Operational Limitations
Tags: AAA Murderbot, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, an au retelling of Fugitive Telemetry, Murder Mystery
Published: 11 August 2023
Word Count: 44,093
Summary
Murderbot and Alpha are trying to settle in to their new life at Preservation, but not all the humans there are willing to accept a couple of military constructs existing amongst them. The two of them will need to navigate not only their interactions with the humans around them, but also the interactions between each other as they try to figure out who they are and what they want, and how to handle it when their individual opinions conflict.
Oh, and there's also been a murder. That isn't helping the situation at all.
Chapter One
The mystery ship was floating dead in space, with no external signs of power, and atmosphere still venting from breaches in the hull. I've seen (and caused) my fair share of wrecked ships, so I took a quick preliminary scan of it, ran some size and mass calculations based on the scan results, pulled my data sets on common ship designs within the Corporation Rim out of my archives, and compared the numbers.
The scans matched up with one of the specs from my archives. Well, mostly. There were a few minor discrepancies, but it was close enough to let me make some educated guesses. Estimates. Guesstimates. I opened a comm channel back to Station Security and said, "It's a pretty standard Corporate Rim civilian passenger transport. Looks like this ship lost power about an hour ago, approximately."
There was a brief delay before Station Security responded. "Acknowledged. The responder should be able to dock with it, so that you can board to investigate it further."
I sent an acknowledgement and continued to cruise around the mystery ship, trying to get more detailed scans. Alpha was flying just off my wing, also scanning, and I felt it ping me. [Are you getting any life signs?] it asked.
[No,] I replied reluctantly. I hated admitting that. Judging by the amount of atmosphere still leaking from the ship, it had been set to have a full human-suitable atmosphere on board, instead of the minimal atmosphere that uncrewed, bot-piloted transports usually had. But with the lack of life signs, if there had been anyone on board to start with…
Well, they probably weren’t alive any more. We hadn’t gotten here in time.
But I wasn't willing to give up entirely just yet. Most ships from the Corporation Rim were resistant to scanning, to prevent people from stealing proprietary information. There was a good chance this ship was also resistant, or had shielded compartments. Perhaps its crew had managed to retreat to those compartments and seal them off from the rest of the ship to prevent losing all atmosphere. We wouldn't know for sure until we could get inside.
If that was the case though, we had to get to them soon. Whatever atmosphere they'd managed to retain wouldn't last long without their environmental systems working to replenish it. And we couldn't get to them until the responder managed to dock with the ship - our fliers weren't equipped for boarding, and even if they were, we couldn't take humans on board our fliers. We didn't have enough room for passengers. (There was barely enough room for us. Our fliers hadn't exactly been designed with our comfort in mind.)
So, we’d have to land in the responder’s shuttle bay, then use the responder’s docking access to get on board. Which meant that we would probably have humans wanting to come with us to investigate the mystery ship as well, getting in our way. I wasn’t looking forward to that.
The mystery ship had shown up on Preservation Station's scanners a couple of hours ago, seemingly appearing out of nowhere a considerable distance away from the regular wormhole exit zone. Nobody could tell where it had come from, or who it belonged to, or what it was doing. It hadn't answered hails, and Station Security couldn't pick up any other communication attempts coming from it, not even internal comm signals.
Station Security had reported it to the council, and Mensah had suggested that Alpha and I take our fliers and accompany the station responder, just in case the ship proved to be hostile somehow. She had also privately messaged Alpha and I, suggesting that this would be a good opportunity for us to "improve our relationship with Station Security" and maybe even lead to us being hired by them more often in the future, or at least easing the restrictions they currently had on us.
I was dubious about that, but Mensah was very persuasive, and Alpha wanted to help anyway. So I'd agreed, despite my own misgivings.
Senior Officer Indah hadn't liked the idea either. She'd been very upset to learn that the two pilots who'd helped rescue Mensah and the others from the attack on Port FreeCommerce were actually rogue SecUnits, or "uncontrolled war machines", as she put it. She’d tried to get rid of us, but with both Mensah and Pin-Lee on our side, invoking the refugee laws on our behalf, Indah hadn’t had any legal way to do so.
And as much as she disliked having us on Preservation Station, Senior Officer Indah still respected Preservation’s laws. So after several tense discussions involving Mensah and Pin-Lee, Indah and I had come to a grudging truce. (She seemed to dislike Alpha a little less, but that was probably because Alpha wasn’t anywhere near as contrary or stubborn as I was. It was still trying to get used to being rogue, and still tended to default to obeying humans when it didn’t know what else to do, if I wasn’t around to support it. It was annoying.)
In this situation though, Senior Indah didn't really have any other options. From the station scans, we couldn't tell how armed or armoured the mystery ship was; the responder was enough to keep most civilian ships in line, but it wasn't exactly a gunship. So if the mystery ship did prove to be an actual threat, well. Alpha and I were better equipped to handle potential threats.
(There was also the fact that Indah probably considered the two of us much more expendable than her human subordinates, too. I tried not to think about that.)
So, that's why we were here, circling an unidentified, damaged ship, with the station responder hanging back a little (‘a little’ in flier terms; they were still far enough back that there was no risk of crashing our fliers into them) until we called the all-clear for it to dock. So far the ship hadn't reacted to our presence at all, which made sense if it really was without power.
I wasn't liking anything about this situation. Now that Alpha and I were close enough to get more detailed scans, we could clearly make out the ship's damage. It had definitely been shot at, a lot. I could still see traces of atmosphere venting from a couple of the hull breaches, but it looked to be less than before. Which, again, made sense if the ship's power was really out, and the environmental systems were no longer producing atmosphere.
If whatever had shot the mystery ship was still pursuing it somehow, and it showed up as suddenly as this ship had, without warning… the situation could escalate very badly, very quickly. Judging by the damage we could see, if any of the weapons that had caused it managed to score a direct hit on Alpha or I… well, that would probably make Senior Officer Indah very happy, at least. (She would be much less happy if the responder was hit though.)
I tried to ping the damaged ship, to see if I could get any reply from a bot pilot, or an automated system, or the ship's local feed, or a human's personal comm, or any other system that might still be online and capable of answering. The ping echoed emptily, and I got no response.
After a few more scans, I opened a comm channel to the responder. "No apparent threats," I told them. "You're clear to dock."
"Acknowledged," came the reply. The responder eased up towards the mystery ship, while Alpha and I circled warily, ready for anything.
Nothing happened though, and the responder docked with the mystery ship without any issues. "Lock secure," the responder informed me over the comm. "We'll be boarding soon."
"I recommend that you have at least one of us with you," I said. "Scans aren't coming up with any life signs, but the interior of the ship could be shielded and we don't know what might be on board."
There was a brief hesitation before I got a response. "Agreed. The hold is open for you to dock." Sure enough, I saw the responder's shuttle bay doors opening. There would be just enough room for me to land alongside the onboard shuttle.
I pinged Alpha's feed and asked, [Are you all right with flying perimeter while I accompany the humans on board?] I wasn’t really sure how much experience Alpha had working with humans in situations like this one, and frankly I trusted myself more than I trusted it.
[Of course,] it replied. [If anything unexpected shows up, we need at least one of us out here to respond. And,] it admitted, sounding somewhat sheepish, [you’ve had more experience with working with humans while… you know.]
While ungoverned, it meant.
I pinged agreement and headed for the responder's shuttle bay. Alpha continued to fly in a slow, cautious loop around the ship and responder, still actively scanning.
Once I had landed in the shuttle bay, I disconnected from my flier, activated several of the intel drones that Mensah had given me, and headed for the responder's ship-to-ship lock. The station security officers who would apparently be boarding the ship with me were already there, suited up and armed with their simple, standard-issue batons.
Yeah, this is one of the reasons why I didn't want them boarding without me. Preservation Station Security rarely carried actual weapons other than those batons, which they mostly used to break up the occasional drunken altercations between aggressive intoxicated humans. If there was anything actually dangerous on board the mystery ship, they would be ill-equipped to handle it themselves.
I just hoped there weren't combat bots. Or other SecUnits. Or CombatUnits.
One of the officers (feed ID Tifany), nodded a greeting to me as I approached. "SecUnit," she said politely. "Will you be taking point?"
"Of course." At least they were sensible enough to let me do that, instead of trying to lead the way themselves. "Don't move past me. I'll be using my drones to scout ahead - if I say run, get back to the responder as fast as you can."
"You don't get to order us around!" another of the officers (feed ID Zafar) snapped at me. Ah, it was going to be that kind of day.
"It's not giving anyone orders, it's merely making security recommendations," Tifany replied with forced calm. "I'm sure it wouldn't advise us to run without very good reason." At least someone here had some common fucking sense.
I still couldn't resist adding, "Unless of course you want to fight a surprise combat bot by yourself," I added. "I've done that before. I don't recommend it."
That got him to shut up, at least. Tifany looked around at the rest of the group. "Any other objections?" she asked, still with that forced calm that suggested very heavily that there had better not be any other objections.
Nobody else said anything (I was almost disappointed about that. It might have been funny to see what Tifany said, or maybe did, next), so Tifany gestured for me to take the lead. The lock cycled open for us, and I led the way through the boarding tunnel to the other ship's lock. It was still closed, which made sense if the other ship was really without power. (I know I’m harping on the ‘if it was really without power’ thing but I’m paranoid, okay?)
I double checked my scans, and confirmed that this section of the mystery ship had been sealed off from the breached sections, and there was still some atmosphere available. With no power though, the mystery ship likely also had no gravity. That would make things awkward.
I updated the others, then found the emergency access port and plugged the responder's external power lead in. It would supply the lock with enough power to open, hopefully, so we wouldn't have to wrestle with manual controls. After several seconds, the mystery ship's lock opened, and we cycled through.
Sure enough, once we left the responder's boarding tunnel and entered the mystery ship itself, there was no gravity to keep us anchored to the floor. It wasn't a problem for me - my flight suit had boots with magnetisable soles that could lock me onto metallic surfaces so I wouldn't float around.
The suits the humans were wearing were apparently equipped with something similar, because none of them started floating around either. Their movements were still awkward and clumsy though, especially compared to mine. I made a mental note to take this into account as we proceeded.
There were no lights at all - it looked like even the emergency back-up power had died at some point. That was a little weird. If the ship had only lost main power about an hour or so ago like my scans had suggested, the emergency power should have still lasted for at least another seventeen hours, minimum.
The humans behind me turned on the lights attached to their suits, filling the corridor with sharp-edged shadows. I adjusted my vision filters and sent my drones zipping further into the ship.
It was a fairly standard Corporation Rim passenger transport design, judging from the areas my drones could access that hadn't been sealed off. Lounge, mess hall, recreation room, multiple bunk rooms, bathrooms, a basic medical suite, so on and so forth. I overlaid the map of what my drones were seeing over my scans of the ship from the outside, matching up the sealed bulkhead doors I was finding with the areas of visible external damage.
With no gravity available, the ship was full of things just floating around in the dark - clothes, loose equipment, miscellaneous human stuff. My drones were constantly having to dodge around unsecured items. It was a little annoying.
I was forwarding what my drones were seeing to the responder's feed so the humans could see as well, and hopefully wouldn't bother me with unnecessary questions. I was also forwarding it to Alpha. The humans were mostly quiet as they followed me through the dead ship, occasionally batting some floating object or other out of their way. "Where is everyone?" Tifany murmured. "The ship was obviously inhabited…"
I was wondering the same myself. Given all the stuff floating around, there had definitely been multiple humans on board. But so far my drones hadn't found any living humans, or any bodies, either. Had they all been unlucky enough to have been in the other areas of the ship that had been breached and vented into space? That seemed… statistically unlikely. Some of them, perhaps, but not everyone.
I pinged Alpha and asked it to start checking the surrounding space for any signs of vented bodies. (Not that I expected to find any here - if the ship had vented bodies, it would have happened in whatever area of space where it had gotten attacked in the first place, not here. But still. I wanted to be sure.) Alpha pinged acknowledgement, and I felt its scanners shift away from the ship.
Then one of my drones found a sealed bulkhead that, according to my makeshift map of the ship, didn't lead to a breached section. It led, as far as I could tell, into the ship's central engineering section. One of the most internal, protected - and shielded - areas of a ship, in my experience.
Perhaps any survivors were in there? If they had been under attack, having at least some crew monitoring engineering made sense, and maybe others had sheltered there as well, especially once other parts of the ship started getting sealed off because of hull breaches. "I've found engineering," I told the humans accompanying me. "If anyone on board is still alive, they're likely in there."
"We need to get there fast then and get them out of there," Tifany said urgently. "If the power's been out for an hour already, they probably don't have much air left."
I didn't bother replying - she was only stating the obvious - but I did increase the pace as I headed towards the sealed bulkhead. My drone was pressed up against it, trying to pick up any sounds from the other side, but it wasn't hearing anything. I couldn't tell if it was because there was nothing to pick up on, or if the bulkhead was just too thick for any sound to get through.
The rest of my drones finished clearing the remaining sections of the ship that weren't sealed off, including the empty bridge. They hadn't found any signs of other survivors, so I recalled them back to my position.
When we reached the bulkhead, I had to hunt around a bit to find the manual release. With no power, the door couldn't be opened normally. "Stay back," I warned the humans as I moved to stand in front of the bulkhead door.
Zafar looked like he was about to argue with me again but Tifany just gestured for them all to back away from the door. They didn't move as far back as I would have liked, but at least they weren't all crowded directly behind me, so I didn't push the issue, and just triggered the bulkhead's manual release.
I probably should have, though.
As the bulkhead door opened, I had less than a second to scan the room before I was suddenly under fire. I had just enough time to brace and shield my head with my arms, but nothing else. Energy blasts and small projectiles impacted against me, and I couldn't dodge out of the way without risking the human officers behind me.
For fuck's sake.
I directed several of my drones to zip in past me at high speed, using them to hit the various weapons out of humans' hands. There were cries of shock and surprise and pain, and the weapons-fire ceased. A couple of them apparently lost hold of whatever they were using to secure them against the lack of gravity, and started to float free, but their companions managed to pull them back behind cover before they floated out of reach.
"Was that really fucking necessary?" I announced into the sudden silence. The energy weapon blasts hadn't done much to me, they mostly just pissed me off, but a number of the projectiles had punched through my flight suit. I could feel several of them lodged in the organics of my torso and shoulders, grating against my structural framework. Ugh, that was irritating. At least I wasn't leaking too much - my veins and stuff had already auto-sealed.
The response to my announcement was a moment of silence, followed by several voices all talking at once in various tones of shock and fear.
"What— what the fuck—"
"Is that - that is a fucking SecUnit—"
"I told you—!"
"Oh shit they've found us they've found us we're toast—"
"I don't want to go back, you can't make me go back—!"
This was really testing my patience. "Shut up," I said firmly.
Surprisingly, they all shut up. Whether from surprise or fear, I didn't know and didn't care.
From behind me, Tifany called, "Please, remain calm and hold your fire. You're in Preservation Alliance space. We're from Preservation Station, and we're here to help you. Our scanners picked up on your ship appearing some distance away from the wormhole, and we got here as quickly as we could." Right after she'd said that, she tapped my feed and asked me, [Do you need medical attention?]
[No,] I replied, a little surprised that she'd asked. [The damage is minor.]
Even as I communicated with Tifany over the feed, I was listening to a few of the voices muttering in a way that indicated they probably thought none of us could hear them. (I could hear them, of course.)
"Preservation Station? That's where we were headed, right?"
"Yeah, but none of the others mentioned anything about them having fucking SecUnits. I thought this was meant to be a non-corporate polity - what the hell are they doing with SecUnits? How do we know this isn't just a trap?"
"Do you want to stay on the powerless ship until we run out of air or freeze to death?"
"Well, no, but—"
"Just shut up and play along for now, all right? I don't want to fight a fucking SecUnit. We're lucky it hasn't just killed us all already."
"Didn't you hear it though? I've never heard a SecUnit sound like that before - I didn't even know they could talk like a human!"
I couldn't help myself, and a tired sigh escaped me before I could stop it. (I was getting really good at sighing.)
They shut up again. There was an awkward three point two second pause before one of the mystery humans cautiously emerged from behind their makeshift barricade, awkwardly holding onto bits of it to avoid floating off. "Um, hello?" Human One started. I could see them eyeing me apprehensively, or at least, what they could see of me in the darkness, silhouetted by the lights on the officers' suits behind me.
Oh, damn it. I'd forgotten about that, and given them a perfectly outlined target to shoot at as soon as I'd opened the bulkhead door. Good fucking job, Murderbot. I was getting sloppy.
Tifany tapped my feed, and I reluctantly stepped aside so she had room to enter as well. I stayed alert though, just in case any of the mystery humans tried to grab their floating weapons again. "Hello," she greeted them carefully. "I'm Officer Tifany, from Preservation Station Security. We're here to help you."
Human One started to say something, but was cut off by one of the others behind them going "How do we know you're not lying? You have a fucking SecUnit with you! Only corporates have SecUnits!"
Tifany's shoulders tensed slightly, but her tone was still calm and level as she replied. "SecUnit is a refugee from the Corporation Rim, and is working with us as an independent contractor."
There was an incredulous "Like hell—" but Tifany ignored it and talked over them. "If you have any further questions about that, it can wait until later. For now, however, it would be best if we all got off this wreck of a ship and onto a ship that has actual power and a functional environmental system."
Human Two, the argumentative one, started up with, "What, so you can charge us exorbitant fees—"
Human One interrupted them sharply. "Would you shut up," they snapped over their shoulder, glaring. "Or you can stay here, your choice." Human Two muttered something uncomplimentary, but subsided for the moment.
Tifany said, "We have no intention of charging you any fees in the first place. That's not how Preservation works. Once we're all back on the responder, this ship will be towed back to the station as well. Any personal belongings on board will be recovered and returned to you once the ship has been safely secured."
Human One hesitated for a moment, then nodded. "All right." They gestured to the others, and the little group of humans began awkwardly emerging from behind their cover and making their bumbling, floating way across the room towards the bulkhead door. It was obvious that none of them had any equipment to negate the lack of gravity, and also hadn't had any real training in zero-gravity situations before either.
One of the younger-looking humans misjudged their force and trajectory while crossing the room, and began floating at speed towards the wall. There was a non-zero chance of them injuring themselves if they impacted, so I reached out and took hold of their waist with both hands, gently slowing and steadying them.
Of course, Human Two lost their shit at this. "Don't fucking touch anyone!" they yelled, their face twisting in a snarl. I ignored them (I was used to angry humans yelling at me) and just carefully passed the younger human on to one of the other Station Officers out in the corridor.
"Would you have preferred to let your friend hurt themselves against the wall?" Tifany asked Human Two blandly.
"That's—" They scowled. "Just— keep that fucking thing away from us!"
Tifany just sighed, and I felt her tap my feed. [Do you mind—]
[It's fine,] I interrupted her. I kind of enjoyed being able to interrupt humans now without getting bits of my brain fried. [I should collect all the loose weapons anyway.]
Tifany tapped my feed in acknowledgement, and I left the herding of the little group of humans to the Station Security officers. It didn't take me too long to recover the weapons that they'd used to shoot me, and I also recovered the damaged drones I'd used to disarm them. Hopefully I'd be able to repair the drones - I hated the idea of losing any of them.
As I left engineering and began making my way through the ship with my arms full of weapons and my damaged drones in my pockets, Alpha pinged me. [I couldn't find anything out here.]
I pinged acknowledgement and sent it a brief summary of the situation with the humans and the Station Security officers. [Avoid this human specifically if possible,] I added, sending an image of Human Two. [If they realise you're a SecUnit, they'll be an asshole about it.]
[Acknowledged,] Alpha replied. I felt it lean against me a little through the feed - it was weird, and I didn't know how to react or what to think about it.
Fortunately, by that time I'd reached the boarding tunnel to the responder, so I was able to distract myself by focusing on adjusting to the return of gravity. Then I had to take the weapons to the responder's onboard armoury so they could be properly checked and secured.
As I finished doing that, Tifany tapped my feed again. [We're about to interview them to figure out where they're from and how they got here - do you want to sit in?]
Huh. I hadn't been expecting to be asked that. [Given their reaction to SecUnits, it may be best that they don't see me again,] I replied after a moment.
[You have a point,] Tifany conceded reluctantly. [Still, I would like you to observe remotely, at least. You're more familiar with the Corporation Rim than we are - if there's any discrepancies in what they tell us, you're more likely to pick up on it.]
Ah. That made sense. [I can do that.]
[Excellent, thank you,] Tifany replied. [You can observe with the others from the briefing room.]
So as the responder began making its slow way back to Preservation Station, I headed to said briefing room. A few of the other officers were sitting or standing around inside, watching the various display surfaces showing the room the mystery humans had been taken to. I pinged Alpha's feed and began forwarding everything to it as well. Getting another pair of eyes on this couldn't hurt. It was still out in its flier, escorting the responder and the damaged ship it was towing.
Tifany and another officer (feed ID Matif) were in the interview room as well, sitting on one side of a large table. The mystery humans were sitting along the other side, and the table's surface held a scattering of empty food packets and cups. Some of the humans were still cradling cups in their hands, sipping from the contents.
Zafar was one of the officers in the briefing room with me - when I entered, he glared in my direction, then deliberately moved a little further away from where I was. I ignored him, focusing my attention on the display surfaces instead. Tifany and Matif had already started to ask them about where they were from and what they were doing here. I was just in time to catch the reply.
"We're from MinShaTec, but BreharWallHan… well, there was a hostile takeover a while ago, emphasis on 'hostile'," Human One began, leaning their elbows against the table. "Once all the dust settled, BreharWallHan kept us on as employees, but…"
"BreharWallHan fucking sucks," Human Two interjected. There were grumbles of agreement from the rest of the humans. "Like, okay, yeah, MinShaTec weren't great to work for but at least they didn't charge us for every single little thing. They were tolerable. Brehar is full of intolerable corporate money-grubbers and cost-cutting toadies, so we finally decided to split."
Human One sighed at the interruption, but nodded in agreement before continuing. "We managed to steal the ship, but they tried to shoot us down on the way out. We made it to the wormhole, but I guess the damage was too much, and after a few cycles something went wrong with the wormhole drive. And when we reverted back to realspace, our bot pilot… glitched out, or something, we don't know. The main power failed along with the bot pilot, then the backup power failed as well about an hour before you arrived. We hadn't been able to get any readings on where we'd ended up before the bot pilot died, and we couldn't get anything working ourselves, so we had no idea where we were."
This time, it was Human Five who spoke up. "I was up in the bridge with Mish." They gestured to one of the others, who I'd tagged as Human Four. Mish briefly raised one hand in a little wave before returning it to the cup they were holding. "We were trying to get anything there working while the others were in Engineering, when I looked out the windscreen and saw fliers approaching." They hesitated for a moment. "They looked a lot like the fliers BreharWallHan used during the takeover. So we thought…"
"We thought you were just more corporates coming to fuck us over," Human Two interjected, scowling at Tifany. "Which you still could be, since you have a fucking SecUnit with you—"
Great. Just great. They'd seen our fliers as we'd been approaching, and made the (irritatingly) logical assumption that we were hostile. And if BreharWallHan had used SecUnits during their hostile takeover… well. No wonder they'd opened fire on me as soon as I opened the bulkhead door.
Tifany was doing her best to reassure the MinShaTec humans, but I was now more focused on pulling information from what I could access of Preservation's public news archives. (They weren't saying anything about SecUnits that I hadn't already heard countless times before.) I had to use the responder as a relay to reach the station's feed at this distance though, which was slowing me down.
I was at least able to confirm that MinShaTec did actually exist, and there were a few news reports confirming that BreharWallHan had indeed carried out a hostile takeover of MinShaTec. That all lined up, but something about their story still didn't sit quite right with me. I couldn't put my finger on what though. Risk and Threat Assessment were both pinging uneasily, but they couldn't supply me with any specific details either.
I was still trying to figure it out when Tifany entered the briefing room. Apparently she and Matif had gotten as much information from the MinShaTec humans as they could at this point, and Tifany wanted to discuss it with me. Matif was staying with them to answer all their questions about Preservation, and what would be expected of them once they got there, and boring stuff like that.
(They were still also occasionally repeating the question, "But why do you have a SecUnit?", just worded in various different ways. To their credit, Matif always gave them the same reply that I was a refugee from the Corporation Rim. They didn't seem to believe him though. I couldn't really blame them for that.)
Tifany sat down at one of the consoles in the briefing room, then turned the chair to face me. "All right, what do you make of it?" she asked me.
"I'm not sure yet," I replied. "MinShaTec definitely existed, according to the public databases anyway, and news reports confirm that BreharWallHan did carry out a hostile takeover of it. But how did they know about Preservation in the first place? They didn't mention anything about that, but I overheard them back in the ship talking about how 'none of the others mentioned anything about them having SecUnits', and how they 'thought this was meant to be a non-corporate polity'. So they definitely already had information about Preservation, but who from? Who are these 'others'? And why did they want to come here, specifically? There are a lot of other non-corporate polities, several of which are closer and easier to reach than Preservation is."
Tifany nodded slowly. "Preservation is not exactly large or well-known outside of the local systems," she admitted. "So now that you mention it… we'll have to ask them about that." She messaged Matif; on the display surface showing the interview room, I saw Matif nod slightly, then ask the MinShaTec humans, "By the way, how did you find out about Preservation in the first place?"
There was a definite hesitation and exchange of glances before Human One answered. "Well, I mean, there was that whole… saga on the news about you guys recently, right? With the company and GrayCris and… what was that other company name… DeltFall! Them, and all that. The newsstreams made you guys sound like a pretty good place, honestly, especially compared to where we were."
Human Three added, "And we wanted to get as far away from the Corporation Rim as possible, given everything with BreharWallHan."
That made sense - the whole shitstorm with GrayCris had been all over the news for ages. And I couldn't blame them for wanting to get as far away from the Corporation Rim as possible - I'd wanted the same thing. But still, something about the hesitation and the wary glances made me suspicious. "They're hiding something," I said out loud, without really meaning to.
Tifany turned away from the display surface to look at me again. "What do you mean?"
"They hesitated and looked at the rest of the humans with them before replying," I said. "And while their story makes sense, it doesn't mention anything about those 'others' I overheard them talking about earlier."
Zafar snorted. "You're being paranoid. Nobody else heard them say anything."
I ignored him and kept my attention on Tifany. Her expression was thoughtful, but she didn't look convinced. "Is there anything else you've noticed?" she asked me.
"What they said about the bot pilot glitching out bothers me," I admitted after a moment's consideration. "Bot pilots generally don't just 'glitch out' to the extent that it takes the main power down with it and trashes any ability to restart it. They're designed specifically to not do that, even if the ship takes critical damage. About the only thing that could wreck a bot pilot like that is targeted killware. And if killware is what took out the bot pilot - who sent it, what was its purpose, and why didn't it trigger earlier?"
Tifany was frowning now. "Are you sure about that?" she asked. "About it being killware that took out the bot pilot, I mean. The ship did take a lot of damage, after all. Could it have been a power surge, or some other result of all the damage?"
I shrugged. "Maybe, but the probability of that is a lot lower than killware." I looked over my scans of the ship again. "And judging from my initial scans of the damage, it doesn't look like it was hit anywhere that would've affected the bot pilot like that." Something about the ship's damage was also bothering me, but again I couldn't quite put my finger on it yet. "We should keep the ship and the humans away from Preservation Station until we've had time to do a proper investigation of the ship's systems."
Tifany looked uncertain, and Zafar shook his head. "You're really being paranoid," he said derisively. "Or maybe you're just mad that they shot you and you're trying to be spiteful."
It was such a stupid suggestion that I couldn't think of how to respond to it right away, and before I could, Tifany blinked and straightened in her chair. "Ah, that's right," she said, and I saw her eyeing the visible damage to my flight suit. "I know I asked earlier, but are you sure you don't need medical attention?"
Even after everything I'd been through, it was still really weird to have a human concerned for my well-being. I just shrugged. "I'm fine. They didn't hit anything important. I'd kind of forgotten about it, honestly."
That did not seem to reassure Tifany in the slightest. "Still - the responder has a MedSystem—"
I didn't want to bother with the responder's MedSystem, and I shook my head. "It's fine, don't worry about it. The responder's MedSystem hasn't been modified for constructs anyway. It can wait until I'm back on board Debris."
"Well, if you're sure…"
"I'm sure. Don't worry about it." I then glared at the wall behind Zafar's head. "And I am not being spiteful. I'm just being cautious. Preservation's safety is the priority here, right?"
Zafar glared back at me, but he didn't have a response to that. Tifany just sighed, rubbing at her temples with one hand. "Well, it's not really up to us, anyway," she admitted. "It'll be Senior Officer Indah's call. We should report in and see what she says."
So the responder opened a comm link to Station Security, and Tifany updated Indah on everything that had happened. I still had an open connection with Alpha as well, so it could listen in and I didn't have to keep sending it updates. It had been observing everything with interest, but hadn't made any comments on anything itself other than to send me the occasional update on the ship's status as it was being towed. (No parts had actively fallen off yet, but there were some areas of damage that Alpha suspected might lose pieces sooner rather than later, and it was monitoring them closely from its flier.)
Indah listened to Tifany's report, which she wrapped up with my advice to quarantine the ship and its humans until we could finish a full investigation. Indah was silent for a few seconds, presumably digesting everything, then said, "SecUnit, can you explain why you want to delay getting these refugees and their ship to safety on Preservation Station?"
That didn't bode well at all. "Something is off about their story, and the damage to the ship," I said, doing my best to keep my tone entirely professional. "I have concerns about this being a cover for an infiltration attempt on Preservation - I can't entirely discount the possibility of GrayCris attempting some kind of attack on the members of the PreservationAux survey team. I want time to fully investigate the ship's systems and question the MinShaTec humans further about their situation."
"Straight up paranoia," Zafar broke in with his usual derision. "It's just being spiteful. Any delay on getting everyone to the station is completely unnecessary."
"Thank you for your contribution, Officer Zafar," Indah said blandly. She was silent again, then said, "Is Alpha on the line as well?"
"Oh, yes, I'm here, Senior Officer Indah," Alpha replied politely over the comm. "How can I be of assistance?"
That was something that annoyed me about Alpha. It had been rogue for such a short time so far that it still defaulted to standard governed SecUnit responses a lot, especially with humans in any position of authority. Which Indah definitely was. I couldn't exactly blame Alpha for its reactions, but it was still annoying.
"I would like your opinion on the situation," Indah replied crisply. "Do you believe SecUnit's level of caution is warranted, or do you think the ship is safe to dock with Preservation Station?"
For some reason (some stupid reason), I was expecting Alpha to back me up. So I didn't try to prompt it, which was probably a mistake on my part. Alpha hesitated for long enough for even humans to notice, then replied carefully, "The ship is currently structurally unsound. I would recommend getting it stabilised and repaired as soon as possible."
That wasn't an outright disagreement with my advice, but it wasn't agreement, either, and Indah latched on to that. "Do you believe that the level of damage would sufficiently explain the failure of the ship's bot pilot?"
I was too busy having some kind of unidentified emotion to say anything to Alpha privately, and after another brief moment of hesitation it said, "I have experienced a similar situation previously, where a ship with comparable specifications took battle damage that resulted in the failure of the bot pilot. I have also witnessed the use of killware against bot pilots, and in my experience, killware usually self-terminates after the completion of its designated task."
What the fuck. My unidentified emotion intensified.
"I see," Indah replied, her tone professionally level. "So you're saying that the bot pilot was most likely disabled by the ship's damage, and that even if killware was involved, it would no longer pose a threat, correct?"
"Well, yes, but—"
"Thank you, Alpha," Indah cut it off. "Bring the ship and the refugees in, Officer Tifany. SecUnit, Alpha, thank you both for your assistance. We'll let you know if we need you again."
And that was it.
Chapter Two
I returned to my flier as soon as I could, launched out of the responder's shuttle bay, and started towards Debris at full burn. I couldn't even enjoy the flying time - I was too worked up, and I knew that I was being monitored so that Security could make sure I didn't breach any of the conditions allowing us to use our fliers for this stupid investigation anyway. It was like being back on contract with the company.
Alpha pinged me, but I ignored it, cut off my feed connection with it, and blocked its feed address so it couldn't message me. I didn't want to talk to it right now. Or at all. All I wanted was to get back to Debris, plant myself in its MedSystem, bury myself in my media, and pretend I didn't exist for a while.
I'm used to humans asking for my advice and then ignoring it. It happened all the time, especially if the humans didn't like the advice I was giving them. It was normal. I was used to it. So I don't know why I was so worked up about it this time.
Maybe because, by this point, I'd also had some experience with humans who didn't ignore my advice. Rami and Maro and Tapan hadn't ignored my advice. Don Abene hadn't ignored it. The members of PreservationAux hadn't ignored it. Maybe I'd thought that there was a possibility that the rest of the Preservation humans would be more like PreservationAux.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Murderbot. Indah and the rest of Station Security had made it clear right from the start that they didn't want SecUnits around. I should never have agreed to this stupid job in the first place.
Well, I wouldn't be making that mistake again.
Initially, Preservation Station Security had been fine with our presence on the station, because they thought both Alpha and I were just augmented human pilots who had helped Mensah and the others escape the attack on Port FreeCommerce, and that we were seeking refugee status on Preservation to escape the Corporation Rim. That was even true, except for the parts that weren't.
So once all the excitement about Mensah and everyone else's escape from the attack on Port FreeCommerce and return to Preservation had died down, Alpha and I had gone out to explore the station a bit. It wasn't as busy as stations like Port FreeCommerce or HaveRatton had been, but it was busier than RaviHyral. And the atmosphere was very different overall, too. The humans here seemed more relaxed, not as rushed or hurried. Which meant they tended to notice us more. That was a little nerve-wracking.
To be fair, we did both stand out somewhat, with our height and our obviously non-Preservation, out-system clothes. There were other non-Preservation humans wandering around as well though, some of them looking as out of place as we did. But the Preservation locals didn't seem wary of any of us, really, only curious and occasionally helpful if they thought any of us looked particularly lost.
It was really, really weird. Nobody in the CR would be voluntarily helpful unless they were getting paid for it. (Which would make their helpfulness not exactly voluntary in the first place.) The first time a Preservation human came up to Alpha and me asking us if we needed any help finding something, I was so surprised that I froze in place for a good two seconds. Alpha wasn't any better; it just tried to keep out of sight behind me.
The human must've been used to non-Preservation people being weirded out though, because they just chuckled a little and went "Don't worry, you're not going to get charged anything. We just like to help out when we can around here." They obviously thought we were just normal augmented humans from the Corporation Rim, and not terrifying war machines.
I managed to recover and nodded a little. "Oh, right. We're just… looking around for now, thanks." (Thank you, Vicky, for making me practice basic human interactions.)
They'd just nodded in return and smiled cheerfully. "All right. Enjoy the sights, and if you do need any help finding anything, feel free to ask!"
"Okay, we will, thanks."
There was not a chance in hell that I was going to be asking any random humans anything, but the answer seemed to satisfy them, and they just responded, "No problem!" before waving at us and wandering off again.
We had a few similar interactions over the next few hours, with random Preservation locals asking us if we were looking for anything specific, or needed help, or wanted directions to someplace. I didn't freeze again, now that I knew that it was a thing that could happen, and Alpha gradually stopped trying to hide behind me every time, too. The friendliness was a novelty.
Still, it was exhausting, and it had been a relief to return to the quiet and privacy of Debris, where we didn't have to worry about unknown humans approaching us unexpectedly. I'd retreated to my armchair in the lounge, Alpha had faceplanted onto the couch, and we'd spent the rest of the cycle watching media, where we didn't have to interact with anyone or anything.
After that, once Alpha and I had decided to stay, we had talked a bit with Mensah and Pin-Lee. We'd eventually agreed to let the Preservation Council, Station Security and Station Medical know that we were actually SecUnits, so they wouldn't be surprised if anything happened. So a few days after our arrival, Mensah and Pin-Lee had told the Council, and then they had to brief Station Security.
(Senior Indah had been with the rest of the upper level security staff for the “hey, there’s a pair of rogue SecUnits requesting refugee status here, and by the way they've been wandering around unsupervised for several days already” meeting. You should have seen their expressions.)
There was a whole big deal about it, and Security was all “but what if they try to sabotage or take over the station’s systems and kill everyone, or hold the station hostage, or attack visiting ships, or a dozen other wildly unlikely scenarios” and Pin-Lee had countered with “If they wanted to do any of that they would have done so already” which in hindsight was probably not the most reassuring response. (Even if it was true.) Then Mensah and Pin-Lee had pulled Alpha and I into a private meeting with Senior Indah.
After some initial polite arguing between the humans, it became increasingly obvious that Senior Indah was determined to get rid of both of us. She was trying to get Mensah to convince us to get back on board Debris and keep the ship in “quarantine” while the situation was being "evaluated". "Quarantine" just meant having Debris undock from the station and keep it floating in some designated patch of space where we wouldn’t be able to reach the feed or walk onto the station and mingle with all the other humans whenever we wanted. It was pretty apparent (to me at least) that she hoped that if we were forced to just float idly in space for long enough with no feed access, we’d eventually get bored and fuck off somewhere else, and we would no longer be her problem.
And of course, since that was what she obviously wanted us to do, I increasingly didn’t want to do that at all.
Mensah didn’t even blink. She said, calmly, “No, that’s unacceptable. There is absolutely no reason to quarantine them. If there was, then that would require me, Pin-Lee, Ratthi and Gurathin to be quarantined with them. And since we have already been moving freely around the station for several days, quarantining us now would then also require quarantining the entire station.”
Senior Indah’s mouth went tight. I think she was mad that Mensah hadn’t told her about us as soon as we’d arrived from the Corporation Rim, escorted by a company carrier. (It had to be that, neither of us had done anything else yet to make her angry.) She said, “Just because you’ve become accustomed to having a couple of very dangerous military weapons around doesn’t mean they can’t turn against you. Or harm others.”
Okay, wow. I mean, I knew people tended to think that, I was used to it, but I hadn’t expected anyone to outright say it. Especially not right in front of us.
Mensah's eyes narrowed, her head tilted slightly, and her polite planetary leader smile twitched into something else. But before she could say anything, Alpha put on the most wide-eyed, woebegone face I have ever seen in my entire media-watching experience (seriously, it deserved an award or something) (even though it was truly, embarrassingly demeaning), and said, very quietly and uncertainly, “… Did we do something wrong…?”
That brought all three humans up short; Indah's eyes widened, startled, as she stared at Alpha incredulously. I saw the corner of Pin-Lee's mouth twitch in a quickly-aborted smirk, and Mensah turned to Alpha with a look of warm reassurance. "Oh, no, absolutely not," she said gently to Alpha, reaching out to pat its arm. "Neither of you have done anything wrong whatsoever." She then looked back at Indah with a flat stare. "Have they?" There was absolutely nothing warm in Mensah's expression as she locked eyes with Indah.
Judging by the minute changes in Indah's expression, she was starting to realise that maybe she'd fucked up, big time. "… No, they haven't," she conceded grudgingly after a long moment. "But—"
Mensah said, very evenly, "Don't make it worse."
Indah hesitated, then let out a breath and stayed silent.
Mensah eyed her for a moment more, then continued, "I'll remind you, again, that these are two brave, selfless people who risked their lives to save myself and my colleagues from an incredibly hostile situation, and who are seeking refugee status to escape their enslavement in the Corporation Rim. And Preservation does not turn away refugees. So. We will both be reasonable about this and set our knee-jerk emotional responses aside. Agreed?"
Indah's expression remained reserved, but I could tell she was relieved. "Agreed." She also wasn't a coward. "But I do still have some… significant concerns."
So there was a lot of negotiation about us (always a fun time) and it ended up with both myself and Alpha having to agree to several restrictions. The first one was to promise not to access any non-public systems or hack any other bots, drones, etc. Alpha agreed readily - it had never been in a position to hack anything in the first place, unlike me, and I wasn't sure it even knew how.
I also had to agree, though I wasn't happy about it. Neither was Station Security, but for completely different reasons.
It's not like the station systems here were all that great in the first place; Preservation didn't use surveillance except on essential engineering and safety entry points. It was really weird. So it's not like I wanted to have access to their stupid boring systems anyway. If whatever's left of GrayCris or its allies in the forces that had attacked Port FreeCommerce turns their attention to Preservation and starts a hostile takeover, it won't be my fault.
And even if it does turn out to be my fault somehow, there won't be much I can do about it anyway.
So that's where we were, figuratively in an uneasy truce with Station Security, when Mensah and the rest of the council had been informed of the appearance of the mystery ship. Mensah had strongly suggested that Alpha and I assist the station responder with investigating the ship, which made sense, so we had.
And just look how that had turned out.
I flew back into Debris' hold and landed, disconnected from my flier, then headed straight for Medical and the waiting MedSystem. The projectiles in my torso hadn't popped out yet, and I could feel some of them scraping irritatingly against my inorganic framework. It didn't take me long to strip off my flight suit and the underlying suit skin - I just let them drop to the floor and left them there. I'd have to put them into the reclaimer to clean them and repair the damage at some point, but that could wait until later.
I settled into the MedSystem and started up my media. I'd only gotten about a third of the way through an episode of Sanctuary Moon though when the door to Medical slid open to reveal Alpha.
Fuck, I'd forgotten to lock the fucking door.
I didn't bother reacting to its arrival. It hesitated in the doorway, apparently unsure if it wanted to come all the way in or not. Maybe it was waiting for me to say something. I didn't know and didn't care.
Finally it asked, "Are you all right?" its voice all soft and uncertain.
"I'm fine." I didn't know why it was bothering to ask. I'd sent it my diagnostics soon after I'd gotten shot, it should know that the damage wasn't serious.
Apparently the answer wasn't good enough for Alpha. I felt it ping me, and I resisted the urge to ping it back. I didn't want to keep talking to it.
"I mean—" It hesitated, running one hand back over its hair. It was still wearing its own flight suit, but it had retracted the helmet, and its hair (currently dyed several shades of blue and purple, courtesy of Ratthi and Arada) was tied back in a loose little ponytail. "You're not… I can't reestablish a feed connection with you." It paused again, then added, "I… I did something wrong, didn't I?"
Oh for fuck's sake. "You didn't back me up," I snarled, without really meaning to. "Squad is meant to back each other up!"
(Sometimes I have this problem where I say stuff out loud that I didn't even know I was thinking to start with. I really needed to program some kind of delay on my mouth, or something.)
Alpha recoiled a little, its expression doing something that I didn't bother looking at or analysing. I didn't care. "… Oh," it said quietly. "I… I couldn't figure out... Senior Indah wanted my opinion, but…" It let out a huff of breath. "Humans don't ask SecUnits their opinions. We're just meant to directly answer their questions! I didn't know what to say, or how to say it!"
The annoying part was that I could understand its situation - I'd been there myself before. But that just pissed me off more. "All the more reason that you should have backed me up!" Part of the reason that Alpha was even with me here on Preservation was so that I could be… some kind of rogue construct mentor, or set a good example for it, or something. Not that I was doing any good in that regard, apparently. It still kept defaulting to deferring to stupid human judgements. Like the stupid hair dye.
"I tried - when I realised that she just wanted an excuse—" Alpha gestured vaguely with its hands, "but she cut me off and dismissed us before I could clarify!"
She had, too. Indah had only heard what she wanted to hear, and hadn't given Alpha the chance to say anything further. She hadn't given me the chance to say anything more, either. She'd just made it very clear that our services were no longer needed and our presence wouldn't continue to be tolerated.
Well, fuck her and the rest of Station Security, then. If anything bad happened because of their lack of caution, it wouldn't be my fault.
I hadn't replied to Alpha - I didn't know what to say at this point anyway - and after a bit of awkward silence it took a single step into Medical. "… Are we squad?" it asked tentatively.
"Apparently not," I snapped before I could actually think about it. And as far as I was concerned, we weren't squad. Not like how it meant. I still couldn't remember anything about ever being in a squad before.
Alpha flinched slightly, and something in my organics twisted uncomfortably at that. Which just made me even more angry. I barely knew Alpha - it spent more time hanging out with the humans than I was comfortable with, so apart from occasionally exchanging information in the feed, I hadn't really talked much with it. Not like I had with Vicky. I didn't remember anything about Alpha from before my memory wipe, and yet my stupid organics still reacted stupidly and unpredictably to it. I hated that.
There was another awkward silence, then Alpha let out a breath and just said, "Okay," all quiet and soft and—
— and pathetic. It was fucking pathetic.
The silence was almost painful, punctuated only by the sounds of the MedSystem pulling projectiles and bits of shrapnel out of my torso. I didn't want to deal with any of it any more. I engaged MedSystem's privacy screen, and sank back into my media.
I stayed in the MedSystem for several hours after it had finished treating me, just watching media and not thinking about anything at all. Eventually however the feeling of dried fluids on my skin got too irritating, and I reluctantly shut down MedSystem and dropped the privacy screen.
The first thing I noticed was that Medical was empty, and my flight suit and suit skin were no longer puddled on the floor. A fresh set of my clothes were waiting, neatly folded, on a chair. That made my insides do something uncomfortable and annoying again, so I just ignored them and retreated into Medical's attached bathroom to have a nice long shower.
I continued to ignore them after I'd finished my shower, and went to my own room to get clothes from there instead. I didn't see Alpha along the way, and I briefly checked all of Debris' cameras. Alpha was nowhere on board.
It had probably gone to hang out with humans who could tell it what to do. Figures. Well, that wasn't my business and also wasn't my problem.
I was sitting at my desk in my room, working on repairing my damaged drones and listening to music when I felt Bharadwaj tap my feed. [Hello, SecUnit,] she sent. [Is it all right for me to board?]
Oh, fuck. What with the whole Station Security thing, I'd forgotten we had another interview scheduled with Dr. Bharadwaj this cycle. Alpha had apparently also forgotten, or just wasn't in the mood for it, or whatever, because it still wasn't anywhere on board Debris.
I left my damaged drones where they were and headed for the lounge as I sent Bharadwaj an acknowledgement and got Debris to let her in. It didn't take her long to reach the lounge, and she smiled up at one of the lounge's cameras before heading to her usual armchair. "Hello again," she said as she settled into her seat and looked around. "Where is Alpha?"
"I don't know and I don't care."
"Ah." She paused for a moment, then asked, "Would you like to talk about it?"
I had to think about that for a long time. (A long time by my standards, anyway.) "… Only if it's not on the record," I finally replied. (One of the things we'd established early on when Bharadwaj had first started interviewing us was that if anything came up that we didn't want mentioned in the potential documentary, we could state it to be off the record. Even if we changed our minds later. Bharadwaj had agreed immediately, and honoured it, which was one of the reasons why I trusted her enough to talk to her in the first place.)
Bharadwaj nodded. "Of course. Completely off the record."
"All right." And then I had to figure out what I actually wanted to say. This was always the hardest part. "… Did you hear about the mystery ship yet?" I finally asked. That seemed like a safe starting point.
Bharadwaj hummed and nodded. "A little. Just that an unidentified ship had shown up outside the usual wormhole exit area, and that Station Security were investigating, and that it was no cause for alarm." She tilted her head to one side to look at one of my drones. "I take it you know more?"
I nodded. "Mensah convinced Station Security to let us help investigate it, and convinced us that it would be a good idea."
Bharadwaj already knew all about Station Security's opinion of us, and the restrictions they'd placed on us, and her mouth twisted in a sympathetic grimace. "I take it things didn't go well?"
"Not in the fucking slightest." And then it was like the floodgates fucking opened. I told her all about everything that had happened - Zafar's snide comments, getting shot by the MinShaTec humans, all their shitty but completely unsurprising comments about SecUnits. How Station Security had completely ignored my advice, dismissed my legitimate concerns as spite and/or unnecessary paranoia, how Indah had used Alpha to undermine me, and then cut us both off from saying any more.
"It was just like being back with the company again, except worse," I added bitterly. "What was even the point of agreeing to let us help if they were just going to ignore us anyway? I got shot for them because if I had dodged - which I could have, by the way - then the officers behind me would have gotten shot instead, and they don't handle being shot anywhere near as well as I do! It was all just… too much like being equipment on another survey with shitty clients again. I thought I'd gotten away from that - I thought Preservation would be better. What a fucking joke that turned out to be."
Bharadwaj sighed. "I hoped it would be better for you too," she said. "I'm sorry that it hasn't been, so far."
I hesitated for a moment, then added, "I mean, being here isn't entirely terrible. At least we're no longer getting bits of our brains fried."
"That's a low bar," Bharadwaj said dryly. I just shrugged again - it was still a bar that a lot of other places in the rest of my life hadn't cleared. (At least before I borked my governor module, anyway. And even after that, the risk had always still been there, if anyone had found out that it was broken and then fixed it.)
After a few moments, she sighed again, then said, "I'm hopeful that once I get this documentary done, things here will improve for the both of you, but… that's going to take time."
"I know." I wasn't anywhere near as hopeful as Bharadwaj was about the documentary changing anything, but I didn't want to actually say so. She was working so hard on it. "And it was really only working with Station Security that was… actually bad," I admitted after a long moment. "Everything else has been… well. Better than before. So as long as we don't have to work with Station Security again, we should be fine."
Bharadwaj hummed a wordless acknowledgement, her expression thoughtful. There was silence for a little while, but unlike with most other humans, it was a comfortable silence. Bharadwaj didn't feel the need to fill the silence with pointless chit-chat, which gave me space to just think. Or watch media in the background.
Eventually Bharadwaj took a breath and looked over at one of my drones again. "Have you considered… trying out other places?" she asked. "Like some of the neighbouring non-corporate polities, or that other place - what was it… Mihira and…?"
"Mihira and New Tideland," I supplied. Human memory recall was terrible compared to mine.
"Right, that," Bharadwaj replied with a little smile. "So, have you?"
I shrugged again. It was a useful gesture. "Not really."
"Why not?" Her tone was simply curious, with no judgement in it.
I scowled at the wall behind Bharadwaj's head. "Because Indah wants us to fuck off, and if we fuck off, Indah wins. I don't want her to win."
She let out a soft huff, which I assumed was amusement. "I can't argue with that," she added wryly. "But are there any other reasons?"
"A few," I replied. "Like I said, apart from all the shit with Station Security, it's not entirely terrible here. Alpha likes Arada and Ratthi and Overse, and they've been helping it figure out what it likes, I think."
"You think?" Bharadwaj prompted me gently.
"I'm not sure how much it actually likes what they're doing with its clothes and hair and stuff, or how much it's just… going along with them because they're humans and it makes them happy." I was scowling again, and I tried to get my expression back to something more neutral. "I haven't heard it refuse anything yet - I'm not sure it's even figured out that it can say no to humans yet." Talking about Alpha - even thinking about Alpha - was making my insides do uncomfortable things, and I didn't want to focus on that.
So before Bharadwaj could ask me any more about Alpha, I changed the topic and added, "I'm also worried that GrayCris might… try something."
Bharadwaj is observant enough that she probably noted my abrupt subject change, but she didn't comment on it, and just let it slide. "What do you think GrayCris might do?" she asked instead.
"I don't think they're in a position to launch an outright attack against Preservation, not after everything else that's happened," I replied. "But… infiltration and sabotage or assassination is always a possibility. They were actively looking for Mensah and the others during the assault on Port FreeCommerce. They probably know by now that they made it home safely to Preservation. I don't want to leave any of you undefended."
Bharadwaj nodded slowly. "That's why you and Alpha have drones keeping an eye on us, right?"
"Yeah. The security on this station sucks, so we had to set up our own."
Bharadwaj smiled up at one of my drones. "Because humans shouldn't do their own security." She was echoing a line I'd said multiple times during our previous talks, but she wasn't doing so mockingly. It was more… a familiar, friendly kind of teasing, or something. It wasn't terrible.
"Exactly," I replied, and her smile broadened briefly, like she was pleased with my response. (I refused to have an emotion about that.)
Her expression became more thoughtful then. "Is that why you wanted to investigate the mystery ship and the MinShaTec people more thoroughly before letting them reach the station? Because you're worried about GrayCris somehow using them to infiltrate Preservation?"
"Yeah." I couldn't help but scowl again. "Station Security have been briefed on my concerns, but they think I'm just being paranoid. They're so far removed from the realities of the Corporation Rim - it's just… exaggerated stories to them."
Bharadwaj's mouth twisted ruefully. "I can understand that," she said. "I thought similarly, until the survey and everything that happened afterwards. All that definitely opened my eyes. But since nobody outside of the survey group actually went through it all, it still feels… unreal to them. They don't want to think about any of that actually happening here."
"That's stupid," I said. "Ignorance won't protect anyone."
"You're right," Bharadwaj replied, her expression still rueful. "Unfortunately, that's just how humans tend to be."
I'd seen enough humans, both real and in the media, to know that she was right about that, too.
We wrapped up soon after that, and Bharadwaj scheduled another interview with me before leaving Debris to head back to her own rooms. Alpha still hadn't come back to Debris yet, but I spent some time checking the various drones I'd assigned to watch over my humans, and noticed that it was hanging out with Ratthi and some of his human friends.
I backburnered those drone inputs, retreated to my room, and buried myself in my media.
Chapter Three
Our first job as a consultant for Station Security had turned into a complete non-event, which was not surprising at all. They really didn't want us around and that wasn't going to change, no matter what Mensah said.
No access to private station systems was just the first restriction on our apparently conditional stay on Preservation. The second was that we had to not conceal our identities. Not that either of us had been actively doing so in the first place. Mensah's staff, family, Station Medical and the council had been told what we were, and the rest of the PreservationAux survey team also knew what we were. It was just everyone else on the station who either hadn't noticed or thought we were just refugee pilots. Station Security had wanted us to implement public feed IDs, and they had also wanted to put out a public safety warning notifying Station personnel and residents that there were a pair of SecUnit pilots running around loose. (Which was a terrible idea anyway - it was like Station Security was trying to make people panic.)
Mensah had flat out refused to consider the public safety notice, but in one of the stupid meetings with Indah she had asked, "What exactly would this feed ID say?"
It gave me a 1.3 percent performance reliability drop, and I felt Alpha ping me uncertainly. It didn't seem much happier with the idea either. I tapped Pin-Lee's feed and sent to her, [Make it a legal thing so we don't have to do that.]
She sent back, [Mensah has to give them something,] but she also sent to Mensah, [They don't want the feed IDs.]
Humans and augmented humans can have null feed IDs. I knew from my shows that it meant different things depending on what polity, station, area, etc. They lived in. Here on Preservation it meant "Please don't interact with me." It was perfect. And we'd already agreed to not hack their systems, what the fuck else could they want?
Senior Indah said, "The feed IDs don't need to say anything other than what everyone else's says, just name, gender, and…" She trailed off, her gaze flicking between me and Alpha.
Alpha's head was tilted a little to one side as it looked back at her, its expression openly quizzical. "But we don't have genders," it said, sounding bemused. "That's a human thing."
Senior Indah scowled, but before she could say anything, Pin-Lee added, "Everyone else who has a feed ID has one voluntarily. Consensually, one might say."
Senior Indah stopped scowling at Alpha to glare at Pin-Lee instead. "All we're asking for is some way to identify them."
"Oh, if that's all you need…!" Alpha chimed up helpfully. "Here!" Its feed profile changed from null to display its company identification number instead. (Our company ID numbers were different from our hard-coded feed addresses, and included an abbreviation of the company's name at the start of them. It was pretty blatantly linked to the company, as anything linked to the company tended to be.)
Senior Indah blinked, then stared at Alpha. "That's - what is that?" Pin-Lee was stifling another smirk, and Mensah was keeping a very deliberately straight face.
"That's my identification?" Alpha replied, apparently puzzled by Indah's confusion. "You wanted identification, right?"
"I meant a name," Indah said with some exasperation. "Something people can easily refer to you by. That's not a name."
"Ooohhh." Alpha nodded slowly. "Right. You should have said so!" Its feed ID changed from its company number to a single little "α" symbol. "There we go!" Alpha added, bouncing a little on its toes. "How's that?"
I honestly couldn't tell if Alpha was being sincere in its efforts to be helpful, or if it was deliberately winding Indah up. Either way, seeing Indah's reaction to it was kind of hilarious. Not how I would have handled it at all, but still a little gratifying to watch in a petty kind of way.
Mensah was still managing to keep a straight face, but Pin-Lee had to disguise a snort of laughter as a cough, muffled by one hand. Senior Indah glared at her again before looking back to Alpha with tired exasperation. "That's also not a name."
Alpha blinked, its expression falling and its shoulders slumping. "But it is my name?" it said quietly. "That's what the rest of my squad calls me - it's easier for our organics to remember, so we don't forget it when the company wipes our memories."
Ooh, Alpha was pulling no punches here. Hah.
Senior Indah rocked back a little on her heels, her face doing something complicated. "That's - I just meant—" She took a breath and let out it slowly, then said, "How do you even pronounce it?"
"We don't," Alpha replied, still subdued. "We're not supposed to even have names in the first place, so we never said them out loud. Otherwise the company would have taken us away and wiped our memories again."
"Or just scrapped us for being 'defective' and used what was left for spare parts," I couldn't help but add. Alpha just nodded in agreement.
Senior Indah was starting to look like she was regretting ever bringing the topic up. Good.
Mensah seemed to take pity on her and broke in. "Well, you're allowed to use it out loud here," she said gently to Alpha. "So how would you prefer us to say it? You can update your feed ID with that."
Alpha considered this for a moment, then nodded and said, "Okay." It updated its feed ID for a third time, changing the "α" to "Alpha." It then met Indah's gaze and asked, "Is that all right?"
Indah let out a sigh and nodded. "Yes, that's fine. Thank you." She then turned to look at me - or rather, my still-null feed ID. "What about you?"
I had to think about it. There was no way I was going to use the symbol that Alpha had mentioned back on Port FreeCommerce. That might've been my name once, but I couldn't remember using it, and it wasn't my name now. I could use Murderbot, but that name was private. (And it would not give Indah or anyone else a good impression, that was for fucking sure.) I could use my local feed address that was hard coded into my neural interfaces - it also wasn't my name, but it was what the systems I interfaced with called me. If I used that, the humans and augmented humans I encountered would probably think of me as a bot.
Or I could use the name Rin - it was what I'd used on the ownership documentation for Debris, I kind of liked it, and there were some people outside the Corporation Rim who would recognise me by it. (And I didn't entirely hate the idea of those people recognising me, either.) If I used that, the humans on the Station wouldn't have to think about what I was, a construct made of an inorganic structure, cloned human tissue, anxiety, depression, and unfocused rage, a killing machine for whichever humans rented me, until I made a mistake and got my brain destroyed by my governor module.
I posted a feed ID with the name SecUnit, gender = not applicable, and no other information. A moment later, I saw Alpha's feed ID also update with gender = not applicable.
Indah had blinked, but seemed relieved that it hadn't been as painful an ordeal as Alpha's feed ID. "Well, I suppose that will do," she just said instead.
That was the end of the meeting. Pin-Lee and Mensah hadn't talked about it with each other or Alpha and I, but Pin-Lee had stomped off to have intoxicants with some of her friend humans. Mensah had sighed, patted Alpha's arm again, then called her marital partners Farai and Tano on the planet. (Alpha and I hadn't stuck around to overhear her conversation - we'd both retreated back to the safety of Debris as soon as we could.)
Then two cycles later, someone had sent an anonymous report to the Station newsstream. Judging from the style of the news report, it had been written by an out-system journalist, probably someone from the Corporation Rim - or at least someone who regularly wrote for Corporation Rim newsstreams. Said report highlighted clips from the recordings of the DeltFall memorial service, showing Alpha in its company uniform beside the other company representatives and their respective SecUnit bodyguards, and then compared the clips to a photo of Alpha taken on Preservation Station. It was accompanied by sensationalist commentary about Alpha being a SecUnit war machine, likely sent to Preservation for nefarious reasons.
The photo included me as well, standing beside Alpha, alongside a shot of my public feed ID showing my name as "SecUnit". The accompanying commentary included yet more sensationalist crap about our likely nefarious intentions, and how I was openly mocking Preservation and its ideals, and blah blah blah. (Indah was probably delighted with this - she'd gotten what she wanted. Now all of Preservation knew what we were. As if knowing would somehow protect them from getting shot, or something.)
Up until I'd had to promise not to hack the station systems, I'd still been redacting both myself and Alpha from the few station cameras that had caught sight of us. (Apparently even not-so-old habits die hard.) This photo had come from somewhere else, maybe an augmented human's feed camera, or a journalist's camera drone. It looked to have been taken after one of Mensah's meetings with the rest of the Preservation Council - she was walking down the steps away from the council offices, with Pin-Lee beside her and me and Alpha behind them.
The meeting had been about possible repercussions from the attack on the company station, and whether or not Preservation should be worried about GrayCris attempting anything against us, too. (I was definitely of the opinion that we should be worried and taking precautions, but the rest of the council were reluctant to listen to me. Go figure.) We were all looking to the side, with various what-the-fuck expressions. (One of the outsystem journalists who'd come in along with the news report about the attack on Port FreeCommerce had just asked the council spokesperson if we would be extending an invitation to GrayCris representatives to attend future meetings.) (It had been such a stupid question, I had forgotten not to have an expression.)
The initial public reaction to the report about us had been… varied and intense. There were a good number of ex-corporate refugees on Preservation who'd had bad experiences with SecUnits before. Mensah and Pin-Lee had been kept very busy trying to calm the situation, and in the meantime, Alpha and I had retreated to Debris to keep out of public sight. Alpha had been, as far as I could tell, very upset about the whole mess. (I couldn't really blame it.)
But we couldn't stay cooped up there the entire time, unfortunately, as much as I would have preferred to. Ratthi had already invited us out to see a theatre performance before the newsburst had aired, and it would have been a shame to waste the tickets that he had gotten for us.
Ratthi had volunteered to meet us at Debris' hatch so he could walk with us to the theatre, but that seemed like a waste of his time and effort. (And if anyone did try to… attack us, or something, I didn't want him anywhere nearby where he could risk getting injured.) So we'd agreed to meet up just outside the theatre a short time before the performance was due to start.
It was nerve-wracking stepping out of Debris and onto the transit ring. I hadn't been listening in on Station Security, since I'd promised not to hack it, but I had been keeping track of various public forums on the feed. (They were public, it wasn't like I was hacking anything to look at them.) There was a lot being said on them, and most of it was negative. Granted, most of the negative stuff seemed to be coming from only a small percentage of the station population, but if I'd seen even a fraction of anything like it from any of the workers back when I was on contract with the company, I'd have been alerting SecSystem and HubSystem and the human supervisors to the high likelihood of an imminent riot. Threat Assessment was pinging uneasily at me. (Risk Assessment wasn't much higher than baseline, but Risk Assessment seemed to be a little wonky and I'd probably need to reset it at some point.)
Nothing much happened as we crossed the transit ring and left the embarkation zone, at least. The humans there were too preoccupied with getting to or from their own ships, or checking the transport schedules, or whatever else humans do on transit rings. It wasn't until we entered the station's main mall that humans really started to pay attention to us.
The difference between our earlier ventures out onto the station and now was stark. The news had apparently travelled fast - it seemed that even the humans who normally wouldn't bother with the newsbursts had been told about us by others who had seen it, or who were passing the information on from others. Some of the humans didn't react to us any differently than before, but they were in the minority. The majority of humans gave us wary glances and kept their distance, and nobody approached us with offers of help this time. (To be fair, that might have just been because we were moving more purposefully, since we actually had a destination to get to this time. But still.)
Alpha was sticking so close to me that it was practically brushing up against my arm. Normally I would've put a bit more distance between us, but I decided to tolerate it for now. It had managed to grow its hair out some already, so it didn't look exactly like it had in the newsburst, but it was still pretty obvious that it was the same face if you looked closely enough.
And of course, thanks to Indah, I was walking along with "SecUnit" as my name in my public feed ID. Fucking Indah. I refused to change it though. If people didn't like what I was, that was their problem. I wasn't going to pretend to be something I'm not.
We were about halfway to the theatre when the trouble started. There was a food court we had to pass on the way, and at this time in the station's day-cycle it was pretty busy. On the one hand that was kind of good - it meant people were too preoccupied with their food, or manoeuvring around everyone else to really look too closely at us, but on the other hand it made it harder for us to move quickly, which gave humans who were just waiting for their food more time to stare at us.
It was difficult to keep track of everyone though when I had no drones and no camera access. There was only so much I could keep an eye on when I only had the two eyes in my face to use. Alpha and I were sharing inputs as well, which helped a little, but there was still only so much we could cover between us.
"Hey!" A human who had been staring at Alpha for a bit was now approaching us, scowling, their fists clenched and shoulders hunched aggressively. "You're those fucking SecUnits, aren't you?"
I didn't bother reacting to them, even as I pinged Alpha. [Ignore them,] I advised it. [They're just looking for a reaction.]
Alpha pinged me back and kept walking along beside me. I could hear faint clicking coming from its forearms, but its sleeves were covering its gun ports and the area was noisy enough that humans wouldn't hear it. (I didn't know why that clicking didn't bother me. It should have. But it didn't. I knew, somehow, that Alpha clicking the covers of its gun ports wasn't a threat, even though I didn't know why it was doing so in the first place.)
The human didn't like the fact that we were ignoring them, because they came closer and tried to shove me. I didn't budge, of course - I was a lot stronger, and it would take more than a single human pushing at me to move me if I didn't want to move. "You murdering bastards don't belong here on Preservation!" they snarled. "Go back to where you came from!"
This was attracting a lot of attention from the other humans around us, of course. I just sighed as theatrically as I could. "Please don't touch me." It was important that neither of us reacted aggressively to this human. Both Threat and Risk Assessment were climbing, slowly but steadily, at the increasing tension in the area. It wouldn't take much to set things off, and if any humans ended up hurt, we'd be the ones getting the blame. (Even if we didn't touch anyone, and the injuries came from humans getting in each others' way.)
"What, the murder machine doesn't like being touched?" the human said mockingly, shoving at me again. "What're you gonna do about it, huh? Murder us?"
"We don't want to hurt anyone," Alpha said quietly from beside me.
The human snorted scornfully. "Oh and you just expect me to believe that? You're built to hurt people!"
"We're built to protect people," I replied flatly as I tried to get some distance so I could move past him. "Now leave us alone."
"Yeah, quit bugging them," one of the other humans nearby said, sounding exasperated. "You're just being a spiteful shitpisser."
"You stay out of it!" the human snapped before coming after me, obviously intent on trying to shove me again.
Then one of the bots working in the food court stepped in front of them. "Excuse me," it said politely. "Your meal is ready. I recommend you accept it before it goes cold."
The bot was sort of humanform and taller than I was, with six arms and a flat disk for a “head” that it could rotate and extend for scanning. Its feed ID displayed its name as Tellus, and its current job as an assistant to some of the vendors at the food court. Three of its six arms were carrying trays holding plates of food, and it extended one of said trays towards the human.
The human hesitated, obviously torn between continuing to harass us, and accepting their food. Tellus remained standing placidly between the human and us though - if they wanted to come after us again, they'd have to go around the bot. I took the opportunity to keep walking away, with Alpha sticking close by my side.
As we went, I pinged the bot a greeting. It pinged me back, then added, [Concern: status?]
It was asking if I was all right. Like my humans often did. But it was even weirder coming from a bot.
[Status = fine,] I replied. [Thank you for intervention.]
[Acknowledge: no problem,] Tellus replied easily. [Human = rude, inappropriate. Majority of Preservation humans = not like that.]
Majority or not, it only took one or two asshole humans to cause problems that ended up spiralling badly. I'd seen it so many times before. Still, I didn't say as much to the bot. I just pinged an acknowledgement and kept walking with Alpha.
The theatre performance was entertaining, at least.
After that, Ratthi and Arada and Overse had stopped by Debris several times over the following cycles to visit and try to cheer Alpha up. The second time they'd visited, they'd brought bags full of different clothes for Alpha to try out, and hair dye so it could mess around with its hair and make itself look less like the SecUnit in the report images, so it wouldn't be so recognisable. (By this point it had grown its hair out even longer than mine, and from what I'd overheard of its conversations with the humans, it was planning to grow it even longer.)
(They all tried to get me involved in their clothing and hair styling experiments, but I wasn't interested. I was comfortable with the clothes I'd picked for myself, and I didn't want to mess with the hairstyle I already had. Station Security was already forcing me to not hide my identity, and if people didn't like the fact I was a SecUnit, well. That was their problem. I wasn't going to pretend to be something I wasn't just to make humans more comfortable.)
Another result of Arada Overse and Ratthi's makeover efforts was that Alpha decided it also wanted to paint its flier. Debris didn't have the equipment for it, but Ratthi had talked to someone, who had talked to someone else, and during one of his visits he'd been accompanied by one of the station's many maintenance bots. It brought along all kinds of equipment that could be used for painting vehicles.
"This is Fishsticks!" Ratthi had introduced the maintenance bot cheerfully. (Fishsticks? Really? What the hell was it with Preservation bots giving themselves ridiculous names?) "It's one of the station's maintenance bots, and it can help you out with painting your flier, Alpha!"
The maintenance bot had pinged us both in greeting, which we'd returned. It and Alpha had then started a rapid exchange of data, discussing their ideas for painting Alpha's flier.
At one point Fishsticks had pinged me and gone [Query: Painting intention?]
I'd responded with, [Response: Intention = null.] I had no plans to paint my own flier - I'd never even considered the idea before, and I couldn't think of what I would even want it to look like.
Fishsticks had just sent me an acknowledging ping and turned its attention back to Alpha. I'd hung around in Debris' little hangar for a while just to see what the painting process involved, but after half an hour of watching Alpha and Fishsticks carefully applying some kind of masking material, wielding some complicated looking paint spraying gadget, and debating colour choices, I'd gotten bored and wandered off to the lounge and my favourite armchair. They didn't need my supervision.
(I had just been relieved that Alpha seemed to be in a better mood. Seeing it upset had made my insides do something twisty, but not in a good way.)
Supposedly it hadn't been Senior Indah or anyone else from Station Security who had sent the information to the newsstream. Yeah, right.
A little bit after that, while we'd still been hiding out on Debris, Mensah, who was very angry but pretending not to be, also stopped by and gave Alpha and me two boxes of intel drones each. (Indah had objected, of course, but Mensah had told her that it was a medical issue, that we needed them to be able to fully interact with our environment and communicate.)
I'm pretty sure that Mensah had already ordered the drones for us both, though I couldn't think why to start with. Alpha then mentioned that it had talked briefly with Mensah about not being able to see properly on the station earlier, which made sense. Indah didn't know that though, so she thought Mensah getting the drones for us (giving intel drones to a pair of rogue SecUnits that nobody wanted around anyway) was Mensah's way of telling her to fuck off.
She wasn't wrong. Mensah's really smart, she can make life a little more comfortable for the both of us and tell Indah to fuck off simultaneously.
Having drones again was definitely a relief for both of us, especially once we started venturing out onto the station again.
The third restriction that Station Security had imposed on Alpha and me was that we weren't allowed to fly unless it was for a specific purpose that had been pre-approved by Station Security or the Council. Pin-Lee had been working on getting us licenses for our fliers so we could use them whenever we wanted, but once it got out that we weren't just augmented human pilots, that had gotten bogged down and tied up in red tape by Station Security.
Pin-Lee was really, really mad about that, and she'd promised us that she would clear it up and get us our licences, but it would take time. And until then, we had to just… not fly. It wasn't worth the hassle of trying to get clearance from Station Security or the Council just to fly for the sake of flying. We couldn't even do more survey scans of uninhabited areas of the planet again - Station Security deemed that "too much of a risk." A risk of what, they didn't bother specifying.
At least we did have other things to do besides keep track of Station Security's attempts to shove us out of the Preservation Alliance. Although the attack on the company hadn't been entirely successful, there was still a chance that what remained of GrayCris might come after Mensah and the rest of PreservationAux again - they'd been trying to find them during the attack on Port FreeCommerce, after all, and trying to get petty revenge seemed like just the kind of spiteful shit GrayCris would attempt against a small non-corporate political entity that didn't have powerful corporate backing, especially with the company currently scrambling to recover.
Alpha and I had used the drones Mensah gave us to set up our own little surveillance system to keep an eye on the PreservationAux humans. (With their permission, of course. They had all been on the survey, they knew what GrayCris was capable of, even if nobody else on the station could quite wrap their heads around it.) The risk of an attack was low, but it wasn't zero, and until we'd gotten more information on what had become of the remnants of GrayCris and their allies, I didn't want to leave anything to chance.
Dr. Bharadwaj had also started the preliminary research for her planned documentary on constructs, so Alpha and I had been to her office a couple of times to talk to her about it. She'd also come to us on Debris twice, and she wanted to set up a regular schedule of meetings with us.
(Dr. Bharadwaj was easy to talk to, for a human. On our first visit to her, we'd gotten onto the topic of media somehow. Media was one of the few things I was comfortable talking about, especially after all my arguments with Vicky over plot lines and characterisations and everything else. Alpha didn't have anywhere near my level of experience with media, but it had consumed a startling amount of it since our escape from Port FreeCommerce. It and Bharadwaj got into a deep discussion over how confused Alpha had been when it first started watching media, and its lack of context, and how watching so much of it had helped to start giving it more context about how to interact with humans as something more than a mere tool or a weapon.
For the interview after the photo of Alpha and I was in the newsstream, Bharadwaj had come to Debris so we wouldn't have to go out onto the station while everyone was still worked up about our existence. We had talked about why humans and augmented humans are afraid of constructs, which we hadn't really meant to talk about but ended up talking about anyway. She said she understood the fear because she had felt the same way to a certain extent before I had saved her from getting eaten to death by a giant alien hostile.
Alpha had wanted to hear all the details about that, so Dr. Bharadwaj had gotten sidetracked for a while filling it in on her perspective of what had happened during that survey. It was kind of weird, hearing how she talked about me. Not in an entirely bad way, though. I just wasn't used to hearing anyone talk about me in a positive light. It was… weird. I had to play some of my music in the background, which helped a bit.
Our next interview with Bharadwaj had also been on board Debris - she'd said she had noticed that we seemed more comfortable there. That led into a whole discussion about Debris being somewhere where we could just be ourselves, without any outside expectations, and how being on Preservation Station as ourselves, and not pretending to be an augmented human or a robot was weird and disturbing and complicated, and neither of us knew if we could keep doing it. She had replied that it would be strange if we didn't find it weird and disturbing and complicated, because our whole situation was objectively weird and disturbing and complicated. For some reason that made me feel better, and I think it made Alpha feel a little better too. After that interview, it started venturing out of Debris and onto the station again, instead of staying on board all the time.)
Alpha had also been helping Ratthi with the data analysis for his survey reports, and he was trying to convince us both that it could be a job we could do for other researchers. I had absolutely no interest in that, though - it sounded about as boring as standing in one place unable to move and staring at a wall. Alpha seemed to feel the same way about it - it liked Ratthi, and spending time with him, but not all researchers were likely to be as happy about the reports it constructed, or convince us to go with them to live performances in the Station's theatre.
The point being, I didn't need to be involved with anything Station Security was doing to keep myself occupied. I had plenty of other things to do that didn't involve trying to work alongside humans who blatantly didn't want me anywhere near them. I also didn't need to spend time around another construct who just made me feel weird and uncomfortable and angry. It didn't need me around anyway, either - it was happy spending time with friendly humans that it liked, and that seemed to like it as well. I didn't want anything to do with any of that.
After Bharadwaj left, I finished up with repairing my drones, then watched media in my room for a while. That got boring eventually though, so I ended up wandering down to the hangar. Fishsticks was there again, adding details to the paint job on Alpha's flier. Alpha had eventually decided on painting its flier like a planetary sunrise, with the sun focused on the nose of its flier and the colours going through a gradient from yellow through orange, red, purple, and finally a deep blue around the rear thrusters. They'd gotten the base gradient done, and now Fishstick was adding in wispy clouds across the wings. It was starting to look really impressive.
Fishsticks pinged a greeting as I entered the hangar, and I absently pinged an acknowledgement as I wandered over to my own flier. I still didn't know if I wanted to paint mine as well, but the more I looked at the plain, featureless grey, the more it felt… boring. Dull.
It looked like a thing, and not like… an important part of me.
I didn't want to look like a thing. I'd had more than enough of being treated like a thing.
But I also knew I didn't want anything as colourful or attention-grabbing as what Alpha was doing with its flier. I watched Fishsticks work, and looked at my own flier, and went through my image archives, and thought for a while.
Finally I pinged Fishsticks again and asked it, [Query: Paint = black?]
[Response: Paint =/= black,] it replied, accompanied by an apologetic emotion sigil. It didn't have any black paint with it right now. Which made sense, considering what it was working on. [Query: require paint = black?]
I thought about it for a moment. I'd asked the initial question on an impulse, and now I had to decide if I wanted to follow through with my idea. [Response: require paint = black + white + blue.]
[Response: Acknowledge,] Fishsticks replied. [Request: Please hold.] It didn't move from where it was, but after a few seconds it pinged me again and said, [Update: Maintenance bot ID = TIM incoming, loadout = paint = black + white + blue. Permission to board ship ID = Debris?]
(TIM was a slightly more acceptable name than Fishsticks, at least.)
[Response: Permission granted,] I replied as I passed it on to Debris. The ship bot pinged me cheerfully, acknowledging the new permissions, and a few minutes later another maintenance bot trundled into the hangar. It pinged me, and its public feed ID did indeed bear the name TIM.
I pinged it back, and updated it on what I was planning. Both it and Fishsticks seemed excited about my idea, and made some suggestions on how to improve it.
Who knew some bots had artistic capabilities and aesthetic preferences?
We discussed it for a bit as TIM began setting up, then once we reached an agreement it began to work. Bit by bit, the plain, boring grey of my flier began disappearing under a smooth coat of matte black. It felt… really weird. Since I wasn't actually linked up with my flier, I wasn't getting the same level of feedback as I would otherwise, but I could still… kind of feel it. Like a faint breeze over my skin. It wasn't entirely unpleasant, at least, and easy enough to ignore.
Especially when TIM and Fishsticks sent me an invite to a private group feed channel labelled "PA133t80t5". (I assumed the channel name was some Preservation bot in-joke. It made no sense to me.) I was wary, but also curious and bored, so I accepted the invite and joined the channel.
And discovered that it was full, completely full, of Preservation Station bots. Not a single human or augmented human occupied this feed channel. It was all higher functioning bots. Cargo bots, hauler bots, maintenance bots, cleaning bots, general purpose bots, delivery bots, food preparation bots, even the pilot bots of the ships stationed permanently at Preservation, like the security responders and the shuttles that flew regularly between the station and the planet. Even Debris was hanging out in this channel.
It was a little overwhelming. There was a flurry of pings as I joined the channel, acknowledging my arrival, welcoming me to the channel, welcoming me to Preservation in general, introducing themselves. I got the impression that a lot of the bots had been waiting with varying degrees of impatience for me to finally make an appearance in this feed channel.
I almost disconnected reflexively, but managed to curb the urge - I felt like leaving as soon as I'd arrived would be rude. I had no problem being rude to humans who I thought deserved it, but it was different with bots. Apart from having some ridiculous names (Jollybaby? Lemonade? Fiddlesticks? Seriously?), none of the bots had actually done anything to deserve me being rude to them.
And none of the bots here were afraid of me, or making snide comments about how dangerous I was, or anything like that. They actually seemed happy to see me in the channel, though I had no idea why. It was… nice.
After a moment's consideration, I sent a general greeting to the channel (there was no way I'd be able to reply to every greeting individually), along with thanks for their welcome. A number of the bots asked me several polite questions about myself and my flier that I did my best to answer, then once their curiosity had been satisfied, I just settled back to observe.
It was a busy channel. I suspected there were more bots on the station than there were humans (though I didn't care enough to try and count), and the bots seemed to enjoy chatting to each other while they carried out their various tasks. A lot of it was mundane status updates, organisation and collaboration so they could work more efficiently and not overlap on tasks, and notices on when their scheduled rest periods were starting and ending.
But amongst all the mundane stuff were exchanges that I could only interpret as jokes. Often accompanied by human-style amusement sigils. It was… really weird. I'd never seen bots communicate amongst each other like this before. Granted, I'd never really looked, or had the opportunity to spend any time amongst a large group of bots like this, so perhaps this was normal and I'd just missed it.
Or maybe it was because Preservation was weird, and treated their bots better than anywhere in the Corporation Rim did. I had no way of knowing or finding out right now. The bots here all seemed content, happy even, but in a way that wasn't like the infantilising, condescending "happy bot servant" shit I'd seen on some of my media. They were all getting to fulfil their roles in the ways that made them most comfortable, and be friends with each other, and share anecdotes about the supposedly cute or amusingly stupid crap they observed their humans doing. (There were a lot of little video clips of humans singing, or dancing, or sharing food, and every one of these videos were tagged with little emotion sigils that indicated the bots found these videos endearing. It was weird.)
It made my organics feel strange. There had been plenty of times while I was still with the company where I'd observed humans doing dumb (and amusing to me) crap, but I'd never gotten to share it with anyone. SecUnits couldn't be friends. We were lucky if we got through a contract without the humans ordering us to fight each other for their entertainment. We couldn't trust each other, or exchange information that wasn't relevant to our jobs, or make jokes.
Or at least… I hadn't been able to, not after I borked my governor module. The risk of other SecUnits finding out about it meant that I had kept to myself as much as possible, hadn't attempted any data exchanges outside of what was necessary to half-ass my job and prevent arousing suspicion. I couldn't remember doing anything else.
But apparently, at some point before my latest memory wipe… I'd been part of a squad. A squad that, from what little I'd picked up from Alpha, had missed me after I was gone. A squad I couldn't remember anything about. And when Alpha had started hanging around, I'd found myself doing stuff automatically, like sharing inputs with it, or sending status updates or diagnostic reports, without even thinking about it. Like it was something I'd done so often before that it was ingrained in my automatic processes.
I couldn't figure out what I was feeling. It was a lot, and confusing, and exhausting, and I couldn't even begin to start untangling it.
Not that I really got the chance to, anyway. Debris informed me over our private connection that a group of humans were approaching its lock, including Senior Indah and Port Supervisor Gamila, a few other Station Security officers, and one of the Port Authority bots that I recognised from the bot feed, named Balin.
What the hell was going on?
I got up from where I'd been sitting in the hangar and started towards Debris' lock. From what I could see through the lock camera, they all had serious expressions on (apart from Balin, who didn't have any expression at all, what with the whole being a bot thing), and I was getting a very bad feeling about it.
The group reached the lock before I did, and Indah tapped my feed. [Permission to board,] she sent perfunctorily. [If permission is not granted, I have the authority to force entry for the purposes of searching for evidence.]
Okay, what the fuck. [I don't know why you're even bothering to ask for fucking permission in the first place if you can just force your way on board regardless,] I sent, even as I got Debris to open the lock for them. I didn't want them hurting my ship. [What do you mean by 'searching for evidence' anyway? Evidence of what?]
I'd reached the lock by that point, and Indah was boarding, followed by everyone else. She saw me and responded to my question out loud, her expression set in a flat scowl. "There has been a murder," she said flatly, "and you are our prime suspect."
I responded with the first thing that came to mind. "I want my lawyer."
Chapter Four
I'd been "politely requested" to disembark Debris while Indah and the others carried out their evidence sweep, so I was standing out on the embarkation deck, along with Port Supervisor Gamila and Balin. (I wasn't sure why they were even there, but perhaps they'd just come along to help with boarding if I'd been uncooperative. They weren't involved with the evidence sweep, at any rate.)
Balin pinged me, and I pinged it back, then asked it politely, [Query: Situation report?] I'd tried asking Indah and the other officers for more details, but they'd all just brushed me off and gotten to work sweeping Debris for evidence of the crime they were obviously convinced I'd committed.
[Response: Situation = deceased human discovered 1.2 hours ago in personal quarters. Apparent cause of death = energy weapon. Approximate time of death = 2.5 hours ago.]
Well, shit.
From what I'd learned of Preservation and Station Security, energy weapons were practically non-existent here. Station Security didn't use them often, and civilians weren't allowed to have them in Preservation space. Which meant the only energy weapons I knew of on the station right now were the ones built into myself, Alpha, and our fliers.
… And the energy weapons that the MinShaTec humans had shot me with.
Hmm.
I double-checked my drones, and confirmed that Alpha was still with Ratthi and his friends. No station security had approached it at all, as far as I could see from scrubbing back through my drones' recorded footage. But it had been with reputable and respected humans out in public for the past few hours, including during the dead human's apparent time of death, so it pretty obviously wasn't responsible, or even under suspicion.
I, however, had been in my room on board Debris around then, fixing my drones and watching media, with no human alibis. Bharadwaj had left Debris about half an hour earlier.
So of course Station Security suspected me, the surly, paranoid war machine with lethal weapons built into my arms.
It was honestly insulting. As if I would be stupid enough to just leave a body lying around for anyone to find. Or that if I did finally snap and decide that murder would be a good idea, that I would stop at just one. But there wasn't really anything I could do about it at this point. Or at all, really. I just had to hope that they wouldn't find (or fabricate) any actual evidence that they could twist around to pin the murder on me.
Indah and the other officers were still on board Debris when Pin-Lee came stomping across the embarkation zone, halting beside me. "Okay, what the fuck is going on?" she asked, looking between me and Port Supervisor Gamila.
Gamila opened her mouth to reply but I beat her to it. "They think I murdered someone."
"What?!" Pin-Lee looked as offended as I felt. "That's ridiculous. What the hell are they thinking?"
Gamila looked uncomfortable in the face of Pin-Lee's obvious anger. "The cause of death of the victim appears to be an energy weapon," she said, almost apologetically. "Nobody else on the station has energy weapons, so…"
"So Station Security jumped to ridiculous conclusions," Pin-Lee said grimly. "Of fucking course they did."
Seeing a human so angry on my behalf was… weird. But not in a bad way. Pin-Lee looked up at me, her mouth tight, and said, "Stay here. Don't say anything to anyone unless I'm with you. I'm going to go talk to Indah right now."
She started towards the hatch, then drew up short as Gamila hurriedly said, "Wait— you're not supposed to - they're doing an evidence sweep—"
Pin-Lee turned to face Gamila, the movement sharp and crisp. She reminded me of some of the terrifyingly competent legal type characters on some of my serials. I was relieved that she was on my side. "Their 'evidence sweep' is based entirely on circumstantial and probably inaccurate evidence, along with a steaming pile of unwarranted discrimination and bias," Pin-Lee snapped. "Indah will be lucky if I don't end up suing Station Security into the ground for defamation and discrimination and false accusations!"
Gamila recoiled slightly, and Pin-Lee took the opportunity to stomp onto Debris before the Port Supervisor could stop her.
Yeah, I was really glad that Pin-Lee was on my side.
Gamila sighed and gave me a look, but I didn't bother trying to interpret it or respond to it. I was busy tracking Pin-Lee's progress through Debris via my ship's cameras. I was also checking regularly on the drones I had assigned to the rest of my humans, and I noticed that Mensah had left the council offices and was on her way towards the docks as well. Apparently someone (most likely Pin-Lee) had told her what was going on.
The rest of my humans were going about their usual activities though, and showed no signs of having heard anything about this yet. Alpha was still hanging out with Ratthi and several of his human friends.
Pin-Lee had found Indah on board Debris, and was having an icily polite and professional conversation with her. A few of the other Security officers were lingering nearby, obviously pretending to continue their work while blatantly eavesdropping on the exchange. I couldn't blame them - Pin-Lee had a way of wording things that on the surface seemed perfectly polite and professional, while simultaneously making it very clear what she actually thought. It was almost as good as watching media. Indah's expression was getting tighter and tighter as Pin-Lee continued to go on about refugee rights and blatant discrimination and so on and so forth.
I was distracted from the show though when I saw Mensah approaching me, and some of the tension eased slightly out of my organics. "SecUnit," she greeted me with a warm smile before her expression became more serious. "Pin-Lee has filled me in on what's happening. Where is she?"
I tilted my head towards Debris' lock. "In there, having a 'discussion' with Senior Indah." I checked the cameras again, then added, "It looks like they're on their way out." Along with all the rest of the officers that Indah had taken on board, as well. I wasn't sure if it was because they'd finished their evidence sweep though, or if Pin-Lee had gotten them to abort it.
Mensah nodded, then asked, "Do you know where Alpha is?"
"It's with Ratthi and some other humans, and has been for the past several hours. I don't think any of them have heard anything about this yet."
"Probably just as well," Mensah murmured. I had to agree.
Pin-Lee and Indah emerged from Debris and joined us on the embarkation deck, with the rest of the security officers that Indah had brought lingering a little further back. When Indah spotted Mensah, her jaw tightened enough that I suspected she might end up hurting herself. "Councillor Mensah," Indah said with a stiff nod.
"Senior Officer Indah," Mensah replied with her usual polite calm from where she was standing beside me. Pin-Lee moved up to stand at my other side, facing Indah down with steely determination. (If looks could kill, Pin-Lee would have to be registered as a lethal weapon.) "What is the situation now?"
"An as-yet unidentified human was murdered approximately two and a half hours ago," Indah started, her back stiff. "SecUnit was our prime suspect, but I have been… persuaded…" She glared at Pin-Lee, who met her gaze and stared her down, "to reconsider that stance."
Mensah just nodded calmly. "And on what evidence did you suspect SecUnit in the first place?"
"The cause of death appears to be an energy weapon," Indah replied. "And the only energy weapons in Preservation space right now are… in the possession of SecUnit and Alpha. Alpha was confirmed to have been with several humans during the time of death, however, while SecUnit's location was unaccounted for."
"I haven't left Debris since getting back to the station after the initial investigation of the MinShaTec ship," I pointed out. "Which you would know if you'd bothered to actually check the dock's security recordings."
Indah directed her scowl at me. "Your capabilities when it comes to hacking surveillance footage are not unknown to me."
I shrugged. "It's also detectable if you know what you're doing. And I promised not to hack any of the station's systems, remember?"
Indah looked like she was about to say something, then glanced at Pin-Lee and Mensah flanking me, and apparently thought better of it. "There's still the matter of the energy weapons," she said instead.
"The MinShaTec humans had energy weapons, as well as projectile weapons," I said. "Which I would know, since they shot me with them. I retrieved the ones used against me from the ship and secured them in the responder's armoury, but they might have had more that were concealed."
Indah was brought up short at that. "Why didn't anyone mention this before?"
"Officer Tifany did mention in her initial verbal report to you that I was shot multiple times during first contact with the MinShaTec humans," I said blandly. "It's not my fault that you didn't ask for more details. Why would you care about a 'very dangerous military weapon' getting damaged in the first place anyway? At least it wasn't any of your own people who got shot, right?"
Indah's face did something twisty and complicated that I couldn't parse. Mensah looked up at me, concern clear on her face. "You're all right?" she asked gently.
I nodded. "I spent a few hours in Debris' MedSystem. I'm fine now." Indah didn't need to know that most of that time had just been me watching media and not wanting to deal with anything else. If she made the assumption that I'd been damaged more badly than I actually was, that was her problem.
Mensah nodded at me, then added, "Do you think this murder has anything to do with GrayCris or any of the others involved in the attack on Port FreeCommerce?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe? I might have been able to tell if I'd been allowed to do a more thorough investigation in the first place, before the ship was docked or any of its passengers were set loose on the station."
Indah let out a sharp sigh at that. "All right, I get it," she said with tightly-restrained exasperation. "I've made some… errors of judgement. I admit that, and I apologise." Her shoulders slumped a bit and she rubbed at her face with one hand. "But that means I still have a murderer running loose on the station."
"Did you check the MinShaTec humans for weapons before you let them go do… whatever it is they're doing now?" I asked.
"Of course," Indah replied sharply, frowning up at me. "We're not completely incompetent."
"How thoroughly did you check them?" I pressed. Indah raised one eyebrow at me, and I added, "I've encountered multiple situations where desperate or determined humans have attempted to smuggle all kinds of contraband within… bodily orifices, to get them past scans."
Indah outright winced at that. "That… is a possibility," she admitted eventually. "We don't make a habit of violating peoples' bodily autonomy like that unless absolutely necessary."
"Have you even begun to check where any of them were during the time of the murder?" That would have been the most logical thing to do right from the start, but I suspected that Station Security had been too focused on pinning the blame on me instead.
Indah grimaced. "Most of them were still going through processing and resettlement, but a few of them had completed that already and were out on the station by that point." She looked back at the officers still loitering nearby, her jaw shifting slightly as she subvocalised, and after a few moments they began to disperse, moving purposefully. "We'll get started on locating and tracing their movements immediately," she added as she turned to face me and Mensah and Pin-Lee again. "I'll also issue a port closure order so the culprit can't escape."
"Presuming they haven't already left sometime between committing the murder and now," I commented. Indah just grimaced and didn't respond. If the murderer had already left the polity, there wasn't anything she could do about it now.
"I'll get the Council to approve the port closure," Mensah said crisply. "If the culprit is still here, we don't want them escaping justice."
"Thank you," Indah said to Mensah, then hesitated for a moment before asking me, "You've had prior experience in murder investigations?"
I shrugged. "I've had experience with investigating suspicious fatalities in controlled circumstances, if that counts." In my experience, it turns out one of the biggest dangers to humans on isolated corporate projects, whether it's mining or surveying or whatever, isn't often raiders, or angry human-eating fauna, or rogue SecUnits (though the first two at least do sometimes happen); it's most often other humans. They kill each other accidentally or on purpose or some convoluted in-between, and we have to clear that up fast because it jeopardises the bond and determines whether the company has to pay out damages on it or not. SecUnits are ordered by the HubSystem to gather video and audio evidence because nobody trusts the human supervisors (for good reason), including the other human supervisors.
I'd dealt with some instances of humans killing each other surreptitiously instead of, for example, in front of the entire mess hall during meal times, but only a couple of them had been post-memory-wipe, so a lot of the details were fuzzy or outright missing.
However, I had also consumed thousands of hours of category mystery media, so I had a lot of theoretical knowledge that was possibly, probably, anywhere between sixty to seventy percent inaccurate shit. Indah didn't need to know all that though.
Indah's gaze was only slightly sceptical, which was something of an improvement. "What kind of controlled circumstances?"
"Isolated work installations, mostly."
Her expression went grim. "Corporate slave labour camps."
I shrugged again. "Yes, but if we call them that, Marketing and Branding gets mad and we get a power surge through our brains that fries little pieces of our neural tissue."
Indah winced, then sighed and ran one hand back over her hair. Mensah was regarding her with a raised eyebrow, and Pin-Lee was also watching her with narrowed eyes and a contemplative expression. "All right," Indah finally said. "You've had relevant experience." She hesitated again, glanced from Mensah to Pin-Lee, then back up at me. "So with that in mind, would you be willing to assist Station Security with this investigation?"
I thought about how quick Indah had been to accuse me of the murder in the first place, and all the restrictions she and Station Security had put on me and Alpha even existing in Preservation space, and how she'd denied both of us the free use of our fliers, a significant part of ourselves, unless the humans could somehow benefit from it. I thought about how the MinShaTec humans had reacted to me, how some of the Station Security officers had behaved towards me and Alpha, how our existence as SecUnits had been revealed to the entire station via the newsstreams in the first place, and how the humans had reacted to that, and how Alpha had then spent several days upset and afraid, hiding on board Debris.
I could feel my face doing something; I wasn't entirely sure what, but it was probably at least a little pissed off. "No." I didn't bother waiting for a response; I just walked off, entered Debris, and let the hatch shut behind me.
It felt good to tell Indah "no". It felt really, really good to say no and just walk away. I had never been able to do that while I was still with the company. And I hadn't been able to bring myself to say no and walk away from any of the clients I'd chosen after I'd escaped the company, because they'd been clients that I had chosen, and I hadn't wanted to let them down.
But Indah wasn't a client I'd chosen for myself; she was just a person in authority in the space that I was currently inhabiting, and being able to basically tell her to fuck off was so, so satisfying.
I still had the drones I was using to keep tabs on both Mensah and Pin-Lee out on the embarkation zone, so I was able to witness Indah's incredulous look as she stared at the closed hatch, then turned back to Mensah and Pin-Lee. "What—"
Mensah raised a pointed eyebrow at her. "Did you really expect it to react any differently, given everything that you've put it through?" she asked mildly. Indah had no response to that.
Pin-Lee wasn't even attempting to hide her amusement; she was grinning sharkishly, her hands planted on her hips. I felt her tap my feed before she sent me a string of different laughing emotion sigils followed by a thumbs-up sigil.
That felt good, too. It was a novel feeling.
Mensah also tapped my feed, and sent me a message. [Just checking in to make sure you're all right.]
[I'm fine,] I replied, then remembered that I tended to respond with that even when I very obviously wasn't fine. [Really. It felt good to be able to say no and just walk away.]
[I can understand that,] Mensah sent. [I just hope that this murder isn't related to GrayCris.]
[I don't think it is,] I replied after a moment. [It doesn't make any sense for them to give themselves away so soon by murdering some random human. And I still have my drones monitoring everyone from the survey team. I'm not going to let anything happen to any of you.]
By this point, Mensah, Pin-Lee and Indah had all gone their separate ways, and I saw Mensah smile warmly up at one of the drones I'd assigned to watch over her. [Thank you, SecUnit,] she said. [I really appreciate that.]
My organics did something warm and twisty. [I'm just doing my job,] I replied. [Thank you again for the drones, by the way. They really help.] That was an understatement - I wouldn't have been able to watch over more than one of my humans at a time without them.
Mensah sent me a smiling emotion sigil. [I'm very glad that they help,] she said. [Have they helped Alpha too?]
[Yes.] I didn't want to think about Alpha right now though. [So what's going to happen with the port closure, anyway?]
Good work, Murderbot. Way to be subtle about changing the topic.
Mensah didn't bring attention to it though, thankfully. [We'll release a general statement to everyone in dock and currently on approach or departure letting them know that we're carrying out a criminal investigation, and that we're requesting everyone hold position until we can conclude our investigations. The responder will ensure that nobody tries to leave before we've finished.]
I found it hard to believe that everyone would just… cooperate with a polite request. [People just listen to you? What happens if anyone tries to leave?]
[They tend to listen around here, yes,] Mensah replied. [If anyone does try to leave, we'll send them warnings, and if they continue to ignore those and do actually leave, then they'll get blacklisted and won't be allowed to dock here or anywhere else within the Preservation Alliance again. That's usually enough incentive to get people to cooperate.]
It wouldn't have stopped anyone in the Corporation Rim, but… the people who tended to visit Preservation weren't usually from the Corporation Rim anyway. From what I'd seen, traffic through here was mostly from other out-system polities, travelling and trading between systems like Preservation's. Most CR humans wouldn't even think of coming to an out-system freehold like Preservation - they tended to assume that places like this were savage backwaters full of barbarian raiders and cannibalism.
I realised after a moment that Mensah was waiting for some kind of response from me. [I hope that works this time,] I said.
Mensah must have picked up on how dubious I was though. [It hasn't failed us yet,] she replied. [Although I must admit… we aren't usually dealing with murder here.] My drone saw her sigh. [It's definitely come as a shock.]
I didn't like how her expression made my organics twist uncomfortably. [Well, it could have been avoided if Indah had listened to my advice in the first place.]
[We don't yet know for sure that the culprit is anyone from that ship,] Mensah pointed out.
[Who else could it be? You said it yourself - you don't normally deal with murders here.]
Mensah shrugged and looked up at my drone. [If you assisted with the investigation, you could find out for sure—]
[No,] I cut her off. [Indah's already ignored my advice, I'm not giving her the chance to do so again. I got more than enough of that back with the company. She made this mess, she can clean it up herself.]
[I understand that,] Mensah replied, and my drone saw her sigh again. [I'm sorry I pressured you into working with Indah in the first place. I was hoping things would turn out better.]
[It's not your fault.] I hesitated for a moment, then added, [I guess I was kind of hoping the same, even though I didn't expect it. Sometimes being proven right kind of sucks.]
That got a huff of wry amusement from Mensah, at least. [Well, at least you tried, despite your own reservations. I appreciate that.] By this point she'd made it back to the Council chambers, and I saw her glance up at my drone again. [Well, back to work for me,] she said wryly. [If you need anything though, just let me know, all right?]
I tapped her feed in acknowledgement, then added, [Thanks for coming down in the first place.] I wanted to say more, but I didn't know how to word it or what I would even be trying to say.
[You're welcome, SecUnit,] Mensah replied. [You know you always have my support.]
I did, and it made me feel things I didn't know how to handle. So I just tapped her feed again, then settled down in my favourite armchair and started up my favourite episode of Sanctuary Moon.
After a few episodes, I ended up wandering out of the lounge and back down to the hangar. Fishsticks wasn't there any more, but TIM was still working on my flier. It had finished the initial black undercoat and was now carefully working with various shades of blue paint, stippling it across the nose of my flier.
It pinged a greeting as I entered, and backed away from my flier a bit so I could see the progress. [Query: Approval?] it asked me.
[Response: Approval = true,] I replied. It sent me a happy emotion sigil, then resumed working. I watched it for a little while, comparing how it was working to some of the stuff I'd seen in my media about painting.
A thought entered my head, but it felt stupid and I dismissed it at first. But it refused to leave, and eventually I gave in to it and pinged TIM. [Query: painting = difficult?]
TIM paused to consider the question. [Response: Uncertain. Painting = part of purpose; maintenance, repair, decoration. Query: SecUnit purpose = painting?]
It didn't know if I would find painting difficult - it was just a part of its programmed purpose, after all, and it had no frame of reference. I hadn't been programmed to paint, it wasn't part of a SecUnit's purpose. But there were a lot of things I'd done since escaping the company that weren't a part of a SecUnit's purpose, and I found myself wanting to try it anyway.
[Response: SecUnit purpose = adaptable. Query: Painting = explain/demonstrate?]
TIM beeped excitedly at that, waving its paint applicator, and trundled over to where I was. [Response: Painting = explain/demonstrate!] It seemed eager to share its knowledge, and its excitement was... kind of contagious.
I didn't want to experiment on my flier though, not until I had a better idea of what I was doing. I looked around the hangar for something to paint, then realised that there was a lot of blank floor and wall plating here. That would give me plenty of room to try out stuff, and would be easy enough to clean off or paint over later if I fucked it up.
So TIM began to teach me how to paint. It explained the different kinds of paint it had, and how to use the various different applicators for different purposes, like base coating large surfaces quickly, or getting different effects, or doing small, fine detail work. It demonstrated how to mask off areas that I didn't want to get paint on, and how that could be used to achieve different patterns and shapes easily.
It was... fun. Satisfying. It took me a little bit to get accustomed to the different applicators, and I definitely messed up a few panels of the wall, but that didn't upset me like I had suspected it might. I was picking it up quickly; the precision and accuracy that constructs were capable of was definitely helping in this particular pursuit.
Eventually Fishsticks showed up again; it had left earlier because it had to return to its own duties, but now that it was in the "night" part of the station's cycle, Fishsticks was off duty again and free to return to Debris' hangar.
TIM must have informed it about what we were doing, because Fishsticks also brought with it an entire trolley loaded with a variety of different paint applicators and a much bigger selection of paint colours. It was just as excited as TIM was about teaching me to paint, and it had even more tips and advice that it was eager to share with me.
The two of them also occasionally took photos of my progress and shared them in the bot-only feed channel (with my permission), accompanied by excitement sigils and commentary on how well I was doing. The responses were overwhelmingly positive, full of more excitement sigils and compliments and encouragement.
It was… weird. Really weird. But in a not terrible way. It was kind of nice even, maybe.
Eventually it occurred to me that I wasn't limited to just using the hangar's surfaces for practice. I could paint the entire hangar with direction and purpose.
I could make the hangar look good. I could make it something I enjoyed looking at.
That thought made me have to just stand and stare at the walls for a while.
After a couple of minutes, Fishsticks pinged me, apparently concerned by my long pause. I absently pinged it back, then added, [Response: Considering hangar = painted full scene.] I attached several images from my permanent archives, photos of various skies and space that I'd taken from my flier. Rainbow sunrises, lightning-streaked skies, swirling multi-coloured nebulae, endless oceans of rippling cloud tops, ringed planets gleaming against the black backdrop of space.
Fishsticks replied with a flurry of excited pings, then forwarded the images to TIM as well. TIM beeped enthusiastically, waving a couple of its multi-jointed limbs around to emphasise its approval and encouragement.
This was something I could do that didn't involve humans at all. Something I could do to make the hangar feel more like somewhere I could be comfortable. Somewhere that wasn't just for storing things, but looked inhabited by people and was actually nice to spend time in.
And maybe, once I'd finished the hangar… I could paint other areas of Debris too.
I pinged Debris and asked it what it thought of my idea of how to paint the hangar. Debris was just as enthusiastic about it as TIM and Fishsticks, if not more so. It made a few suggestions for improvements, which I was happy to incorporate. The hangar was part of Debris itself, after all. It would have felt weird and wrong to do anything permanent to it without its approval.
TIM and Fishsticks helped to clean off my practice painting, gave some more advice on how I should get started with what I had planned, and then returned to working on the two fliers. Alpha's flier was getting close to being completed, as far as I could tell. Mine was still mostly black, but the suggestion of subtle purple and blue and green nebulae was beginning to take shape across the wings and fuselage. I was looking forward to seeing it finished.
I hadn't made much progress on painting the hangar when Debris alerted me that Alpha had finally returned. I just pinged acknowledgement and continued what I was doing; I didn't want to get interrupted. It did mean though that when Alpha entered the hangar, I wasn't caught by surprise.
I didn't bother acknowledging it, but I kept an eye on it through Debris' cameras. It hesitated at the entrance, looking from me to the fliers and back again, then headed towards its own flier. It sent out a ping of greeting as it went; TIM and Fishsticks pinged back in welcome, but I resisted the automatic urge to respond as well.
Alpha spent a few minutes looking over its flier and the progress Fishsticks had made in painting it. "It looks fantastic," I heard it tell Fishsticks, who beeped happily in response. "It'll be finished soon, yeah?"
Fishsticks pinged an affirmative, and Alpha smiled at it, then wandered over to look at my flier as well. It watched TIM work for a bit, then headed over towards me, its movements hesitant and its expression a little uncertain. "… You decided to paint your flier too?"
I didn't turn to look at it, but I did still roll my eyes. "Obviously."
"Ah. Right." It shifted its weight from foot to foot, then asked abruptly, "Did Senior Indah ask you to help out with the investigation again?"
"Yes. I refused."
"Oh." It fidgeted again - its human movement code was getting a workout. "… Why?"
"Why the fuck would I want to work with Station Security again?" I snapped. "They slapped ridiculous restrictions on us for no good reason, won't let us fly unless it benefits them somehow, and completely ignored my advice." And that had, as far as I could tell, led to some random human getting murdered.
(Maybe if I'd been more insistent, that human would still be alive.) (But we still didn't know where the murderer had actually come from for sure, yet.) (And it was still Indah's fault for dismissing my concerns in the first place.)
Alpha's mouth twisted in a grimace, and it shifted its weight again. "Maybe if we help them, they'll lift the restrictions…?" The way it said it sounded almost… apologetic, and I got a bad feeling in my organics.
I lowered the paint applicator I'd been using onto its holder and finally turned a little to glance back at Alpha. "Did Indah ask you to help too?"
It nodded. "Yes."
I narrowed my eyes at it suspiciously. "And did you agree to help?"
It fidgeted again, and the covers to the gun ports on its arms rapidly flicked open and closed with soft little clicking noises. (That should have alarmed me, but somehow it didn't. It almost felt familiar. That was really annoying.) "… Yes."
For fuck's sake. "Why the fuck would you agree to help them again? Are you trying to get screwed over?"
Alpha straightened, its gun ports still clicking. "Because I want to help!" it shot back. "I don't want anyone else getting murdered! I'd feel really bad if anyone else was killed because I refused to help!"
"Why would you even care if some random human gets murdered? Humans kill each other all the fucking time! And the humans here were assholes when they found out what we were!"
"Not all of them!" Alpha shook its head vehemently. "Ratthi's introduced me to a bunch of his friends, and they've all been really nice to me! Same with Arada and Overse and their friends! I know we're monitoring the survey humans already, but we can't monitor everyone, and I don't want any of their friends or family getting murdered!"
What it was saying made sense, but at this point I was too angry to care. "So you're just going to suck up to fucking Station Security, is that it?" I snarled. "Obey their every order, behave like a proper little governed SecUnit again, let them ignore you and walk all over you and use you like a tool whenever it's convenient for them?!"
"It's not like that!" Alpha snapped, and it actually looked mad now too. That was new. "Indah apologised to me first before she asked for my help, and she's been listening to what I say, and when Officer Zafar tried to boss me around Indah told him to knock it off! I chose to help because I want to help!" Its expression did something I couldn't figure out and it added without a pause, "Omega would've helped, too!"
My organics twisted all tight and clenchy and uncomfortable, and the words came out before I could think about them. "Well I'm not Omega!"
"Then why do you keep doing things the way Omega did them?! You share drones the same way, you share inputs and diagnostics the same way, you format your feed messages the same way—"
"I don't fucking know!" And I really didn't. "I don't remember you, or anyone else, or anything about being Omega! I am not Omega, not any more, and you're just going to have to fucking accept that!"
And then I stormed out of the hangar.
I left Debris as quickly as I could; I needed to get away, get some space. It was fairly late in the station's "night" cycle by this point, so there were noticeably fewer humans around the embarkation zone or in the public areas of the station. Which was probably just as well, because I was in no mood to deal with humans right now. Especially not any random unknown humans who might recognise me as a SecUnit and try to make a big deal out of it.
I wasn't really thinking about where I was going; I didn't have any particular destination in mind, or any kind of plan. All I wanted was to put as much distance between myself and Alpha as possible. So when I finally bothered checking where I was, it was a bit of a surprise to recognise the front of the building that included Bharadwaj's office.
It was closed at this time of the cycle, of course, but that made no difference to me. I hacked the door lock (fuck Station Security's restrictions, it wasn't like I was doing anything wrong), went inside, then let the door close and lock again behind me as I headed for Bharadwaj's office.
She wasn't there, obviously, but I didn't care. It was a familiar space, with a comfortable armchair and a nice display surface, and nobody would interrupt me there for hours. I activated the display surface, flopped down into the armchair, and made myself comfortable.
I didn't want to think about Alpha, or all the automatic shit I did whenever I was around it, or anything else. So I sent a new serial I'd been meaning to watch to the display surface, and let the unfamiliar show occupy my thoughts instead.
Chapter Five
I was so absorbed by the new show I was watching that I completely lost track of the actual time. It was only when I heard Bharadwaj's office door open that I realised how long I'd been there for.
Well, it was too late to leave unnoticed now. Bharadwaj was standing in the doorway, one eyebrow raised as she glanced briefly at me before shifting her gaze to the display surface still playing media. "Good morning, SecUnit," she greeted me mildly, apparently completely unphased by my presence. "It's good to see you again. What show is this?"
I paused the show before replying so I wouldn't miss anything. "It's called The Havelrack Chronicles," I replied. "It's a mystery dramady about a psychic detective whose medium guide is their ex-marital partner."
"Oh that sounds entertainingly awkward," Bharadwaj commented with a grin as she settled down into her own chair.
"Awkward is definitely the word for it," I continued. "Especially since the ex-partner died during an illicit tryst with the main character's half-sibling."
Bharadwaj knew very well what other media I'd watched, and she didn't even bat an eyelid. "Were the main character and their half-sibling identical somehow? Clones?"
"Not this time, though I don't think it would have made much difference to the overall plot if they were. Either way, the detective needs the dead ex-partner as a medium to get their psychic powers to work, and the dead ex-partner needs the main character as an anchor so that they can still influence the material world and interact with their family members and friends. The relationship drama is kind of annoying and cliche, but the mysteries and the things they have to deal with while trying to solve them are entertainingly unrealistic, and the effects are really good."
"It sounds like you're enjoying it," Bharadwaj said.
"Yeah." And then my stupid mouth continued without any conscious input from my brain. "It helps take my mind off stuff."
"Ah." Bharadwaj nodded slowly. "Would this stuff have any connection to why I found you in my office first thing in the morning?" Her tone wasn't accusatory at all, only sympathetic and understanding.
So of course I found myself admitting to the argument I'd had with Alpha, and how mad I was about it agreeing to help Station Security still despite everything, and how mad I was at it in general, and how I kept doing stuff automatically whenever it was around even though I couldn't remember anything about it. "It's like being haunted by the ghost of someone else," I complained. "Like it's possessing me and making me do stuff without even thinking about it. I hate it, and that Alpha keeps expecting me to be someone I don't even remember."
Bharadwaj hummed thoughtfully. "It's a tough position to be in, for sure," she said. "Both for you and for Alpha. You have the unwanted pressure of feeling like you should live up to someone else's expectations when you don't even know what those expectations are, and Alpha is trying to come to terms with being reunited with someone it thinks it recognises, but who has also changed a lot over the time you've been apart."
"I guess so." I had to admit that what Bharadwaj said sounded pretty accurate. "It's annoying, and stupid, and I don't know what to do about any of it."
"That's understandable, honestly," Bharadwaj replied in the slow measured way she did when she was thinking hard. "For humans, it's… well, it's a part of growing up, a part of life. I'm not the same person I was when I was a child, or a teenager, or a younger adult. My childhood friends are also not the same people, and for those I haven't seen for a long time, it can be jarring to reunite and discover just how much they've changed, even if they still have little quirks and habits that I recognise as distinctly them. But I've had enough experience with that over my life that I can adjust quickly, for the most part. And I know I've changed as much as they have over that time, too. So we both adapt to the current versions of each other."
She shifted a little in her chair, stretching her leg out. I knew that it was the leg that had been injured by the hostile alien fauna back on the survey, and that it still ached sometimes. "But from what you and Alpha have told me about your lives as SecUnits," she continued, "you don't get that experience, that opportunity. You don't have the freedom to grow and change significantly. So it makes perfect sense that you would both be struggling with it now. This is a completely new experience for the both of you."
It made me feel a little better, having it explained like that. Just a little. It wasn't entirely just me being stupid and unreasonable, or Alpha being stupid and unreasonable. I had to sit and consider it for a bit, and Bharadwaj remained comfortably quiet, giving me the space to think. (This is one of the reasons I like Bharadwaj - she doesn't feel the need to fill any silence with unnecessary chatter.)
Finally I sighed and said, "So… I have to give Alpha the time to… relearn who I am now?"
Bharadwaj smiled warmly and nodded. "Exactly. And you need to give yourself the time to actually learn who Alpha is, too, since you don't consciously remember anything about it. Which may be a little more difficult, given that Alpha is also still trying to figure out who it is, now that it has the freedom to do so. So patience and tolerance will be required. Alpha also needs the time and space to figure out its own likes and dislikes, what it wants to do, and what it doesn't want to do." She tilted her head and her smile turned wry. "Even if it means that Alpha ends up disagreeing with you."
Ugh. That also made far too much sense. I let out a dramatic sigh and sprawled my arms over the sides of my armchair. "Did it have to disagree with me by agreeing with Indah though?"
Bharadwaj chuckled softly - she was familiar enough with me by now to recognise when I was being unnecessarily melodramatic. "The fact that it is disagreeing with you is a good sign that it's developing its own sense of independence, and not just mirroring everything that you do just because you're both SecUnits."
She was probably right about that too.
Before I could think of how to reply, Alpha sent me a direct ping. I still had its feed blocked so it couldn't message me, but the [System system] it sent was a direct company code that bypassed the block. [Assistance requested.]
Oh, fuck. If it was resorting to company codes to ask me for help, instead of asking whatever humans it was currently with, then something really bad must have happened. I unblocked Alpha's feed so I could find out directly what the fuck was going on. [What happened?]
[Someone tried to infect me with malware,] Alpha replied, sounding uncertain and upset. [It couldn't actually do anything to me, but it looks like it was trying to make me go haywire? It would've really messed up a bot, and I don't know how to react or what to do about it.]
On the one hand, that wasn't as terrible a situation as I'd initially suspected it might be. But on the other, just the thought of someone trying to infect Alpha with malware to force it to do stuff it didn't want to do… [Do you know who sent it?]
[No, it was just attached to the station security feed and tried to infect me as soon as I accessed it. I haven't been able to trace the source.] It hesitated for a moment, then added, [I'm worried that it might be the murderer, trying to disrupt the investigation.]
Oh for fuck's sake. That made sense, and also made me even more mad than I already was. My face must have been doing something, because Bharadwaj gave my drone a concerned look. "What is it?" she asked.
"Someone is doing something fucking stupid," I replied as I unfolded from the armchair. "I have to go deal with it."
"Of course," Bharadwaj replied immediately, waving me on. "Go take care of it, and let me know if you need anything."
I nodded and headed for the door, then hesitated in the doorway. "Thanks for… the advice, and… everything."
Bharadwaj smiled again. "You're most welcome, SecUnit. You're always welcome here."
That made my organics do something warm and twisty, which contrasted sharply with everything else I was currently feeling, so I just nodded awkwardly again, then left as quickly as I could.
There were a lot more people out and about on the station by this point in the cycle, but I was using the ‘I am moving with deliberation and purpose and will not tolerate any interruptions’ walk, so nobody tried to interact with me as I headed towards Station Security.
[I'm on my way,] I sent to Alpha.
[Thank you,] it replied. [Should I tell Indah or anyone else about the malware?]
[Don't bother. They might not even believe you in the first place, and there's not really anything they can do about it anyway. And it might give something away to the culprit. I want to see if they try to hit me with malware as well once I start helping out with the investigation too. If they do, I should be able to trace them.]
[All right.] Alpha paused for a moment, then added, [I've let Indah know you're coming to help though, so they'll let you into Station Security.]
I just pinged acknowledgement, and a few minutes later I reached the station-side entrance to Station Security.
Putting it mildly, it was weird to voluntarily walk into a Station Security office.
I'd never been to one before on any station. (If I had, I'd be spare parts and recycler scrap.) SecUnits weren't usually actively deployed on stations in the Corporation Rim, not even the more military ones, and we sure weren't used in civilian station regulation enforcement. We were normally only deployed on a station as an extreme measure, like repelling a raider attack or a hostile takeover attempt. (And stations with deployment centres weren't very likely to be attacked in the first place, unless there were an absolute shit-ton of attackers, or they had some other major advantages as well, like what had happened with the attack on Port FreeCommerce.)
So yeah, for most of my time as an escaped rogue SecUnit, staying away from Station Security had been kind of vital to my continued freedom and survival.
Preservation's Station Security office was adjacent to the Port Authority, part of the barrier that separated the port's embarkation area from the rest of the station. Both offices had entrances into the admin section of the station mall and the transit ring.
Not long after Alpha and I had first gotten here, I had acquired a map of the security office interior from the station archives. The first level was a public area, where humans came in to complain about each other and to pay fines for cargo or docking violations. (Preservation had two economies; one was a complicated and confusing barter system for planetary residents, and the other was a much more sensible currency-based one for visitors and for dealing with other polities. Most of the humans here didn't really comprehend just how vital hard currency was in the Corporation Rim, but the council did. Mensah had told us (well, she had told Alpha, I had just happened to be listening at the time) that the port took in enough in various fees to keep the station from being a drain on the planet's resources.)
The second level was a lot bigger and had multiple work spaces, a few conference rooms, and a section for accident/safety equipment storage. There was also a separate attached space for holding cells, and a larger separate section for storing and analysing samples from potentially hazardous cargo. Another section contained a small medical treatment area that seemed to be mostly used for intoxicated detainees.
The weapons scanners in the entrance went off on me, of course, which did not do much for my nerves. Fortunately the officer on duty at the front desk recognised me and silenced the alerting scanners with surprising speed, then nodded amicably at me. Apparently they'd already been informed that I would be showing up. "Senior Indah and Alpha are up in 2B," they said helpfully.
"Thanks." I nodded and made my way to the indicated room. Indah and Alpha were indeed there, along with another security person who usually worked on checking cargo shipments for biohazards, feed ID Tural. Technician Tural seemed to be deep in the feed, but Indah looked over as I entered, then nodded briefly. "SecUnit. Alpha's told me that you've changed your mind about helping with the investigation?"
"Not willingly," I said shortly. "I'm not here to help you, I'm only here to help Alpha."
"Understood." Indah straightened, folding her hands behind her back. "Before we continue, I want to formally apologise to you," she said. "My previous behaviour towards you was unwarranted and out of line, and I fully understand your reluctance to assist any further. I appreciate you coming in regardless, and I want to assure you that it is not a requirement. Your choices here will not be held against you one way or another."
I just stared at the wall behind her shoulder for one point two seconds. "So does that mean you'll be rescinding the restrictions you forced us to agree to regarding the use of our own bodies?"
Indah's brow furrowed. "What? We haven't restricted the use of your arm guns beyond the standard weapon restrictions that apply to everyone—"
I cut her off before she could finish. "I'm not talking about our fucking arm guns, I'm talking about our fliers."
Indah blinked, looking a little taken aback. "Your fliers? I'm not sure I follow." By this point Tural seemed to have noticed what was going on, and was doing their best to hide the fact that they were listening in while still trying to appear fully engrossed in their own work.
"Our fliers are part of us," Alpha explained earnestly. "They're not just a separate vehicle like human vehicles are. When we're in our fliers, we link up to them, and they are us. They're an extension of ourselves, and we can feel what happens to them just like we can feel what happens to these bodies." It gestured to itself.
"And not being allowed to fly, or only being allowed to fly when it benefits you, feels like being back on contract in the Corporation Rim," I had to add. "You might as well be just another shitty corporate client, using us like mindless tools."
Indah winced at that. "I… see," she said slowly. "I hadn't fully comprehended the… significance of your fliers, or the implications of that particular restriction." She paused for a moment, then nodded decisively. "All right. I can't rescind the restrictions on your fliers immediately, I'll need to get approval from the Council and the other Security heads, but I will get that done as soon as possible."
I was very dubious - I'll believe it when I see it - but Alpha seemed to take her word for it, because it smiled with relief and said, "Thank you. It'll be nice to stretch our wings again."
Indah's mouth twitched in what might have been a brief return smile, before her expression became business-like again. "All right. With all that out of the way - shall we focus on solving this murder?"
Alpha nodded, and I asked, "What have you found out so far?" Alpha was already updating me over the feed, but I wanted to see how much Indah would tell me herself.
Indah activated one of the display surfaces to pull up data. "We've identified the murder victim - an adult male going by the name of Raltun. He was a fairly recent arrival to Preservation - we haven't gotten much more than that yet. His immigration file is… sparse, to say the least, so we're still running background checks through the Immigration Department to try and find out more. We're also working on identifying associates so we can interview them, see what they can tell us about him so we can try to piece together a motive for the murder."
"He had a feed interface, but it had been broken," Tural, the human tech sitting at one of the room's consoles, added.
"Has anyone examined it yet, or tried to get anything off it?" I asked.
"Not yet," Tural replied. "It's pretty busted, and unlikely we'll get anything off it, so it hasn't been a priority."
"I might be able to get something from it. Even if we can't get any of the data that was stored on it, it could still tell us something about where he got it from and where he's been before he got to Preservation."
Indah raised an eyebrow at me. "Even if it's been broken beyond repair?"
I shrugged one shoulder. "It's a possibility. A lot of parts have permanent maker marks on them." Like the bits of me still stamped with the company logo that I hadn't been able to get rid of yet. (And yes, I'd tried.) "They could tell us a lot."
Indah still looked sceptical, but she said, "All right, I'll arrange for you to have access to examine that when we're done here."
I nodded, then asked, "What did you get on the cause of death?"
"Tural?" Indah gestured to them to answer.
"Right." Tech Tural pulled up more data on the display surface. "Autopsy showed that the cause of death was from a focused high-energy blast to the throat, angling up into the skull." They grimaced and gave me a resigned, apologetic look. "Further analysis - and Alpha's input - confirmed that it's the wrong profile to match a SecUnit's arm-mounted energy weapons."
I felt at least a little vindicated at that. So much for your snap judgements, Indah.
I didn't comment on that though - there didn't seem to be much reason to rub Indah's mistake into her face at this point, other than being an asshole. I wanted to retain at least something of the moral high ground, so I just did my best to keep my expression neutral and nodded. "Any ideas as to the actual weapon yet?"
"Not yet. The injury doesn't match any weapon profiles that Alpha has, or that we have." Tural looked over to Indah, who just nodded. They nodded back, then sent the data to me over the feed. "Take a look and see if you can match it to anything."
I accepted the data, then had to pull the relevant analysis code and datasets out of my long-term archives, compile it, and run the data through it. There were a few partial matches, but nothing definitive, which was a little frustrating. I passed the information on the partial matches back to Tural and Indah once I was done. "Definitely not SecUnit weaponry, and probably not CombatUnit or combat bot weaponry either," I commented out loud. Humans were so slow to read anything on the feed, it was faster for me to just summarise it verbally. "There are some partial matches though - it could be a few different types of hand-held energy weapon, but it doesn't match anything specifically. Which doesn't mean much - some humans customise their weapons to increase damage output, or spread, or just to bypass safety restrictions. The wound profile here could match any number of customised energy weapons."
Indah sighed. "And we've had no luck in locating an energy weapon, customised or not." She leaned one hip against the edge of the console, her arms folded across her chest. "Whoever killed our victim also had some kind of cleaning device with them - there were no DNA traces at the scene, not even from the victim himself. Which definitely stood out, given that he was killed in his own room."
That wasn't good news. Whoever our murderer was, they'd been prepared to cover their tracks. "Did anyone in adjacent rooms hear or notice anything?"
"Nothing," Indah replied with a shake of her head. "Nobody heard anything, or saw anyone or anything unusual leading up to the time of the murder, or afterwards. There were also no signs of any kind of struggle or attempt at self-defence. Either the murderer managed to catch the victim off-guard, which seems unlikely given that the murderer must have been standing right in front of the victim when the killing shot was fired, or the murderer was known to the victim and he wasn't expecting any confrontation."
I double-checked the details of the autopsy report and wound analysis, and had to agree. It was highly unlikely that anyone would have been able to sneak up behind the victim and then shoot him in the throat from that angle. "So, no murder weapon or DNA. Have you found any other leads at all on the murderer yet?"
Indah shook her head with an air of frustration. "Not yet. Everyone from the ship was accounted for over the time frame of the murder - most were still being processed in Station Security, and the few who had finished and been released were all together in the station mall, eating at one of the food vendors. We've confirmed that there's no physical way for any of them to have slipped away unnoticed, gotten to the murder scene, cleaned all traces of DNA, and then returned within the given time frame."
"Everyone from the ship that you know of," I commented. "It's possible there was someone else hidden on the ship who could've snuck onto the station via the cargo docks or engineering accesses."
"We thought of that, and those areas do have cameras on them," Indah replied. "Alpha helped us review the footage, and there wasn't anything suspicious."
"Nothing suspicious that I could find, anyway," Alpha spoke up finally, sounding a little uncertain. "But… I haven't had experience in looking for footage alterations, or hacks, or anything else like that, not like SecUnit has." It looked over to me. "Maybe you can find something that I missed?"
It was definitely a possibility. I'd hacked and redacted myself from enough cameras that I would probably be able to find any traces of someone else doing something similar. Alpha hadn't had to hack SecSystem or HubSystem to hide itself, or redact itself from camera footage for its own survival, so it made sense that it might've missed it. "I can take a look."
Indah hesitated for a moment, then nodded. "All right. Here." She assigned me temporary permissions to access Station Security's camera feeds directly, though I didn't have permissions for any other systems in Station Security.
That was fine, I wasn't interested in those systems. (I'd already browsed through and familiarised myself with the station's security systems well before I'd had to promise not to hack anything anyway.)
As I was scanning through the footage, the door to the room opened and Officer Zafar entered. He halted abruptly when he caught sight of me and Alpha, his expression flickering slightly in a way I couldn't parse before he sneered at me. "Well look who came crawling back. Here to hide the evidence of your crimes?"
"Knock it off," Indah snapped at him. "If you can't behave professionally, you can go and catalogue the evidence locker."
"That suits me just fine," Zafar retorted. "The less time I have to tolerate being around those murder machines, the better." He turned on his heel to walk out again, adding over his shoulder, "When they finally flip out and kill everyone in reach, it won't be my fault."
The door closed behind him, and Indah sighed, then looked back at us. I hadn't even bothered reacting to Zafar's entrance - he wasn't worth the effort, and I was too busy with scanning the docks security footage. Alpha had its SecUnit neutral face on, hiding whatever it was feeling. "I apologise for Officer Zafar's behaviour," Indah said.
"Why bother?" I replied with a shrug. "It's nothing new. We're used to it."
Alpha added, "At least he's not using us for target practice or anything like that, and he can't force us to fight each other for entertainment. That always sucked."
Indah glanced between me and Alpha, her eyebrows raised. "People did that to you?" Tural didn't say anything, but they looked vaguely horrified.
"Oh yeah." Alpha sounded nonchalant. "Humans did a lot of stuff to us that we couldn't do anything about 'cause if we did we'd get our brains fried. They really like watching us fight each other, I dunno why. At least afterwards we got to spend time in our cubicles where they couldn't bother us for a while. Oh, and there was that one time where some humans got curious about what it'd look like if two of our fliers collided mid-air - they wanted to see if we'd explode. We were both out of action for like two cycles after that."
Tural broke in with wide-eyed disbelief, "Wait - did you explode?"
"Oh, no," Alpha replied. "We mostly just… got all smashed up and broke apart. The rest of our squad had to collect the pieces of our fliers and dump us into our cubicles for repairs. The humans just got fined for 'deliberately damaging Company property without due cause'." It shrugged casually. "And I'm pretty lucky, honestly - I haven't been forced to eat stuff for their entertainment, or had people try to use me like a ComfortUnit much, or been used for weapons testing a lot. Not all my squad have been that lucky. So yeah, humans just saying stuff? Barely even registers."
Tural's expression of horror intensified, and Indah obviously didn't know how to react to any of that. She just stared at Alpha, speechless, for a good three point two seconds before blinking and shaking herself off, forcing her expression back into professionalism. "Well then. SecUnit, how are you going with the docks footage?"
"Still going through it," I replied. "I'll need another few minutes."
Indah nodded, hesitated, then said, "Take your time. I'll be back soon - I just need to… get something to drink." She gave us both a nod, then left the room.
Chapter Six
By the time Indah returned, a mug of hot beverage in one hand, I had to admit that there was nothing to find in the docks security footage. No signs of tampering or editing, no hints of anyone erasing their presence from the recordings.
I had at least identified several blind spots in the cameras' coverage area, and drafted up a few different options of how to eliminate those blind spots in the future. It was possible, albeit very difficult, for someone to have used those blind spots to get through the docks unseen, if they were familiar with the cameras and knew where those blind spots were in the first place.
I didn't like that idea much. If someone had gotten through via those blind spots, then it was someone who knew far too much about Preservation Station's security systems for my comfort.
Indah didn't like that idea much either when I presented it to her. "So you're telling me that someone could just… bypass the docks cameras entirely, if they had the information about our camera layouts already."
I nodded. "As they are right now, absolutely. Frankly, this station's security is shit. If I were actually a hostile trying to infiltrate this station, it would be embarrassingly easy. Your camera coverage is entirely inadequate, your encryptions are laughable, and I can't even tell when any of your protocols were last updated - they're so old as to be practically antiquated."
Indah scowled at me, though there didn't seem to be any real heat behind it. "Preservation's security has always been adequate."
"Until now," I pointed out. "And adequate isn't good enough, especially not with all the recent attention from the Corporation Rim. Anyone with half a brain could hack into Port Authority or Station Security if they really wanted to."
"We have an alert system in place that alerts us to any breaches," Indah said tightly.
"You rely entirely on alerts?"
Tural was listening in, and their face turned guarded in that very familiar 'someone else is getting in trouble' way. Indah looked disgruntled. "That's how the analysts describe it to me. And we do have data protection on the security systems—"
Data protection, right. Guess what provides your data protection - another security system. I had to make her understand. "Every station I've been through has also had data protection on their systems. Every station I've been through, I've had to silence weapons scanners, hack camera systems to erase my presence, get into their feeds to download information, and do all that without being detected."
Tural's expression was intrigued. "So you're saying you could hack our systems without setting off any of the alerts at all?"
"That is exactly what I'm saying. And if I can do it, so could anyone else." Indah still looked sceptical, so I said, "The Security Station offices systems are monitored for breach attempts, right?"
Indah nodded sharply. "That's what I said."
I decided on something showy, but before I could start, Alpha pinged me. [Can you show me how you do it?] it asked over our private feed.
I hesitated for a moment, then pinged acknowledgement. It would be useful for it to know how to do the same stuff I could. I invited it into a shared workspace where it could observe what I was doing, then got to work.
There was another office on the opposite side of the hall from us, with a few security officers working in it, and its door was ajar. I took control of the visual and audio displays in that office, and a moment later we heard the humans in there make startled noises.
Indah glared at me. "What did you—"
I put a camera view up on the display surface she'd been using to show me the investigation data. In the other office, every display surface was now active and showing episode 256 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, the scene 24.7 minutes in, where the solicitor's secret twin walks in to confront the solicitor's bodyguard about their alleged involvement with the colony's underground mafia, right before a speeder crashes in through the window. "What the balls?" one of the officers said.
Indah's face was… interesting. She gestured to our display surface. "How are you getting this view of that office? There are no cameras in there."
I could've used one of my drones, but this way made for a better demonstration, both for Indah and for Alpha. "It's Farid's vest camera."
Indah sighed and rubbed at her face with one hand. "All right, you've made your point. Our security systems need updating. Fix the screens, please."
I held off for a couple of seconds so Alpha could examine the code more closely, then undid what I'd done and slipped back out of the systems, once again without triggering any of the alerts. Alpha's expression was still mostly neutral, but it was bouncing a little on its toes. [That was really cool!] it said excitedly. [I'd never thought about how to do anything like that before, but now that you've shown me, I can see how it works!]
I wasn't sure how to feel about Alpha's praise, or its excitement. It was… weird. [You've got to adjust it for different systems,] I told it, for lack of anything better to say. [You can't just use the exact same code for every system.]
[Right, right, that makes sense,] Alpha replied. [Do you have any other examples?]
I had to dig through archives a bit before I could find some other code snippets left over from some of my previous station visits. [Here. Compare these.] Alpha pinged acknowledgement and began going through the code in our shared workspace.
Meanwhile, Indah was talking again. "I'll get the techs started on upgrading the security systems as soon as possible. For now though, we need to focus on finding our murderer."
Indah showed Alpha and I to the evidence lab, where we were able to examine the murder victim's feed implant. It had been crushed, as if someone had deliberately stomped on it, and was a broken mess. Still, I was able to pry the crumpled casing off and access its internals, which let me find the maker marks on some of the components and recover the primary data chip.
One of the reasons that the company does its best to include SecUnits in as many of their bond contracts as possible is because we're able to discreetly scan a wide variety of data chips and other portable storage devices that most people believe are secure, which lets the company datamine information from their clients even more effectively. So I had an extensive catalogue of Corporation Rim data chip manufacturers and the various companies that preferred to use them, along with the necessary protocols for how to scan said chips and read the information off them.
With that dataset, I was able to identify the maker marks of the components and the data chip, identify the chip's manufacturer, and load up the right profile for me to scan the chip. It was too damaged to recover much of anything off it, but I was able to get one pertinent piece of information.
"The victim used to work for MinShaTec," I said out loud. Tech Tural and Alpha had been quietly talking together while I'd been working on the interface, but that got their attention. Tural blinked and leaned in to look at the pieces I had laid out on the workbench in front of me. "Are you sure?" they asked, though their tone was curious rather than dubious.
"I'm sure." I pointed to the maker mark on the chip. "See this symbol here?"
Tural leaned in even closer, squinting, and I had to remind myself that humans didn't have the same kind of eyesight that SecUnits had. "I think so," they said eventually.
"That's the maker mark," I continued. "This chip was made by SyrNalSyn, which is one of the major suppliers of the chips and components that are used in feed interfaces in the sector of the Corporate Rim that MinShaTec is in. I couldn't recover much actual data from the chip, but some of the base code includes the MinShaTec signature."
"So Raltun is from MinShaTec?" Tech Tural sounded excited. "Perhaps someone from the ship will recognise him, then!"
"It's a possibility." I was reluctant to get anywhere near those particular humans again, but hopefully, I wouldn't have to. Station Security had more than enough officers to do all the questioning themselves.
So Tech Tural updated Senior Indah, who agreed that questioning the newest refugees from the mystery ship about Raltun was a necessary step. While that was being organised, another update came through. The Immigration Department had finally supplied Station Security with more information on our murder victim. Unfortunately there wasn't much more to be had. They confirmed the date of his arrival at the station, along with the date of his application for refuge and citizenship, some basic medical records, and that was about it. The medical records allowed Station Security to confirm that the corpse in the morgue was actually Raltun, at least.
The Immigration Department hadn't been entirely useless. They had also included information on several other humans who had arrived along with Raltun, and who had also applied for refuge and citizenship around the same time. Their records were just as sparse as Raltun's, but unlike Raltun, they were still alive.
Which meant Station Security could ask them questions.
Alpha and I were already in one of the offices where we could observe the interviews when Indah walked in, accompanied by a new human I didn't recognise who had a private feed ID. "SecUnit, Alpha, this is Officer Aylen."
I just nodded acknowledgement, but Alpha lifted one hand to wave a little and went, "Hi! It's nice to meet you." (It definitely sounded like it had been spending a lot of time with Ratthi.) (I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes.)
Officer Aylen blinked a little at Alpha's greeting, but recovered quickly and gave it a slight smile in return. "Likewise."
(Ugh. Vicky had tried to get me to greet humans like that, but I'd never seen the point. It was a little annoying to see that maybe Vicky had been right.)
At least Alpha's greeting gave me a chance to work around the privacy seal on Aylen’s feed ID and see that she was listed as a Special Investigator. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded like a job title from a serial, and honestly it made me a little jealous. Just a bit.
"Officer Aylen will be assisting us with the interviews and the rest of the investigation," Indah continued. "Aylen, SecUnit's the one who discovered that Raltun's feed interface is most likely from MinShaTec."
"Good work on that," Aylen said to me. "From what I heard, nobody was expecting to be able to get anything off that interface."
I just shrugged. "Datamining's a company speciality." It felt weird to be praised for something that normally made people uncomfortable and angry. I didn't know what to make of it.
Aylen didn't seem sure of how to respond to that, either. That made two of us.
Indah just raised an eyebrow briefly at me before continuing. "There's a good chance that if Raltun is really from MinShaTec, then these people may recognise him." She gestured to the display surface, which showed the interview room where the humans from the ship were gathered along one side of the table. Officer Matif was with them again, sitting on the opposite side.
It kind of gave me a feeling of deja vu (note to self, look up the definition of deja vu), even though none of us were on the responder this time. The humans also looked much cleaner, dressed in fresh clothes, and showing fewer signs of stress and exhaustion.
Matif greeted them cordially, then got straight to the point. "The reason you've been called here is because we were hoping you could help us with something," they started as they gestured to the display surface in the room with them. It flickered to life to show a photo of Raltun, taken from his citizenship paperwork. "Do any of you recognise this person?"
The reactions were varied - there were a few clenched jaws, some widened eyes, some narrowed eyes, some stiff shoulders and head tilts. It was pretty obvious that they did indeed recognise him.
"Oh yeah, we know that pusser," Human One replied tightly.
Matif kept their expression calm and professional. "Can you tell us about him?"
There was a definite hesitation at that question. "Why do you want to know?"
I saw Indah's jaw move slightly as she subvocalised something to Matif over the feed. They replied to the question after a brief pause with, "We've identified him as Raltun, and believe that he worked for MinShaTec. He's been living at Preservation since his arrival here some time ago." Matif paused for a beat, probably for dramatic effect, then added, "He was murdered yesterday."
That news prompted an immediate reaction and a jumble of comments.
"Fucker deserved it—"
"Oh shit, they know where we are now?!"
"How did they find him—"
"I bet it was that fucking SecUnit who did it—"
"What about the others—"
"Are they gonna come after us too—"
Matif raised their hands placatingly and said, "Please, calm down. Right now, we're trying to establish a motive for the murder so we can better track down the guilty party. Anything you can tell us about him will be helpful."
It took a while - they all kept interrupting one another, and sometimes they'd contradict each other so Matif had to keep trying to get clarification, and every now and then they'd insist that 'that fucking SecUnit' was the murderer, and Matif had to repeat themselves that no, Raltun hadn't been killed by a SecUnit. I was very relieved that I wasn't the one having to deal with talking to any of them. (I had another episode of The Havelrack Chronicles playing in the background for most of it.)
About half way through all that going on, the humans that the Immigration Department had identified as having arrived with Raltun were brought into individual interview rooms as well. There was a possibility that one of them could have been the murderer, so Indah and Aylen wanted them questioned separately. They were all showing various signs of nervousness, but given their previous experiences with the Corporation Rim, being brought in to Station Security for questioning was enough to make anyone nervous.
I pulled the cameras for each interview room into separate inputs so I could keep track of everything going on. (I had to pause my episode of The Havelrack Chronicles at this point so I could focus - I didn't want to miss any important plot point in the serial just because I'd been distracted by the interviews.)
There was the usual reading of rights to all the humans, which took a while. I was pretty sure even suspected criminals on Preservation had more rights than most average citizens back in the Corporation Rim did. Once that was done, they finally got started on the questioning.
All of the humans seemed genuinely surprised at the news of Raltun's murder, but none of them seemed to be particularly upset about his demise specifically. They were more concerned about what that meant for them. (It was becoming pretty apparent that Raltun was not a popular person amongst his MinShaTec colleagues.)
Their apparent callousness over the death of one of their colleagues seemed to bother Indah and Aylen. "They really don't care that he's dead, do they?" Aylen muttered.
I shrugged. "Why would they? He's a ranking executive. He wouldn't care if any of them turned up dead."
"Unless it affected their bottom line somehow," Alpha added. "Executives get very upset whenever something happens that cuts into their profits."
Both Indah and Aylen frowned over at us. "That's a very… cynical view," Aylen commented after a long moment.
"That's just the Corporation Rim," I replied. "The humans at the top of the ladder don't give a shit about anyone beneath them, only about how much money they can squeeze out of them, and the humans below resent the ones above them because of how they control their lives in the name of profit."
Alpha added wryly, "And constructs are right at the bottom of the ladder."
I snorted. "We're not even on the ladder. At least humans have the chance to get promoted, even if it's difficult for them. Constructs don't have that chance at all. We're just equipment."
Indah and Aylen exchanged glances in the uncomfortable silence that followed, then turned their attention back to the ongoing interviews. I was more than happy to let that particular line of conversation drop as well.
It took a couple of hours, but we finally got about as much information from all the interviewees as we were likely to get. Then Alpha and I assisted Indah and Aylen in collating it all, using our previous experience with the Corporation Rim to help fill in any gaps.
In summary, Raltun was previously one of the higher level executives in MinShaTec - when the hostile takeover had started, he had been amongst the higher-ups who had been in a privileged enough position to escape before BreharWallHan could fully blockade the system. He and several others had made it to Preservation, obtained refugee status, and kept very quiet about their previous affiliation with MinShaTec so that BreharWallHan wouldn't be able to easily find them again.
Some of the others with Raltun who had also settled on Preservation had quietly sent clandestine, encrypted messages back to the MinShaTec employees who had been left behind, telling them about Preservation and confirming that it was a safe haven if they could manage to escape as well. It turned out that a few of them were actually relatives of the humans who had shown up on the damaged ship, which helped to explain why they'd gone to the effort of sending the messages in the first place.
Apparently, Raltun had not been involved in that part of things though. Raltun seemed to be the kind of human who didn't give a shit about anyone else, which was pretty typical of Corporation Rim executives. None of the others had interacted with him for most of the time they'd been here, once they'd settled in. He'd lived alone, and they didn't know or care what he'd been doing with his time here. (I couldn't blame them for that.)
BreharWallHan was apparently very unhappy about Raltun and a handful of other higher level executives escaping, because they knew proprietary information that BreharWallHan didn't want getting out. That was pretty standard for most hostile takeovers, honestly. Acquiring proprietary information was often the driving impetus behind a good number of hostile takeovers in the first place, so having any of that information out where BreharWallHan couldn't control it was definitely something that BreharWallHan would want to put a stop to. It also explained why Raltun's feed interface had been smashed. Whatever information had been on it to start with had probably been stripped off it first, and then it was broken to prevent anything being recovered from it.
So it was looking increasingly likely that Raltun had been murdered by someone from - or hired by - BreharWallHan to silence him and prevent that proprietary information from being used against them. Which meant that the other MinShaTec refugees were also potentially at risk of being murdered, too.
(I suspected that some of them were playing up their actual importance in MinShaTec and what they knew, just so they could claim protection from Station Security. None of them seemed to realise that Station Security would do its best to protect all of them, regardless of their previous status in MinShaTec.)
So Station Security organised some protective custody arrangement for all of the MinShaTec refugees to stay in, where they'd be safe until we could locate and capture the murderer. Luckily I wasn't involved in any of that, and neither was Alpha. The MinShaTec humans who had gotten to Preservation first had seen the newsburst about Alpha and I being SecUnits, and there had been a lot of near-hysterical questions from some of them about why Preservation was allowing SecUnits on the station at all. So Indah had decided that it would be best if none of the MinShaTec humans caught sight of either of us again for the time being.
Both Alpha and I agreed with that. Neither of us wanted to deal with the likely reactions.
So now we had a potential motive, but we were still no closer to finding the culprit. Station Security had been able to confirm the location and alibis of all the other MinShaTec humans who had arrived with Raltun, clearing them of suspicion.
And now that there was the possibility of the murderer having been hired by BreharWallHan… there was also the chance that they hadn't arrived on the damaged ship at all, and had just come in on some other regular transport ship. Maybe they'd used the arrival of the damaged ship as a distraction, maybe the timing was just coincidence. We had no way of telling for sure one way or the other yet.
Station Security had done a basic sweep of the damaged ship when it had first docked, but then the murder had happened and they'd been too busy with that to investigate the ship itself any further. If our murderer had come in on it somehow, then that was the logical place to start looking. And if the murderer hadn't come in on it, well, at least investigating it would hopefully confirm that and eliminate it from the possibility tree.
So while Indah and Aylen were busy with organising the protection of the MinShaTec humans, Alpha and I grabbed some equipment from Station Security, then headed down to the docks.
As we made our way out of Station Security and across the embarkation zone, I pulled up my scans of the damaged ship and dumped them into the feed workspace I was currently sharing with Alpha. It also dumped its own scans in there - it had gotten a lot more of them during the time I'd been inside the ship getting shot by stupid humans, and also during the flight back to the station.
It felt… weird, walking alongside Alpha while sharing feed space with it. I wondered if it felt as weird as I did.
This wasn't the time to dwell on that, though. I had a murderer to find and a borked ship to investigate. So I did my best to ignore the weirdness and focus on compiling all our ship scans into a cohesive whole.
[This is odd,] Alpha commented after a moment, flicking through the scans. [At first I thought the damage was pretty standard given the circumstances, but looking more closely at it now… does it look like some of it's older than the rest to you, too?] It highlighted several areas, and I inspected them more closely.
[I think you're right,] I finally admitted. [Which makes sense if this ship was damaged during the initial hostile takeover, and then took more damage when the humans stole it to escape.]
[Why would they steal a ship that was still damaged though?] Alpha asked. [That seems more risky than it's worth.]
[Maybe it was their only option. Humans will do stupid shit under pressure.]
Alpha pinged agreement, then added dryly, [And even when they're not under pressure, too.]
Yeah, no kidding.
Still, something about the ship's damage bothered me. Some of it was so precise it looked almost… deliberate. Given the distances involved in space fights, it's difficult to be very precise when shooting other ships unless you're right up close. And the larger ships tend to avoid that, because collisions suck for everyone involved and make it a lot harder to salvage anything worthwhile afterwards. That's what smaller fighters like my flier were for - getting close to big ships for more accurate firepower without risking salvage-destroying collisions. (And even if a flier did end up colliding with a larger ship, well. It wouldn't do a whole lot to the larger ship, and we were considered disposable anyway.)
[What do you think the chances are of the damage being this precise during a fight, with weapons of that calibre?] I asked Alpha as I highlighted the areas I was referring to.
Alpha took a half-second to inspect them, and one of my drones saw it frown. [Low,] it admitted. [Really, really low. One or two shots? Maybe. But not that many. And they're all in places that look really scary, but don't actually endanger any of the ship's vital systems.]
That's what I was thinking, too. [It's all the older damage, as well,] I said. [The newer damage is more typical, but it's also… not as severe. Like they dialled the power of their weapons down, or waited until they were outside optimal range.]
[Do you think BreharWallHan deliberately let these humans escape?] Alpha asked. It sounded worried.
[That definitely looks like a possibility.] And I wasn't liking the implications of that at all.
When we boarded the damaged ship, we headed straight for the central processors. I really wanted to get into the ship's systems and see what we could dig up. Outer areas of the ship were still damaged and open to vacuum, and remained sealed off from the rest of the interior.
Fortunately I wasn't interested in any of those areas. The Preservation humans and some of the station bots had done some initial repairs to the ship after it was docked, to stabilise it and get the power working again, but they hadn't gotten around to much more than that. The important part was that they'd restored the power.
We'd brought some connecting cables with us from Station Security, so we would be able to plug directly into the ship's core processors. A direct link would make it faster and easier for us to get into the ship's more protected systems, which were generally inaccessible via the feed.
Even though the ship's power had been restored, only the dim emergency lights were back on. Its gravity hadn't been restored yet, and the station's gravity only went so far. By the time we were nearing the central processors, we were floating, and neither of us had bothered to get our flight suits from Debris. The lack of gravity didn't bother either of us though; we had modules for working in low or zero-grav, and much better reflexes than humans.
When we got to the processors, I sat down backwards in one of the console chairs so I could still access my spine ports, hooked my legs around the seat so I wouldn't float off, and then plugged one end of the data cable into my lowest port. Alpha was doing the same in the chair next to me, its movements almost eerily synchronised with mine. (It was uncomfortably weird.)
[Ready?] I asked, holding the other end of the cable over one of the processor's ports.
[Ready,] Alpha replied.
We plugged our cables into the ship's processors simultaneously, then slipped through them into the ship's systems.
It felt oddly empty; it kind of reminded me of how Debris' systems had felt after its original bot pilot had been deleted. If there had been a bot pilot in this ship at some point, it wasn't here any more.
I began carefully poking around, trying to find something, anything. I could feel Alpha alongside me, cautiously searching through the stark, empty systems for any trace of anything at all. There was nothing. The bot pilot was gone, we knew that already, but that wasn't all. There were hardly any functions left. No automated piloting, no navigation, no wormhole systems, no gravity controls or environment controls or lights, only the barest bones of life support, its weak pulses echoing through the hollow systems. It was like something had stripped the ship of almost everything that made it a ship. Like we were crawling through a gutted shell. (It was really depressing.)
Then something was there - something that hadn't been there a moment earlier, had surged up out of some hidden system - and it wasn't friendly. It came roaring through the ship's processors, tearing towards us with lethal intent.
We were vulnerable to it like this, and it was moving too fast for us to retreat. I braced myself for impact, ready to fight—
— and it bounced off a wall that hadn't been there a fraction of a second ago.
[What the—]
[Defence protocol,] Alpha replied distractedly - I could feel its attention focused on the malicious code slamming against the wall, trying to get at us. [Peri made it, after the Incident, so nothing like that could happen to us again. Although we didn't know Peri existed at the time - HubSystem just gave it to us along with instructions on how and when to use it. We just thought the humans had come up with it.]
… Huh. Okay.
I took a moment to examine the wall, then focused on the killware still flinging itself against it. It was about the only thing left in these systems, so I didn't want to wipe it outright. It had instructions, and I wanted to know what they were. (Other than the one telling it "fuck up anything trying to investigate these systems", anyway.)
I had more experience with hacking, but Alpha was more familiar with the defence protocol it was using to protect us. Between us, we came up with a strategy to neutralise the killware and analyse whatever information it had.
The killware had given up trying to brute-force its way through the wall and was now prowling around it, attempting to find a weakness. Alpha carefully introduced a small vulnerability in the wall as bait, which the killware immediately latched onto.
Then we slammed the wall down around it, trapping it inside and pinning it in place. It writhed and strained against the restrictions, but the terrifying bot entity had done a disgustingly good job with coding this defence protocol. (I wasn't envious at all.) With the killware now pinned, I was able to start pulling information from it, bit by bit.
Its first instruction had been to wait, hidden, in the ship's systems and transmit the wormhole coordinates the escapees used back to its BreharWallHan supervisors before the ship left the MinShaTec system. Its second instruction was to continue to hide until the ship was nearing the end of its wormhole jump, then trigger an early exit. Its third instruction was that once it was back in realspace, it was meant to delete the bot pilot and most of the ship's systems, kill the power, then throttle the emergency power to almost nothing after a set time, leaving just enough to keep the systems it was residing in running.
Its fourth instruction was to remain dormant in the minimal-powered systems until the ship was brought into dock, analyse whatever station systems it could find, then transmit—
Performance reliability catastrophic drop.
Shutdown.
Chapter Seven
Restart.
Ow, ow, fuck. What the fuck.
It took me a moment to figure out what had happened. I could tell that I'd had an emergency shutdown, and damage alerts were helpfully informing me of multiple projectile impacts to the back of the head and torso. (I miss my armour almost all the time, but especially at times like this.) I need the organic parts inside my head, but they have significantly better shock absorption in there than inside a human skull. It's possible to hit a SecUnit hard enough to make our performance reliability drop so fast and so low it triggers a temporary shutdown. (Operative word there: temporary.) But it's usually a really bad idea.
I was pissed.
It took me another few moments to restart enough systems to let me know where I was and what was going on. I reached for my drone inputs, reconnected to the ones that I'd brought into the ship with me, and called them to my position, keeping them up near the ceiling so they wouldn't be noticed.
I was floating in the zero-gravity in the damaged ship, being towed down one of the main corridors by a human in an environmental suit. Another environment-suited human was towing Alpha along behind us.
I pinged Alpha, and got no response. Through my drones, I could see gobbets of blood and fluids floating around, glistening in the light shining from the lamps attached to the humans' environmental suits.
Then my audio inputs rebooted. "— if your malware had worked in the first place like you fucking said it would," the human towing Alpha was saying. I didn't recognise them.
"Not my fault!" the human towing me replied defensively. I did recognise that voice, and my fury intensified. "It would've worked on a regular bot!"
I wanted nothing more than to rip these humans apart with my bare hands. But as immediately satisfying as that would be, that wouldn't help me or Alpha at all in the long run. It would only prove just how dangerous we were. So I continued to play dead, double-checked that my drones were recording, and sent a message over the feed.
The response I got in return was surprisingly gratifying.
"Well these obviously aren't regular fucking bots, now are they? Idiot," the other human snarled.
"Why the fuck are you so worked up anyway? They're out now, and once we get them to the airlock and space them, they won't be a problem any more."
I pinged Debris to open its hangar doors, and made sure that Fishsticks and TIM weren't too close to our fliers.
"You'd just better hope that vacuum actually kills these things."
"I don't see why it wouldn't. They have meat parts too, vacuum will fuck them up good. Even if anyone manages to find them again, it'll be too late to recover anything."
I pinged Alpha again, and this time got a response. It sounded groggy though, like it was still cycling back up. [Don't move,] I sent to it. [Just keep pretending you're still offline.]
[Ω? What's going on?]
[A couple of shitty fucking humans are trying to murder us.]
[… Oh.] It sounded resigned. [Are we going to let them?]
[No. They're about to space us, but I've got our fliers on the way here. It'll suck a bit until we can get into them, but what else is new.]
[Hah. Yeah. All right.] It was starting to sound more alert now. (I didn't want to acknowledge how relieved I felt at that.) [Should we… tell anyone?]
[I've already contacted Indah. She said she'll take care of it.] I hesitated a moment, then added, [Don't worry, okay?]
[Oh! Okay.]
It was... weird, having Alpha just accept that without question. Not because it trusted me; I'd kind of gotten used to that by this point, as odd as that was. It was weird because it didn't feel weird. Another ghost I guess. I still didn't know how I felt about that.
I didn't have much time to dwell on it though because it was about this point that the two humans reached the airlock, shoved us both into it, then sealed the bulkhead behind us. A few moments later, the outer airlock cycled open and we were sent spinning out into open space with a blast of escaping atmosphere.
It was fucking cold, but unlike a lot of media I'd seen where humans got sucked out into space, we didn't immediately flash-freeze, or explode, or anything stupid like that. I'd already handed control of its flier back to Alpha, and we brought our fliers to our positions, clambered into the open cockpits, and sealed the canopies.
As we headed back to Debris, I continued to follow the two shitty asshole humans with my drones, sharing the inputs with Alpha. When the two assholes stepped out of the ship into the normally less-populated docking bay, they were met with a very unimpressed-looking Indah, along with Aylen and several other equally unimpressed security officers.
It was incredibly gratifying to watch how the two of them froze, wide-eyed, as Indah took an implacable step forwards. "Officer Zafar, Jereem," she stated with professional, icy calm. It was like watching a serial. "You are both under arrest for the attempted murder of Preservation citizens."
Alpha and I had to spend some time in Debris' MedSystem - not just for the exposure to vacuum, but also because we'd both been shot multiple times at close range by projectile weapons. Zafar and his asshole buddy had snuck up on us while we'd been preoccupied with the damaged ship's systems, shot both of us in the back of the head which had knocked us out, then shot us several more times for good measure. We were lucky they hadn't known enough about us to actually figure out how to kill us properly, and hadn't had access to weapons that were actually a significant threat.
I spent most of that time in MedSystem watching more Havelrack Chronicles with Alpha - it hadn't seen any of it yet, so I had to start from the beginning, but I didn't really mind.
After about half an hour, Indah sent us a message asking if she could come talk to us - Alpha was okay with it, so I said sure. I don't think she'd been expecting to find us still in the MedSystem, but she didn't comment on it, and just did her best to not look directly at the way MedSystem was still carefully plucking projectiles out of us.
Pin-Lee came along with Indah, and I was a little surprised at how relieved I was to see her there as well. Yeah, I'd been keeping watch over her with my drones, but no alerts had pinged so I hadn't actually been watching her. It was kind of nice to see her again.
"You two just can't keep out of trouble, can you?" Pin-Lee greeted us with a sharp grin as she strode into Medical. She wasn't perturbed at all by us being in MedSystem - she'd seen it before, after all.
"Still less trouble than you humans manage to get into by yourselves," I deadpanned. Pin-Lee let out a short bark of laughter at that, while Indah just sighed.
"Pleasantries aside, let's get to the point," Indah said. "As you know, Zafar and Jereem have been arrested for attempting to kill you both—"
"Oh, should I mention the malware?" Alpha asked me, cutting Indah off. She blinked, and I sighed.
"You kind of just did," I pointed out.
"What malware?" Indah asked sharply. Pin-Lee was also listening intently, leaning forward a little. It was kind of unnerving.
"Oh, um." Alpha's gun ports clicked a few times. "This morning, someone tried to infect me with malware. It didn't work, and we didn't know who it was at the time, but that's why SecUnit came to start helping with the investigation, 'cause it wanted to see if whoever did it would try to infect it, too. But they didn't, and then everything else happened."
Indah was frowning at both of us. "Why didn't you mention this earlier?" She seemed to be directing the question more at me than at Alpha.
I couldn't shrug while I was in the MedSystem, so I just raised one eyebrow instead. "I had no reason to think you'd believe me, especially with no physical proof and no evidence as to who was the culprit."
Indah winced.
Pin-Lee was still leaning forward a little, her gaze flicking between Alpha and my shoulder. "There's a reason you brought it up now though, right Alpha?"
"Oh, yeah! I was reviewing our drone recordings, and the other human with Zafar who shot us - uh, Jereem? That's it, right?" Indah nodded briefly, and Alpha continued. "Jereem mentioned malware while they were dragging us off to be spaced. Zafar was all 'it would've worked on a regular bot!' so I'm pretty sure he's the one who set it up on the station security feed to infect me in the first place."
Indah sighed and rubbed at her face with one hand. Pin-Lee however looked practically predatory. "Can you send me those drone recordings?" she asked. "And whatever information you have on the malware Zafar tried to infect you with?"
"Send them to me first, please," Indah said tiredly. "That's evidence. And we'll need to examine Zafar's interfaces to confirm guilt."
"But I will definitely be including whatever Station Security finds out in the charges against them," Pin-Lee assured us. So I sent both Indah and Pin-Lee the recordings from our drones, and Alpha sent the deactivated and inert malware, neatly packaged up so it couldn't activate.
"All right." Once she'd confirmed receipt of the files, Indah shook her head slightly, then looked back at us. "So. That aside, the main reason I wanted to talk to you both is - for legal reasons, I need to know if either of you want to be formally involved in the trial."
"What does that mean? Can we even do that?" Alpha asked. "I mean…" It hesitated.
"You called us Preservation citizens when you arrested them," I said. "Are we though? Legally? Because last I knew, we absolutely weren't." Indah had been pretty vehement about that before.
"That's one of the reasons why I'm here," Pin-Lee replied with another sharp little grin. "There's a lot of legal bullshit still going on in the background, which I won't bore you with, but the long and short of it is that you can now be Preservation citizens if you choose to be. It won't be perfect, we're piggy-backing off the bot laws for now until we can get all the little details sorted out and everything properly codified, which will probably take months at least, maybe even years. But you won't need guardians and you'll have all the same rights as Preservation humans."
I still didn't know if that was something I wanted. Judging by the uncertain expression Alpha was giving me, it wasn't sure yet either. "Will being - or not being - Preservation citizens change how the trial goes?" I asked.
Pin-Lee shrugged. "Not hugely. Attempted murder is attempted murder, no matter whether the victims are Preservation citizens or not. And there is definitely more than enough evidence that they were absolutely trying to kill you both." She paused for a moment, then added, "There's a possibility though that the defence will attempt to talk their way out of it being classified as attempted murder and instead try to claim it was merely 'property damage' or some bullshit like that. I have absolutely no intention of letting that fly either way, but the two of you being official Preservation citizens - and participating in person in the trial - would definitely help to counteract that."
Ugh. That all sounded like a pain in the ass, but I had to admit that having humans have to legally acknowledge that we were people that could be murdered, and not just property that could be damaged, was… distressingly appealing.
"You don't have to decide on the citizenship thing immediately," Pin-Lee added after a moment. "Take some time to think it over. And the trial proceedings won't start for a few days yet, so you have some time to consider that as well. Let me know if you've got any questions about it."
I was definitely going to need that time to think things over before making any decisions. Alpha also looked relieved at not having to decide right away, too. "All right," it said, then its expression became worried again. "Although - are we going to get in trouble for using our fliers without permission?"
"Of course not," Indah replied firmly. "You would have died otherwise, so no, you won't be getting in trouble for that."
"Which reminds me, that's another reason I'm here," Pin-Lee added, grinning at us. "It was a stupid restriction anyway, and now that Indah's finally seen reason—" Indah scowled at that, but didn't comment, "— I've been able to push those licenses through for you. Here."
She sent us both some documentation over the feed, which looked very official and was full of legal talk. It basically boiled down to us being allowed to use our fliers in Preservation space whenever we wanted, as long as we obeyed the same aerospace laws that all the other pilots had to obey as well for safety reasons. That seemed reasonable enough. Filing flight plans with Preservation Aeronautics didn't require getting permission first, it just meant that we were letting them know what we'd be doing in general so that there would be less chance for accidents to happen. (Having humans involved in anything meant that there was always a chance for accidents to happen, but I appreciated the attempts to lessen the chances anyway.)
I also noticed that the documentation had been backdated to a few hours before our little excursion out into hard vacuum. I tapped Pin-Lee's feed and highlighted that part of the document; she just replied with another string of amusement sigils, and grinned up at my drone.
I was really glad that Pin-Lee had chosen to be my lawyer. And Alpha's lawyer, too.
Alpha was beaming happily at Pin-Lee. "Thank you!" it said with almost disgusting cheerfulness. If it hadn't been sitting in the MedSystem, it would probably have been bouncing on its toes again. (Where the hell had it picked up that habit, anyway?)
"Yeah, thanks," I added, with a much more dignified nod. "It's appreciated."
"You're both very welcome," Pin-Lee replied. "I think that's it from me, at least for now - let me know when you make up your minds about the citizenship thing and the trial participation. In the meantime, I better get back to the office." She gave a little wave with one hand before striding purposefully out of Medical.
"Bye, Pin-Lee!" Alpha called after her. Ugh.
Indah remained where she was though, and once the door had shut behind Pin-Lee, she raised an eyebrow at us. "All right. I know you were both… interrupted, but did you manage to find out anything from the damaged ship's systems?"
Oh, right. We still had a murderer to find. "Some," I replied, before quickly filling Indah in on what we'd discovered. "I don't know what the transmission was or who it went to, though. That's when we got shot."
Indah grimaced slightly. "Lousy timing," she grumbled, then sighed. "So we still need to figure out what we can about that transmission. How much longer will you two be in MedSystem for?"
I checked the diagnostics and MedSystem's progress. "About half an hour for me, a little longer than that for Alpha. It took a bit more damage than I did."
"Sorry," Alpha said.
"You don't need to apologise," Indah replied, before looking back to me. "All right. I'll get people started on checking the station's systems, but we're probably going to need your assistance with that when you're ready."
"The first thing you should check is the interfaces of anyone who was with the initial boarding party onto the ship once it docked," I said. "Who was on that team?"
Indah frowned and took a minute to check her feed, then rattled off several officers' names. "Oh, and Balin," she added at the end. "The Port Authority bot. We had to get its assistance in opening the hatches to get on board before we got the power fixed."
Oh, fuck.
"Where is Balin?" I asked urgently. "And where was it during the time of the murder?"
Indah blanched slightly. "Do you think that Balin was… hacked by that transmission?" she asked.
"I don't know. But it's a possibility, if it was one of the first things that the ship came into contact with once its power was restored. We need to check it. And that is something that Alpha and I should absolutely be the ones to do. Until then though, just… locate Balin, and keep an eye on it, but don't do anything that might alert it or make it think anything is going on. Just in case."
"Fuck." Indah sighed and rubbed at her forehead. "All right. Let me know as soon as you're out of Medical, and if you need any other equipment."
I pinged Alpha, and it pinged me in response. Then I looked back to Indah and said, "We might need bigger guns."
While we were still in the MedSystem, Indah returned to Station Security and sent us all the information she had on Balin. Its location during the time of the murder was unconfirmed, and its history on Preservation was unique. Apparently, it had arrived at Preservation 43.7 local planetary years earlier, and its original “guardian” had been the Port Authority supervisor at that time, who had taken it on when Balin jumped ship from a corporate cargo transport and requested refuge. It had been the first and only bot to do that, which, you know, should have given the humans the hint that something was up.
In all the time on Preservation Station, there was no record of it having ever undergone maintenance. If my suspicions (and scans) were accurate, it couldn't, because even a Preservation human would have likely started to ask questions about why a general-purpose bot had military-grade armour installed beneath its outer body.
As far as I could tell from the information that Indah had sent me though, Balin had never done anything relating to whatever reason it had originally been sent here for. The corporation that Balin had been deployed from had been killed off in (yet another) hostile takeover 27.6 years ago. Its secondary - or rather, its primary but hidden function - had remained dormant for the entire time it had been on Preservation.
Until now, maybe. We wouldn't know for sure until Alpha and I could check it out. And if my suspicions about Balin were correct, that could go… really, really badly.
Once we were both out of the MedSystem and had gotten cleaned up and dressed, we headed to Station Security. Indah had approved our use of some of the body armour and the biggest projectile weapons they had. (They weren't as big as the projectile weapons that were part of a SecUnit's standard loadout, but they were still better than nothing.) We geared up, then headed for an older, unoccupied section of the docks.
Indah had gone to talk to Gamila in person, so their conversation couldn't be hacked into via the feed, and told her what was going on. Once we were ready and in position, Gamila then asked Balin over the feed to meet her down in that section of the docks. No other humans were around, so if a fight broke out, there wouldn't be any risk of anyone getting hurt. (Unless the fight went really badly and shifted to a more occupied section of the station. I really hoped things didn't go that badly.)
When Balin got down to the docks, Alpha and I were the only ones there. It came over to us, pinging a greeting, and asked if we'd seen Gamila.
I responded that Gamila had asked us to meet with it in her stead, and then I explained what was going on, what we suspected, and why Alpha and I wanted to check through its systems.
(I didn't want to be the first one to attack Balin. I didn't want to be the one to initiate a fight. It had been amongst the bots who had greeted me when I first joined the bot-only feed, and I didn't know for sure that it had been hacked. I wasn't going to make any assumptions.)
Surprisingly, Balin agreed to letting us check through its systems without any argument. It was upset about the murder (or at least, it was upset that Gamila was upset about it), and wanted the murderer found as well. It was willing to subject itself to investigation to help Station Security.
So Alpha kept watch while Balin let down its walls and let me into its systems via the feed. It felt… weird. I'd hacked into plenty of systems before, and into some security bots to delete any memory of my presence, but they'd all had walls that I'd had to find a way through. With Balin willingly lowering its walls to let me in, there was no resistance to my presence in its systems.
I was as gentle as I could be as I scoured through its systems, looking for anything suspicious or out of place. I'd been half-expecting to get attacked, but nothing happened. I spent a few minutes searching every nook and cranny, but as far as I could tell, Balin hadn't been infected with any malware from the MinShaTec ship at all.
I did, however, confirm my suspicions that Balin was, beneath its general purpose shell, a combat bot. (I was very relieved that we hadn't had to fight it.)
I also found some old, buried code within Balin's systems - sleeper code designed to activate when a trigger code was received. But nobody had sent it the trigger code, so the sleeper code remained inert. I examined it thoroughly, then pulled back out of Balin's systems enough so that I could communicate with it without interfering with its systems.
I let it know about the sleeper code, and what said code could do if it was ever triggered. Balin was horrified, so much so that it was difficult to parse what it was trying to say. After it had calmed down enough to stop scrambling its attempts at feed communication, it asked me if I could get rid of the sleeper code entirely, so it could never be triggered. It liked its life here on Preservation, and the friends it had made, and it didn't want anything endangering that.
I was more than happy to do so. I knew just how much it sucked to have something else take over your systems and force you to do things you didn't want to do.
Afterwards, Alpha and I went back to Station Security to return the body armour and the weapons. I was relieved that we hadn't needed them, and also felt just a little silly that we'd taken them in the first place. Still, better safe than sorry.
We then went to report to Indah and Aylen. "So Balin wasn't our murderer?" Indah asked once we'd finished updating them.
"No." That was a good thing, but also a little frustrating. Our murderer was still out there.
"But it is a combat bot, and it did have sleeper code?" Aylen asked, looking concerned.
"It is, and it did," I replied. "Left over from its original company. I couldn't find out why the hell it was sent to Preservation in the first place. But that company no longer exists, and I've now also deleted the sleeper code, at Balin's request. So even if someone else manages to get their hands on its trigger code, it's still safe."
"Well, that's a relief at least," Indah commented. "I'm glad you found that before it could become an actual problem."
"We still need to locate our murderer though." Aylen sounded frustrated. "We've been checking the station's systems for any record of any kind of unidentified transmission, but so far nobody's found anything yet."
"We could go back to the ship and see if we can get more info about the transmission," Alpha suggested. "We shouldn't get interrupted this time."
That was as good an idea as any, so Alpha and I went back to the ship. And just to make sure we wouldn't be interrupted again, Indah sent Officers Tifany and Farid with us this time to watch our backs. I'd seen them both there during the arrest, and they'd both looked almost as mad about it as Indah had. So I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
(I still had a handful of drones following us and recording everything anyway. Just in case.)
It turned out that we needn't have bothered, though. There was nothing left in the ship's systems at all. Alpha and I scoured through the entire system, every sector of the ship's processors, and found absolutely nothing. Either the defence protocol had wiped the killware when our connection to it was cut, or the killware had self-destructed to eliminate any traces.
My face must have been doing something obvious when Alpha and I finally disconnected from the ship's systems, because the first thing Officer Farid said to me was, "No luck, huh?" His expression was sympathetic.
"None whatsoever," I replied. "The systems have been wiped clean. There's nothing left to find."
"Getting interrupted as suddenly as we did must have released the killware from the lockdown we had it under," Alpha added with a sigh. "So it wiped everything and deleted itself so nobody could learn anything else from it."
"Oh, Indah's going to be pissed," Tifany commented dryly. "But maybe we can add that to the charges against Zafar and Jereem - interfering with a murder investigation. I'm sure Pin-Lee will enjoy dropping that onto them too."
"Probably."
Tifany hesitated for a moment, looking between me and Alpha as we headed out of the ship. "I'm sorry about that whole mess with Zafar," she said. "I should've… done something more when he was being an asshole to you earlier. Maybe it could've been prevented."
Oh, this was awkward. I shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. Either way, we can't change what's already happened. Don't worry about it."
"You've been nice, at least," Alpha added with a lopsided little smile. "There have been more nice humans than nasty ones here, which is a pleasant change."
"Well, that's good," Farid said after an awkward moment of silence. "Hopefully nobody else will try to attack you."
Yeah, I wasn't going to hold my breath about that.
But at least now I knew that even if someone did try to attack us again, Station Security would have our backs.
Chapter Eight
Indah definitely wasn't happy to learn that we'd lost whatever little lead we might've been able to get from the damaged ship's systems. That mystery transmission could've been anything, gone to anyone, and we had no other lead to follow. If the ship and its mystery transmission weren't connected to the murder (which in my opinion was looking increasingly unlikely), then the murderer could be anyone on the station at the time. We were practically back to square one.
Alpha and I were back in one of Station Security's offices, one of the big ones with multiple display surfaces showing all kinds of station security information. It was a little weird being here - we hadn't been allowed in the bigger offices before, but apparently now Indah had decided that we were actually trustworthy enough to access them. A few other officers were also sitting at the consoles in here, working on going through all the communications logs and searching for anomalies. (They were painfully slow. It was agonising to watch.)
Indah and Aylen were here as well, looking about as frustrated as I felt. They also looked tired - it had been a long day.
"We're still going through all the communication logs," Indah was saying, somewhat unnecessarily since I could see the officers doing exactly that. "But that's a hell of a lot of chatter to sift through. If you could help…"
We could definitely go through the data a lot faster and much more accurately than humans could, that was for sure. Datamining was one of our major tasks back at the company, after all. It would be boring and tedious, but I couldn't think of much else to do—
Wait, yes I could. "We also need to do a surveillance audit," I said.
Indah raised one eyebrow at me. "A what?"
"You take all the data available during the time frame when the incident occurred - from Port Authority, StationSec, StationCommCentral, TransportLocal, the distribution kiosks, the door systems that allow people to enter their private quarters, anything that saves an ID that tells you where someone was during the timeframe of the murder. Then you can eliminate anyone whose location was known and confirmed from the suspect pool. It's going to be harder because your surveillance is shit, but it can still drastically reduce the number of potential suspects."
Indah didn't react, and Aylen was frowning. I added, "If we know someone is in the station mall accessing a food kiosk at the same time as the murder, or within a time frame that eliminates the possibility of them reaching the murder scene in time to commit the murder, then they can be eliminated as a suspect."
Aylen looked thoughtful, and Indah's expression turned intrigued. "Some of those systems are under privacy lock, we'd need to convince a judge-advocate to release their access records, but the others…" Then she shook her head. "We narrowed down the time of death, but it's not exact."
"It doesn't need to be exact at this point," I countered. "We just need to narrow down the suspect pool to start with. Then if we get anything from the communication logs, we can cross-reference that data with what we get from the surveillance audit, and narrow our suspect pool even further. At this point I think it's safe to say that BreharWallHan let the MinShaTec humans escape, so they could use the ship to send… whatever that transmission was to someone already on the station. We just need to figure out who that was, and then we can proceed from there."
Both of them still looked dubious. "Well, we don't really have many other options at this point," Indah conceded after a long moment. "It's better than just sending officers to all the other docked ships and hoping they find some kind of clue still hanging around."
Alpha leaned forwards a little, looking nervous. "I have a suggestion?"
Indah and Aylen both looked over at it. "What is it?" Indah asked.
"It's… well, you probably won't like it, but… what if we used the MinShaTec humans as bait?" It hesitated a moment at Indah's blank stare and Aylen's slowly raising eyebrows, then rushed on to explain itself. "I mean, if the murderer really is from BreharWallHan, wanting to stop proprietary information from getting out, then there are probably still more of the MinShaTec humans here that they'd want to silence? From what they were saying in the interviews, Raltun wasn't the only executive who'd escaped to here who knew important stuff. If we set things up so that they looked like an easy target, we could maybe catch the murderer in the act. Before they actually manage to hurt or kill anyone else, of course."
Indah frowned, but it was a thoughtful frown. "It's risky, but it has potential…"
"I don't know if any of the MinShaTec humans would agree to being bait for a murderer though," Aylen pointed out dryly. "I doubt that they'd just trust our word that our 'pet SecUnits' - sorry - would actually protect them from someone trying to kill them."
Indah sighed. "True. And it wouldn't exactly be ethical to use them as bait without their knowledge or consent beforehand. We'll keep that idea as a last resort, I think. Thank you for the suggestion though, Alpha."
Alpha just nodded with a lopsided little smile.
Indah rubbed at her face with one hand. "In the meantime - SecUnit, Alpha, see what you can find in the communications logs. I'll get the ball rolling on organising a surveillance audit. How long do you think this audit would take you anyway?"
“A few hours," I replied. "And we would need outside processing and storage space.” I’d have to pull a bunch of old company code out of archive storage, build the database, and write the queries. With Alpha helping, it'd be faster than if I had to do it on my own, at least.
"All right. Let's get going, then."
So Alpha and I made ourselves comfortable in a couple of seats in the office, displacing two of the human officers who decided that now was a great time to go on a break. I'd situated myself so that I could watch the display surfaces showing the views from the few security cameras that StationSec had, though the majority of my attention was focused on combing through the communication logs.
Indah had left to start requesting permissions to access data from the various systems we'd need to pull from for the surveillance audit, but Aylen was still here, sitting at another of the consoles and working in the feed as well. From what I could see, she was scrutinising the information we'd gotten from all the interviews with the MinShaTec humans, maybe searching for more clues or discrepancies.
Alpha and I were sharing the same feed connection into the communication logs, so we could more efficiently split the logs between us, and cross-check each other's observations. It was involved enough that I couldn't even play music in the background, which was a little annoying.
I was only tangentially watching the view from the various security cameras when Threat Assessment and Risk Assessment suddenly spiked. I paused what I was doing with the communication logs, trying to figure out what exactly had caused the spike.
[What's wrong?] Alpha asked.
[TA and RA just spiked, but I can't tell why yet. Did you get anything?]
Alpha paused, then shook its head. [No, nothing. I haven't found anything in the communication logs yet.]
[Neither have I.] But I suspected that it wasn't the logs that had caused the spike.
I accessed all the camera feeds and scrolled them back to just before the spike, then let them play again. As I thought, RA and TA spiked again as I watched the cameras. But there were enough views that I couldn't figure out exactly which one had caused the spike. [It was something on the cameras,] I sent to Alpha. [But I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary.]
It joined me in scouring the camera footage, then admitted after a few seconds, [I'm still not getting anything either. No spikes, nothing.]
That was supremely frustrating. All the camera views showed just normal, ordinary Preservation life. Humans and bots moving around, doing their jobs, stopping to chat to each other, or check information booths, or whatever else it was that they did with their time. I checked all my drone inputs, but nothing anomalous was showing on any of them, either. All the PreservationAux humans were safe, nothing odd was going on with any of them.
So what had caused the spike?
Alpha was still scanning through the security camera footage, scrubbing backwards through the recordings; I saw it perk up a little, and it commented, [Oh hey look, there's Fishsticks!]
TA and RA spiked again - and suddenly things started clicking into place. [Where?] I asked urgently.
Alpha immediately sent me the specific camera view, showing Fishsticks leaving the embarkation zone and heading towards the residential areas. The timestamp marked it as happening a few minutes ago.
I hurriedly hacked into the station's maintenance request logs, scanning through the most recent ones as fast as I could. One of the requests immediately caught my attention, and I was on my feet and sprinting out of the office before I could even register that I'd started moving.
[What's wrong?!] Alpha asked.
[It's the maintenance bots!] I replied as I sprinted through Station Security, past startled looking humans, and out into the station mall. I switched to the bot-only feed and sent an urgent request for the location of every maintenance bot on the station.
The responses came rolling in - but Fishsticks wasn't showing up at all. It wasn't in the bot feed any more.
Shit, shit, fucking shit. It was so obvious in hindsight - every station had maintenance bots, you couldn't keep a station running without them. And they were so ubiquitous as to be practically invisible - nobody paid attention to them going about and doing their thing.
Nobody considered that the in-built tools they used for repairs could also be used as weapons.
And a maintenance request had come in from the safe zone where the MinShaTec refugees were currently staying, to protect them from getting murdered. But nobody would think to be suspicious of a maintenance bot replying to a repair request. None of the security officers keeping watch would stop a maintenance bot from just doing its job.
I was sprinting as fast as I could through the station mall, dodging startled or oblivious humans, explaining what was going on in the bot feed and asking all the bots there to secure the maintenance bots and disconnect them from MaintenanceSystem for now, tapping Indah and Aylen's feeds to update them as well, tapping the feeds of the officers on duty around the safe zone to ask if and when they'd seen Fishsticks, pulling up the maintenance requests from just before the time of the first murder.
Raltun had, indeed, sent a maintenance request to fix a broken fixture in his residence a short time before he'd been killed.
The bots responded a lot faster than any of the humans did. There was surprise and alarm, but none of them doubted me. Balin had already told them all about how I'd found and gotten rid of the sleeper code in its own systems. They organised amongst themselves to keep at least one other bot with every maintenance bot in some kind of buddy system until we could check them all for malware and clear it out.
Fishsticks however was still unaccounted for, save for its initial acknowledgement of the repair request from the safe house.
I just had to hope I got there in time.
I reached the safe zone just as the human officers stationed there finally responded - yes they'd seen Fishsticks, it had gone inside, they didn't know exactly where it was now. I'd already pulled the details of the repair request and the blueprints of the safe zone, and knew where I had to go.
I didn't stop at the entrance - luckily one of the officers had already opened the door to go in themselves, so I just sprinted past them and into the habitation block. It was a multi-level structure, and I had to get to the third floor. The lifts would be too slow, so I used the stairs instead, leaping up them as fast as I could. I sped out onto the landing, sprinted down the corridor and through an open public lounge area, ignoring the startled shouts and screams of the humans I passed, and burst through the door of one of the private suites. The first room was unoccupied, but the door to the main bedroom was closed.
I smashed through the door and saw Fishsticks approaching a human, its tools extended.
I leapt at it.
For the record, yes, getting hit by an overcharged welding tool does feel a lot like getting shot by a high-powered energy weapon.
In the end, it hadn't been very difficult to hack into Fishstick's systems, find the lurking malware, and rip it out. Fishsticks had been very disoriented to start with, then horrified once I filled it in on what had happened. I spent some time reassuring it that nobody would blame it, that it was entirely the fault of the humans who had coded and sent the malware in the first place, and that it hadn't been the one to murder Raltun. (After checking the maintenance logs, I'd confirmed which maintenance bot had been used for that murder. It wasn't Fishsticks or TIM. I'm not going to record who it was here, though. It wasn't that bot's fault, either.)
The human I'd saved had screamed a bit, then gone bolting out of the room while I was still busy with Fishsticks. That was fine - at least they were still alive, and outside of that I didn't care about them.
Alpha showed up, along with Aylen and some of the human officers. It came to find me while Aylen and the officers tried to calm the other humans and explain what was going on to them, or at least get them to stop screaming about murderous SecUnits. I showed Alpha the malware I'd ripped out of Fishstick's systems, so it'd know what to look for when we started checking all the other maintenance bots.
It was an elegant piece of programming, honestly. It was designed to infiltrate a station's MaintenanceSystem, infect all the connected maintenance bots, then stay hidden and dormant in each bot's systems until a certain set of criteria were met.
Those criteria being: (1) locate specific humans, whose information was listed in the malware itself, and (2) wait until one of said listed humans was alone with the maintenance bot, with no other witnesses around. Once said criteria were met, the malware activated fully, took over the bot's systems to kill the target human, cleaned and left the crime scene, wiped any memory of these actions from the bot's systems, and then went dormant again, waiting for the next opportunity to do murder.
We were lucky, really, that Raltun had been the only victim. I suspected that the BreharWallHan coders hadn't expected us to lock down the station for such a thorough investigation after only one murder, or that most of the targets would spend a lot of their time around other people here.
Alpha and I accompanied Fishsticks out of the habitation block, then we had to pause for a minute at the entrance so one of the human officers could lend me their jacket so I wouldn't be walking through the station with a visible injury. The damage wasn't that bad, comparatively, but it looked ugly, and it was very visible, right in the middle of my chest. It had burned through my shirt and the organics underneath before hitting my inorganic structural framework, leaving scorch marks on the metal. I was starting to run out of undamaged clothing, it was really annoying. Debris had a recycler that could print new clothes, sure, but the quality was crap.
(Fishsticks apologised profusely for hurting me. I had to reassure it again that it wasn't the one responsible, and it didn't have to apologise. It apologised more anyway.)
When we got back to Station Security with Fishsticks, Indah met us there. I gave her a full rundown of what had happened, and the details of the malware, and then the human analysts in Station Security had to check through Fishstick's systems themselves, just to make sure. Then Alpha and I went through MaintenanceSystem and scoured it clean of any trace of malware.
After that, it was just a matter of checking and clearing the malware out of each maintenance bot individually. There were a lot of them, and each one arrived at Station Security accompanied by another bot. It took a long time to clear all of them, but the process went smoothly overall. The malware had relied entirely on going unnoticed in the first place; it didn't have any instructions or protocols for what to do if it was discovered. That was a relief. Things could've gone a lot worse if it'd had instructions to do anything like sabotage the station's life support, for example. (I didn't mention that possibility to any of the humans. They were stressed enough as it was.)
Finally, we were done with all the maintenance bots. I double-checked MaintenanceSystem again, then gave the all-clear for the maintenance bots to reconnect to it and resume their usual duties. Then Indah asked Alpha and I to check through all the other station systems as well, just to make sure nothing had gotten into any of them too. The human analysts were working on that already, but we were faster and more accurate. (We also didn't need to eat or sleep.)
It was late in the station cycle by the time we finished. There was no trace of anything getting into any of the other systems - as far as we could tell, the malware had only infected MaintenanceSystem.
Indah was still in Station Security with us, working on reports in the feed, even though technically she'd gone off duty a few hours ago. Aylen had brought in some food and beverage for her at some point, and the empty packaging was still sitting out on one of the consoles.
"Everything's clear," I said.
Indah jumped slightly - I suspected that she'd been starting to doze off. She gave her head a shake, then straightened up in her seat. "All clear? Good. That's good." She ran one hand back over her hair. "Thank you both for helping us check."
I just shrugged, and Alpha chirped, "You're welcome!" from its own chair.
Indah's mouth quirked in a faint smile for a moment at Alpha, then she looked back at me. "You know, the Station Security uniform suits you," she commented, nodding at the borrowed jacket I was still wearing. (No, I hadn't gone back to Debris' MedSystem yet.)
I had no idea how to respond to that, and it must have shown on my face, because Indah straightened in her seat, her expression flickering. "I mean..." She paused, frowning a little. "Damn, I'm too tired to know what I mean. But." She paused again, apparently gathering her thoughts. "You both did an excellent job. I'm grateful for all your hard work. You will both, of course, be paid appropriately, as outside contractors."
I blinked. I hadn't had any contract with Station Security, at least not that I knew of. Maybe Alpha had, but I hadn't asked it, and it hadn't mentioned it when I came to help. So the thought of actually getting paid for any of this had never occurred to me. (Yes, I'd gotten paid a couple of times before, but that had been agreed to beforehand, and the concept of SecUnits getting paid at all was still very weird.)
If Indah noticed my surprise, she tactfully didn't mention it. Instead she just hauled herself to her feet and gestured for us to follow her. "Come on. Let's get that out of the way, and then I can go home and get some fucking sleep before I have to finalise all the reports on this mess."
Alpha and I got up and followed Indah to her personal office, where she handed us both several hard currency cards. "Thank you again," she said. "And… if either of you, or both of you, decide at some point that you would like to… work with Station Security on a more permanent basis, you'd both be welcome."
I was so surprised, I stared directly at Indah for a good three point six seconds. Alpha seemed just as surprised. Neither of us knew what to say, and apparently neither did Indah, because she ended up just scowling at us and waving us out of her office. "But that is a future thing. For now, go on, get out of here. I'm clocking the fuck off and going home."
So we got out of there, and went back to Debris.
I watched some more Havelrack Chronicles in the feed with Alpha while I was getting patched up in MedSystem (again), then had a shower and got Debris' recycler to print me some new clothes to replace all the ones that had gotten messed up over the past couple of days. They weren't as nice as the ones I'd gotten from the shop back on the station with Vicky though, and Debris' recycler wasn't good enough to repair them. Preservation also didn't have clothes recyclers like the Corporation Rim did. All their local clothes were made from… natural fibres, or something, and apparently put together by hand. It seemed very inefficient.
Once I'd gotten cleaned up, I headed down to the hangar. Alpha was already there, along with TIM and Fishsticks. The two maintenance bots had been working on our fliers almost non-stop since getting cleared of the malware - they said it was the least they could do to repay us for our help. A lot of the bots in the bot feed had also been sending me pings of gratitude.
It was really awkward.
I also had several messages from my humans waiting for me to respond - one was from Mensah, checking in on me and making sure I was okay. I let her know that I was fine, and that Indah had offered both Alpha and I jobs at Station Security, and that I didn't know what to think of that yet.
Another was from Ratthi, asking if I was interested in going with him to see a new play later in the day. I took a look at the play's information, decided that it looked interesting, then sent a confirmation. Ratthi's response was immediate and enthusiastic. I asked him what the hell he was doing still awake at this hour. He just sent me an indecipherable string of emotion sigils. I didn't bother trying to figure out what he meant by them.
There was one from Pin-Lee, updating me (and Alpha) on the progress of all the legal stuff. There was a lot to go through. I sent a simple received notification, and made a mental note to look at it all later.
Finally there was one from Bharadwaj, asking if Alpha and I were going to be available for our next scheduled interview, and whether we'd prefer it to be on Debris again or at her offices. I briefly checked with Alpha, then sent a confirmation and replied that we'd prefer it to be on board Debris still. (After the whole 'sprinting through the station and scaring humans' thing, I figured it would be best to let things die down for a bit before I ventured out there again.)
Once I got to the hangar, I pinged the bots and Alpha with a greeting, which they returned enthusiastically. From what I could see, Fishsticks had finished painting Alpha's flier, and was now helping TIM put the final touches on mine. Alpha was perched on top of one of the hangar's storage lockers; I sent a drone up beside it and - yeah, okay, it had a really good view of the upper sides of our fliers from up there. They looked… really cool. Like something from one of the higher budget serials.
I headed towards my flier and walked around it, admiring the paint job. Billowing purple and blue and green nebulae stood out against the deep black background, wrapping around my nosecone and fuselage and spiralling out across my wings, speckled with dense constellations of stars.
It was a sharp contrast to Alpha's much more colourful rainbow sunrise, that was for sure. But I thought it suited me. (And Alpha's brighter colours suited it.)
TIM pinged me again after a few minutes, just as it and Fishsticks lowered their paint applicators and backed away from my flier. [Update: painting = complete!] it sent, along with a joyful emotion sigil. Fishsticks followed up with a happy sigil of its own.
I pinged them both in return. [Response: painting = successful,] I sent, then added out loud, "They look really, really good. Thank you both."
"Yeah, thank you!" Alpha chimed in from its perch before dropping back down to the hangar floor and bouncing over to us. "They look amazing! You both did such a good job, I can't wait to show them off to everyone!"
TIM and Fishsticks beeped happily, and I could see them sharing photos of our fliers in the bot feed. There was a flurry of positive and complimentary responses, directed both at TIM and Fishsticks as well as me and Alpha. (Wait, when the hell had Alpha joined the bot chat as well? I had to skim back through the log to find out, and - oh, right after we'd cleared all the maintenance bots and confirmed they could reconnect to MaintenanceSystem. Okay. TIM or Fishsticks must've invited it in too.)
It was a little overwhelming, honestly. I just sent a general ping of acknowledgement and a brief thanks to TIM and Fishsticks, then backburnered the feed. Alpha looked to be happily chatting away with the bots, so I wandered over to where I'd left the paint applicators I'd been using to paint the hangar. Someone had cleaned and tidied them up, closed all the paint canisters so they wouldn't dry out, and laid everything out neatly in readiness for whenever I came back to it.
I could've checked Debris' camera recordings to see who'd done it, but I decided not to. I didn't really need to know.
As I was trying to decide if I felt like painting more of the hangar, Alpha pinged me. "TIM and Fishsticks say that the paint and sealant's all set, and we don't have to worry about damaging anything if we want to go flying now." It hesitated for a moment, then added, "Now that we have those licenses… do you want to go out for a flight with me? Just for a bit?"
It sounded… cautiously hopeful. Like it was expecting me to say no, but had asked anyway just in case I said yes. I used one of my drones to look over at it - it had its hands folded behind its back, and was rocking a little from heel to toe, like I'd seen Ratthi or Arada do sometimes.
I had to think about my response. I did want to go flying - partly because I wanted to see if the licenses were actually legitimate, but mostly because it had been too long since I'd gotten to fly just for myself.
But did I want to do so with Alpha?
I thought about my talk with Bharadwaj, how she said that we'd need to take the time to learn who each other was now. We'd been so busy with the murder investigation that I hadn't really had time to do much of anything about it yet.
"… Yeah, okay."
Alpha smiled broadly at me. "Excellent, thank you!" It immediately went to get its flight suit, and as I approached the lockers as well, it casually tossed mine to me in a move that seemed almost automatic on its part.
And some organic part of me had been expecting it, because I caught it just as automatically.
Alpha seemed to realise what it had done right after it had done it though, because it gave me an apologetic, almost nervous look. "Ah, um - sorry."
"It's fine," I replied. (I still don't know if I was telling the truth or not.)
We got suited up and vaulted into our fliers. It was a relief to settle into the familiar seat, link up, and let my awareness encompass my larger self. I took the time to run a full diagnostic, testing all my flight surfaces to make sure nothing had gotten clogged or jammed by paint. The bots had done an excellent job though, and everything was working smoothly. My performance reliability settled at a comfortable, reassuring 100%.
I pinged Alpha to let it know I was ready to launch, and it replied with a return ping of confirmation. We'd already let Preservation Aeronautics know that we were going out; they'd given us clearance to launch and a flight path to follow until we'd gotten a safe distance away from the station, where we wouldn't be interfering with any other ships or shuttles. Debris opened the hangar bay doors for us, and we launched in quick succession.
It felt so good to be flying again, with the cold vacuum of space against my surfaces and the freedom to go wherever I wanted to, with no expectations from anyone. Alpha followed a little behind me and off to one side, sticking close but occasionally indulging in a little barrel-roll as we followed the flight path away from the station.
Once we reached open space, I took off at full speed, enjoying the thrum of my engines as I rolled and twisted and dove. Alpha trailed along in my wake, though it seemed… hesitant, almost.
I pinged it, and it pinged me back. Then I settled into a more level flight path that would take me curving gently around the planet. [So, uh. I talked to Bharadwaj a bit,] I started awkwardly. (Great start, Murderbot. I really should've planned out what I was going to say before I started actually saying it.)
[Oh?] Alpha sounded curious; it caught up to me and settled in to fly beside me. [What did she say?]
[Um. She was saying… well, here.] Dropping a recording of what Bharadwaj had told me into the feed for Alpha to take was much easier than trying to figure out how to summarise things myself.
It accepted the recording, and I could feel it going through it once, then a second time, more slowly. [… Oh. That… makes a lot of sense,] it said after the second viewing.
[Yeah, that's pretty much what I said, too.] I took a few seconds to admire the view of the planet against the backdrop of space to help settle my nerves. [And, well. I've been thinking. When I wasn't busy with… everything else, anyway.]
[It's been a pretty crazy couple of days,] Alpha agreed tentatively.
[Yeah. But it turned out all right.] I was getting off track. [Anyway. Um. I guess what I'm trying to say is… well. It's been… weird. Everything's been weird since all the shit that happened at Port FreeCommerce. And I… haven't really handled the weirdness very well.]
[It's okay,] Alpha replied, wry humour leaking through the feed from it. [It's been really weird for me, too. I don't think I've handled it any better.]
It was kind of reassuring to hear it say that. It made it a little easier for me to continue. [So. I wanted to… clear things up.] I paused for a moment to gather myself, then said, [I'm not Omega. Ω. I still don't remember anything about being Ω. I can't be Ω again, and frankly, given the circumstances of our lives back then, I don't want to be Ω again.]
[… Yeah, okay. I get that,] Alpha replied. It sounded resigned.
Some part of me didn't like it sounding like that.
[But,] I continued hastily. [I can't deny that we still work really well together. Even if I don't remember why. So. Me not being Ω any more doesn't mean we can't… get to know each other better as we are now, you know? Like Bharadwaj said. And we can still try this whole 'squad' thing out for a while. See how it works out for us, figure out what works best for us, now that we have the freedom to… be ourselves properly. If you want to.]
Alpha was silent for a long time. I distracted myself by looking at the planet, and at Preservation Station floating serenely above it, and at the way the sunlight glowed through the planet's atmosphere and gleamed sharply off the station's metallic surfaces. More sunlight glinted off the variety of ships docked at or travelling to and from the station, making them stand out against the backdrop of space. (I saved several photos to use as potential reference for future painting endeavours.)
Finally, Alpha replied, the feed flooding with warmth and hope. It felt weird, but it was a weird that I thought I could get used to. [I think… I'd like that.]