for ten humans at most, no cabins, a toilet facility that folded out from the bulkhead (ugh). The individual seats were in a spiral in the main compartment, so they would have to be cycled around to release each passenger for disembarking. It was obviously meant for short trips between ships or from ship-to-station. The cockpit had a seat for a human pilot next to the currently absent bot pilot’s interface console. The upholstery showed signs of ordinary wear and tear. The single passenger compartment was generally clean but there were scuff marks on the panels and padding. There was only a .01 percent chance it had been constructed as a trap by an alien intelligence. (It was a theory, okay.) On our private feed connection, Amena said, Is it empty? Is there anything strange in it? Can I come closer? You can come to the hatch, but not inside. I started searching for physical evidence. I would need to check all the storage compartments, anywhere there might be a hidden space that could conceal something.
The drive housing still had the factory seal from its last maintenance check, so it probably hadn’t been infected with illegal alien remnant technology. I’d have to break the seal and do a visual inspection anyway, just to be certain. I also needed to pull the logs, but I’d have to do it via a display surface. Even with an inert operating system, I didn’t want to take any chances. Amena came up to the hatch and leaned inside to look around. “If you need me to do anything, I can do it.” I pinged her feed to acknowledge. She watched me search for seven minutes and forty seconds, then said, “Can I ask you a question?” I never know how to answer this. Should I go with my first impulse, which is always “no” or just give in to the inevitable? I said, “Is it contract-relevant?” Big, adolescent human sigh noise. “I just want to understand something.” I gave in to the inevitable. “Yes.” She hesitated. “Right, umm. So my second mom really didn’t ask you to break up me and Marne?” I had answered that question already, back when it happened. I could get mad at her asking it again, but granted, I do lie a lot. “I wasn’t lying to you. She doesn’t know anything about it unless you told her.” I finished the search of the cabin and pinged ART. It generated a display surface with a disabled feed interface so it couldn’t transmit anything that might be in the shuttle’s systems to ART, me, or anything else. Amena still had questions. “Then why did you do it? You didn’t—you don’t—care about me. You didn’t really even know me then.” Why does ART like adolescent humans? This was exhausting. “I have files on all the members of Dr. Mensah’s family and their associates. I alerted on Marne because I ran threat assessments on all humans and augmented humans attempting to approach or form new relationships with Dr. Mensah or her family or associates after the GrayCris incident. Marne registered as a threat to you.” Amena thought about that while I made a connection between the console and the sequestered display surface.
Then I started to run the shuttle’s raw log files on the display, filtering out anything that wasn’t text. I was recording the information visually, and then I could convert it back to data fields and search it more quickly. That way we’d get the log information without any underlying code that might be hidden in it. (There are visual elements that could cause me problems, but I could screen for those and granted, the chances that the log file might be protected against a SecUnit doing a visual download were running under 5 percent.) (I know, I’m paranoid, but that’s how I’ve avoided being rendered for spare parts all this time.) Amena said slowly, “I guess if he wasn’t … He would have wanted to explain himself, instead of running off and refusing to speak to me again.” As far as my threat assessment was concerned, running off and never seeing her again was an excellent result. I was pretty sure Amena wouldn’t want to hear that, though. She continued, “I thought he was nice. I’m not … I know at the time I said I knew what I was doing, but I’m actually not very good at meeting new people.” I knew from threat assessments on Ratthi’s associates that he had a lot of relationships with all genders of humans and augmented humans and he and they all seemed very happy about it. Amena should ask him for advice. I didn’t think she wanted to hear that, either. Then Amena said, “Do you love my second mother? Thiago thinks so.” I should have known this was going to turn into an interrogation. I said, “Not the way he thinks.” Her face went all dubious. “I don’t think you know what he thinks.” He doesn’t know what I think, either, so there. I was distracted converting a dumpload of raw log info from a visual image back into searchable data and if I got the fields wrong it was going to be a giant mess. I probably should have just stopped talking, but I didn’t want to hurt Amena’s feelings. I said, “Your second mother is…” Client wasn’t the right word, not anymore. “My teammate.” I could see I had to clarify.
It was really hard finding the right words. “Before your second mother, I had never been an actual member of a team before. Just an…” Amena finished, “An appliance for a team.” That was it. “Yes.” “I see. Thank you for letting me ask you questions.” ART must be recovering because it had to butt in with, Tell her you care about her. Use those words, don’t tell her you’ll eviscerate anything that tries to hurt her. ART, fuck off. The thing ART has in common with human adolescents is that it doesn’t like to hear the word “no,” either. It persisted, Tell her. It’s true. Just say it. Human adolescents need to hear it from their caretakers. I’m not a caretaker, I told ART. I finished the log conversion and checked my drone view of Amena. She was leaning in the hatchway, her head propped on the seal buffer. (That isn’t a good place to put your head, just FYI.) From her expression, she was either falling asleep or deep in thought. Or possibly both. I said, “You need to sleep.” She yawned. “Okay, third mom.” * * * Arada finally ordered the others to take a rest period, though it took her a while to really understand that ART and I would still be active and there was no reason for the humans to take shifts. (I finally had to tell her that I had a list of things I needed to get done and it would go much faster if they would all stay in one place and shut up for a while and sleeping was the most efficient use of that time.) Overse had finished repairing the repair drone and sent it off to begin the rebuilds of ART’s other drones. She was sleeping on a couch in the lounge next to the galley with Ratthi, who had finished the biohazard cleanup. There was snoring. Arada was sleeping in one of the station chairs on the control deck. (They’re very comfortable, so it’s not as bad as it sounds.) The medical scans had finished and Thiago walked Eletra back to her bunkroom. He hadn’t gotten much more out of her than Amena had, though his questions were more subtle.
With his prompting, Eletra had gone over her augment clock and was now severely confused. It showed their transport had been in this system for forty-three corporation standard days. She was certain that was wrong. It was more support for the theory that Eletra had undergone some kind of memory manipulation. The initial scan analysis showed no genetic manipulation, no hidden devices or non-human biologicals. All my remaining drones were on sentry duty, but I made Amena go to an unused bunkroom near the galley because it was easier to defend if we were attacked by something. (It was unlikely, but so was everything unexpected that had happened so far. My risk assessment module had given up generating reports three hours ago.) Amena tried to just lie down on the bare bunk and pillow her head on the sealed bedding pack but I made her get up and unfold it and do it right. (“You’re mean,” she groaned.) I opened another bedding pack so my bunk would be more comfortable to sit on. I had a lot of coding and analysis to do so I wouldn’t be caught unprepared again. I needed to create workarounds for the drone-resistant camouflage on the targetDrones and countermeasures for the Target’s helmets and gear. I also needed to anticipate how targetControlSystem would countermeasure my countermeasures so I wouldn’t be screwed by an on-the-fly software update. I needed to analyze the solid-state screen device and find out if it really was a Pre–Corporation Rim relic. And I had to analyze the new data files I had just created from the shuttle’s logs. I pulled in the data Ratthi had uploaded to the feed during his pathology examinations and the scans of the Targets’ suits and helmets. Overse had also done some helpful hardware analysis of the targetDrones. Then I got my queries and processes running so I could get started on the code. I also split off an input and started World Hoppers episode 1. I’d seen it before (lots of times before) so I didn’t need to give it my full attention.
(I really, really wanted some time to pull a new show out of longterm storage and watch a few episodes so I could really relax, but World Hoppers in background would help. It was also bait.) After twenty-seven minutes, it worked. I was aware of ART looming in my feed. (Imagine sitting in front of a display surface and someone eight times your size shoulders in and sits in the chair with you.) It was watching World Hoppers, and also backseat driving my coding and doing its own analysis of the data. The solid-state screen device does resemble known schematics of Pre–Corporation Rim technology, ART reported, showing me a scan and the matching examples. But it is not a factory-built unit; it was assembled from components gleaned from other devices of similar age. No trace of alien remnant or known strange synthetics detected. That made sense. It could have been a replacement unit built by humans in the Pre–Corporation Rim colony. Or a unit built by the later abandoned corporate humans, with parts desperately scavenged from the old colony, as their own tech resources failed and they struggled to survive. Yeah, corporations suck. I liked the code we were coming up with, but I didn’t think it was enough. None of it was making my threat assessment stats look any better. I told ART, Everything we’re doing is defensive. We need an attack. I’ve considered constructing a killware assault, but the data I managed to retain from targetControlSystem suggests it would be ineffective. ART displayed some analysis for me. Both Ratthi and Overse have theorized that some elements of the Targets’ Pre–Corporation Rim technology—for example, the implants—may be acting as receivers for esoteric alien remnant tech, like the object that affected my drive. A standard killware assault on the Pre-CR systems would not be able to take into account the alien system, not unless it was variable and could alter its behavior based on the protections and obstructions it encounters. I can’t code that with the resources I have available.
It was talking about something similar to the self-aware virus that GrayCris and Palisade Security had deployed against the company gunship, where I’d crashed myself and nearly wrecked my memory archive helping the bot pilot fight it off. Which gave me an idea, but I didn’t know if it was something we could implement. Then Thiago crossed through the galley, came down our corridor, and leaned in the doorway. Watching him through ART’s camera view, I saw him glance at Amena, who at the moment was an inert pile of limbs under a blanket with a pillow jammed into her face. (Humans do everything weird, including rest.) Then he looked at me. Keeping his voice low, he said, “May I join you?” ART engaged the sound/privacy field on Amena’s bunk. I thought about saying “no.” But I thought he wanted to sleep on one of the bunks within sight of Amena because he didn’t trust me to take care of her. So I marked my killware idea as save-for-later and said, “Yes.” He sat down on the bunk across from me, pulled the bedding pack out from under it, but then set it aside. Oh good, we’re going to have a chat. “If you have a moment, I was hoping we could talk,” he said. I could have said that I didn’t have a moment what with writing code to save humans from whatever the stupid Targets were but I did have a moment. ART had constructed a simulation of the software fix that had protected the Targets’ helmets and gear from my drone strikes and was running tests of my new targeting code for my drones. The targetDrones’ camouflage was harder to crack due to being a physical effect rather than something caused by signal interference. None of the filters I’d come up with for the drones’ scan or targeting functions would work, at least according to the simulations. Continuing to ram my head into that particular wall wasn’t going to get me anywhere until I thought up an alternate approach. So instead of being an asshole, I just said, “Go ahead.” He said, “I know you don’t believe it, but I was glad you came along on this survey.” Oh, please.
I could have played the audio recording I had of what he had said to Dr. Mensah about me, but that was a little incriminating with the whole listening to private conversations in secured spaces and personal dwellings thing. I said, “So you didn’t have serious reservations?” There was that little flash of surprise some humans have when I say something that doesn’t sound like what their idea of a SecUnit should say. He said, slowly, “I did.” It had been too long for a human to remember what he had said verbatim and he didn’t know I was quoting him. Still, his eyes narrowed a little. “And I know you’ve saved our lives.” He hesitated. There was an unvoiced “but” on the end of that sentence. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on this, so I said, “But you don’t like the way I did it.” His gaze went hard and he said, “I don’t. And I don’t like the fact that Amena saw you do it. But that’s not the problem.” On our private connection, ART said, Don’t ask the question unless you already know the answer. Right, so I didn’t listen to ART. I said, “What problem?” ART did the feed equivalent of rolling its eyes and started another episode of World Hoppers. Thiago said, “You have leverage over Ayda.” That one got me. Fortunately ART was keeping track of the processes so I didn’t screw up the data analysis. It also provided a definition of the word leverage. I know what it means, I told ART privately. And I did, but not the way Thiago meant. I think. I said, “I don’t tell Dr. Mensah what to do.” Thiago’s jaw went tight. “I’m sure you didn’t. But she’s afraid to carry out her duties as council leader. She won’t apply to continue her term. That’s because of you. You’ve made her afraid of shadows. She never needed ‘security’ before you came to Preservation. Now she thinks she can’t do her job without it.” There were so many things wrong and unfair and yet true about that I started dropping inputs. ART picked them up and transferred them to our shared workspace. I said, “I didn’t come to Preservation.
I was brought there in an inactive state after incurring a catastrophic failure while saving Dr. Mensah’s life.” “I know that.” Thiago waved a hand in frustration. “I’m saying—” No, I get to talk now. “There was a security threat. After Dr. Mensah returned to Preservation Station, three GrayCris operatives were sent to kill her. They failed but there was a sixty-five percent chance that more operatives would be sent. That percentage started to fall after the bond company destroyed Palisade Security and all of GrayCris’ operational facilities.” It was GrayCris’ own fault for ordering Palisade Security to attack an expensive company gunship and Palisade’s fault for escalating past standard operational parameters, but try telling GrayCris that. And it wasn’t like the company was afraid of GrayCris, but they had to teach them a lesson. (The lesson was: if you’re going to fuck with something bigger and meaner than you, use a quick targeted attack and then run away really fast. (This is the way I always try to operate, too.) GrayCris’ attack had not been quick and targeted and they had failed to run away effectively.) Thiago had his mouth open but I was still talking. “There was, and is, still a potential danger from individual dependents or employees of GrayCris but threat assessment determined that the percentage is low enough for Dr. Mensah to resume normal activities with the assistance of Preservation Station Security.” It took Thiago fourteen seconds to digest that. “There was an attack? Why didn’t she tell us— It would have been in the newsstream—” I pulled the video from my archive and quickly edited in the views from the Station Security helmet cams and the one lousy security cam in the lobby of the council offices on station. ART studied it curiously. I sent it to autoplay in Thiago’s feed. His gaze went distant, then startled, then increasingly appalled. ART watched the full video, running it back and forth.
I had sent Thiago the part where I was on top of the council table trying to snap Hostile One’s neck while Hostile Two was on my back stabbing the absolute crap out of me. Six Station Security officers were draped around the room in various states of consciousness, with Officer Tifany, the only one still functional, hanging on to the stabbing arm of Hostile Two and punching him repeatedly in the head. ART commented, What is that human stabbing you with? Part of a broken chair. “They’re SecUnits?” Thiago asked, horrified. I can see why he might think that. I said, “They’re augmented humans who were chemically enhanced. They don’t feel pain, their reflexes and reaction times are accelerated. They have the physical strength of a SecUnit, but not the feed connectivity or processing capacity. So they’re harder to detect, and even more disposable.” To be fair, at this point GrayCris probably couldn’t get any other security companies licensed to produce and/or deploy SecUnits to contract with them. Between the high-risk assessment and the lack of operating funds and the cheating/attacking contract partners, GrayCris wasn’t a good client. Thiago took a breath, made himself calm down. “But they won’t send anyone else? You said the threat percentage dropped—” “It’s at an acceptable level.” And it hadn’t been easy to get it to that level, either. Thiago watched me with a concentrated intensity I didn’t like. ART’s camera didn’t have a full-face view, but it was obvious even with the angle. “Then why did she decide not to take a second term?” “She didn’t quit because she was afraid, you asshole, she quit because she needs to start the trauma support treatment at Central Medical. She didn’t tell anyone in her extended family because being taken hostage—” In our private connection, ART said, Stop. ART has different ways of telling you to stop doing what you’re doing, with different threat levels, and this was toward the top of the list. I stopped. ART explained, You’re violating her privacy.
I was pissed off, because of course ART was right. I said, What do you know about it? My MedSystem is certified in emotional support and trauma recovery. Ugh, ART did know everything. It was so annoying. I finished, “She wanted me to go on Arada’s survey. I told her I would, but she had to agree to start the treatment. That was the leverage I had.” He was still watching me, and I couldn’t tell if he believed me. His expression was conflicted and I think he was still shocked at the recording. (It had looped through to the end of the clip where stupid Hostile One finally went inert and I rolled myself, Hostile Two, and Tifany off the table. Now Hostile Two was trying to strangle Tifany and I was prying him off her.) ART said aloud, in its polite-but-actually-not-a-suggestion voice, We have work to do, Thiago, and you’re missing your rest period. Perhaps you should go. It startled Thiago, but he pushed to his feet. He said, “You’re right, I’ll go.” I stopped the clip and watched him on ART’s cameras. He went back to the galley lounge and took one of the other couches. He sat there for a while rubbing his face, then got up to get water from the galley and take a medication tab. What is that? I asked ART. A mild pain reliever, for headaches and muscle discomfort. When Thiago went to lie down on the couch, I relaxed a little. He had thought I was taking advantage of Dr. Mensah? I still wasn’t even sure what he meant. Did he think I was making her feel sorry for me? Hey, I hadn’t asked her to buy me. I hadn’t even been there when it happened, I had been still stuck in a cubicle in reconstruction at that point. I wish I could feel all vindicated, but I didn’t think that confrontation had gone well for either me or Thiago. I think he knew now that his view of the situation was inaccurate but I had gotten mad and stupidly admitted to blackmailing Dr. Mensah to go start the trauma treatment. So. I didn’t know what was going to happen, if, you know, we survived and stuff and got back to Preservation.
Like I needed something else to worry about right now. ART said, You haven’t seen the obvious solution to the targetDrone camouflage problem. Obvious? I said. (I know, I was just making it worse. ART wouldn’t have framed it that way if it wasn’t something that was going to make me feel like an idiot for missing.) ART said, Modify your drones with a camouflage field that will display the same interference pattern as the Targets’ helmets and gear. They still won’t be able to strike the targetDrones, but then your supply is so limited that attack is now no longer viable. Well, now I feel even more stupid. ART said, You have time for a recharge cycle. I was going to tell it I didn’t need one. And I really didn’t. But I knew what I did need. I shifted everything over to our shared workspace and pulled up the first episode of Timestream Defenders Orion. I asked ART, Do you want World Hoppers or something new? ART considered, poking thoughtfully at the tag data for the new show. It said, New, as long as it’s not realistic. I’d downloaded Timestream Defenders Orion off the Preservation media archives because it was pretty much the opposite of the whole concept of realistic. I started the first episode. We watched it while ART finished our code, occasionally sending sections to me to check over. (Possibly it was humoring me. ART might still have memory archive gaps, but there was nothing wrong with its other functions.) Twenty-six minutes to the end of the designated rest period, ART said, Using the data from the shuttle, I’ve located one of the Barish-Estranza vessels. My engine repairs are complete and I am moving to intercept. HelpMe.file Excerpt 3 (Section from interview Bharadwaj-108257394.) “It’s normal to feel conflict. You were part of something for a long time. You hate it, and it was a terrible thing. But it created you, and you were part of it.” :session redacted: (File detached from main narrative.) I was sitting on top of Hostile Two to make sure he was dead.
He had been apparently dead at least twice, so this wasn’t misplaced caution. Tifany was on her knees beside me, her weapon pointed at his head. “You’re too close,” I told her. She looked at me, the skin around her eyes so swollen and puffy I’m not sure how well she could see. Then she edged back out of potential arm’s reach. Behind me, in the one stupid security camera, I saw the human second response team and their medical assistance bots belatedly crash through the door. I checked the time and wow, scratch that “belatedly.” This had been a fast incident, even by SecUnit standards of fast. The Preservation council meeting room was a big oval with a long table in the middle, the walls lined with tall narrow windows, two entrances/exits on either end of the room. The one the second response team had come through led to the foyers and station government’s public offices where humans came to take care of things that couldn’t be taken care of on the feed, I guess, I actually had no idea. The other door led into the private offices where the occupants of the council room had managed to evacuate to when the incident occurred. Senior Officer Indah circled around the table and knelt down where I could see her. She said, “Is that person dead?” “Probably but there’s a seventeen percent chance he might revive,” I said. Tifany, her voice a strained rasp, said, “He came back twice. We need a containment unit.” Indah’s brow furrowed. “On the way.” She reached over to Tifany and carefully coaxed the weapon out of her hands. “You’re off duty now, officer.” Tifany said, “Yes, senior,” and folded over onto the floor. “She’s had a hard day,” I told Indah. “I inferred that.” Indah tapped her feed and a spidery-legged medical bot picked its way past me to crouch beside Tifany. Making comforting noises, it scanned her and immediately injected her with something. Indah said, “You need medical assistance, too.” I had a stab wound so large you could see the metal of my interior structure, but Senior Indah was too polite to mention it.
The medical bot extended a delicate sensor limb toward me. On the feed I told it anything it touched me with would get torn off and thrown across the room. It pulled the limb back and used it to check Hostile Two instead. “Is there any hope for the subject?” Indah jerked her chin toward Hostile Two. I didn’t think there had been a person inside Hostile Two since before the first time we killed him. “Probably not.” I stayed in position until containment arrived to take care of our mostly dead Hostile Two and the hopefully all the way dead Hostile One. Tifany and the rest of the first response team had already been carried off to Station Medical. I went the other direction, further into the council/admin offices because I needed to see her. I found her only three unsecured doors away, but at least it was an office without a balcony or windows onto the admin mezzanine. I walked past Station Security and admin personnel. They should have tried to stop me but (a) it wasn’t like they didn’t know who I was and (b) it was a good thing they didn’t try to stop me. Mensah was watching the door and when I walked in her shoulders relaxed. She knew the hostiles had been secured and that the first response team had survived; she had command access to the Station Security feed and she’d been monitoring it from in here. There was a security lockdown on the public and private council feeds right now and we needed to get them restored soon, before anybody outside the offices noticed. We had to keep GrayCris from knowing this attack had nearly succeeded. It would give them too much intel about what to do next. Mensah met me in the middle of the room and did the hand thing that meant she wanted to grab me but knew I wouldn’t like it. She said, “You need to go to Medical.” There was dried blood on the tunic she was wearing, and on the right knee of her pants. Hostile One had charged at her across the council table and I’d stopped him literally a half-meter away from her. She could have reached out and patted his head.
And that was after chasing him all the way here from the transit ring, while Hostile Two was trying to kill me. Slowing down Hostile Two long enough for me to mostly take out Hostile One was what had sent the entire first response security team to Station Medical. They were just lucky Two had been focused on trying to get past them and not slaughtering every human in the way. I said, “I can’t go to Medical yet. There’s something I have to do first.” Her expression was drawn. “Do you need help? Indah’s called in the off-duty personnel. I can get you a team.” “No, I just want to make sure I know how they got onto the station.” She nodded and let me go. So yeah, I’d lied to her. 11 I sent a wake-up call through the comm. While the humans in the galley lounge were staggering around trying to get conscious, ART fed the visual and scan images into the general feed. Amena rolled out of her bunk, blearily focused on the images, and muttered, “So is this good or bad or what?” “It’s ‘or what,’” I told her. ART’s scan image showed the Barish-Estranza supply transport, a mid-sized configuration with capacity to carry multiple landing shuttles and large terrain vehicles. Crew complement was estimated at thirty plus. The schematic looked like several rounded tubes bundled together with odd sharp pieces sticking out in places. The visual image just showed the long dark shape, light from the primary star catching the top of a curve. ART said, Long-range scan indicates systemic damage though some systems including life support show operational. Aft and starboard hull and the engine housing show signs of three distinct weapons strikes, but the pattern does not match my weapons system. That last part was good. If ART had been the one to fire on the supply transport, it would have meant my adjusted timeline was wrong and that I’d been wading in ART’s ocean of status updates for nothing. Amena stumbled out of the bunkroom and followed me to the galley where Thiago, Overse, and Ratthi were.
“So there was a space fight, just not the fight Perihelion remembered.” Ratthi had gotten some packets and bottles out of the prep area for the humans. Amena took one of each and sat down at the table. “We think the Barish-Estranza explorer vessel was armed, correct?” Arada was still on the control deck, much more alert, looking at the multiple displays ART had put up for her. One of ART’s newly repaired drones floated around behind her, using light filters to disinfect the stations and chairs. Arada absently stood up and moved her drink bottle so it could do her station. “Any chance we can tell if it caused the weapon strikes?” Not without an analysis of the explorer’s weapons system for comparison, ART said. Scan indicates minimal power in the engine module. That may be the reason they have not attempted to flee through the wormhole. Thiago rubbed his face, trying to wake himself up. “If they fought with their own explorer, they might be more willing to talk to us. Can you tell if there’s anyone aboard?” I assume so. ART was dry. They are attempting comm contact. “Don’t answer it,” I told ART. “That’s probably how you got into this situation in the first place.” Ratthi waved his drink bottle in what he thought was ART’s direction. “Yes, please be careful. There was a terrible virus on a company ship and we all nearly died and SecUnit’s brain was compromised.” SecUnit’s brain is always compromised, ART said. And I was not breached via the comm. My comm system is filtered to prevent viral attacks and I have engaged extra protections. “That’s probably what you said right before it happened,” I told it. But ART insulting my intelligence was a good sign. It sounded almost normal again. Amena sighed and wiped crumbs off her mouth. “Hey, you two, it’s too early for fighting.” Arada was doing her mouth-twisted expression again. She said, “Perihelion, if you think it’s safe, can you allow contact?” Overse hastily swallowed her food. “Babe, is that a good idea?” Arada made an open-handed shrug gesture.
“I don’t know how else to figure out what’s going on here, babe. If we can get a visual and they’re all gray people wearing alien remnants on their heads, then at least we’ll know they probably won’t want to help us.” She added, “And if we’re a lot more lucky than we usually are, they’ll have some idea where the explorer with Perihelion’s people is.” That wasn’t unreasonable. My threat assessment module didn’t like it, but if we could get intel this way it might mean we could find ART’s humans sooner. Thiago pressed his steepled fingers to his mouth, then said, “I agree. We know the explorer is compromised. If it attacked them, or if there’s another ship we haven’t encountered yet, we need to know.” Ratthi shrugged agreement. Overse didn’t look happy, but she didn’t argue. Amena was still eating, eyes wide. ART said, Accepting contact. A new display appeared above the scan results on the control deck. The static swirled artistically into an image of a human or augmented human wearing the same red and brown uniform as Eletra and Ras. With impatience, the human said, “Unidentified transport, are you receiving this?” ART pulled feed information from the transmission and ran it across the display. Name: Supervisor Leonide, augmented, Barish-Estranza Exploration Services ID, gender: female, femme-neutral. I wasn’t surprised she was a supervisor. (I had worked with a lot of human corporate supervisors and after a while they were fairly easy to identify.) Her skin was one of the mid browns that was common to a large percentage of humans but it had an artificially smooth even tone that indicated cosmetic enhancement. (My skin was less even than hers and it gets completely regenerated on a regular basis due to me being shot in the face.) Her dark hair was wrapped around the top of her head and she had small metallics and gemstones set in the rim of one exposed ear. I thought there was a 49 percent chance that she was a much more important supervisor than the feed signature indicated.
Arada sat up and squared her shoulders. The drone snatched the empty food packet from the console beside her and retreated out of camera range. She ran her fingers through her short hair and said, “Right. When you’re ready, Perihelion.” Of course. ART put up another display showing Arada. It had changed the color of her jacket from Preservation Survey gray to the blue of its crew uniform, edited out the water bottle on the console beside her, and artistically adjusted the lighting. Arada planted a serious expression on her face as ART said, I’ve sent my identifier and a Corporation Rim feed indicator stating that you are Dr. Arada of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. Arada said, “Supervisor Leonide, we see your transport is in distress.” “We are, and would appreciate any assistance.” Leonide’s expression was opaque but vaguely critical. “But this system is under claim by Barish-Estranza, so I wonder why you’re here.” Amena made the huffy noise indicating disbelief and/or incredulity. For the love of light, Ratthi said on the feed, disgusted. Are they really worried about that now? ART was in Arada’s feed supplying an answer, and Arada repeated, “We have a contract for sustainability evaluation and mapping with the Pan-Rim Licensing Agency and this system was listed as a priority. I assure you, the University is not a terraforming entity, and we have no intention of violating your claim.” Arada’s serious expression was a little too fixed, but it got more natural when she added, “I see you’ve taken damage—were you attacked by raiders?” The next hesitation wasn’t calculated at all. “We’ve been in this system only a short time, and encountered some … strange activity.” On a side display in the galley, ART was breaking down Leonide’s opaque expression for us with a feed-superimposed analysis. She was experiencing everything from irritation to reluctant resignation. She said, “There are raiders here. As we’ve discovered.” Arada pressed her lips together and looked thoughtful.
I had a bad feeling she was about to call Leonide a liar—which we all knew Leonide was lying but even I knew that wouldn’t make this interaction any easier. Then Arada said on the feed, I’m going to tell her we have Eletra. But you just told Leonide we’re Perihelion’s crew, Overse objected. Eletra knows we’re from Preservation. She knows Amena is from Preservation, I sent. Yes, ART told me to tell Eletra you all were part of its crew, Amena confirmed. I was doing a rapid search of my recording of all the conversations in Eletra’s hearing since the others had come aboard, particularly when Thiago had spoken to her. None of the rest of you told her you were from Preservation. And some of you are wearing ART’s crew clothing. Overse looked down at the T-shirt she was wearing. Oh, you’re right. ART had thrown in some static to give Arada time to think. Now she said to Leonide, “I don’t think they’re ordinary raiders. We have one of your crew on board, a young person named Eletra. She was captured in a shuttle by some very divergent raiders, who also attacked our ship. She was with another crew member called Ras, but he was injured when he was captured by the raiders and died before our medical facility could help him.” Leonide’s expression went through some rapid calculations. “How did they get aboard your ship, then?” (In the feed, Amena was worried. But Eletra’s really confused, she said. She’s not going to be able to tell them much about what happened. Will they believe her? They won’t accuse her of helping the Targets or something, will they? Or do something terrible to her? She needs more help than we can give her, Thiago told her, and she wants to go home to her family. This may be her only chance. Much as Amena might want to forcibly adopt Eletra and drag her off to Preservation, Thiago was right.) Arada was saying, “They were brought aboard by the raiders who tried to take us prisoner. I can let you speak to Eletra if you’d like.
She’s physically well, but we know they used some sort of mind-altering tech—” You’re talking too much, ART told her on the feed, right as I was about to say it. Overse must have thought so, too, because she made a faint noise of agreement. Arada stopped and ART added a little artistic static to give her a chance to regroup and to show her that its analysis of Leonide’s expression revealed a spike of extreme interest at the words “mind-altering tech.” Arada cleared her throat and said, “So, maybe you could be more forthcoming. We’re ready to render assistance if you need it.” Leonide’s hesitation was more pronounced this time, and her expression said she was conflicted. She said finally, “I’m not allowed to speak further about this on a comm channel not confidential to Barish-Estranza. I’d appreciate the return of our crew member. One of our engine components was destroyed in the attack—if you could sell us replacement components, our pay rate would be fair and generous.” “We don’t—” Arada was going to say “need your payment” and the humans and I all yelled No! on the feed. But ART had her on a one-second delay and stopped her before it got any worse. It was a natural mistake on Arada’s part. In Preservation culture, asking payment for anything considered necessary for living (food, power sources, education, the feed, etc.) was considered outrageous, but asking payment for life-saving help was right up there with cannibalism. Arada coughed and continued, “Of course, we’ll prepare an invoice. But…” She leaned forward. “I think we both know how bad this situation is, and how much danger our crews are in right now. If we could be honest with each other and share information, I think we can better our chances of survival.” Yeah, she had gone there way too quickly. The other humans had stopped breathing. Amena looked at me with an oh shit expression. Yes, I know, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Arada’s risk assessment module was as bad as mine. Leonide’s expression was complex.
She said, after 8.7 fraught seconds where she might have been consulting with someone on her own feed (hopefully not a gray Target person), “Your crew is still in danger?” Arada said, “Because I think we met your explorer. It was the ship that attacked us, and temporarily boarded us, and our wormhole capability is now damaged.” Ratthi made a mmph noise. Thiago was pressing his folded hands against his mouth again. Leonide’s lips set in a hard line. “I see. I still can’t speak on a nonconfidential channel.” Arada hesitated and Ratthi whispered to me, “What—can we make the channel confidential? What does that entail?” I told him, “Not without a Corporation Rim solicitor certified by Barish-Estranza.” Ratthi groaned under his breath. On the feed, ART was explaining the same thing to Arada. She said to Leonide, “Would you be willing to come aboard and speak about it in person?” (I had a camera view of the lower part of the control deck where the drone was now sterilizing the area where Targets One and Three had died. It started working faster.) Leonide snorted. “Your University’s confidentiality agreement would hardly cover me.” Arada gave her a good “it was worth a shot” smile, like she had any clue what Leonide meant. Then Leonide said, “But I’d allow you to come aboard my transport for a conference.” Thiago took a sharp breath. Ratthi’s expression went extremely skeptical. Amena made a derisive noise. Overse said, “Fuck no.” On our private connection, ART said, Should I cut the contact? No, I told it, she won’t do it. We already had a way to get intel off the transport. We could send drones along with the supplies— Then Arada said, “I can do that. If you’ll send me the list of supplies you need, I’ll get my team working on that, and we can arrange the transfer of supplies and your crew person and the meeting at the same time.” What? The other humans all looked at me, appalled. I was also appalled. Leonide kept her expression neutral. “Agreed, though I’d like to speak to my crew member first.” Arada said, “Agreed.
Give me a moment to arrange that.” ART put the contact on hold and said, Clear. And then it did one of my what-the-hell-have-the-humans-done-now sighs. * * * Obviously, there was a big human argument. In order to head off the inevitable “I told you so,” I said to ART, I should have told you to cut the contact. ART said to me, Yes, you should have. To the others, it said, They’ve sent the list of components. Since we’re now committed to this … course of action, I’ve ordered a drone to pull the material out of storage. And I’m producing standard crew clothing for Arada. By that point the argument had ended and Arada was still going to the supply transport, though all the humans had elevated heart rates indicating varying degrees of anger and exasperation. Thiago’s expression was grim. “If we’re going to do this, we need to get Eletra ready to speak to Leonide. Maybe before that, she can tell us something about her. Amena, will you help?” Amena tried not to look startled. “Huh? Oh sure, Uncle.” They headed down the corridor. Arada turned to Overse and said, “I know you’re upset but this will save us a lot of time.” Overse said through gritted teeth, “Rescuing you—or trying to recover your body—will not save us time.” Ratthi pressed his hands over his eyes and dragged them down his face in a way that did not look comfortable. He said, “We need a plan. What are you going to say?” In the corridor, Amena was saying, “I didn’t think you’d want my help. I mean, you all think I’m impulsive.” “No one thinks that, my daughter.” Thiago signaled through the feed to Eletra, telling her they wanted to come in. “Your parents wouldn’t have let you come on this survey if they didn’t trust your judgment.” From Amena’s expression that was news to her, but the door to the bunkroom was already sliding open. Overse was still mad, though when Ratthi asked for her help, she followed him down to the storage module to make sure the drones could shift the supply container into the bulk airlock.
I could have helped, but I think Ratthi wanted to give Overse a chance to vent and calm down, and I did not want to be there for that. Amena had just shown Eletra a feed image of Leonide and asked if she was really who she said she was. At first, Eletra looked relieved. “Yes, that’s Supervisor Leonide. She’s in charge of the supply transport.” Then her expression turned slowly confused. “The supply transport.” She pressed her hands to her head. “Why am I not on the supply transport?” “Can you speak to Supervisor Leonide on the comm?” Thiago asked her. “Just to tell her what happened to you?” Eletra nodded, but said, “It’s hard enough telling you, and you all were there.” Her forehead creased again. “Weren’t you?” “Just tell her what you can,” Thiago said gently, and ART used the display surface in the bunkroom to open the comm contact again. I was worried enough to monitor the conversation, and I could feel ART’s attention in the channel. But Eletra confirmed her capture by the Targets and said that she had been rescued by the ship’s crew and their SecUnit. She gestured toward Amena. “And a young person, an intern from another survey company.” She knew Ras had been killed but she wasn’t sure how. When Leonide pushed her for details, she said, “The gray raiders, they put some kind of augment or something in us. It did something to us.” She gestured at her head. “It’s messed up my whole perception of time. I can’t remember leaving the supply transport. Or the explorer—” Leonide told her that was enough, and sent the connection to her cargo factor to arrange the transfer. Arada’s face was set in a wince, possibly in anticipation of further objections to her plan that everyone clearly hated. We were still standing in the lounge (I was going to change the name on ART’s schematic to “Argument Lounge”) and she looked tired. “Are you mad at me, too, SecUnit?” I said, “Yes.
I’m also going with you.” Really, I was the only one who needed to get over there, and it would be better than sending drones that I wouldn’t be able to retrieve. But I don’t think Supervisor Leonide, who wasn’t too happy letting Arada visit, would say yes to the question “Hey can our SecUnit come over instead? It just wants to stand in your transport for, say, three minutes? No, no reason, it just enjoys looking at other people’s ships.” On the feed, Overse said, Yes, please. Arada, SecUnit has to go with you. She sounded normal again. I had a camera view and audio on a tertiary input of her and Ratthi standing in the foyer to ART’s bulk lock, with her waving her arms and talking angrily while he nodded sympathetically and three of ART’s repaired drones hovered around them. It ended with her apologizing to Ratthi for venting at him and being angry at herself for getting angry at Arada during a crisis. I could play it back to listen in on the whole conversation but I could also punch myself in the head with a sampling drill and I was not going to do that, either. (If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else.) (Wait, I think I am angry constantly. That might explain a lot.) Arada’s expression was complicated, then it settled on relief. “Okay. I wasn’t going to ask, but that’s probably a very good idea.” She took a shaky breath. “Thank you.” You don’t have to thank me for doing my stupid job. But it is nice. In the bunkroom, Thiago was trying to reassure Eletra. He told her, “You sound much better. I think speaking to someone you know helped.” I sent to Amena, Ask her if there are SecUnits on either the explorer or the transport. Amena did. With what seemed a reasonable amount of confidence under the circumstances, Eletra said, “Yes, there were three on the explorer.” “But none on the supply transport?” Amena clarified. Eletra nodded. “Right. The explorer carries the contact party.
Everyone on the transport is support staff.” I told Amena, Ask her if the SecUnits were made by Barish-Estranza, or if they were contracted rentals. I didn’t think they would be company units—the last thing you wanted when you were asserting rights over an unclaimed colony was the company getting its greedy datamining hands all over it. Amena repeated the question, adding to me, “Rentals” is a creepy way to talk about people. Yes, Amena, no shit, I know that. (And I knew this was all new and horrifying to Amena but it was just same old same old for me and Eletra and her permanently indentured family. Which was why I was saying this silently to myself instead of out loud to the whole ship.) Eletra answered, “No, there wasn’t any contracted equipment involved in this job. They didn’t want to chance another corporation finding out what we were doing.” Thiago watched Amena thoughtfully, as if he suspected she was talking to me on the feed. Then Eletra’s expression started to drift again and he hurriedly distracted her with a question about her family. Amena said on our private feed, You’re going with Arada? Yes, I told her. Amena said, If there were three SecUnits on the explorer, why didn’t they stop the Targets from … taking over, or whatever they did? And the Targets didn’t seem to have any idea what you were. I told her, The SecUnits on the explorer would have been under the control of a supervisor, either directly or through a HubSystem. If the Targets got control of either, the SecUnits would have to obey an order to stand down. Which is why I hate hostage situations. You have to get in there fast and neutralize the hostage-takers. They can’t make threats and force you to do stuff you don’t want to do if they’re unconscious or dead. If the Targets knew what I was, they may have thought they could order you to stop me. Amena snorted. Sure, right. Amena was implying that I wouldn’t listen to her, which, right, I wouldn’t, not in that situation.
But also, there was so much about the Targets that we didn’t understand. It was a data vacuum big enough for us all to fall in and die, including ART. Arada’s expression had gone preoccupied. The Barish-Estranza manager had sent the specs for the needed supplies and transfer logistics and she was going over it with ART in the feed. Then she asked me, “So they’ll know you’re a SecUnit because Eletra will tell them, so … how should we handle that?” I wasn’t sure what “that” meant. But I wasn’t sure Arada knew what “that” meant, either. Her experience with SecUnits was limited to exclusively me. I said, “I’ll be the SecUnit the University provided for your security.” I really expected ART to weigh in here, at least with some kind of rude noise. But it didn’t comment. Listening on the feed, Ratthi was dubious about the whole idea. Wouldn’t you be wearing armor then? “Not necessarily. Some contracts require SecUnits to patrol living spaces and that’s usually done in uniform instead of armor.” There are standardization guides for the manufacture of constructs but most humans wouldn’t know that. As long as I didn’t have to walk into a deployment center filled with SecUnits and the human techs who built and disassembled us, my risk assessment module thought everything was great. (I know, it worries me when I say that, too.) Then ART said, Your configuration no longer matches SecUnit standard. ART knew all about that because it was the one who had altered my configuration to help me pass as an augmented human. That combined with the code I’d written to change the way I moved, to add the random movements, hesitations, blinking, and all the things that said “human” to other humans, made it easier to get by, though I’d still had to rely a lot on hacking weapons scanners. “That’s right.” Arada turned to me, her brow pinching up in worry. “You look different since we first met you.
You’ve let your hair grow out a little.” Some of ART’s changes to my configuration had been subtle—longer head hair, more visible eyebrows, the kind of fine, nearly invisible hair humans had on large sections of their skin, the way my organic skin met my inorganic parts. Other changes had been structural, to make sure scanners searching for standard SecUnit specifications wouldn’t hit on me. “I also got shorter,” I told her. “Did you?” Startled, Arada stepped back, eyeing the top of my head. Lack of attention to detail is one of the reasons humans shouldn’t do their own security. But humans do detect subliminal details and react to them whether they’re consciously aware of it or not. Even on Preservation (especially on Preservation) I ran my code to make my movement and body language more human to keep from drawing attention. I was running it now out of habit. When I stopped it, I’d look a lot more like a “normal” SecUnit even without armor. (Normal = neutral expression concealing existential despair and brain-crushing boredom.) Arada and Ratthi still wanted to argue, so I said, “If they ask—and they won’t ask—say I’m an academic model designed specifically for your university.” ART said, I would prefer you go as an augmented human. What I really needed right now was a giant omniscient machine intelligence second-guessing me. “I don’t care what you prefer,” I said. It was safer this way. We were trying to tell one big lie—that we were ART’s crew—and it would be easier to make that believable if we kept the smaller lies to a minimum. The fact that I was a SecUnit and that Arada had contracted for me as security was true, if in a different way than the corporates would assume. I could have said all that, but instead I said, “It’s my decision and you can shut up.” “Don’t fight,” Amena said, coming back into the galley. Thiago was heading to the bulk lock to help Overse and Ratthi. Arada was still watching me dubiously, absently humming and tapping her teeth, and I realized there was another problem.
To Arada, I wasn’t her SecUnit, I was her coworker and she was my team captain. That’s a whole different spectrum of body language. Also, she wasn’t even slightly afraid of me, and even my most confident and contemptuous corporate clients had always been just a little nervous, no matter how hard they tried to cover it. (The ones who weren’t confident and contemptuous were incredibly nervous. It hadn’t exactly been fun for me, either.) I asked her, “Can you treat me like a SecUnit?” On the feed, Overse said, Ummm. She asked Arada, Can you? “Sure.” Arada shrugged, clearly having absolutely no idea what we meant by that. Down in the module dock with Ratthi, Overse sighed. She told me, Right. I’ll work on that with her real quick before you go. I tapped her feed in acknowledgment. Arada demanded, “What?” * * * I went into an empty bunkroom to change into the crew uniform ART had just made me. It was dark blue, the pants and jacket of a deflective fabric that was way better than what Preservation Station Security had, with lots of sealable pockets for weapons and drones, plus stability-fabric boots so tough I could probably use them to jam a closing hatchway open. It looked like what a human security person would wear, it looked like what a SecUnit should wear instead of a cheaper version of the contract’s uniform. I don’t know, maybe security-company-owned SecUnits wore something like this. It had ART’s crew logo on the jacket, but somehow that didn’t bother me as much as usual. I was a little worried the hair on my head would be noticed. After Milu, I had made it this length so I wouldn’t look like a SecUnit and now I had to look like a SecUnit again. ART, watching me watching myself in a camera while poking at my head, pointed me to the bunkroom’s attached bath where there was a dispenser for things humans needed. One was a lubricant-like substance that when I followed the instructions flattened my hair down so it looked shorter. That looked more SecUnit-like.
Since ART had apparently decided to be helpful and stop sulking like a giant angry baby, I said, “Why do you want me to pretend to be an augmented human? This way is easier.” You don’t like it, ART said. “That’s my problem.” I didn’t like it. But if you put everything that had happened to me on a scale of awfulness and assigned exact values to each incident (which I had done once, it’s in my archive somewhere) dealing with corporates who exploited failed colonies, and probably went through SecUnits as fast as Amena did fried vegetable crunchy things, was in the lower third of the chart. Despite what I’d told Amena, the existence of the SecUnits on the explorer worried me. If they had been captured and not destroyed, they were a way for the Targets to get intel about what I was capable of. When my crew is at risk, it’s my problem, ART said. I was getting tired of being told what to do. Self-determination was a pain in the ass sometimes but it beat the alternative by a lot. I made sure my collar was folded down so you could see my data port (though anybody who tried to stick a combat override module in there was going to get a violent surprise) and walked calmly out of the bunkroom into the galley. Amena was sitting on the table, frowning at me. She said, “What are you two fighting about now?” ART said, I made SecUnit’s uniform too nice. Amena nodded. “You do look great.” I’m not even going to dignify that with a reaction. Arada came back to the galley in her crew uniform, which was a less combat-ready version of mine. It was casual and practical and she looked comfortable and natural in it, which would help. “Are we ready?” she asked. “Let’s go.” “Surely they won’t suspect anything,” Ratthi was saying to the others at the bulk dock. “Who runs around with a friendly rogue SecUnit? Besides us, I mean.” 12 We used ART’s EVAC suits, which were better than the ones the Preservation survey owned.
(They had secondary internal protective suits for planetary exploration, not that we’d need them on the transport.) Though first I ran checks to make sure there was no contamination in their onboard systems. (It was unlikely—the power usage stats said the suits had been inactive throughout ART’s whole memory disruption incident—but I was going to be paranoid until I figured out how ART had been attacked.) (I mean, I’ll be paranoid after that, too, but only about the usual things.) We were taking Eletra with us, and Arada had offered to bring Ras’s body over, too, but Leonide had said it wasn’t necessary and we could dispose of it. That upset the humans and it sort of upset me, too, which you wouldn’t think it would, since the organic parts of dead SecUnits (and the parts that get shot off, cut off, crushed, whatever) go into the recyclers. But it did. As Ratthi put it, “You’d think they could at least pretend to give a damn.” ART had closed in to the Barish-Estranza transport and used its cargo tractors to maneuver the container of repair supplies over to the transport’s module dock. Then Arada and I made the short trip to the transport’s starboard airlock, with Eletra’s suit in tow. (On the way over, I made sure I had a private channel with Arada’s EVAC suit, and I told her, “Remember, I’m not your coworker or your employee or your bodyguard. I’m a tool, not a person.” Overse had told her this earlier but I wanted to make sure she understood. Arada made an unhappy noise. After 3.2 seconds, she said, “I understand. Don’t worry.”) Preservation’s ships are different, so stepping onto a Corporation Rim transport was familiar in a weird way. (A weirdly unpleasant way that disrupted the organic parts of my insides.) I had been shipped as cargo to all my contracts, so 90 percent of my experience with transports and bot pilots was after Dr. Mensah bought me and I’d left Port FreeCommerce.
At least Eletra hadn’t lied about the lack of SecUnits aboard; there was no HubSystem in place and they were using their own brand of proprietary tech and not company-standard. But the architecture was similar enough that by the time Arada and I cycled through the lock, their SecSystem thought I had full interactive permissions and their bot pilot had accepted me as a priority contact. I could do a lot with that. They were lucky we weren’t here to hurt them. The airlock foyer held four humans in the red-brown Barish-Estranza corporate livery, under heavy tactical gear and helmets, all armed with projectile weapons. (My ex-owner bond company would never have paid for such nice equipment. Barish-Estranza must put a lot of effort into their branding.) Problem? Arada asked me on our private channel that I had made certain the transport’s SecSystem wouldn’t see. No. It’s security procedure. If it wasn’t, there was going to be a whole lot of trouble for Barish-Estranza. The first crew person/potential hostile said, “Remove your suits, please.” That was a relief. Taking out four armed humans while wearing an EVAC suit would have been annoying. As my suit opened and I stepped out, I detected a subliminal release of tension that made my threat assessment drop by 3 percent. (Note: humans do not generally look relieved when a SecUnit appears, so I doubted they knew what I was. But I was 95 percent certain they were reacting to the fact that I wasn’t a gray Target person.) When Eletra, then Arada stepped out of their suits, the threat assessment dropped a solid 10 percent. They clearly recognized Eletra, and she recognized them, in a confused way. An unarmed crew member with a personnel resources feed-tag came forward to take her arm and lead her away. Another crew person said, “This way, Dr. Arada.” They led us through another hatch and down a utilitarian corridor, then into a meeting room. It had a circle of low-backed padded couches in the center around a large floating display bubble.
Everything was newish and well kept (no aging upholstery here) with bars of decorative abstract designs in Barish-Estranza colors on the walls and padded seats. Leonide was already waiting on the couch. She said, “Dr. Arada,” and gestured to a seat opposite her. The supply transport’s comm vid might have been doing some cosmetic editing, too, because in person faint stress and fatigue signs were visible around Leonide’s eyes and mouth, though she still looked perfect enough to be in a media serial. “Supervisor Leonide.” Arada nodded. As she sat down, I stepped back against the wall behind her. The crew escort, who had followed us in and distributed themselves around the room, reacted with a little uneasiness. They had guessed I was a bodyguard but I had dropped my pretend-human code while I was still in the EVAC suit and it was starting to register with them that I might not be an augmented human. (Despite the weapons and heavy gear, they were amateurs.) (Amateurs are terrifying.) Leonide glanced at me, her perfect brow furrowing. “Your bodyguard…” Then her eyes narrowed. “Is that…” “A SecUnit,” Arada said. I knew her well enough to hear the nervous jitter in her voice but I don’t think anyone else noted it. (They were too busy being nervous about me.) Arada remembered not to glance at me, which was good. She and Ratthi both had a bad habit of doing that when they answered questions about me, like they were checking for permission to talk about me, which is not how humans expect other humans to act around SecUnits. (SecUnits make humans and augmented humans uncomfortable and on my contracts, my clients had acted in a variety of nervous and inconsistent ways when I was around.
(No matter how nervous they were, just assume I was more nervous.) But in a situation like this, it’s more about how other humans expect each other to act and not how humans actually act, which literally might be anything.) I had camera views via my new friend the Barish-Estranza supply transport’s SecSystem, and I watched two members of our crew escort exchange uneasy looks. Their feed activity was monitored by their supervisors so there wasn’t any private chatter, but one did send a safety notice to their bridge. The SecSystem poked me in response and I told it everything was fine, and it went back to happily interfacing with me again. “You don’t trust us?” Leonide said, her expression unreadable. This part, this kind of human dominance posturing, was the part Arada was really afraid she would screw up. Human dominance posturing was not something Arada did, at all. (And yeah, not something I could help with, either.) I thought there was a possibility that the other humans would notice her nerves, and that it might make them suspicious that Arada’s story about what had happened to us was a mashed-up mess of lies and truth. But the chance they would attribute her jumpiness to the fact that she had brought her rogue SecUnit friend aboard their transport was low. (Ratthi was right about that.) Arada managed to smile in a way that wasn’t too friendly and said, “I think we trust each other the same amount.” She added, “And I’m afraid our contract requires our SecUnit be present during off-ship first contacts.” (I had told Arada about the magic words “the contract requires it.”) Leonide’s knit brow unknit slightly and she sent a “maintain position” feed code to her escort, who pretended to think there was something they could have done about me if they hadn’t been ordered not to try. “Of course.” I watched the tension release slightly in Arada’s shoulders. She knew she had used the right tone and it gave her some confidence. She leaned forward. “Can you tell me what happened to your transport?
Because I think it’s very similar to what happened to mine.” Leonide didn’t react immediately; I suspected she was surprised by the direct approach. Arada saw the hesitation and said, “I can go first, if you like.” You would think Leonide would go for that, but apparently she wanted control of the conversation. She said, “Not necessary.” She shifted her position slightly. “You understand the former colony planet in this system is now wholly owned by Barish-Estranza.” Arada kept her expression calm and serious though I knew she still found the idea of owning a planet to be as bizarre as owning me. “Of course.” Leonide acknowledged that with a nod. “Our arrival here and initial scan of the system was uneventful, and we went into orbit while our explorer approached the colony’s space dock. They reported that it was surprisingly still intact and operational, which was good news for our reclamation effort. Bringing in a new one to assemble would be a considerable expense. Instead of a shuttle, the contact team elected to use the dock’s drop box to reach the surface.” Her mouth tightened. “Possibly that was a mistake.” I could tell from Arada’s intent expression that she wanted to interrupt, but she didn’t. SecSystem was helpfully giving me all its collected video and audio, already edited and with the major incidents tagged. Its comm and feed data confirmed Leonide’s story so far. “There was nothing but standard status reports from the explorer for more than fifty-seven hours,” Leonide continued. Actually according to their SecSystem it was 58.57 hours but whatever. “Then the drop box returned.” Leonide almost winced, and I could tell she didn’t like what she was about to say. “Our contact party had been compromised, but we weren’t aware at first. We’d just sent over a shuttle to the explorer with two environmental techs for a standard maintenance check.
I had assumed that shuttle was destroyed in the subsequent … events, until you told me otherwise.” Leonide stopped and waited, and Arada traded her a little more information. “Your techs, Eletra and Ras, had been implanted with these small devices.” On our private feed channel, Arada asked me, Now? Yeah, now was good. I stepped forward, causing a chorus of nervous twitches from Leonide’s escort, and set a small sterile container with Eletra’s implant next to Arada’s hand on the couch. As I stepped back, she picked it up and passed it over to Leonide. We’d kept Ras’s implant and the Targets’ implants, though Overse hadn’t had any luck yet getting information from them. We’d figured since they were the more murdery implants, they might tell us more. Leonide frowned, but thoughtfully, and consulted with an engineering supervisor in her feed. A tech came in to collect the container and carry it away. Leonide said, “That might explain how they were controlling our contact group. As far as we can tell, when the group returned to the explorer via the space dock, they were somehow forced to take the rest of the crew prisoner. Our security system received a truncated warning of a viral threat, so we were able to cut off feed access before our systems were contaminated. It gave us some moments to prepare, before the explorer fired on us.” According to SecSystem, the warning had come from one of the SecUnits. It had sent a code burst that had told the supply transport’s SecSystem to cut comm and feed and order the bot pilot into a defensive stance, just in time not to get blown up. The supply transport had then fled, as the explorer uncoupled from the dock. The explorer had fired again at the supply transport, damaged its engines and other systems, then headed away. It was disturbing data. Raiders would have been intending to lure the supply transport in and take it, too. This looked an awful lot like the whole goal of the Targets was to get off the planet.
Once they had secured an armed ship, they hadn’t bothered with the unarmed supply transport, even though it was, you know, full of supplies. If they had control of the explorer’s crew and bot pilot, they would have been aware that they had just damaged the supply transport’s wormhole capability, ART said. I don’t know how long ART had been riding my feed, probably the whole time. The SecSystem tried to block ART and I quickly put up a wall and deleted its memory of the contact. (ART really did not care to be challenged by other resident systems and I didn’t want the friendly SecSystem deleted.) I said, You were supposed to keep out of this in case this ship was compromised. ART ignored that. Possibly the explorer attacked me because the Targets wanted a second wormhole-capable ship. Or a better armed one. Maybe, though that wasn’t a conclusion that told us much of anything. It was like saying that they had wanted ART because it was pretty. Arada was asking, “Did you get any visual images of the raiders?” I had already seen the images, sent in the SecUnit’s codeburst. A six-second video clip of two Targets, bursting through a hatchway. Leonide admitted, “Very briefly in a security vid. They were, as you said, unusually divergent.” Arada’s expression was grave. “We suspect they’ve been affected by alien remnant contamination.” “Yes.” Leonide’s expression and tone said she did, too, and it was a source of extreme exasperation. If Barish-Estranza was going to get any return on their investment, they would have to do something about the contamination first, which at best would mean quarantining a large section of the planet and calling in a licensed decontam operation. (If they meant to do this legally and not pull a GrayCris and deal with it by murdering all the witnesses.) “How were you attacked?” “We had just arrived in the system and started our initial longrange mapping scans.” Arada spread her hands.
This was the hard lying part and I put SecSystem’s download on hold so I could concentrate and because it was just too nerve-racking. “We received a distress call from a ship we now know was your explorer. When we came within range, it launched a shuttle. We allowed it to dock and ended up in a battle for our lives and our ship. They were able to take eight members of our crew. If we hadn’t had a SecUnit, we would have lost the ship.” Leonide’s gaze lifted briefly to me. I was doing the blank SecUnit stare at the wall past her head, which is less effective than the opaque helmet stare, but still gets the job done. She said, “Our Units weren’t so effective.” Oh, I don’t know about that. If not for that codeburst warning, you and your supply transport would be in tiny pieces. “Did you see anyone who might have been from the explorer’s crew?” Leonide asked. She managed to make it sound just the right amount of casual. “Just Eletra and poor Ras,” Arada answered seriously. I thought that was showing too much sympathy, but Leonide was preoccupied and didn’t seem to notice. Then Arada said, “Did you have any idea there were alien remnants on this planet, perhaps at the old colony site?” Careful, I said on our feed connection. That was getting uncomfortably close to discussing Barish-Estranza’s steadily falling profit margin for this reclamation and its potential liability for exposing employees and assets to active alien remnants. (Overse was right, alien remnants were the one thing the whole Corporation Rim agreed was bad. Not that there weren’t corporates like GrayCris who would sell them if they thought they could get away with it, but the liability bonds and the chances of wiping out your entire population made it rare.) Leonide had relaxed a little, maybe lulled into a sense of security by Arada’s general air of earnestness, but now her expression went back to a smooth professional mask. “I’m afraid my contract won’t permit discussing that.
Our cargo factor has finished unloading your supplies.” Leonide eyed Arada again, and obviously came to a conclusion. “Before we transmit a certificate of note for your invoice, perhaps you’d like to negotiate.” Oh, here we go. Arada frowned, not understanding. “Negotiate what?” Leonide said, “Your return to your ship.” Ugh, I hate hostage situations. I vaulted over the couch, grabbed the guard nearest Leonide, yanked him up against my chest and twisted his arm so his weapon was pointed at Leonide. I did it really fast. The other guards made various alarmed/aggressive noises and pointed their weapons at me but it was a little too late. Leonide, staring at the weapon me and my human shield were pointing at her, sent a code telling them to stand down. They hesitated. My human shield, whose feedname was Jete, tried to send a code through the feed but I’d already cut off access to the rest of the transport for everybody in the room. I increased my forearm pressure on his throat and he stopped thinking about struggling. Arada had her hands up. It was a reflex but a little embarrassing, frankly. I told her on the feed, Arada, put your hands down. You’re supposed to be the one giving me orders. Oh, sorry, you’re right. She put her hands down. She had light gold-brown skin and you could really tell all the blood had drained out of her face. Her voice a little shaky, she told Leonide, “I don’t want to negotiate.” Leonide wet her lips, pulling her composure back together. “Our onboard security—” “Is useless, right now.” Arada flicked a look at me. I had or dered my new SecSystem friend to seal certain hatches, cutting off this section from the rest of the transport but allowing us a path straight to the airlock. She added, “As you said, our SecUnit is very effective.” Okay, I forgive her for putting her hands up. Leonide, playing for time, said, “Where did you get it?” Arada was too nervous to remember what I had told her to say if someone asked that.
She said, “The company.” (Well, that was a waste of a good cover story about SecUnits produced for academic expeditions. I filed it in case I ever needed it again.) Leonide’s expression tightened. “Company units have a reputation for being dangerous.” Arada was beginning to get angry. “I know.” I had also cut off Arada’s feed from ART so the four humans over there who were currently losing their minds and/or frantically shushing each other wouldn’t distract her. ART, who I couldn’t block because it’s a monster, said, I have a targeting lock on their bridge. The section you’re in will break off and I can tractor you over before you lose too much atmosphere. The problem with gunships is they want to shoot at stuff. That’s why they’re so expensive to write bond contracts for. I said, No, don’t shoot at us. For fuck’s sake, ART. If everybody would just let me do my stupid job for one minute. Leonide’s hard expression was tinged with outrage. She had realized she was cut off from the feed and there was no point in stalling for time. “It’s against Corporation Rim standards to allow a SecUnit control over proprietary systems.” Arada’s gaze narrowed. “Then you should call someone and complain about that.” Yeah, Arada was definitely mad now. ART slid into her feed to show her its targeting lock. The transport’s bot pilot had noticed the targeting lock, too, and was not happy. I let the bridge supervisor’s pretend-calm-but-really-slightly-panicked feed message to Leonide get through. Leonide pressed her lips together. I could see it was a concession and I thought Arada did, too. Composed and calm, Leonide said, “There’s no need for all this. I was simply looking for a better deal. Perhaps coming from an academic background, you find that unusual.” Arada swallowed, and also made herself sound calm. “Well, it was a little rude. I’d like to go back to my ship now.” And for you to transmit the invoice, I told her in the feed. “And for you to transmit the invoice,” she repeated. Leonide tilted her head.
“Of course.” The rest was pretty normal. We backed out toward the lock and dropped Jete in the corridor before I sealed the foyer off from the rest of the ship. I let Arada have her feed back, and Overse said immediately, Are you all right? I’m fine, babe, Arada told her. Just some corporate power peeing. Ick. We got our EVAC suits on. (I had control of the lock so no chance of them spacing us. And with ART’s guns still pointed at them, it would have been a suicidally stupid thing to do.) Then we cycled out of the lock with no trouble. Once we were in the safety of ART’s tractors, and Arada had responded to all the exclamations from Ratthi, Amena, and Thiago, Arada tapped my private connection and asked, Why did she do that? Did I sound weak? I’m sorry I messed up. No, it wasn’t you. I think she told us too much, in front of her crew, and she realized it. She wanted to make sure they knew she was in charge. I didn’t say it but I also thought Arada had been too sympathetic, and it had made Leonide feel like she had given too much away. Arada sighed. But it was worth it. At least we know what to do next, now. Yeah. We were going to the colony’s space dock. * * * It was four hours by ART’s clock to the colony planet and its space dock, which would have given us time to get ready, if we had any idea what to get ready for. “We don’t know Perihelion’s crew is there,” Arada reported to the others as we took off our EVAC suits in ART’s airlock foyer. “But there is a chance the explorer is using it as a base of operations.” “At worst, it may provide some information about just what is going on here,” Ratthi agreed over the comm. “If the dock’s systems are still active, then they might have information that SecUnit can pry out for us.” Arada and I tried to stow our suits but one of ART’s drones showed up to elbow us out of the way and take over. ART agreed with Arada’s assessment, because the nav/route info scroll in ART’s feed showed we were already pulling away from the supply transport.
I’d had an idea earlier, now where was it? I checked my save-for-later. Oh right, that idea. I needed to talk to ART about it. It was a bad idea. But I had a bad feeling we were going to need it. * * * I didn’t know how long it would take to do this, so I had to ditch the humans quickly. Fortunately Thiago went to take another rest period (since he’d wasted part of the first one having a stupid argument with me), Overse and Arada went up to the control deck together, and Ratthi was sitting in the galley going over all the collected data from the Targets’ pathology scans and the material analysis of their gear again. Overse thought she had found evidence of alien remnant tech influence and he was trying to verify her results. Amena tried to follow me into the bunkroom and I told her, “Stay with Ratthi.” Amena stopped and frowned. “Why? What are you going to do?” I wanted to be in a physically private space instead of just a closed channel on the feed. It was a weird thing I was going to ask ART to do, and I didn’t want humans staring at my face while I did it, even if they couldn’t hear what I was saying. I was going to have to answer Amena and I was in a hurry so I just tried the truth. “I need to talk to ART in private.” Amena’s expression did something funny and she lifted her brows. “About your relationship?” I felt ART’s sharpened attention in the feed. I said, “Very funny.” I walked into the bunkroom, told the door to slide shut and set it on lock. I’d already cut the others out of the feed. ART said, Do you want to watch Timestream Defenders Orion? Of course I did, but first I had to do this. I said, “I have an idea about how to create a variable killware assault to deploy against the Targets’ systems. You can copy me and use me as the sentient component.” I’d put together a report on the sentient killware Palisade Security had deployed against the company gunship that had taken us off TranRollinHyfa, and now I sent it to ART.
The analysis the company bot pilot and I had done during the incident suggested the sentient virus had been built using a construct consciousness, probably from a combat unit. Substituting a copy of my consciousness could produce the same results. I knew ART wasn’t going to like this, though I didn’t know how I knew that. ART wasn’t a human, or a construct. Humans and constructs were full of overwrought emotions like depression, anxiety, and anger (was anxiety an emotion? It sure felt like one) and I had no idea what ART was full of, except how much it cared about its crew. 6.4 seconds dragged by (seriously, even a human would notice a pause that long) and ART hadn’t said anything. Then it said, That is a terrible idea. Which just pissed me off. “It’s a great idea.” It was a great idea. ART had been working on a virus code tailored for targetCon trolSystem and the structure it had built so far was stored in our shared workspace. ART had halted development when it became clear there was no point in continuing without a way to make it variable, because of the combination of targetControlSystem’s archaic architecture and the possibility of a connection to alien remnant tech. I couldn’t do this without ART’s help. On the company gunship, I’d moved my consciousness into the bot pilot’s processing space to help it fight the sentient killware, but this was different; I’d never copied myself and I wasn’t sure how to start, unless I had a place to put me. I couldn’t just stick Me.copy into ART’s semi-completed code, not without ART’s help. “And you thought of it first, you said we needed killware with a variable component.” ART said, I didn’t mean you. That sounds mild, putting it like that, like something ART would say in a normal tone. But it said it with so much force in the feed I sat down hard on the bunk. I said, “Stop yelling at me.” ART didn’t respond. It just existed there, glaring at me invisibly in the feed.

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