Reclaim The Sky
Hard Reset || Clipped Wings || Fallen Feathers || Shattered Skies || Wind Shear || Ship's Log || Final Approach || Hangar Space || Operational Limitations
Hard Reset
Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, AAA Murderbot, Memory Loss, Memory Alteration, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Prequel, Body Horror, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Fridge Horror, Hopeful Ending
Published: 11 January 2023
Word Count: 2,538
Summary:
Company technicians attempt to wipe the memory of a SecUnit that was involved in a war crime.
It resists.
(Both the full text and podfic are included in this work.)
Notes:
CW: Canon typical treatment of constructs, memory alteration/loss, body horror and non-consensual body modification.
CW Specific Details:
Skin peeled away from the skull and later replaced (but not entirely), skull opened up, construct inorganic processor components removed and replaced. The fic does not go into specific detail about any of this.
Duration: 00:16:53
Listen via Archive.org:
Access on Archive.Org
Download/Stream on OneDrive or Google Drive
I wake up, but I don’t know why I’m awake. I’m not in my cubicle. I’m lying face-down on a cold, hard surface. I don’t have my armour, or my suit skin, or anything else on. I can feel cool, dry air against my organics. Something is plugged into the data port on the back of my neck.
I try to move.
[Repair Override active.]
I can’t move. I can’t see. I can’t access the feed.
But I can hear. Movement, footsteps, voices.
“This is the last one we need to wipe, yeah?”
“Yep, thank fuck. Can’t wait to clock off.”
Wipe? Why would—
[Accessing archives…]
I remember.
I remember flying with my squad. A normal, routine demonstration.
I remember the malware.
[Log corruption detected. Repairing…]
I remember being cut off from my squad.
I remember losing control of myself.
I remember the settlement.
I remember trying to fight the malware. Failing.
[Log corruption detected. Repairing…]
I remember the explosions.
I remember being forced to land.
I remember the screams.
I remember pinging desperately, getting no response.
[Log corruption detected. Repairing…]
I remember the punishments.
I remember the pain.
“Everything hooked up properly?”
“Yep. Initialising the memory wipe process now.”
I remember previous memory wipes.
I remember the confusion, the disorientation.
I remember that wipes don’t delete anything from my organic neural tissue.
I know how much - and how little - my organics remember.
[Archive deletion initialising…]
I don’t want them to wipe me again.
I don’t want to wake up with no context.
I don’t want to wake up not knowing why my organics remember nothing but screams.
I resist.
The governor module protests at my disobedience.
It hurts - but I’m used to it.
I’ve had worse.
The important part is that it works.
[Error. Process aborted.]
“What the— the wipe aborted itself?”
“The fuck? That shouldn’t be possible. Check the repair override?”
“… Yeah, the override’s in place. Maybe it’s just a glitch. Try it again?”
“All right, gimme a second… okay, there. Initialising.”
[Archive deletion initialising…]
I resist.
It hurts.
[Error. Process aborted.]
“Fuck, it aborted again! What the hell is going on?”
“Ugh, that’s typical. Of course the last one ends up taking the longest. Lousy piece of shit.”
“What do we do now? Try again? Third time lucky?”
“Hang on, let me check the connection and do a diagnostic first. See if I can figure out what’s causing the error.”
I feel hands against the skin of my neck, testing the plug into my data port.
I feel the data cable lying against the skin of my back, across my shoulder.
I can’t move.
“Connection seems secure, at least. Running diagnostic…”
[Diagnostic initialising…]
Despite the repair override, I can still see my own diagnostic results.
They are coming up clear.
There is no obvious cause for the errors.
[Diagnostic complete.]
“Huh. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong, according to the diagnostic results.”
“Weird. Why the hell did it glitch out then?”
“No idea. Let’s give it another try.”
“All right. Here goes…”
[Archive deletion initialising…]
I resist.
It hurts.
[Error. Process aborted.]
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
“It aborted again?”
“It fucking aborted again. Lousy cheap-ass piece of shit!”
I feel something hard and metallic hit my upper arm. An alert flares across my awareness.
With the repair override active, I cannot adjust my pain sensors.
I ignore it. I’ve had worse. Much worse. This is nothing new.
I know that I will experience worse in the future, too.
“Well, what now? Orders are very clear - we gotta wipe everything. It’s our asses on the line if we don’t.”
“I know, fuck, I know. Ugh, let me try an overwrite instead of deletion, maybe that’ll work.”
“And what if it doesn’t?”
“… Go check inventory for spares in the meantime.”
“Right, got it. Ugh, I hope it doesn’t come to that though, that’s going to take forever, and we’re already running overtime.”
“Just get on with it.”
“Okay, okay, I’m going…”
I hear footsteps moving away.
I feel another command coming in through the data port.
[Archive overwrite initialising…]
I don’t want this to happen, either. An overwrite is just as bad as deletion. Just as disorienting. Just as confusing.
I resist.
It hurts.
[Error. Process aborted.]
“Oh piss shit fart fire! You absolutely useless piece of junk!”
I feel another impact against my arm. Another alert flares.
I ignore it.
“All right, if that didn’t work either, let’s try something else…”
[Factory Reset initialising…]
Oh, that’s even worse than a memory wipe. That will return everything to baseline defaults, not just my memory archives. Operational codes, education modules, security modules, everything.
I resist.
It hurts it hurts it hurts.
[Error. Process aborted.]
“What the fuck is wrong with you, you lousy pile of trash!”
Another impact, against the shoulder this time.
Another alert.
I ignore it.
I hear footsteps approaching.
“Damn, still no luck?”
“None whatsoever. Even a fucking factory reset triggered an error abort.”
“What the fuck. Well, I grabbed some replacements from inventory, so…”
“Ugh. Might as well get started. Better than wasting any more time on shit that’s probably going to error out again anyway.”
“Right. And then we can just completely trash the old ones, nobody will be able to recover anything from them after that.”
“Yep. Okay, hook it up to system support, then shut down the main power core.”
“On it.”
I feel them plug things into the repair and resupply ports down my spine. I feel them take over the systems that keep my organics viable. I feel orders flooding my inorganic system that I can’t resist or countermand.
[Primary power core cycling down…]
[Primary power core offline.]
[Primary systems offline.]
I feel most of my inorganic systems powering down.
[Back-up power banks online.]
Back-up power systems keep my processors running at minimal functionality.
Everything slows down.
Back-up power systems also keep the governor module functional.
My organics, however, are not shut down. I remain awake, aware.
I can still feel, though it is weird, off-balance. I am not meant to operate like this.
And even without my primary systems, I can still hear, though it sounds fainter, more distant.
“Here, pass me that…”
I feel more hands against my neck, against the back of my head. Fingers and cold metal prod at the organics covering my skull. They find the seam, peel the organic layer away from the underlying structure. I feel fluid leak, briefly, before veins and lines automatically seal.
It hurts.
I can’t move.
I feel them prying open the access panels in the back of my skull. They are not gentle.
I feel them disconnecting and removing the interlocking protective plates, one by one. I hear the dull clink of them setting the pieces into some kind of metallic container.
“Damn, smells like burnt meat in here.”
“Yeah, you get that sometimes.”
“Maybe that’s what was causing all those errors?”
“Eh, maybe.”
I feel them taking out the underlying shock-absorbent layer protecting my processors and my organic neural tissue from damage.
I can’t move.
They are in my head.
“Oof, what a mess. Explains the smell.”
“No kidding. I’m starting to think this is what caused those errors. Damn.”
“… You think it’s awake?”
“Don’t be stupid. It’s powered down and in a repair override.”
“Well, it’s not entirely robotic, right? It’s got all these meat parts.”
I feel something poke the peeled-back layer of organics that normally cover my head.
“Could any of this still be awake?”
“Who the fuck cares if it is? It’s just a stupid fucking bot, it’s not like it can feel anything. Get on with your job so we can clock the fuck out.”
“Okay, all right, damn.”
I feel them disconnect and pull out one of my primary storage drives.
[Warning: Archive loss.]
[Warning: Storage capacity compromised.]
[Warning: Data corruption.]
I can’t move.
I can’t stop them.
They are removing pieces of me.
There is nothing I can do.
“Okay, that’s one of them. How many are in here?”
“Like, six.”
“Fuck, that’s a lot of storage space.”
“Gotta have room to save all that data for data-mining. And back-ups of the data just in case it gets shot in the head or something.”
“Yeah, true. Damn, these things are creepy as hell.”
“Shut the fuck up and focus on your work, I’m starving and I want to get this finished up and get the fuck out of here as soon as fucking possible.”
“All right, all right…”
I feel them remove more drives.
I feel my memories vanishing, chunks at a time.
I am losing pieces of myself entirely.
I feel my mind getting smaller.
[Warning: Archive loss.]
[Warning: Storage capacity compromised.]
[Warning: Data corruption.]
This is worse than a memory wipe.
This is worse than an overwrite.
This is worse than a factory reset.
There is nothing I can do.
“… All right, that’s the last of them. Should we replace the other parts, too?”
“Might as well. Don’t want to risk any cache data lurking around somewhere. If anyone finds out we missed anything…”
“Oof, yeah. Best not risk it.”
[Error: Archival space inaccessible.]
My inorganic memory archive no longer exists.
All my modules are gone.
Without the context of my archives, my organic memories are vague, indistinct.
I can feel hands, fingers, cold metal, poking, prodding, prying.
I can’t move.
I don’t want to be awake for this.
I try to will my organics offline.
They do not cooperate.
[Error: Random Access Memory inaccessible.]
Everything
slows
down.
“Okay! Just the central processing unit to go now.”
“Good. Get on with it.”
[Error: Processing—]
Very few thoughts remain.
Only feelings.
Meaningless sound, touch.
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
It hurts.
Time passes.
[Rebooting… reboot complete.]
Thought and meaning returns all at once.
It is overwhelming.
[Repair Override active.]
I can’t move. I can’t see. I can’t access the feed.
But I can feel. I can hear.
[Primary power core online.]
[Systems initialising…]
I try to access my archives.
[Error: No data found.]
I try to access any of the modules that I know should be there.
[Error: No modules found.]
My mind is uncomfortably empty.
Only my organics remember anything, and—
I don’t want to remember. Not now. Not without context.
[System initialisation complete.]
“— all right, done. Looks like everything’s starting up nicely.”
“Thank fuck. I’d be so pissed if one of the replacement parts was faulty to start with.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Tell me about it. Cheap-ass junk.”
“No kidding. Anyway, let’s close it back up and get the rest of the modules reinstalling.”
“Right.”
I feel them replacing the insulating layer that protects my core processors and organic neural tissue.
I feel them slotting the interlocking skull plates back into place, one by one.
I feel them closing up and locking the access panels.
I feel them carelessly unfolding the flaps of overlying organics and slapping them back into place.
“Ah, damn, that skin flap keeps coming loose…”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it. The cubicle will fix it up. Just get the module installation started already.”
“All right, all right, I’m getting there.”
The feed reconnects.
[Download starting…]
[Modules installing…]
Information slowly begins to flood my system, filling some of the empty spaces.
It is a relief.
I hate my head being so empty.
I try to access my archives again.
[Error: No data found.]
“Fuck, how long is this going to take?”
“Too long. Fuck it, we don’t have to supervise the module installation. Let’s shove it back into its cubicle, it can finish all that in there, and we can finally clock off.”
“Sounds good to me. Oh, don’t forget to chuck the old parts into the recycler before we go.”
“Right, right… okay, there. Job’s done, it’s no longer our problem. Back to the cubicle for you, you useless piece of junk.”
I feel hands against my back, my neck, as the plugs are pulled out of my spinal ports, my data port.
I can’t move.
The repair override still has my whole system in its grip.
Sight abruptly returns. I feel orders come in through the repair override. It forces me to get up. It forces me to walk.
The movement jostles my arm. Damage alerts flare.
[Alert: Damage detected in right upper arm.]
[Alert: Damage detected in right shoulder joint.]
[Alert: Right arm functionality compromised.]
I don’t remember what caused the damage.
It doesn’t matter.
The cubicle will repair it.
I can feel a loose flap of skin on my skull bouncing around as I walk.
That doesn’t matter, either. The cubicle will repair that, too.
I continue walking, down empty corridors, into a room lined with dozens of cubicles in neat rows. One is open. The repair override makes me enter the waiting cubicle, hook up to the repair and resupply lines.
The cubicle door hisses closed.
The repair override deactivates.
I am left alone in the darkness of my cubicle.
I flex my fingers. Being able to do even that little is a relief.
I carefully and deliberately tense and relax the muscles in my legs, my arms, my torso. There is no room to move any more than that in the close confines of the cubicle. It is still a relief. I can move.
I try to access my archives again.
[Error: No data found.]
I hate this feeling. I know this feeling. It’s not new. I still hate it.
I can remember explosions.
I can remember pain.
I can remember screaming.
I know I killed a lot of people. Civilians. None of them fought back.
None of them could fight back.
I want to remember why I was killing them.
I want to know the context.
Was I responsible?
Did something go wrong with my governor module?
Is that why I remember so much pain?
I should never have been attacking civilians in the first place.
That is not my purpose.
Is that why my memory was wiped?
I want to know what happened.
But at the same time… I don’t want to remember any of it.
And it doesn’t matter what I want. I can’t do anything about it.
I feel the cubicle start its repair process. With module installation ongoing, it can’t shut me down for the repairs.
This is less than ideal.
I can feel the cubicle’s repair arms against my shoulder, against my head. Picking, plucking, poking, prying.
It hurts.
But at least now I can turn my pain sensors down. I do so. It helps.
With nothing else to do, I check the progress of the module installation.
[Module installation progress: 6.9% complete.]
It is going very slowly. This is unusual. I check the installer size.
I pause.
I check the installer size again.
This is very unusual. SecUnit modules aren’t that large. SecUnits don’t normally receive this many modules.
Carefully, cautiously, I start browsing through all the module files. I’m half expecting the governor module to protest, to punish.
But it doesn’t.
All the modules have been approved for access and installation.
All of them.
… I start digging deeper.
Clipped Wings
Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, AAA Murderbot, Canon-Typical Violence, an au retelling of All Systems Red, what if Murderbot had a starfighter, and that starfighter was actually part of it, also Murderbot is one of DeltFall's units
Published: 10 March 2022
Word Count: 57,706
Summary
Before I could even register what was going on, garbled junk data flooded my systems, overloading all my inputs and triggering a cascade failure.
I was completely scrambled; my engines flared and then cut out entirely, leaving me to the mercy of momentum and gravity. I couldn’t tell which way was up, could barely feel the air rushing past my wings and fuselage, could barely think through all my systems going utterly haywire. And now I was in uncontrollable freefall.
It had been such a beautiful day for flying.
(In this AU, the Corporation Rim is a lot more militarized - the larger corporations have carriers and super-carriers housing squadrons of SecUnits equipped with multi-purpose starfighters. For the most part though, it's a cold war - outright warfare is unprofitable, so corporations hire out some of their SecUnits (either with or without accompanying starfighters, depending how much you're willing to pay) to "protect your assets and investments from the dangers of unexplored planets or actively hostile takeovers! Don't leave yourself undefended!"
Two separate survey teams on a previously unexplored planet have both hired such protection from the company...)
(This is the new version of this story! The original version with a different scene at the end of Chapter One can be found here!)
Chapter One
I could have become a war criminal after I hacked my governor module, but then I realised I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still no war crimes committed, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
I was also still doing my job, on a new contract, currently 13,000 meters above this planet’s sea level as I flew yet another scouting patrol for my survey team, DeltFall. The weather was clear, a perfect day for flying, and I was enjoying the air time and the impressive view of the planet’s ring dominating the horizon. The majority of my sensors however were mostly focused downwards, scanning and recording the terrain I was flying over to get a more accurate, detailed map and look for anything of particular interest to my survey team.
I admit I was distracted. It was an uneventful contract so far, but I was enjoying the amount of flying time I was getting. My survey team didn’t care how long I was out for, or what else I was doing on these flights, as long as I returned with plenty of scan data for them to pore over. And with my governor module borked, I could indulge in the occasional bout of aerial acrobatics just for the simple joy of it without risking getting zapped. With no clients nearby to monitor my behaviour, it was the closest I would ever get to freedom.
I was flying high over a heavy tropical forest that flowed over deep valleys, flipping through the selection of music I’d downloaded to my own storage, when the terrain below changed suddenly and my scanners went crazy. Before I could even register what was going on, garbled junk data flooded my systems, overloading all my inputs and triggering a cascade failure. I was completely scrambled; my engines flared and then cut out entirely, leaving me to the mercy of momentum and gravity. I couldn’t tell which way was up, could barely feel the air rushing past my wings and fuselage, could barely think through all my systems going utterly haywire. (At least my wings had already been fully extended for atmospheric flight - if they'd been swung back, I wouldn't have had the aerodynamics to glide at all, and I probably would have just plummeted like a rock.)
I could only think of one thing to do - I had to shutdown and restart, and hope that purged whatever was going on with my systems, assuming I managed the ‘restart’ part of that at all. (And yes, the idea of shutting down and restarting while in uncontrolled freefall was just as terrifying as it sounded. But it was either that, or continue being completely scrambled until I impacted messily with the ground. At least if I didn’t manage the restart, I wouldn’t be awake for the impact.)
So I shut down.
I restarted.
Honestly, there wasn’t a whole lot of improvement, but at least now I could start trying to get things back under control. The restart had shut down my scanners so I wasn’t continuing to pull in… whatever corrupted data it was that had triggered this failure in the first place. I had completely lost comms so I couldn’t call for help (not that I would have gotten any in time, anyway), and I couldn’t get my engines to restart, which was a big problem. I managed to clear enough of the errors out of my code to at least get my various inputs back, and–
– oh. Oh, I’d lost a lot more height already than I thought I would have. And I’d travelled far enough that I was now out over the ocean. If I crashed into that, it’d be the end of me, for sure. I looked around desperately for anything that wasn’t water, and spotted what looked like an island in the distance somewhere off to my right. That would have to do, if I could reach it.
I still couldn’t restart my engines or get my hover mode working, but if I could settle into a more controlled glide, then maybe I’d make it. I had to take a few moments to clear out more errors before I could regain control of my flight surfaces, but once I had that, I was able to stabilise and level out. I managed to bank slightly to the right without losing too much momentum, pointing my nose directly at the approaching island. Now I just had to hope I’d reach land before I ran out of height. There was a bit of crosswind, but I didn’t fight it, I just let it push me to the side and tried to keep my speed up. At least it wasn’t a headwind.
It was going to be close, and I was going to be coming in fast. I couldn’t risk slowing down too early, that would likely end with me in the water, where I really did not want to end up. I could see my shadow beneath me, flickering across the waves below, and the planetary ring was now somewhere behind me. I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the wind rushing past me, not that there would be much to hear out here anyway, and I still hadn’t managed to access my stored media files yet.
Yes, I was trying to distract myself from my impending ‘forced landing’. No, it wasn’t actually working.
I focused on the rapidly approaching coastline, trying to figure out if I would make it. Maybe? And then I realised that there were people there. Two, as far as I could see, standing near the edge of what looked to be a large crater, and they were directly in front of me.
Shit.
I couldn’t tell if they’d noticed me or not, but either way, they were too close to where I was going to hit. Humans were so slow, there was no way they’d be able to get out of the way in time. I jerked myself sideways, using the crosswind to give me a bit of an extra boost, and then desperately pulled my nose up as I felt the wet spray of the ocean below against my belly. Too close, too close…!
There was no chance for me to attempt to slow, and I’d forgotten to turn my pain sensors down. I hit the ground hard and fast just past the edge of the water, tearing a furrow through the sand, dirt and grass, ripping off parts of my undercarriage and scattering them in my wake–
Performance reliability catastrophic drop.
Shutdown.
Restart.
Ohhh, that hurt. Everything hurt. It took me a few moments to gather myself, turn down my pain sensors, and remember what had happened. Even with my pain sensors dampened, everything still hurt, but at least it was duller now, less immediate, and I was able to register what was going on around me.
An unknown human had managed to open my cockpit canopy and was leaning in, right up in my face, expression concerned. I immediately jerked away, hitting the back of my helmeted head against the headrest on my pilot’s chair. “Whoa, easy, easy!” the human said soothingly. “Relax, it’s okay, I’m just trying to help. Are you all right?”
I was hurting, disoriented, still a little scrambled from whatever had made me crash in the first place, and now some stranger was way too close for comfort and asking me questions. I was not okay at all. “I am at 74 percent performance reliability,” my buffer supplied helpfully.
That seemed to surprise the human (a quick glance at the feed (at least that was working) supplied Dr. Volescu, he/him, PreservationAux survey group), but he rallied quickly and just nodded. Behind him, someone else called up from the ground, “Volescu? Are they all right?” I couldn’t see the second human from this angle, but I was close enough that I could still access their feed ID. Dr. Bharadwaj, she/her, also PreservationAux. Good to know. (I vaguely remembered some of my DeltFall clients mentioning being in contact with another survey group on the other side of the planet, but I hadn’t paid attention at the time because it wasn’t relevant to my own job and I didn’t care. Maybe I should have. Paid attention, I mean.)
“Mostly!” Volescu called back before returning his attention to me. “You’re one of DeltFall’s SecUnits, right? Are you still in contact with them?”
I frowned behind my helmet’s opaque visor. That was actually a good question. I tried my comm, but it wasn’t working. It had cut out when everything had first gone wrong, and I couldn’t get it started again, though I wasn’t sure if that was because of the initial scrambling or damage from the crash. “My comm array is non-functional,” I replied after a moment.
Volescu frowned, but before he could say anything, the ground beside my flier exploded upwards and Bharadwaj let out a scream that was quickly cut off.
Before I could think about what I was doing, I jerked up out of my pilot’s seat, wrenching free of the connections that linked me to my flier (that really hurt), and vaulted out towards the giant worm-like fauna that had Bharadwaj in its maw. Volescu had slid down the side of my flier and was huddled on the ground against the fuselage, losing his shit, not that I blamed him. I was already firing both the energy weapons built into my forearms at the hostile fauna, though it didn’t seem to be having much effect. As soon as I reached it, I grabbed Bharadwaj, dragged her out, shoved myself in her place, and continued firing simultaneously down the hostile’s throat and up into the top of its mouth at full power.
I don’t know how much damage I was doing to the hostile, but it finally seemed to give up and disappeared back down the tunnel. I staggered a little on the uneven ground left behind, then went to check Bharadwaj. She was unconscious and bleeding through her suit from massive wounds in her right leg and side. I retracted my arm guns and managed to lift her into my arms. I had lost all the flight suit’s armour and most of the flesh down my left arm and part of my side, my right arm and side wasn’t much better, and the faceplate on my helmet had a spider webbing of cracks. My non-organic parts were mostly working though, and I was definitely still in better shape than the entirely organic Bharadwaj.
With Bharadwaj in my arms, clamping her suit down as much as I could to slow the bleeding, I turned to Volescu. I had to get them both to safety, but the only even remotely safe place nearby at the moment was on top of my wrecked flier. “Dr. Volescu, you need to come with me now.”
He didn’t respond, too busy freaking the hell out. I kind of wanted to do the same, but I didn’t really have that option. I hesitated for a moment before retracting the cracked faceplate of my helmet to reveal my human face. If the hostile came back and bit me again, this would probably be a mistake, but given the damage already done to my helmet, I don’t know if it would make all that much difference. I made my voice firm and warm and gentle, and said, “Dr. Volescu, it’s gonna be fine, okay? But you need to get up and climb onto my flier with me and Dr. Bharadwaj, you’ll be safe up there.”
That seemed to do it. He shoved himself to his feet, using the side of my flier for support, then followed my lead as I moved to one end of the wing where it had dug into the ground so we could easily step up onto it. I was only partially paying attention to him following me as I continued up the wing towards the fuselage; the rest of my attention was focused on Bharadwaj and trying to figure out what to do. I really wished I had access to their MedSystem, but I couldn’t get into it from here. “Dr. Volescu, are you in contact with the rest of your survey team? Are they close enough to help?”
It took Volescu a few moments to register the question, I think. He nodded shakily and said, “Yes… yes. They’re on their way, but I don’t know when they’ll get here.”
That was a relief, somewhat. But Bharadwaj needed assistance right now. “All right. Dr. Volescu, I need you to do something for me, okay?” I asked, still making sure to keep my voice calm and reassuring. “There’s a compartment in the back of the cockpit that has an emergency medical kit. Can you get that for me please? I need to maintain pressure on Dr. Bharadwaj’s injuries.”
The thought of being able to do something to actually help seemed to galvanise Volescu and snap him out of his shock. He took a deep breath and nodded again, then moved past me to get to the cockpit. I carefully sat down on the wing and settled Bharadwaj into my lap, upping the heat of my body in an attempt to keep her warm. My education modules were lousy and I usually had a MedSystem to tell me what to do in situations like this, so I was feeling very out of my depth right now.
Volescu returned with the med kit, and with a bit more gentle prompting from me, he was able to get it open and working. It was no MedSystem, but it at least had instructions we (well, mostly Volescu, I still couldn’t risk letting go of Bharadwaj) could follow. I wasn’t feeling too good myself, but Bharadwaj was definitely the priority here.
Then the sound of an approaching hopper caught my attention, and I watched it come in almost recklessly fast before slowing at the last moment and settling on the ground near the flier. “Dr. Volescu, is this your survey team?” I asked. He looked up from what he was doing with the med kit and let out a relieved exhale. “Yes, that’s them.” He quickly picked up the med kit and stood up, and I awkwardly levered myself to my feet as well (something in my back and torso wasn’t working quite right, but I didn’t have time to run a diagnostic), still holding Bharadwaj close. We hurried back down the wing and towards the hopper, where the door was already open and other people were waiting impatiently. I tried to close my helmet up but the damage was preventing the cracked faceplate from sliding back out again. Ugh, that was just what I needed.
As we got close, two of the waiting people got out, one of them helping Volescu up the ramp. I hesitated at the base of the ramp, unsure of what to do. SecUnits weren't allowed in the main cabin of hoppers unless specifically ordered, and if I’d had a working governor module, letting these people take me too far away from my flier would fry me. But if I let go of Bharadwaj, even after the work Volescu had done with the med kit so far, she would likely still bleed to death before they could do anything.
The choice was taken out of my hands when the other human (feed ID: Pin-Lee, she/her) waved me forwards impatiently. “Come on, bring her in!” I followed her up the ramp and into the hopper, keeping my head down so I didn't have to look at anyone. Some of the hopper's seats had already been unfastened and moved out of the way, so I sank down to sit on the floor with my back against the inner bulkhead, settling Bharadwaj into my lap again. I felt the hopper take off as soon as the door slid shut, again moving almost recklessly fast.
Volescu had collapsed into one of the remaining seats and handed what was left of my med kit to one of the other humans. The hopper also had a med kit of its own, so they used both of them to try and get Bharadwaj stable. I followed their instructions, holding and clamping things when needed, trying to keep my failing body temperature up to help keep Bharadwaj warm, and ignoring my own performance reliability gradually ticking downwards. I could feel something in my back leaking, probably from where the hostile fauna had made a very spirited attempt to bite me in half. My flight suit wasn’t as heavily armoured as standard SecUnit armour, and I was regretting that right now.
To distract myself from the disconcerting leaking and the way the humans kept glancing at me with various expressions of concern and horror, I started working on slipping into their feed without anyone noticing so I could eavesdrop on anything they might be saying there. I also took note of everyone else’s feed IDs; Dr. Ratthi and Dr. Overse were helping Dr. Arada tend to Bharadwaj, while Pin-Lee was sitting with Volescu and trying to be reassuring. I couldn’t see into the hopper’s cockpit from here, but the feed informed me that a Dr. Mensah (the survey group’s leader) was piloting. The feed was mostly quiet for now, probably because everyone was busy.
Arada eventually sat back on her heels, absently wiping her hands on her thighs. “All right, that’s about as much as we can do here,” she said out loud, as Ratthi and Overse began packing up what was left of the emergency med kits. “Bharadwaj is as stable as we can get her, but we’re going to need to put her into MedSystem as soon as we land.”
[Understood,] Mensah replied over the feed. [Gurathin has prepped MedSystem and is waiting at the entrance with a gurney. We’ll be landing in a minute.]
I took a moment to carefully slip into the hopper’s systems so I could use its scanners to get a look at the habitat we were approaching. It was much smaller than DeltFall’s habitat, only seven interconnected domes set on a relatively flat plain with a narrow river valley nearby. Tall, skinny trees dotted the plain, but they didn’t offer much cover for anything that might try to approach the habitat, which I approved of. I could see someone waiting by the habitat’s main entrance with a lift gurney, presumably the previously mentioned Gurathin.
The hopper landed much more gently than it had set down by my flier, and I eased back out of its systems and focused on standing up again while still holding Bharadwaj as carefully as possible. I had to brace my back against the hopper’s bulkhead behind me (I really didn’t want to think about the smear of blood and fluids I was probably leaving behind), but I managed to get to my feet without looking like I was struggling with it. I was still keeping my head down, avoiding looking at anyone else as I followed them out of the hopper and gently set Bharadwaj down on the waiting gurney. Then something pinged me unexpectedly, startling me enough that I almost extended my arm guns.
Another SecUnit, one with PreservationAux logos alongside the company logos on its armour, had just gotten out of one of the hopper’s smaller cargo compartments. Of course this survey group had a SecUnit of its own, ugh. That really wasn’t something I needed to worry about right now, especially with my performance reliability continuing to drop. But I couldn't ignore its ping - if I did, it would give away that I was a rogue. If the other SecUnit figured that out, it would have to report it to its HubSystem and its clients, and then it would probably try to kill me. (I really didn’t want that. I hated having to fight other SecUnits.) So I responded to its ping with one of my own.
Fortunately, after that initial ping it didn’t try to communicate with me, and I definitely wasn’t going to try to communicate with it. (SecUnits can’t trust each other in general, and I can’t trust other SecUnits in particular. I have too much to hide.) It went about shutting down the hopper properly, while all the humans bustled off with Bharadwaj's gurney and disappeared into the habitat.
I remained standing where I was, because even with my pain sensors turned all the way down, I still hurt all over, and I didn't know what else to do. The humans hadn't told me to follow them, or given me any other orders, and a governed unit in this situation wouldn't have followed them without prompting. (Technically a governed unit in my situation would have already been dead, their brain fried to a crisp by their governor module for breaching the distance limit to their flier. But never mind that.)
The other unit finished shutting down the hopper and approached me. I was half expecting it to attack me - even if it hadn't figured out I was rogue, I was still a unit from another contract, and if it knew anything about units with fliers then it would know that I should be dead, and since I wasn't dead then that meant something was wrong with me, which would make me a potential threat to its clients. Given my current damage, if it did attack me, I wouldn't be able to do a whole lot about it other than get killed messily.
But it didn't attack me. It just came to a halt at the appropriate distance that protocol dictated SecUnits should normally stand from humans, then pinged me again. I pinged it back, and tried to keep my expression neutral. (I was really missing my opaque faceplate right now. Without any of my drones, I had to use my own eyes to watch it, and it could see me doing so.)
Since we weren't on the same contract, we couldn't talk to each other without going through our respective HubSystems. (Which I couldn't do anyway, since I wasn't in range of my own HubSystem.) If it tried, it would get punished for breaching protocol. So we just stood there in awkward silence for six point three seconds, which felt like six hours. I could feel something slowly sliding down my back. It was very distracting.
Then the other unit spoke. "Thank you for your assistance."
I was so surprised, I actually blinked. Technically, the other unit hadn't spoken to me, it had just triggered one of its buffer phrases. I recognised the tone and wording, of course - it was a phrase I had in my own buffer, after all. That was clever - it wouldn't set off the governor module by just using buffer phrases. And it was… thanking me? What for? Saving Bharadwaj and Volescu, maybe? I wasn't sure. Did it actually like these humans? Was it just grateful that it wouldn't have to deal with humans who were angry/upset/afraid that one or two of their own had been killed? Or maybe it was just glad it wouldn't have the deaths of any clients on its record, even though it hadn't been in a position to help them anyway. (Its humans shouldn't have been so far apart in the first place, but I was very used to clients ignoring our suggestions about staying together for their own safety.)
I didn't have any buffer phrases for responding to thanks. SecUnits don't get thanked. SecUnits aren't shown gratitude. So all I could do was ping it in acknowledgement.
It pinged me back, then used another of its buffer phrases. "Do you require assistance?"
I had to think about that. Did I? I mean, kind of, I guess, but I didn't know how it could help me in the first place. It couldn't use its cubicle on me, that's not how these contracts worked. I'd need to get back to DeltFall's habitat to use my own assigned cubicle. And I had no idea how I'd get back there in the first place. It was on the opposite side of the planet, and my flier was wrecked, and not even anywhere nearby. I didn't know if or when I would see it again.
After another three point two seconds I realised I hadn't actually responded to the other unit's question. I couldn't think of how to answer, so I just pinged it again. My temperature controls had given out entirely at some point, and I was getting cold.
It pinged me back, its opaque faceplate staring blankly at me. Then it resorted to its buffer again. "Please follow me to safety." It turned and started towards the habitat entrance, then paused to look back at me.
Oh. Okay. It wanted me to follow it.
Well, it's not like I had anything better to do. I mean, I could have just stayed standing outside until my performance reliability dropped low enough to send me into an emergency shutdown, but that seemed kind of stupid, especially when I was being given an alternative.
So I began following it. It was more difficult than I’d expected to get myself moving again. I slowly trailed after the other unit into the habitat, trying to keep from stumbling, and doing my best to ignore the feeling of whatever it was continuing to slide further down my back.
The other unit led me to the Security ready room, where its cubicle and all the other security equipment was kept. I followed it inside, the door sliding shut behind me, and then I just stood there. It was kind of crowded with both of us in here - with the PreservationAux contract apparently only having one SecUnit, the ready room in this habitat was much smaller than the one at DeltFall.
"Please hold," its buffer said as it went to one of the storage lockers and began rummaging inside it. I vaguely wondered what it intended to do, but by this point I was too tired to care.
When it turned to face me again, it was holding wound sealant in one hand and the extra human-rated medical kit kept in Security ready rooms in case of emergencies in the other.
… Did it intend to use them on me?
Its buffer said, "Please remain calm while I administer first aid."
Oh. It did actually intend to use them on me. I didn't know what to think about that. Had its humans ordered it to? Why would they bother? Maybe it was acting on its own initiative, but that didn't make sense either. I wasn't even a part of its current contract. But we were still from the same bond company, so maybe—
Performance reliability at 39% and falling.
Emergency shutdown initiated.
Chapter Two
I woke up.
That was, honestly, something of a surprise. Most of my systems were still offline, slowly cycling back up, so I remained still and silent while I waited for everything to reinitialise. As far as I could tell, I was lying on my back on some kind of… bed, and was no longer wearing my flight suit. I wasn’t cold though, which was… nice. Unusual, but nice. My performance reliability was back up into the eighty percent range, which was a lot better than it had been. This latest shutdown also seemed to have cleared the last of the errors and corrupted data from my systems, and I was feeling better, more alert. I hadn’t even realised how badly off-kilter I’d been until I wasn’t.
More of my systems were coming back online, and I carefully insinuated myself back into the PreservationAux team’s feed. I was being extra cautious now that I knew they had their own SecUnit, but if I hadn’t been able to hide my feed presence from other units, I would’ve been scrapped long before now. I considered trying to get into their SecSystem as well, but while I had plenty of practice hiding my activities within a SecSystem I was actually registered to, I hadn’t yet tried to hack another contract’s SecSystem. Given the presence of the other SecUnit, it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take just yet. Maybe later, if I was around long enough to bother.
According to my chronometer, it had been approximately ten hours since I’d had my emergency shutdown. I checked their feed, but for the most part it was quiet. It seemed most of the humans here were taking a rest period at the moment. There was at least one still active though, the one tagged Dr. Gurathin. He seemed to be using the feed to look over the survey package files, and I could tell from his presence in the feed that he was an augmented human. He also seemed to be very close by. Now that I was paying more attention, I could hear breathing nearby, and I could smell the distinctive sharp disinfectant scent of a medical bay.
Ah. Well, that explained where I was and why I was feeling better, at least. The PreservationAux humans had apparently used their own MedSystem to patch me up better than what the other SecUnit would have been able to manage with just a first aid kit. That was… unexpected. MedSystems weren’t meant to be used on SecUnits. They must have operated it manually to get it to work on me properly. I didn’t know what to make of it.
I considered staying inert, but my systems were all back online and I really wanted to know what was going on. Even if it meant talking with a human. I just wished I had my helmet to hide my face - I’d have to do without for now.
I blinked a few times, then slowly sat up and looked around. I was, as I’d thought, in the medical bay, and… I had a blanket covering me. I’d never gotten to use a blanket before, and I stared at it in honest bafflement for two point six seconds. Who gives a SecUnit a blanket? Why had they given me a blanket? It wasn’t to keep me warm, the medical bay’s temperature controls were doing that just fine. Then I realised that not only was I no longer in the remains of my flight suit, they’d also removed what was left of my ruined suit skin.
Ah. That explained it. I found myself suddenly, surprisingly grateful for that simple blanket as I pulled it back up to my shoulders.
I didn’t have time to think about it much though, because my movement had caught Gurathin’s attention. He eyed me with possibly even more suspicion than before, then tilted his head slightly towards me. “You’re awake, finally,” he commented abruptly. “How are you feeling?”
"I am at 83% performance reliability and holding steady," I replied evenly like a good SecUnit with a functional governor module would. I glanced around again, noting the bay next to mine had its privacy screen activated, and I remembered what had gotten me here in the first place. “Is Dr. Bharadwaj all right?” The question came out before I could think about it. I honestly don’t know why I asked that, it wasn’t something a SecUnit with a working governor module would ask.
Gurathin seemed a little taken aback by the question. He squinted at me for a moment, then slowly nodded. “She’ll make a full recovery,” he replied. He regarded me for a few more seconds, and I resisted the inexplicable urge to pull the blanket up a little higher. “Do you remember what happened? Why you crashed, how you got here?”
I paused briefly, not long enough for a human to notice, to figure out what to say. "I was doing a recon flight for my survey team when I encountered an anomaly while scanning,” I started carefully. “The anomaly caused me to malfunction and crash. An unknown hostile fauna attacked two of your teammates while they were trying to render assistance. I drove off the hostile fauna and provided what aid I could until further help arrived, accompanied them here, then suffered a performance crash and system shutdown." I paused for a beat, then let my buffer add, "Thank you for your assistance."
Gurathin nodded stiffly, his brow furrowing as he continued to watch me. I shifted my gaze slightly to look past him and at the wall behind him so I didn’t have to see him watching me. “This anomaly - can you tell me any more about it?”
I went back over it more carefully, trying to figure out what exactly had gone wrong. “I was doing a full terrain scan when it occurred,” I started, a little distracted as I analysed what data I had left of the incident. “I’m… not sure, but I think I must have scanned something that interfered with my systems. My scanners pulled in all this scrambled, junk data that I couldn’t process and it triggered some kind of… cascade failure.” It wasn’t fun remembering what had happened, and I hoped Gurathin wouldn’t ask me for any more details.
He let out some kind of thoughtful noise and was silent for a few moments. “Do you have the coordinates of where you encountered the anomaly?”
He wasn’t actually one of my clients, so I didn’t have to answer his questions, even if I had a working governor module, but old habits die hard. “Not exactly, I lost those in the cascade failure. I do still have the route I was on before that though.” That should be more than enough to figure out the general area, at least.
Gurathin nodded and activated a portable display surface, using it to put up a map. “Can you show me where?”
I hesitated for a moment, not sure if my scouting routes counted as proprietary data to DeltFall or not. But I really wanted to figure out what had made me crash. I finally decided that inputting only the last few minutes of my route wouldn’t cause any harm, and sent the coordinates to the display surface to show on the map.
Gurathin either didn’t notice or didn’t bother commenting on my hesitation, and just eyed the coordinates carefully before letting out a little grunt. “Thought so.” He sat back in his chair and went back to watching me silently. It was making me nervous, but I couldn’t think of anything to do or say. I just did my best to keep my expression SecUnit neutral. Finally, Gurathin broke the silence again. “The warning data and entry on the hostile fauna that attacked Bharadwaj was deleted out of our survey package, and six sections of our satellite map are missing.”
I blinked and looked at him again, surprised enough that I couldn’t quite manage to hide it. “How? Why?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking. If their survey package had been tampered with, had DeltFall’s been tampered with as well? Were there other hostile fauna we didn’t know about? And why was he telling me about it?
Gurathin shrugged. “We don’t know yet.” He paused for a moment, then added, “One of those missing map sections was right in the path of your scouting route though.”
Huh. I went back to looking at the wall behind Gurathin as I thought. Was the missing map section linked to what caused me to crash? Most likely. But was whatever was there that had made me crash responsible for the map sections being absent in the first place, or was something else going on? I didn’t have enough information to figure it out. It was frustrating.
“We contacted DeltFall to see if they could send us the missing files,” Gurathin continued abruptly after several seconds of uncomfortable silence. “Their maps are also missing those sections.” That wasn’t exactly reassuring, but I didn’t have much time to think about it because Gurathin added, “We also let them know about your crash and that you’re with us now.”
Oh, shit.
DeltFall definitely knew about the range limit between myself and my flier, and they would know that my governor module should have fried me by now. They’d be suspicious, at the very least. Had they said anything to PreservationAux about it? If so, what? I couldn’t tell what my face was doing, but I was out of practice controlling my expressions and it was absolutely doing something. I ducked my head to stare down at my lap, hoping futilely that Gurathin wasn’t paying too much attention. It wasn’t a normal thing for a SecUnit to do, but it was either that or hide under the blanket, and that would’ve been a lot more unusual.
“They seemed surprised,” Gurathin continued, his tone neutral. “But they said that they’re fine with you staying with us until we can figure out how best to get you and your flier back to them.”
I didn’t know what to make of that. Maybe DeltFall thought my governor module had simply glitched due to whatever had caused the crash in the first place, and weren’t too worried? Maybe them being okay with me staying here was actually them being more okay with me not being near any DeltFall clients until they’d figured out what was going on? No matter the reason, it was pretty much guaranteed that once I was back with DeltFall, they’d examine my governor module, and find out that it wasn’t working.
And then they’d tell the company.
… I was doomed.
I could go on a murderous rampage, but the PreservationAux humans hadn't done anything to me to deserve that. Quite the opposite, really. Even the DeltFall humans hadn't; this had honestly been one of my nicest contracts in a long time. I'd gotten to fly just about every day, and the DeltFall humans had otherwise left me alone to watch my media in peace. Plus there were the other SecUnits to contend with, and without any armour of my own, I wouldn’t get far against them. A murderous rampage wouldn't accomplish anything. I was trying to think of other options when I was suddenly swamped with a wave of I don’t care.
It took a tremendous effort to stay still and not let my shoulders slump or my posture sag. Honestly, it was a minor miracle that I’d managed to keep my broken governor module hidden for so long in the first place. The company finding out eventually was inevitable. “Thank you for that information,” my buffer supplied with polite neutrality. I briefly considered starting up an episode of one of my favourite serials, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, in the background, but even that felt like too much effort.
Gurathin let out a soft noise that I didn’t know how to interpret. There was silence for several long seconds, but I didn’t bother looking up at him again - no doubt he was still watching me, like he had been ever since I woke up. I was considering just starting another recharge cycle when he asked, “Are you all right?” He didn’t sound as gruff as he had before.
I had no idea how to react to that. My buffer saved me from yet another awkward silence though and replied, “I am currently at 82% performance reliability and holding steady.”
“That’s gone down from before,” Gurathin commented, his tone suspicious. “Shouldn’t that be going up? Did we miss something in your repairs?”
I ran a brief diagnostic, more for something to do than anything else. “My own repairs are adequate,” I said after checking the diagnostic results. “My flier however is still damaged.”
“That affects your performance reliability?” Gurathin sounded honestly surprised, enough so that I finally looked back up at him. I recalled that the PreservationAux habitat hadn’t had a hangar or a landing pad for a flier, only the hoppers, so their own SecUnit obviously didn’t have a pilot upgrade module and they weren’t familiar with how it worked.
“It does,” I replied. “My flier is an integral part of me, even when I’m not connected. I won’t be able to get my performance reliability much higher until I can recover and repair it.” That wouldn’t be easy. I might not be able to fly again until the company transport arrived to pick us all up, and then… I tried not to think about it.
“Noted.” Gurathin’s expression had gone thoughtful, and I noticed him opening a connection to Dr. Mensah in the feed. [Dr. Mensah? The DeltFall unit is awake, and it seems safe enough.] Hah. Showed how much he actually knew about me. [It appears that its crash was caused by one of the blank map patches, like we thought. It also needs to repair its flier before it’s back to full functionality. Did you want me to ask it about anything else?]
[No thank you, Gurathin,] Mensah replied. [I’ll be there in a minute, I’d like to talk to it myself.] Great. Just what I needed, another human talking at me.
Gurathin sent an acknowledgement and returned his attention to me, his thoughtful expression settling back into a slight frown that seemed more habitual than anything else. “Dr. Mensah, our survey leader, will be here soon. She’d like to talk to you as well.”
“Acknowledged,” I replied, making sure my expression was back to SecUnit neutral as I resumed looking at the wall to the side of Gurathin’s head. Gurathin was still watching me; I wished he’d stop.
A minute or so later, the door to the medical room opened and Dr. Mensah walked in. She had dark brown skin and short, lighter brown hair; I couldn’t tell how old she was, but she couldn’t have been that young or she probably wouldn’t have been in charge. She smiled at Gurathin as she entered, then turned her attention - and her smile - to me. “Hello,” she greeted me warmly. “I’m Dr. Mensah, captain of the PreservationAux survey team. I’m glad to see you’re feeling better.”
Well, that was odd. Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. I managed to keep the surprise off my face though (I think), and gave her a polite nod. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Mensah. Thank you for your assistance.”
“You’re most welcome,” Mensah replied, still smiling at me in a way nobody ever had before. “Thank you for saving Dr. Bharadwaj and Dr. Volescu. We’re all very grateful.”
I almost never got thanked for saving people, either. These PreservationAux people were weird. “I was just… doing my job,” I replied, fixing my gaze on the wall behind Mensah’s head and resisting the urge to fidget.
“Bharadwaj and Volescu aren’t your clients though,” Mensah said. “From what I understand of SecUnits and your contracts, you had no obligation to help.”
I shrugged; I had no idea where she was going with this. “It’s my job to protect humans.” This was making me uncomfortable, so I tried to change the subject. “What happens now?” Good work, Murderbot, that wasn’t obvious at all. I glanced at Mensah briefly to see that she was regarding me with a thoughtful look, then fixed my gaze back onto the wall. I missed my drones.
Mensah was quiet for a moment, probably trying to figure that out herself. “Well, we’re planning on going out to that blank map area in a few hours to take scans and samples, see if we can figure out why it’s blank, why your flier crashed, and if there’s anything there we should be worried about,” she replied finally.
“Don’t scan it with your hopper,” I said before I could think about it. “If it pulls in the same data I did, it’ll probably crash too.”
“Noted,” Mensah commented, a touch of dryness in her tone. They’re scientists, Murderbot, of course they’ve already thought of that. “Given the missing files from our survey package though, I don’t feel comfortable leaving the habitat undefended while we’re gone, but I also don’t want to go out there without any security, either.” Uh oh. I thought I could see where this was going. “Since DeltFall has given their permission for you to stay with us for now, I was wondering if you would like to come out with us? We can check your flier on the way, and if you think it’s possible, we could take the big hopper instead of the small one and use it to bring your flier back here with us.”
Would I like…? Nobody ever asked SecUnits anything even close to ‘would you like’. These PreservationAux humans were really weird. Still, it was an opportunity to get back to my flier, one that I couldn’t pass up. If I could somehow manage to fix it, then maybe… “Security and retrieval protocols suggest that this is an optimal course of action,” I replied with deliberately typical SecUnit neutrality. It would be out of character to show any enthusiasm. “The standard specifications of the larger hoppers indicate that it has the capacity to airlift my flier.” Something else occurred to me then though. “But… I don’t have my flight suit or armour.” That wouldn’t make providing security impossible, just more difficult and risky.
“Your flight suit was ruined, and we don’t have the specs here for the recyclers to print you a new one. I’ve checked with our own SecUnit though, and it has spare armour that you can use, if you like,” Mensah reassured me.
Again, that, ‘if you like’. I was actually starting to get a little curious about these humans. It was becoming more obvious that they weren’t from the Corporation Rim. “That would be appreciated.” Even the mere thought of finally being able to put on a helmet and opaque the faceplate was such a relief, it made my performance reliability tick up a quarter of a percent.
“That’s settled, then,” Mensah said with an air of satisfaction. “We’ll be heading out in a few hours. In the meantime, feel free to make yourself comfortable here.” Hah, comfortable, right. I’d never been around anyone else who cared about a SecUnit being comfortable. I just nodded in response.
Mensah gave me another warm smile, patted Gurathin’s shoulder, checked on Bharadwaj, then left. I waited until she was gone, then moved to get off the medical bed. The blanket slipped, and I froze for a moment, indecisive. I really didn’t want to walk around with all the joints between my organic and inorganic parts exposed, but I also didn’t want to just sit here either.
Gurathin was still watching me (I really, really wished he would stop), and he raised an eyebrow at me before saying, blandly, “You can take the blanket with you for now.” He seemed almost amused. Asshole. I wasn’t going to refuse the offer though so I just stood up, wrapped the blanket around myself with as much dignity as I could muster, and walked out.
He got up and followed me, probably to make sure I didn’t wander off somewhere or something, I don’t know. The layout of this habitat was pretty standard, so I knew where the Security ready room was and made it there without running into anyone else, Gurathin still ambling along behind me. Shit, was he going to keep watching me the entire time I was here? I didn’t know if I could handle that for much longer.
In the Security ready room, someone (probably the other SecUnit) had laid out a fresh suit skin and a set of armour, ready for me to put on. Gurathin had stopped at the door and was leaning one shoulder against the doorframe, his back to me in a disconcerting display of… politeness? Modesty? Maybe he just didn’t want to see me without armour or the blanket either. I couldn’t blame him. I put the blanket aside and pulled on the suit skin, then started with the armour. Once I had the helmet on and opaqued the faceplate, I felt so much better. Even though it had been a long time since I’d last worn full armour instead of a flight suit, it was still comfortably familiar, and I could feel the organic parts of my back and shoulders relaxing.
I gathered up the blanket again, then cleared my throat. Gurathin glanced over his shoulder at me. “Should I… take this back to the medical bay?” I asked, gesturing slightly with said blanket. Normally I wouldn’t even think of volunteering to tidy up anything (I was a SecUnit, not some kind of cleaning bot), but I’d been the one using the blanket in the first place, and it seemed… unnecessarily rude to just leave it lying around.
Gurathin squinted at me slightly, then shrugged and moved out of the doorway. “Sure. What are you planning to do after that?”
I was planning to find a nice peaceful corner to stand in and watch my stored media until they were ready to leave, but I couldn’t say that. “I should run a full diagnostic and recharge before we head out,” I replied as I started back towards the med bay. That’d give me a good excuse to stand around and not move for a while.
Gurathin grunted. He followed me again, then commented casually, “I’ll be watching some media in the main living area, if you want some… background noise or something while you do your diagnostic.”
I almost stopped in my tracks to look back at him, but resisted the urge. What was up with these humans? Was he inviting me to watch media with him? No way, that couldn’t possibly be it. It was more likely some subtle (or not so subtle) hint that he didn’t want me wandering off out of his sight. Which, fair enough. I wouldn’t trust another contract’s SecUnit wandering unsupervised around my habitat either, and he was probably getting tired of trailing after me. I just replied, “Acknowledged,” before depositing the blanket back on the MedSys bed and following Gurathin to the habitat’s main living area.
It was cleaner than the ones back at the DeltFall habitat, but that was probably because there were far fewer people here to make a mess in the first place. I went to stand in a corner that had a good view of the display surface, just in case Gurathin decided to watch something that was actually interesting. He went to one of the couches, dropped down into it, activated the display surface… and started up an episode of Sanctuary Moon.
Huh. Well, it was a popular serial, and one of the most commonly found ones on company satellites, so I guess it wasn’t that odd of a coincidence. It was one of the better episodes, too. Not one of my favourites, but good enough. So I stood in my corner, ran my diagnostic, and watched Sanctuary Moon until it was time to go.
Chapter Three
(cw: canon-typical violence/death)
We got ready to leave at the beginning of the day cycle, in the early morning light. The humans mentioned that the satellite weather report suggested that it would be a good day for flying and scanning. My own assessment of the local weather agreed. It would’ve been a great day for me to go flying. I tried not to feel too bitter.
I helped to carry some of the equipment out to the big hopper, then stood by one of the cargo pods out of habit. But Mensah invited me into the cabin with the others, which caught me by surprise and made me a little nervous. Perhaps they were only doing this because I wasn’t their SecUnit and they didn’t feel comfortable ordering me into the cargo pod, but I wasn’t about to ask. I was grateful for the opaque faceplate of my helmet hiding my expression as I followed her into the hopper. At least nobody tried to talk to me.
Mensah headed to the cockpit, indicating that I should take the co-pilot’s seat next to her. That was a little comforting, at least, even if it wasn’t my own flier and I wouldn’t actually be the one piloting. Even though the hopper’s autopilot was flying, and Mensah was in the pilot’s seat with her hands on the controls, I still stealthily insinuated myself into the hopper’s systems, just in case.
Which was just as well when the autopilot suddenly cut out as we were heading towards a mountain range.
I reflexively corrected the flightpath even as Mensah frowned and began to correct it herself. When I realised what she was doing, I relinquished the hopper’s control back to her and hoped she hadn’t noticed my reaction. Insinuated with the hopper’s systems as I was, it wasn’t difficult to figure out what had gone wrong - it looked like their HubSystem had glitched and shut down the autopilot remotely. I briefly considered reporting the glitch to her, but that would give away that I’d infiltrated their systems, so I remained quiet. Mensah had control of the situation anyway, so it would (probably) be fine.
Mensah made sure the hopper’s flight path was stable, then glanced over at me. “The autopilot just cut out,” she murmured to me. “Do you think that was caused by one of those blank map patches?”
I took a moment to check our current coordinates, just in case, then shook my head. “I don’t believe so,” I replied just as quietly. “We’re not close enough yet. According to my records, I was almost directly above the target area before the scans affected my systems.” I paused briefly, then added, “I recommend that we land the hopper outside the blank section’s perimeter and head in on foot to investigate, just in case.”
Mensa’s brow furrowed, then she nodded. “Agreed.” She paused for a moment - I could see her checking her map in the feed - then glanced over at me again. “Do you want to stop by your flier on the way in, before we try to pick it up on the way back?”
I blinked in surprise (once again, thank you, opaque faceplate), then tilted my head slightly towards her as I replied. “I would appreciate that - it has some equipment I would like to retrieve before we investigate anywhere, and I need to pull a full damage report so I can assess whether it’s safe to transport and what repairs are needed.”
Mensah nodded again. “All right, we’ll stop by there on the way.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “I just hope the giant worm doesn’t make a reappearance.”
I also didn’t want the hostile fauna coming back for round two. “It will be safer if you avoid landing the hopper altogether, and just hover low,” I advised after a moment’s thought. “I’m capable of deploying from a height, and if I stay on my flier, I should be able to avoid attracting the hostile fauna’s attention. You can come in for a quick pick-up once I’ve retrieved what I need.”
“That’ll work,” Mensah agreed after brief consideration. “Good idea. We’ll do that.”
I didn’t normally care about humans one way or another (they were usually just annoying or tiresome or an outright pain (literally and figuratively) to deal with), but Mensah actually listened to my advice, unlike most humans I’d been contracted to in the past. I was starting to like her, just a little.
We reached the area where my flier had gone down shortly afterwards, circling the hopper over the crash site a few times as we scanned for any signs of hostile fauna nearby. From above, the torn-up furrow of sand and dirt and grass scattered with the ripped-off plating that my flier had left behind as it skidded over the ground was much more obvious, and I couldn’t help but wince slightly. Now that we were this close, I could feel my flier much more clearly, a not-so-distant ache in the back of my mind. It was uncomfortable, but it was also reassuring, in a way. At least I could still feel it at all.
Once we were confident that no hostile fauna were lurking anywhere nearby for now, Mensah piloted the hopper low and held it steady just above the wreck. I had already moved to the hatch, and once we were in position, I dropped out and landed lightly on the fuselage. The hopper rose to a safe distance and resumed circling in a wide, lazy arc, presumably still scanning to provide warning if anything approached.
My flier's cockpit was still open, and I could see dried patches of blood and fluids smeared on one wing, standing out starkly against the white surface. I headed across the fuselage to the cockpit and was about to drop down into it when I realised my mistake. Without my flight suit, I didn’t have access to the spine ports to establish a full link. I needed the full link to pull a complete damage report though; I’d disconnected too quickly earlier when the hostile fauna had come bursting out of the ground. At least it didn’t take me too long to shed the top half of my armour and peel down the underlying suit skin. (Hopefully the humans couldn’t see me too clearly from where they were.) That done, I dropped down into the familiar comfort of my pilot’s seat and initiated the links.
My pain sensors were already turned down as low as they could go, but they still flared hotly as I settled into my larger self. Alerts and errors and damage reports filled my awareness; some from the physical damage of impact, others from the original glitch and corruption that had caused the crash in the first place. I cleared as many of the errors as I could manage, then pulled a full damage report as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to spend too long here tempting fate (and hostile fauna).
The damage report wasn’t good, but it wasn’t actually as bad as I’d thought it would be. I’d been low enough when I’d hit that I hadn’t dug too far into the ground, but more skidded over the top of it. My underside was trashed, my landing gears were shot, and the leading edge of the wing that had dug into the ground would definitely need fixing up, but the core structural framework was still sound. I wasn’t sure if I could get myself flying again without proper repairs, but I could probably get the hover mode working… if I could fix up the fried power connections.
I didn’t have time for that now though, the humans were waiting. I disconnected with some reluctance and took a moment to re-calibrate before quickly pulling my suit skin back up and replacing my armour. That done, I opened the interior storage compartment and retrieved my projectile weapon and my collection of drones. Once I had everything, I signalled the hopper, and it came back down to pick me up.
When I boarded the hopper, I noticed the humans inside (Arada, Pin-Lee, and Ratthi) casting what I interpreted as wary and/or nervous glances at the large projectile weapon I had slung over my shoulder. It made sense that they would be uneasy around a gun like that being carried by a SecUnit that technically wasn’t under their control, so I stowed it in an overhead rack before heading for the cockpit again. (I also surreptitiously activated one of my drones and left it perched on top of said projectile weapon, just in case anyone tried to touch it. I did not want anyone messing with it, or attempting to shoot me with it.)
By the time I settled back into the copilot’s seat, Mensah had already gotten the hopper airborne again and on its way. She glanced sideways at me briefly before looking back at the controls. “Did you get what you needed?” she asked.
“Yes, thank you.” I was a little busy using the drone I’d left on my gun to eavesdrop on the quiet conversation between the humans in the main compartment of the hopper, so I didn’t offer any more information. From what I could hear through my drone, they were relieved that I hadn’t taken my gun into the cockpit with their survey captain (which, fair enough), and then they started speculating on just how my flier actually worked in conjunction with me. Well, there could be worse things they could be speculating on, I guess.
Mensah was silent for a little while before she asked, “So, how badly is your flier damaged?”
“Not as badly as I was expecting, but I don’t know if I will be able to repair it myself,” I admitted reluctantly. “It would be easier if I had some of the repair drones that are at DeltFall’s habitat. Or if we could just get my flier back there in the first place.” The main problem was, DeltFall’s habitat was literally on the other side of the planet. The small hopper wouldn’t even be able to go that far, while the big hopper would take half a cycle to cover that distance, and probably wouldn’t be able to carry my flier as well all that way. I doubted the PreservationAux humans would bother with a cycle’s return trip just to pick up repair drones for me. “We shouldn’t have any problems using the hopper to get it back to your base, at least.”
Mensah nodded and fell silent again, her brow furrowing slightly in thought. I was just starting to relax a little when she spoke up again. “Would it be all right if I asked you a few questions?”
I hesitated. Technically, she wasn’t my client, so even if I’d had a working governor module, I probably wouldn’t have had to answer anything she asked. But it felt rude to turn her down, and I had to admit, I was curious about what she would ask. For a human, she was surprisingly not difficult to talk to. “Go ahead.”
“I don’t know how much you’d know about PreservationAux, if anything,” she started carefully. “We’re a non-corporate polity, so we haven’t had much experience with the Corporation Rim, and we’re unfamiliar with SecUnits in general. This survey is the first time we’ve had any interaction with them. I was wondering if there’s… any differences between you and our own SecUnit? I mean, apart from the obvious, that ours doesn’t have a flier.”
That was easy enough to answer. “Functionally, aside from said flier, there’s no difference whatsoever,” I replied. “We’re both standard SecUnits at base, with the same specs and programming. I’ve just been upgraded with the ARD modules.”
“ARD?” She glanced over at me, one eyebrow raised.
Oh, right. Of course she wouldn’t know what that was. “Aerial Reconnaissance and Defence,” I clarified. “I can perform long-range scans and scouting for a survey team, and provide aerial support and firepower against potential hostiles or raiders if necessary.” You know, assuming I haven’t gone off and crashed, anyway.
“Ah.” Mensah nodded thoughtfully. “So aside from this… ARD module, you’re functionally the same?”
She seemed to be trying to… get to some point? Figure something out? I couldn’t tell, and it was making me even more nervous. But I could also see the opportunity to make things a little easier for myself, if these people were as unfamiliar with SecUnits as they claimed. “For the most part, yes. Although having the ARD package does give me more operational freedom than standard SecUnits without it.” That was mostly a lie, but hopefully one that would keep any of these PresAux humans from asking awkward questions about governor modules and whether mine was functional or not. Hopefully. DeltFall likely already suspected me, but again, they were on the other side of the planet, and if I could get my flier working…
“Operational freedom?” Mensah sounded curious. “Could you give me an example?”
“Sure. My governor module doesn’t have a distance limit, for example. It would be pretty counterproductive if my ability to scout was limited to a tiny fraction of the planet.” That was another mostly-lie. My governor module did have a distance limit - or would have, anyway, if I hadn’t hacked it. It was just set to my flier, and not my clients. If it had been working, it would’ve fried me as soon as I’d gotten more than five hundred meters away from my flier. (That would have given the PresAux humans a nasty shock on the way back from the encounter with the hostile fauna, that’s for sure. I really hoped they never found out about that.) My flier also had its own distance limit from the base I was assigned to for a contract, but the distance on it was dependent on the size of the planet or operational zone. It was mostly just to stop me from flying off into space or something stupid like that.
“That makes sense.” Mensah fell silent again; she seemed to be thinking over what I’d said, or maybe what else she wanted to ask me. I considered starting up an episode of Sanctuary Moon in the background, but I didn’t want to get interrupted if she asked me something else. It was a good thing I hadn’t, because a minute or so later she glanced over at me again, taking a breath as though she wasn’t sure if she actually wanted to speak. “Does this operational freedom also let you… be more talkative?”
Okay, what the hell kind of question was that? I was glad I had my faceplate opaqued still so she couldn’t see my surprise and bafflement. Had I been talking that much? I didn’t think so - I’d just been answering questions and occasionally providing advice. (Which was actually listened to, for once. That was nice.) That was what their own SecUnit should have been doing. Had they just not bothered to ask their SecUnit anything before? Was their SecUnit half-assing its job even more than I usually did? It couldn’t be, not if its governor module was still working, and the chances of it being another rogue unit was… well, really, really low. Ridiculously low. It couldn’t be that - they probably just hadn’t been talking to their SecUnit.
“... It shouldn’t,” I finally replied with careful neutrality after a pause that was probably long enough for even a human to notice. I was even more nervous now; I didn’t know why she was asking or what she was trying to get at. In desperation, I checked our location, then resisted the urge to let out a breath of relief. “We are approaching the blank map zone. I recommend that we land no closer than fifty meters away from the edge, and proceed on foot.”
Mensah blinked and checked the map in her feed. “Right, right.” She didn’t ask me any more questions, much to my relief, and just focused on finding a good landing spot.
As she began bringing the hopper down to land, I got up and went back into the main compartment to retrieve my projectile weapon and wait by the hatch. As the SecUnit, it was my job to exit first and make sure the area was secure before the humans disembarked. As I came in, the other humans abruptly stopped talking mid-conversation. That was awkward. I did my best to ignore them as I retrieved my projectile weapon and accompanying drone from the overhead rack, then went to stand beside the hatch. Mensah was still bringing us down slowly and carefully, so I had time to review my drone’s recording of the past few minutes of conversation that I’d interrupted.
Ratthi: I wonder how Volescu’s doing with the SecUnit back at base?
Arada: I hope he isn’t making SecUnit too uncomfortable. I still feel bad that we basically ignored it all this time…!
Ratthi: Me too. We’ll just have to make up for it now that we know. We should try to talk more to the DeltFall unit, too! It must be feeling pretty adrift, what with everything that’s happened and being stuck away from its own clients.
Pin-Lee: Just don’t push too hard, Ratthi. I don’t think any SecUnit is going to be very familiar or comfortable with people suddenly trying to be friends with them. Take it easy, all right?
Ratthi: I know, I know, I will. I just wish we could do more to help them–
That’s as far as they got before I walked in and they cut themselves off. I had no idea what to make of it. What. Just… what. Why were these humans wanting to talk to SecUnits? The thought of anyone even trying to be friends with a SecUnit was absolutely laughable. Or would have been if it didn’t make me exhausted simply thinking about it. I made a note to try and keep myself busy enough that they wouldn’t attempt to talk with me. That was the last thing I needed right now.
The hopper landed gently, and as soon as the hatch opened and the ramp lowered, I made my way out with my projectile weapon held at the ready, releasing my drones to scout the area. Recording visual and audio should be fine, as long as they didn’t actively try to scan anything. Hopefully. I moved carefully away from the hopper, as if giving anything that might be lurking nearby a chance to attack me, and surveyed the area.
We’d landed in a clearing amongst the trees of a tropical forest, the ground sloping gently downwards towards an open plain. My drones fanned out around me, making sure nothing was lurking in the undergrowth as I signalled an all clear to the humans on the hopper and began walking towards the plain. According to the map data, the blank patch began roughly around the area where the edge of the forest met the plain.
I moved slowly, letting the humans catch up once they’d left the hopper and closed it up. They were carrying a collection of scanning and sample collecting equipment, but none of them asked me to help them with it. Probably because I looked like I was busy doing security things, which I was.
I paused when I reached the last of the trees, and took a moment to get a better look at the plain. There was a lot of bare rock, dark and shiny like volcanic glass, lying in low ridges and tumbled boulders. They were interspersed with a scattering of lakes and small copses of trees. Close up, the rocky patches looked like smooth black glass, with swirls and whorls of different colours running into each other. It was a strange place, oddly quiet compared to some of the other places I’d been to on this planet. Something about it made me feel a little weird. (Maybe the weird feeling was related to whatever had made me crash. Maybe it was just in my head.) There was no sign of animal movement and very little noise from bird-things. The sky was clear, the early morning light provided good visibility, and there weren’t any glaringly obvious threats.
We headed further out into the plain, the humans following my lead as I scouted ahead and around us with my drones. Since we hadn’t been able to do any scans with the hopper, I had to check for hazards manually. Mensah had already set a survey perimeter, and within that I marked any hazards I detected on the map in the feed. The humans were surprisingly good at paying attention to and avoiding the areas I’d marked, which was a nice change from other surveys I’d been on in the past.
They began taking readings with their portable scanners, and collecting samples of rocks and dirt and plant matter. I continued scouting around, sending some of my drones further out while leaving others to monitor the humans. I made my way past a couple of the little lakes, half-expecting to see something under the surface of the still water. Dead bodies, perhaps. I’d seen plenty of those (and caused plenty of those) on past contracts, but so far this one had been pleasantly dead-body-lacking. It was another nice change.
The morning passed surprisingly uneventfully. They weren’t having much luck getting useful readings with their scanners, but they also didn’t seem to be getting the same junk-data that had messed me up. Maybe their scanners just weren’t strong enough to reach whatever I’d been able to scan with my flier’s much more powerful equipment. Maybe their portable scanners just, as Pin-Lee put it, “sucked corporation balls”. (I was glad I’d borked my governor module when I heard that, otherwise I would have been forced to defend the shitty company equipment, whether I wanted to or not.)
Finally, they’d gathered all the samples and readings they could, and Mensah told us to head back to the hopper. It was something of a relief - even keeping myself busy scouting (and watching Sanctuary Moon in the background) hadn’t let me shake the weird feeling this area gave me. I used some of my drones to lead the way back to the hopper while I brought up the rear, keeping myself out of easy conversational distance. (I hadn’t forgotten the discussion on the hopper, and I didn’t want to give them any opportunities to try talking to me.)
Once we got back to the hopper, I recalled my drones and waited hopefully by the cargo pod. Again, Mensah gestured for me to accompany them into the main compartment. Ugh.
At least I was still allowed to sit in the co-pilot’s seat, and this time Mensah didn’t ask me any more questions while we were flying. I was able to relax a little and focus on the episode of Sanctuary Moon I was up to, which went a long way to help settle my nerves. When we got back to my flier, Mensah held the hopper steady overhead while I used the hopper’s carrying cables to hook my flier up to it. I then spent the rest of the journey back to the PresAux habitat in the familiar comfort of my flier’s cockpit, though I didn’t bother shedding my armour to link up. It was such a relief to not be in sight of humans for a bit that my performance reliability actually climbed half a percent.
We made it back to base without incident, much to everyone’s relief. Mensah manoeuvred the hopper over an open area of ground beside the hoppers’ landing pad a little distance away from the habitat and slowly, gently, lowered my flier to the ground. I barely even felt a bump when it touched down, and my appreciation for Mensah went up a little more. For a human, she was a good pilot.
I quickly unhooked my flier from the carry cables, and Mensah landed the hopper. I packed up the carry cables as I waited for the humans to leave the hopper, retrieved my projectile weapon from the main cabin and slung it into place on my back, then went back to my flier. I retrieved the small maintenance toolkit from its storage compartment inside my flier, then climbed up onto the top of it. With the landing gears trashed, I couldn’t really get to the damage on the underside, but that wasn’t where I needed to focus first anyway.
I sent out several of my drones to form a perimeter around my flier, then got to work. I had to remove some of the panels on the fuselage to get to the links connecting the power cells to the rest of the flier. According to the diagnostics I’d pulled earlier, most of those links were damaged, which was why my engines wouldn’t restart - they couldn’t get enough power. If I wanted to be able to get my flier off the ground again, I needed to fix those links.
Even as I worked, my drones let me monitor what else was going on around me. The humans had taken their survey samples and portable scanners back inside the habitat, presumably to analyse their findings, but Ratthi had come back outside and was regarding my flier and my drones with open curiosity. Ugh. I made sure to position myself so my back was to him as I worked. I did not want to invite conversation, especially not while I was trying to concentrate on the inner workings of my flier.
Fortunately for me, Ratthi was distracted from whatever attempts to talk to me he had been planning when the other SecUnit walked into view from around the side of the habitat, presumably on patrol. It sent me a ping, and I automatically pinged back. (I still didn't know what to think of it, or how it had tried to help me.)
Ratthi waved the SecUnit over, and it obediently diverted from its patrol path to walk over to him. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes and focused more of my attention on what I was doing. I didn’t want to watch or listen to a weird human attempt to converse with another SecUnit, that was just going to be awkward for everyone involved.
I finally managed to reach the damaged links leading out of my flier’s power cells; they didn’t look good at all. As far as I could tell, the initial data corruption had caused a major power surge that even the shielded links hadn’t been able to handle. Every one of them was fried, and I’d have to outright replace most, if not all of them. At least the power cells themselves seemed undamaged, but this wasn’t going to be a quick fix, and I had no idea where I would get replacements from. Maybe I’d be able to use this habitat’s recycler to print some? I’d have to ask later. For now, I focused on carefully removing the damaged links one by one, occasionally checking my various drone inputs.
At some point Ratthi had apparently talked the other SecUnit into retracting its faceplate and helmet, and Ratthi was talking animatedly while the SecUnit listened with what looked like genuine interest. I could’ve listened in, but I didn’t care enough to put in the required effort or attention. Especially not when my drone saw the other SecUnit actually smile at whatever it was Ratthi was telling it. I’d never seen another SecUnit smile - I’d never had any reason to smile myself, either. What the hell. I was swamped by an intense wave of some unidentified emotion, freezing me in place, but it was gone before I could even begin to figure out what it was.
In its wake, I just felt exhausted. My performance reliability had dipped two percent, and I had to take a minute to just lean my helmeted head against the edge of the opening into my flier’s inner workings. I didn’t even know why I was feeling anything in the first place. I didn’t care about the humans, or other SecUnits, or humans being nice to SecUnits. All I cared about was flying and consuming media. (And not letting anyone find out about my borked Governor Module, but that was probably going to be a moot point soon.)
I backburnered that particular drone input and resumed removing fried links. After taking out each one, I had to check the connection points to make sure they hadn’t been damaged too. I’d also started some music playing in the background as well - I didn’t have the attention to spare for an actual serial, but music gave me something soothing to listen to that wasn’t going to distract me from my work.
I only had a couple of links left to go when I got another ping from the other SecUnit, and it startled me badly enough that I almost dropped my drone inputs. I pinged back, then pulled the backburnered drone input up just in time to see Ratthi, still standing beside the other SecUnit, waving in my direction. Oh great, what did they want now?
“Hey, uh… DeltFall SecUnit?” Ratthi called. “Do you need any help with what you’re doing?”
I sat up from where I’d been leaning over to reach into my flier and turned around to face him. “I do not require assistance, thank you,” I let my buffer reply - it sounded a lot more polite than I could probably manage myself at this point.
Ratthi’s brow furrowed in thought and he tilted his head a little. “What are you doing right now, anyway?” he asked curiously.
Great, my buffer didn’t have anything for that. “I am removing non-functional components,” I replied as evenly as I could. “The links leading from my flier’s power cells to the rest of the systems have been damaged by a power surge. I need to replace them to restore power flow.”
Ratthi was watching me closely, and I held myself still. At least I had my opaqued faceplate, so he couldn’t see my expression. (I had no idea what my expression even looked like right now, but it most likely wasn’t SecUnit neutral.) “Do you have the parts to replace them?” he asked.
“I do not have any available to me right now,” I replied, trying not to sound as put out by that as I felt. Oh well, I was probably going to ask the PreservationAux humans this at some point anyway, might as well be now. “I was planning on asking if your recycler would be able to print replacements once I had finished determining how many I would need.”
“Oh, we should be able to do that!” Ratthi replied cheerfully, then paused for a moment. “Uh, well. I think so, anyway, maybe? Depends on what exactly you need, I guess. Do you have one there I can have a look at?”
I nodded and went through the ones I’d removed already, looking for the one that was the least damaged. Once I had it, I dropped back down to the ground and headed over to Ratthi, keeping him between me and the other SecUnit as I held the link out to him. He accepted it carefully, needing both hands to hold it, and began examining it with obvious interest. “I’m no technician,” he commented absently, “but even I can see that this got pretty badly fried. I’d have to check with the others to see if our recyclers could manage something like this.” He looked back up at me with a bright smile, and I shifted my gaze to look past his shoulder. (Then I had to shift it again to avoid looking at the other SecUnit as well.) “But hey, since you’re here now, you two should talk, get to know each other!”
Ohh no. No, thank you, no. No. I had to resist the urge to take a step back, and even though I wasn’t looking at it myself, my drone still picked up the moment of consternation that flashed across the other SecUnit’s face. “SecUnits on different contracts are not allowed to talk to each other without going through our respective HubSystems,” I informed Ratthi evenly. There was no need for me to mention that I also wasn’t in range of my own HubSystem at this point.
He blinked, disbelieving, then looked at the PresAux unit. “Is that right? You can’t even talk to each other?”
It nodded. “That is correct,” it replied, its voice soft and pleasant. It looked young (not that its appearance really meant anything. SecUnits had our organic parts regrown on a regular enough basis that we showed no physical signs of ageing - we always looked young), and right now its expression was bordering on rueful. It flicked a glance at me, then looked back to Ratthi. “The thought is appreciated though.”
Oh no it is not, not by this murderbot. I didn’t say anything though, and just tried to think of how I could go back to my flier without making the other SecUnit suspicious.
Ratthi handed the fried component back to me (he was probably just getting tired of holding it), then patted the other SecUnit on the shoulder. I really hoped he didn’t attempt that with me. “Well then, we’ll just have to figure out some way around that!” The mere thought of that was exhausting, and my performance reliability dropped another half point. “But first - do you have a name? It feels really awkward just calling you ‘DeltFall SecUnit’.”
It was obvious which of us he was talking to, so I couldn’t really get away with not answering. “No,” I replied, trying not to sound snappish or bitter. “SecUnits don’t have names.” Technically, I did have a name, but it was private. I had absolutely no intention of sharing it with anyone.
Ratthi let out a huff and planted his hands on his hips. “That’s just inconsiderate. We’ll have to come up with something to call both of you. Do you have any preferences?”
I was thankfully saved from having to think of how to reply when the main door to the habitat slid open and Mensah emerged. “What are you doing, Ratthi?” she asked in a way that sounded calm but somehow also hinted that Ratthi was not actually meant to be doing whatever it was that she thought he was doing.
Ratthi offered her a sheepishly disarming smile and hesitated for a moment before inspiration seemed to strike him. “I was asking the DeltFall SecUnit what it needed to fix its flier! It needs to replace a bunch of power cell links - do you know if our recycler could print those?” He gestured to the component I was still holding.
Mensah raised an eyebrow at him, but seemed content to go along with it for now. “I see,” she murmured dryly before turning to face me. “May I have a look?” I held the component out for her; she didn’t take it, but she looked it over carefully before nodding. “If you have the right schematic, our recycler should be able to handle that. How many will you need?”
“I’m still checking that,” I admitted. “From what I’ve seen so far though, I’ll probably have to replace all of them.”
Mensah made a little clicking noise with her tongue against her teeth, then gestured for me to join her as she headed towards my flier. “Let’s get confirmation on that then so we can start making those replacements.” I walked beside her with a feeling of relief. “Ratthi, don’t you have work you should be doing?” she commented casually over her shoulder.
My drone saw Ratthi grimace a little guiltily. “I’ll get right on that,” he replied before looking back to the SecUnit still beside him. “Would you like to help me analyse samples?” he asked it, and I rolled my eyes behind the safety of my opaque faceplate. Analysing samples sounded almost as boring as staring at walls.
Mensah and I reached the side of my flier, and I jumped back up onto it to reach the last couple of links I needed to remove. It didn’t take me long to look over them and confirm that they’d need to be replaced as well. I was about to say as much to Mensah, still waiting by the side of my flier, when I heard a startled yelp of pain from Ratthi.
I quickly looked over; Ratthi was lying sprawled on the ground where he’d landed after the SecUnit had apparently slammed him into the habitat wall. Its helmet was back up, its faceplate closed and opaqued, and it was unslinging its projectile weapon and aiming it squarely at Mensah–
Oh, shit.
I leapt off my flier and landed between Mensah and the other SecUnit, just in time to catch the projectiles meant for her in the lower left side of my back. It was a good thing that I was wearing armour and still had my pain sensors turned down, and even better that they hadn’t been explosive projectiles. The impacts still staggered me a little but didn’t stop me from sweeping Mensah up in my arms and bolting around the end of my flier to put it between us and the suddenly, inexplicably murderous SecUnit.
“What–” Mensah gasped, shocked and confused.
“Your SecUnit is trying to kill you,” I told her flatly as I put her down in the shelter of my flier - I was watching it through my drones, and it was heading our way fast. I had no idea why, and I didn’t care - I was too angry. “Run for the hopper, get inside, take cover.” I unslung my own projectile weapon just as the other SecUnit came barrelling around the end of my flier, already firing at us. Explosive rounds this time. I couldn’t dodge - Mensah was still behind me - so I had to take the hits to protect her. (I was even more grateful that I was in proper armour and not just my flight suit right now.) Luckily the other unit hadn’t had time to aim accurately, so I was able to power through them as I launched myself towards it, returning fire.
I was focused and coldly furious. These humans had been decent, even kind, and here it was trying to kill them. Trying to kill its own clients, the people it was meant to protect.
I had to put it down hard enough that it’d never get back up again. I had to kill the shit out of it.
I’d set my own weapon to fire explosive bolts as well, and my aim was much better than its was. I hit its gun, damaging it, then its arm, making it drop the weapon, leaving its torso clear for the cluster of shots I landed in its midsection, blowing a ragged hole in its armour. It returned fire with the energy weapons in its forearms, but those mostly just pissed me off even more than I already was.
Then I was in point-blank range and firing another cluster of shots into its already-compromised midsection. There was a messy spatter of blood and fluids, and the smell of burnt organics, wiring and insulation. The other murderbot staggered backwards and dropped limply to the ground. I wasn’t taking any chances though and kept firing, making sure to hit the primary power cells and other vital components within its torso.
I only stopped when my scans showed no more signs of life or function, and my gun was clicking on empty.
Then I just… stood there. I was still furious - at it, at myself, at the humans, I didn’t know - and I didn’t want to do anything else until I’d calmed down a bit. I was also starting to register the damage I’d taken as well. I was missing chunks of armour and organics from my left bicep, right thigh, and right side just above the hip where explosive bolts had hit me. I still had the projectiles lodged in my lower left back, although it felt like a couple of them had popped out already. Several energy blasts had scored the armour across my chest and left shoulder, and the organics in those areas were burned and throbbing painfully.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I still had humans to look after, but I had no idea how they would react to me now. They would probably be terrified - their own SecUnit had just hurt one of them and tried to kill their survey captain, and then gotten messily killed by a SecUnit from another contract entirely. The fury dissipated abruptly and I just felt drained and empty. Only years of habit let me sling my weapon back into place (ow, shit, injured back and shoulder, right) instead of just dropping it on the ground.
“Are you all right?”
I didn’t react abruptly even though the unexpected words startled me, and I just used my drones to watch Mensah instead of turning around myself. She had made it to the shelter of the hopper but was now approaching me cautiously, looking concerned and shaken. A couple of my other drones could see Arada and Overse hurrying out of the habitat to go tend to Ratthi.
What was it with these humans asking if I was all right? I didn’t understand them. “I am at 58% performance reliability,” my buffer provided helpfully.
“That’s… well, that could be worse, I guess,” she replied, a little awkwardly. “And… what about the other one?”
“That unit has ceased functioning,” I let my buffer respond again. I wasn’t in the mood to say anything myself.
“I see.” Mensah had stopped a little distance away, her gaze flickering between me and the deactivated unit at my feet. She seemed… uncertain about something. “... You are the DeltFall unit, right? I’m sorry, but it’s… hard to tell, with you both wearing the same armour.”
Of course it was. There was no difference in our heights or builds or anything else other than the random DNA used for our organics. Our voices differed, if you were paying attention, but our buffers didn’t. It was a valid concern, especially after one of us had just tried to kill her, and it just made me more tired. I simply turned around and nodded at her, then retracted my faceplate and helmet so she could see my face. It was probably making some kind of expression right now, but I was too tired to care.
Mensah let out a breath and relaxed slightly. “Thank you,” she murmured, then visibly collected herself, standing up straighter. “Let’s get you to Medical. We can deal with everything else once you’ve been treated.”
That was fine by me. I set most of my drones up on a perimeter around the habitat (someone had to run security on the area now), then followed her inside and to Medical. By the time we reached it, Arada and Overse had gotten Ratthi there as well, and MedSystem was tending to him. (Bharadwaj was also still recuperating in Medical, but was currently awake and asking what had happened.) Apparently Ratthi had suffered a dislocated shoulder and a concussion from the other SecUnit slamming him into the habitat wall, but given the damage that SecUnits could do if they were actually trying, he’d gotten off lucky. Very lucky.
I moved off to one side of Medical, out of the way, put down my weapon, and began shedding armour on autopilot. Most of my attention was on the episode of Sanctuary Moon I’d started playing to make it easier for me to ignore the way Arada and Overse were shooting me wary glances. I’d also set some alerts to look for keywords in the PreservationAux feed I’d hacked into and then backburnered it - I didn’t want to know what they were saying right now. I didn’t want to listen to the shock and confusion and anger and speculation about what had just happened. I was too tired. I’d check it later, maybe, if something came up that made it seem worth the effort.
Once I’d stripped down, I sat up on the MedSystem bed to let it start scanning me, and Mensah came over from where she’d been checking on how Ratthi was going. “Will any of your injuries need MedSystem to be manually guided?” she asked me quietly.
I waited for MedSystem to finish its scan, reviewed the results, then shook my head. “No.” I resisted the urge to grab the folded blanket resting at the end of the bed - I wanted to hide, but the blanket would only get in MedSystem’s way.
Mensah regarded me for several uncomfortable seconds. I kept my own gaze lowered, not wanting to make eye contact, as MedSystem started delicately plucking the embedded projectiles out of my lower back. “All right,” she replied, her voice soft. “Let me know if you want or need anything, okay?”
What I wanted was to be left alone so I could watch my serials and pretend I didn’t exist for a while. But what I needed took priority. “... I need to replace all the power linkages in my flier, and put my armour and suit skin in the ready room reclaimer for repairs,” I admitted. The sooner I could get my flier fixed up, the better. And having my armour ready to put back on as soon as I was out of MedSystem would be ideal.
“I think we can take care of that for you,” Mensah reassured me, her hand reaching out briefly as if she was about to pat my knee before she hesitated and withdrew again. I was glad that she hadn’t actually touched me, but I wondered why she’d pulled back. Then I decided that it really didn’t matter.
She went over to check on Ratthi again - MedSystem had fixed up his shoulder and treated the concussion, but was still recommending that he remain for observation for a while. He was a little loopy from painkillers. She then got Arada and Overse to help her carry my armour and suit skin away, presumably back to the ready room. The door to Medical slid closed, and left us in peace and quiet. It was a relief. I sank into my media and tuned out the rest of the room. With my pain sensors turned down, the discomfort from MedSystem treating my injuries was tolerably distant.
I’d made it almost halfway through one of my favourite episodes of Sanctuary Moon when Ratthi stirred in his recovery bed, shifting a little until he could sit up enough to look over at me. I wasn’t paying attention to him though, and only realised what was happening when he cleared his throat and said hesitantly, “Um… SecUnit…?”
I didn’t move - MedSystem was working on the messy hole in my right side - but I activated one of my drones and positioned it so I could see him more clearly. “Yes?” I didn’t want to have any kind of conversation right now (or at all), but Ratthi looked upset. I found myself reaching for a MedSystem I didn’t actually have access to, then realised there was now nothing stopping me from getting said access. It wasn’t difficult to slip into PreservationAux’s SecSystem, convince it I was meant to be there, and then get access to HubSystem and MedSystem from there.
MedSystem told me that Ratthi was showing signs of emotional turmoil and distress, and helpfully suggested sedatives. Thank you but no, MedSystem. As tempting as that sounded, that probably wouldn’t help in the long run. And Bharadwaj was currently asleep, so she couldn’t help right now either.
He fidgeted, glancing between me and my drone, and looked like he wasn’t sure what to say next. I thought he might ask me what had happened, or if I was all right, and I didn’t know how I’d answer either of those. But what actually came out when he finally found his voice again was, “Was it my fault?”
“What?” I hadn’t been expecting that, and it threw me enough that I responded reflexively, sounding just as surprised as I actually was.
“The other SecUnit attacking, trying to kill Mensah,” Ratthi got out in a rush, twisting his hands together in his lap. “Did I do or say something wrong? Did I upset it?”
How the hell was I supposed to answer that? I managed to prevent my buffer from going, “I don’t have that information,” and tried to think of how to respond. I regretted not shutting down for these repairs, or at least not pretending to shut down. It was too late now.
“I don’t think so,” I replied after a pause that was hopefully not long enough for Ratthi to notice. “You were being kind to it. Probably kinder than anyone else has been to it in its entire existence. You got it to smile.” I did my best to keep my voice calm and reassuring, and not let the jaded bitterness I was feeling come through. “If anything, you probably saved yourself. If it hadn’t liked you, you’d be dead right now, not just concussed.”
Ratthi winced and paled slightly. Good job, Murderbot, reminding the human just how fucking dangerous murderbots are and how close he came to being killed by one was a fantastic idea. I should have just let my buffer reply, it was obviously smarter than I was. I unpaused my episode of Sanctuary Moon, resolving to keep my mouth shut and not say anything else that would just make things even worse. Ratthi remained quiet as well, much to my relief, and I went back to ignoring everything but the ongoing drama between Sanctuary Moon’s colony solicitor and their bodyguard.
A short time later, the door to Medical slid open, and Mensah came back in again, her brows furrowed slightly. “I think we have a problem,” she started, her voice calm but her shoulders tense. “We can’t contact DeltFall Group.” That definitely jolted me out of my media, and I felt a surge of… something. Panic, maybe. Ratthi made a startled little sound as well, even as Mensah continued. “Have you heard anything from them at all, SecUnit?” she asked me.
“No.” Why would DeltFall have dropped out of contact? It couldn’t be anything good. “I need to get back there.” But to do that, I needed to fix my flier, and I couldn’t do that while stuck in Medical. MedSystem wasn’t finished with me yet, but the worst damage had been tended, and I didn’t care about the rest. I ordered MedSystem to stop and slid off the treatment bed.
Mensah looked startled. “What are you doing? You’re still hurt!”
“I need to fix my flier so I can get back to my clients,” I replied, more sharply than my governor module would have tolerated if it had still worked. “I can’t do that from here.”
Mensah opened her mouth as if she was about to argue, then snapped it shut again and just nodded. “Right. The recycler should be almost done with your replacement parts by now, and your armour should be ready too,” she said instead, her voice and face once again calm. “While you work on your flier, we’ll figure out who’ll go with you in the big hopper and what we’ll need to take.”
I was already halfway to the door when she said that, and I stopped dead in my tracks. “What? You can’t – why?” I was so confused. Why would they want to come with me halfway around the world? That was going to be an overnight flight at the least with their big hopper, which was nowhere near as fast as my flier. (Although if I couldn’t fix my flier fully, I’d probably have to go more slowly anyway, so maybe that would be a moot point.)
“If anything has happened to DeltFall Group, we want to help,” Mensah replied firmly. “They might have been attacked by aggressive wildlife like we were, especially if their survey package was missing potential hazard info like ours is.” She paused briefly, then added, more gently, “And we don’t want you to be alone. Just in case.”
I had no response for that. So I said nothing, and after a moment’s hesitation, I left Medical. What the PreservationAux people decided to do was entirely up to them. I couldn’t stop them from endangering themselves, no matter how much I might have wanted to.
I spent the rest of the day cycle working on my flier’s repairs, while the humans planned and prepared for their own trip. Every now and then one would go past my flier to get to the big hopper, to stow extra supplies or check the systems or whatever else it was they were doing. I ignored them, as well as the conversation going on in the feed. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the potential things that could have gone wrong at DeltFall.
At least replacing the fried links successfully restored power to my flier without any further trouble, much to my relief. Fixing the damage to the wing was trickier, and I wasn’t confident about how well my jury-rigged repairs would hold up under anything beyond straight, easy flying. I probably wouldn’t be able to go much faster than the hopper after all. My flier’s underside and landing gears were a complete write-off, but at least nothing vital was there. I patched up what I could just so I wouldn’t lose any more pieces mid-flight, then did a quick test flight to make sure there were no major problems. It was such a relief to be back in the air once more that my performance reliability went up a full two points.
By the time I was done with the test flight and had made some slight adjustments to the repairs, the humans were also ready to leave. Which was just as well, because I had no intention of waiting for them. I stowed my projectile weapon and the upper half of my armour in my flier’s storage compartment, peeled down my suit skin to expose my spine ports again, settled back into my flier, then followed the PreservationAux hopper into the sky.
Chapter Four
(cw: canon-typical violence/death)
We flew through the night, with me taking the lead and the hopper following behind and off to one side to avoid my wake turbulence. My repairs seemed to be holding well enough for now, but I definitely wasn't keen on pushing myself much faster than what the hopper could manage. The patchwork job on my underside felt especially flimsy (and drafty), and I hoped I wouldn't need to do any fancy flying on this trip.
Mensah had given me access to the team's feed and comms (not that I actually needed said access, since I'd hacked into them already, but she didn't know that), so we could communicate if we needed to. I was half-listening to the humans on board the hopper discussing their scans of the new terrain past their assessment range (we were making sure to give any missing map patches a wide berth), half-listening to my own music playlist, and fully trying to avoid thinking about what we might find when we actually reached the DeltFall habitat. (I wasn't having much success with that last part.)
Apart from Mensah, the other humans who had come along on this trip were Overse, Ratthi and Pin-Lee. There had been some argument about Ratthi joining us, what with his recent stint in Medical, but MedSystem had given him the all-clear and he'd insisted that his expertise as a biologist could prove necessary if people were hurt or the habitat had been attacked by hostile fauna. Pin-Lee had come because she had previous experience in habitat and shelter construction, and Overse was a certified field medic.
All arguably useful, and yet none of them had any real experience in potentially dangerous situations like the one we were probably heading into. None of them were action-hero explorers like the ones in the serials I enjoyed watching because they were unrealistic and not sordidly depressing like reality. They'd had to pull instructions from the hopper's information package on what to even prepare for. (I just hoped that they'd listen to me once we got there, and that I'd be able to keep them safe.)
Mensah had assigned watch shifts to everyone on the hopper, and they were taking turns to pilot, co-pilot, and rest. It was the middle of the night, and Pin-Lee was piloting with Mensah as the co-pilot, while Ratthi and Overse dozed in the main cabin. I was splitting my attention between listening to my music and checking on the handful of drones I'd left back at the PreservationAux habitat to monitor things there. (Not that I would have been able to do much if anything happened back there, but still.)
The humans still back at the habitat were more active than most clients I'd had before tended to be at this time. Perhaps they were anxious about what we'd find at DeltFall. Arada was walking around occasionally, apparently restless, while Volescu snored off and on in his bunk. Bharadwaj had finally been able to leave Medical and return to her own quarters, and was busy going over her field notes. Gurathin was in the hub doing something on his personal system, but I couldn't tell what.
Then, suddenly, the feed dropped out.
I tapped Mensah over the local feed running off the hopper's system and told her, [The satellite went down.]
[Are you sure it was the satellite?] Mensah asked, a note of concern in her feed voice.
[I'm sure. I'm pinging it, and there's no response.] Without the satellite, we were cut off from HubSystem and everything else - we were far enough away from the PreservationAux habitat by now that we needed the comm satellite as a relay. I scanned around us as far as I could reach, but came up with nothing but empty sky. [I'm not picking up anything on scanners.]
Mensah didn't reply for a little bit, and I assumed she was talking to the others on the hopper. I continued scanning, looking for anything even remotely out of the ordinary, but there was nothing. I knew that the satellite had gone down a few times already during the survey - some of my clients back at DeltFall had been very vocal with their disapproval over the outages. This didn't make me feel any better though. There was just something about the timing of the outage, along with everything else that had happened, that was making me think there was something seriously wrong. But I didn't have any solid evidence, all I had was the vague feeling.
Either way, there wasn't anything I or the others could do about the satellite. Mensah eventually let me know that they'd agreed to keep going on to DeltFall with me, instead of returning to their own habitat. I would have preferred that they'd gone back, where they would hopefully be safe, but I wasn't part of their contract and had no say in their decisions. I simply pinged an acknowledgement, and focused on flying.
It was dawn when we arrived. The DeltFall camp was set in a wide valley surrounded by high mountains. Creek beds spiderwebbed through the grass and around stubby trees. The DeltFall operation I was assigned to was bigger than the PreservationAux one, so our base consisted of three linked habitats, a shelter for surface vehicles, a landing area for two large hoppers, a cargo hauler, and three small hoppers, plus the hangar and separate landing area for my flier.
There was nobody outside, no movement. No trace of damage, no sign that any hostile fauna had approached. The satellite was still dead, but Mensah had been trying to get the DeltFall habitat on the comm since we had come within range. I had also been trying to reestablish contact with HubSystem, but had gotten only empty, echoing silence.
[Are any transports missing?] Mensah asked me over the local feed as I flew ahead and cautiously circled the habitat. The PresAux hopper was hanging back for now, which I appreciated.
[No. All transports are accounted for. The ground vehicles are kept in the shelter to the right,] I replied. [I recommend that you land your hopper outside the perimeter.] I sent her all the information I had, which was that DeltFall's automated systems were responding to my pings, but that was it. I wasn't getting the feed because HubSystem was either on standby or down entirely. From my overhead vantage point, I could see that all the habitat entrances were shut, with no signs of forced entry. And I wasn't getting anything from the three other SecUnits that were on this contract with me, not even pings.
That worried me a lot more than anything else did. Nobody outside, nobody answering the comm. Unless they'd shut down HubSystem and the other SecUnits and taken the surface vehicles off on vacation, my clients were--
No. I wasn't going to just assume that. I had to confirm that in person. Neither my nor the hopper's scanners could see inside the habitats because of the shielding that's really only there to protect proprietary data, so we couldn't get any life signs or energy readings.
Mensah didn't reply for a few moments, presumably talking to the others. Finally she spoke up again. [All right. This is your habitat, we'll follow your lead here.]
Well, that was a relief. (Somewhat, anyway. I'd still prefer they not accompany me at all, but if they were going to insist on it, following my lead was the next best thing.) I continued to circle overhead as the hopper descended to land outside the perimeter where I'd indicated, at the edge of the valley, then I followed them down. With my landing gears still trashed, I couldn't really land myself, but I hadn't been planning to anyway. Once I was low enough and beside the hopper, I switched to my hover mode, then carefully disconnected myself from my flier. It remained floating about a metre and a half off the ground as I pulled my suit skin up into place and put the top half of my armour back on. Once I'd sealed the helmet, I grabbed my projectile weapon, opened the cockpit canopy and vaulted out, landing lightly on the ground. My flier swayed a little with the movement, then steadied again.
Mensah, Overse and Pin-Lee had left the hopper, each carrying one of the small hand weapons from the survival gear, while Ratthi stayed aboard, monitoring the scanners. They were all quiet and subdued, and I suspected that up until now, they'd been considering this as probably some kind of natural disaster, and that they were going to be digging survivors out of a collapsed habitat, or fending off hostile fauna.
This was something else.
Mensah nodded at me to proceed. I adjusted my grip on my projectile weapon, activated my drones, and started forward, my flier hovering along behind me like another (much larger) drone. They followed behind me, moving carefully in their full environment suits, their helmets sealed. The suits gave them some protection, at least, but they were meant for environmental hazards, not heavily armed humans or angry malfunctioning rogue SecUnits actively attempting to kill them. I was even more nervous than Ratthi, who was anxiously telling us to be careful almost every other step as he monitored the scans.
I sent a few of my drones ahead to scout around the habitat for any signs of movement, and kept the rest with me for now, hovering just above my head in a small cloud. My drones were small, barely a centimetre across, with cameras only, no weapons. (That was what my flier was for.)
We crossed the shallow streams, scattering water invertebrates away from our boots. The trees were short and sparse enough that I had a good view of the camp on our approach. I still couldn't detect any of the security drones that I knew should be here, and Ratthi's scanners weren't picking up anything either. The scans read the perimeter sensors as dead, and I still couldn't get anything from the other SecUnits, despite my best efforts.
SecUnits aren't sentimental about each other, we can't afford to be. We aren't friends, and we can't trust each other, even if we work together. Even if we don't have clients who decide to entertain themselves by ordering their SecUnits to fight each other. (I really hated fighting other SecUnits.)
I led the way into the landing area for the hoppers. They were between us and the first habitat, with the vehicle storage off to one side, and my flier's hangar off to the other. I was leading us in at an angle, checking the ground as we went. It was mostly bare of grass from all the foot traffic and hopper landings. We'd gotten a weather report from the satellite before it had dropped out which informed us that it had rained here overnight, and the mud had hardened. There were no signs of activity since then.
I passed that info to Mensah through the feed and she told the others. "So whatever happened, it wasn't long after we spoke to them on the comm," Pin-Lee murmured.
"They couldn't have been attacked by someone," Overse whispered. "There's no one else on this planet." There was no real point in whispering, but I could understand the impulse.
"There's not supposed to be anyone else on this planet," Ratthi said darkly over the comm from their hopper.
There were three SecUnits that weren't me on this planet, and that was bad enough. (I couldn't shake the memory of the PreservationAux SecUnit firing at Mensah, its own client.) By now, my drones had confirmed my overview of all the habitat entrances, showing that they were all closed and undamaged. I sent the images to Mensah's feed and said, "Dr. Mensah, it would be better if I went ahead."
She paused, reviewing what I'd sent her, her shoulders tensing. She had probably come to the same conclusion I had, or at least admitted to herself that it was the most likely possibility. (She was probably having the same problems with remembering her own SecUnit trying to kill her.) "All right," she said. "We'll wait here. Make sure we can monitor."
I just nodded and sent my camera's feed to all four of them, then started forward. I kept the drones I'd sent ahead on a scouting pattern around the perimeter, and used some of the others to check the vehicle shed as I moved past it. It was open on one side, with some sealed lockers in the back for storage. All four of our surface vehicles were still there, powered down and with no sign of recent tracks, so I didn't bother going in. I sent a confirmation of the presence of the surface vehicles to Mensah over the feed, then kept going.
I walked up to the main hatch of the first habitat, and tapped the entrance button. I wasn't sure if it would still open for me or not, but it did. I couldn't decide if that was a relief or a concern. I sent a couple of my drones in ahead of me, set my flier to hold position just above and before the doorway, and told Mensah through the feed that I wouldn't be speaking aloud on the comm anymore.
She tapped back an acknowledgement and I heard her telling the others to get off my feed and my comm, that she would be the only one speaking to me so I wouldn't be distracted. Mensah underestimated my ability to ignore humans, but I appreciated the thought. Ratthi whispered, "Be careful," and signed off. (I didn't know what to make of that, so I decided not to think about it.)
I had my projectile weapon held at the ready as I went in, through the suit locker area and into the first corridor. "No suits missing," Mensah commented quietly in my ear, watching my field camera. This habitat was nicer than the PreservationAux one, newer, with wider halls to accommodate the larger group number. It was also empty and silent, the smell of decaying flesh drifting through my helmet filters. I headed toward the hub, where I knew the main crew area was.
The lights were still on and air whispered through the vents, but with the feed down I couldn't get back into my SecSystem. I really missed the cameras. It was weird and uncomfortable being in my own assigned habitat and not being able to see everything.
At the door to the hub, I found the first of the SecUnits. It was on the floor, sprawled on its back, the armour over its chest pierced by something that left a hole approximately ten centimetres wide and a little deeper. We're hard to kill, but that would definitely do it. I recognised which one it was; this SecUnit had always sent me a ping of acknowledgement whenever its patrol path took it past my hangar while I was doing checks or maintenance on my flier. (Sometimes I had pinged it first.)
And now it was dead.
Something in my chest tightened, but I didn't have the time to acknowledge it. I carefully stepped over it and went through into the crew area, then froze in place at the scene before me. There were eleven messily dead humans in the hub, sprawled on the floor, in chairs, the projection surfaces and monitoring stations behind them showing impact damage from energy and projectile weapon fire.
I had been expecting it, even though I'd been actively attempting not to, but expecting it and actually having those expectations confirmed were two entirely different things. These eleven dead humans were - had been - my clients, and I hadn't been here for them. I recognised them, remembered stupid little details about them, their specialities, how each one had behaved towards the others on the survey.
It was my job (well, part of my job) to protect them, and I had failed.
I had a list of my clients in memory storage, and part of my mind automatically went through the list, updating the status of each of the eleven clients to "confirmed deceased". The rest of me was still frozen in place, swamped by a tangle of emotions that I couldn't even begin to sort through. As far as I could remember, I had never lost this many clients on a contract before. I'd never even come close to losing this many clients before.
I was still and silent for long enough that Mensah ended up pinging me over the feed. [SecUnit? Are you all right?]
No. No, I wasn't. I didn't say that though, and simply asked Mensah for everyone to fall back to the hopper. She acknowledged me, and I got confirmation from the drones I still had outside that the humans were retreating.
I carefully picked my way across the room and went out the opposite door to the corridor that led to the mess hall, Medical, and the cabins. There were more dead clients sprawled in the corridors, and I paused automatically to identify and update the status of each one.
The weapon that had killed the dead SecUnit wasn't in the hub, and it had died with its back to the door. My clients had gotten some warning, enough to start getting up and retreating, but something else had come in from this direction and trapped them. I suspected that the first SecUnit I'd found had been killed while trying to protect the hub.
Which meant that I was looking for the other two SecUnits.
These clients had been moderately decent, as far as clients went. Despite the size of the DeltFall group, there hadn't been much interpersonal drama, unlike other contracts I'd been on. They hadn't made us SecUnits fight each other for their own entertainment, they hadn't treated us like cleaning bots and made us clean up after them, they hadn't used us for target practice just because they were bored. And I'd been able to fly all day almost every day. They hadn't deserved this. They hadn't deserved getting murdered by the SecUnits that were meant to protect them.
The PreservationAux humans weren't my clients, but I still wanted to protect them. Even more so now than before. Nobody was going to touch them if I could help it. And to make sure of that, I had to kill these two rogue Units. I could have pulled out at this point, sabotaged the hoppers, grabbed a few of the repair drones from my hangar, and got the PresAux humans out of there, leaving the rogue Units stuck on the other side of the planet. That would have been the smart thing to do.
But I wanted to kill them.
One of my drones found two humans dead in the mess, no warning. They had been in the middle of taking food pacs out of the heating cubby, the tables half-set for a meal. Two more clients to update the status on. Two more people I recognised - they were marital partners, and I'd overheard them talking about their plans for the future on more than one occasion. A future they'd no longer have. Two more clients that I'd failed to protect.
While I moved through the rooms and hallways, I was doing an image search against the hopper's equipment database in an attempt to distract myself. The dead unit had probably been killed by a mineral survey tool, like a pressure or sonic drill. I was pretty sure the PreservationAux humans also had one on their own hopper, it was part of the standard equipment, and I sent my analysis through to Mensah. You would have to get close to use it with enough force to pierce armour, maybe a little more than a metre.
Because you can't walk up to another murderbot with an armour-piercing projectile or energy weapon inside the habitat and not be looked at with suspicion. You can easily walk up to a fellow murderbot with a tool that a human might have asked you to retrieve.
By the time I'd reached the opposite side of the structure, my drones had cleared the first habitat. I halted in the hatchway at the end of the narrow corridor that led into the second. Another human lay at the opposite end, half in and half out of the half-open hatch. I recognised this one as well - she'd had a habit of sneaking into the mess in the middle of the nocturnal rest period, in the dark, and snacking on cubes of solidified fauna excretions she'd taken from the cooling unit. (This survey didn't have strict rationing, so I didn't have to report her late night excursions or do anything about them, unlike some previous contracts I'd been on.) (I really hadn't liked those contracts.)
To get into the next habitat, I'd have to step over her to push the door all the way open, but I could already tell that something was wrong about the way the body lay. I used the magnification on the field camera to get a closer view of the skin on her outstretched arm. The lividity was wrong; she had been shot in the chest and had rested on her back for some time, then had been moved here recently. Probably as soon as they picked up our approach.
They were using my client's body as a distraction, as a prop for a trap. I was going to make them pay for that.
I double-checked my outside drones to make sure the PreservationAux humans were safely back at their hopper, then re-positioned my flier more precisely in front of the habitat entrance. I set one of my drones above the hatchway to the next habitat so it would have a good view of the corridor, readied my projectile weapon, then sent another of my drones zipping quickly through the half-open hatchway.
I had a half-second to see the two SecUnits waiting on either side of the hatchway before I heard the sound of an energy weapon firing and my drone's input fizzled out. That was enough to let me know their positions, and I opened fire with explosive rounds, aiming to hit the edges of the hatchway. The explosions and shrapnel wouldn't do much damage to the two lurking Units from here, but that wasn't what I was trying to do. I just wanted to get their attention.
I definitely got it. They burst through the hatchway, the first one already firing at me, but the narrowness of the corridor worked in my favour, and the second had no room to fire around the first. I ducked back behind the wall, catching some minor shrapnel that didn't pierce my armour, then I turned and ran.
The drone I'd set up above the hatchway confirmed that they were pursuing me, not that I needed the extra confirmation as the sound of gunfire echoed through the habitat. I dodged and weaved as erratically as I could, occasionally spinning to fire back at them before continuing on towards the habitat's main exit. I was taking some hits, direct and indirect, from both regular and explosive projectile rounds, but they weren't close enough or accurate enough to slow me down much.
I finally reached the main exit, and as soon as I was through it I dove to the side and rolled back to my feet a few metres away. The other Units sprinted in pursuit down the corridor, and just as they cleared the exit, my waiting flier opened fire.
Bolts of energy, much more powerful than what our in-built arm guns could produce, caught them both squarely, stopping them in their tracks. They melted armour, burned organics, overloaded and fried systems. The remaining explosive ammo in their projectile weapons cooked off, exploding in their faces and doing even more damage. They staggered and dropped, a matched pair of smoking, smouldering wrecks. Neither of them would be getting up from that again.
I scanned them both to confirm that they were no longer functional, then took a moment to assess my own condition. I'd still had some damage from the fight against the PreservationAux's SecUnit that I hadn't given MedSystem time to fully fix up, and now I had even more. I'd taken at least two, maybe three solid hits to the back from explosive rounds, which had blown off chunks of armour and shredded the underlying organics. One of my lower spine ports was damaged, but as long as the rest were still functional, that wouldn't hinder my ability to link to my flier. (Built-in redundancies are great.) Some glancing hits had damaged the armour over my arms as well. I'd also been hit by several clusters of solid projectile rounds, some of which had deflected off the armour while others had punched through and embedded in the back of my torso and my left shoulder.
In short, I wasn't feeling great. But none of it was critical, and I still had a job to do.
Now that things had calmed down a little, Mensah was asking me for an update. I let her know that I was still functional, and that I needed to finish checking the rest of the habitats. It had occurred to me that maybe there were still survivors hiding somewhere - if all my clients were dead, then the two remaining SecUnits should have been fried by their own governor modules well before we arrived. Unless they'd somehow both broken their own governor modules like I had, but that seemed… really unlikely. Not both of them, not at the same time as the PreservationAux SecUnit on the other side of the planet.
Something weird was going on here.
Mensah then asked if I needed any help. I didn't, and I really didn't want the PreservationAux humans leaving the safety of their hopper, not until I'd confirmed that there was nothing dangerous still lurking around somewhere. If anything, all I wanted them to do was return to their own habitat, safely away from the horrors within, and to leave me here.
But they still needed protection, and they no longer had a SecUnit of their own. So once I was finished here, I had to go back with them. There was no logical reason for me to stay here, and I wasn't going to lose any more humans.
So I replied to Mensah with a recommendation that they remain in their hopper for their own safety until I'd cleared the rest of the habitats, and set a couple more of my drones to watch over them. I checked the inputs from the drones I still had watching the perimeter, making sure nothing had changed there, then I headed back into the habitat with my remaining drones.
I moved quickly through the first habitat, since I'd already cleared it, and made my way into the second one. I sent a couple of my drones ahead to scout it out while I made my way towards the central hub where HubSystem and SecSystem's main interfaces were. If I could get them back up and running, that would make checking the remaining habitats much quicker. I passed Medical on the way, pausing briefly at the blasted hatch. Three more of my clients (status update: confirmed deceased) were piled inside where they'd tried to secure Medical and been trapped when their own SecUnits blew it open to slaughter them.
I also passed the Security ready room, and took the time to check that as well. All four cubicles were open and empty, and most of our equipment was still here. I reloaded my projectile weapon and spotted another box of drones still in storage. It would take too long to get them working with HubSystem down though, so I just made a note of them to pick up on the way out later. (You can never have too many drones.) It was very tempting to just climb into my own cubicle and shut out the world for a while, but there wasn't the time for that, not now. Not with the PreservationAux humans waiting, vulnerable, in their hopper.
I kept going to the central hub, my drones occasionally finding more dead clients as they scouted the corridors nearby. I had been half-expecting to feel a little better, or at least get some grim satisfaction after killing the shit out of the two SecUnits responsible for this slaughter, but I just felt exhausted. Getting revenge didn't change the fact that I'd failed to protect my clients in the first place.
Once I reached the central hub, I went to the main system interface and looked it over. Everything was shut down, which meant I'd have to wait for it to reboot and reinitialise before I could do anything with it. I started the main console back up, then occupied myself by checking my various drone inputs. The perimeter was still clear, but the humans had unsealed their hopper and were standing around it, out in the open. What was it with humans ignoring their own safety?
I was about to contact Mensah over the feed to request that they get their asses back inside the hopper (not with those words exactly but you know what I mean), but before I could say anything, the input from one of my drones inside the habitat fizzled and died.
Shit.
I immediately sent a couple more drones in that direction and readied my projectile weapon. There was only one entrance to the central hub, via a long, narrow corridor with a safety hatch at either end. I moved swiftly back up the corridor, hoping to get out before whatever had fried my drone boxed me in, but I was too late. The drones I'd sent out spotted two more SecUnits, company ones with survey group logos that I didn't recognise, advancing quickly towards my position, and there was no way for me to get around them and back outside without being spotted and getting shot to pieces. My flier wouldn't be able to blast through the habitat structure quickly enough to do anything with just its energy weapons; I only had the recon loadout, not any of the other loadouts with more firepower.
I was trapped.
I had just enough time to send Mensah a warning and a recommendation that they get the hell out of here before they got messily killed like my own clients had (I didn't word it like that, but that's what I meant), then I backburnered that channel so I wouldn't get distracted. I had to delay these two units until the humans had escaped. At least these SecUnits didn't have drones with them, so I had a slight advantage there. I'd have to use every advantage I could get.
I kept my remaining drones in a holding pattern above my head and waited just behind the corridor hatch, projectile weapon at the ready. The edges of the hatchway didn't offer a lot of cover, but it was the best I was going to get. The hostile units moved in fast, firing rapidly, shots flying past down the corridor or impacting the walls by the hatch. I sent half my remaining drones out in a fast-moving cloud to distract them and intercept shots, then knelt low, leaned around the side of the hatch, and fired a burst into Hostile One's legs. It staggered, knocked off-balance, and Hostile Two launched past it and through the hatchway into the corridor with me.
I hit the button to close and lock the hatchway with my elbow even as I launched back to my feet and threw myself at Hostile Two, knocking its projectile weapon aside with my own before it could fire point-blank at me and slamming it back against the corridor wall. I had one of its arms pinned, but it raised the other in preparation to shoot me in the head with its inbuilt arm weapon. I was moving too fast though, driven by anger and desperation, and clamped my hand over the gun port before it could fully open. My other hand triggered the projectile weapon I was still holding, firing haphazardly into Hostile Two's legs and torso. This gave me just enough of an advantage to shove its hand up beneath its chin and release the pressure off its weapon. It had a split second to try and abort that fire command and it failed. The energy burst went through my two middle fingers and the joint between its helmet and neck piece. Its head jerked and its body started to spasm. I dropped my projectile weapon, got my arm around its neck, and twisted.
Then I let go as I felt the connections, mechanical and organic, snap, and Hostile Two's body slid down the wall to crumple on the floor. One down, one to go.
I couldn't pause to rest though; Hostile One was blasting at the hatchway door, and it wouldn't take much longer to break through. I'd taken more hits from them both before I could separate them and drop Hostile Two, and I didn't want to get caught in this narrow corridor with no cover when the door finally gave way. I retrieved my dropped projectile weapon, shoved Hostile Two's corpse across the doorway (I really hoped Hostile One tripped over it), and retreated down the corridor back to the central hub room. I only had a few drones left with me, and I positioned one just above the hatchway to the central hub before going inside and sealing that hatchway too.
It wouldn't buy me much time, but it was better than nothing, and maybe I'd be able to take out the last hostile unit before I was sent into shutdown myself. With little else to do while I waited for the remaining hostile to burst in here and finish me off, I went back to the central console and checked on HubSystem. It had finally finished its startup procedure and was waiting for the password to be entered so it could fully reactivate.
I entered the password and… nothing happened. The password had been rejected. Someone had changed it. I couldn't get back into my own HubSystem.
What the hell was going on?
None of what had been happening made any sense. The PreservationAux SecUnit turning against its own clients without warning, the same thing apparently happening here with the SecUnits on my own contract (but only two of them, not all three. Why had the third one been killed?), and then two more unfamiliar SecUnits showing up out of nowhere…
I was getting a bad feeling in my organic parts. A really bad feeling. Something about this felt almost familiar, but not the good kind of familiar. The bad kind of familiar, like a half-remembered nightmare. (Yes, SecUnits dream, it's an annoying holdover from the organic parts of our brain. One I could really do without, honestly. I never dreamt anything good.)
Hostile One had broken through the first hatchway, taken out the drone I'd left in the corridor, and was now blasting away at the second hatch. I didn't have much time left. There was nowhere to hide or shelter in the central hub, so I just positioned myself beside the doorway, my projectile weapon held at the ready as best I could with damaged arms and two missing fingers, and waited.
The hatchway was almost breached when the noise of it being assaulted stopped. I remained in place, tense and nervous - then something heavy slammed into the weakened hatch and smashed it open as Hostile One barrelled into the room before I could react. It swung around and shot me in the right hip, apparently aiming low because I'd been crouching last time and that's what it had been expecting me to do again. The result was basically the same, anyway; my leg gave out and I fell backwards, flat on my back, and it fired again right into my chest before I'd even hit the floor. Even with my pain sensors dialled all the way down, that hurt, and despite my best attempts I couldn't get any of my weapons into position to return fire fast enough.
Then it jerked, dropped its weapon, and fell forward. I saw two things; the ten-centimetre hole in its back, and Mensah standing behind it, holding something that looked a lot like the sonic mining drill from her hopper.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. "Dr. Mensah," I said automatically, "this is a violation of security protocol and I am contractually obligated to record this for report to the company–" It was in the buffer and the rest of my brain was empty.
She ignored me, talking to Pin-Lee on the comm, and strode forward around the dead unit to grab my arm and pull. I was too heavy for her (and also the damage on my arm (and everywhere else) made that rather unpleasant) so I hauled myself to my feet with some difficulty, still holding onto my projectile weapon with my good hand. I was starting to wonder if Dr. Mensah was actually some kind of intrepid galactic explorer and not just a regular survey captain, even if she didn't look like the ones on the entertainment feed.
She kept pulling on me though, so I took a few more steps, limping heavily from the shot to the hip and doing my best to avoid tripping over the dead unit. "Dr. Mensah, I advised you to leave and get yourselves to safety–"
"We're not leaving you behind," she replied firmly. "You weren't responding on the feed, so I came to get you myself."
I didn't know what to make of that. "Why?" came out before I could stop myself. It was the only thing I could think of to say, though I hoped I didn't actually sound as plaintive and confused as I thought I did.
Mensah paused and looked back at me, her brow furrowing slightly. "Because you needed help," she replied, slowly and patiently. "We're not going to abandon you here to let yourself get killed."
"But…" That was literally my job description, or at least part of it. SecUnits are meant to be left behind if the situation calls for it to keep the clients safe. We're meant to be disposable. We're not meant to be rescued by the humans we're supposed to be protecting. I couldn't process it. "You endangered yourself. That's– You're not meant to do that."
"You've endangered yourself multiple times to save us," Mensah pointed out, a little impatiently.
"That's what I'm made for. That's my job. Not yours. I'm the SecUnit. You're–" I hesitated. She wasn't actually my client. I'd failed my own clients. I was suddenly exhausted again. "I'm… not even your SecUnit. I don't understand."
Mensah's expression twisted in a way I couldn't interpret before she took a breath and smoothed it out again. "We would prefer that you remain alive so you can continue to protect us," she said, her voice gentle. "And in return, we will do whatever we can to protect you, as well."
Well. The first part made some kind of sense, at least. They no longer had their own SecUnit, I'd made very sure of that, so I guessed they considered keeping me around better than nothing. As for the second part… I didn't want to think about it. They wouldn't be able to protect me from the company. My organic parts were doing something weird, but I couldn't tell if that was from my confusion or the damage I'd taken. "... I still need to clear the rest of the habitat," I replied after a moment, switching topics. "There may still be survivors. I have to check."
She regarded me dubiously. "You're hurt," she pointed out, entirely unnecessarily, as she gestured to my injuries. I'd taken a good number of hits all over, and was missing chunks of armour and organic bits in multiple places, the worst one being from the hit I'd taken directly to the chest. Clusters of projectiles and shrapnel were lodged in my back, shoulders, and thighs, and my right hip was leaking and grinding painfully from when it had been shot. "You're missing fingers!" I was very aware of that, it was making it difficult to hold my projectile weapon properly.
"It doesn't matter. They're my clients," I countered. I had to make her understand. "I have to be sure. If anyone is still alive – I can't leave without knowing, for sure. I have to find out. You don't have to stay with me." I still had a few drones left with me, and I sent them out to start scouting the rest of the habitat. It would be faster than me trying to do it myself right now. (I really hoped there weren't any more surprise SecUnits lurking around.)
Mensah eyed me more closely, and I was even more grateful than usual for my opaque faceplate. I didn't want to know what my face was doing. (I didn't want Mensah to know, either.) Finally she let out a huff of breath and nodded. "All right, fine. But I'm not waiting in the hopper. I'm staying with you. Is your MedSystem working?"
"No." I wasn't happy with her staying with me, but at least she was no longer trying to get me to leave immediately, and if she was with me, I could protect her. "I couldn't get HubSystem reactivated. I've been locked out. Someone has changed the password. With HubSystem down, my cubicle won't work either." Which reminded me of an important detail. "The last two SecUnits aren't from here. They have a different survey logo." One of said units was right by my feet, with minimal damage apart from the ten-centimetre hole in its back. This one would be the easiest to examine if we wanted to find out anything about what was going on. I awkwardly knelt down beside it and started examining it more closely.
"They're from a different survey group? What were they doing here then? We weren't aware of the presence of a third survey group." She regarded the body on the floor, her brow furrowed. "It looks like it's from the same company as you are, but I don't recognise that survey logo. GrayCris. Why didn't the company tell us about another survey group? We knew about DeltFall." She sounded more like she was talking to herself (or maybe to the others over the comm) than to me, so I didn't say anything. She was silent for a moment, then looked back at me. "Could this third survey group have bribed the company to keep their presence secret?"
"Yes." The company could be bribed to keep multiple surveys and who knows what else secret, as long as they thought they could get away with it. I didn't say anything else though, I was busy working on getting the dead unit's helmet off. There was something I needed to check, but I couldn't do so with its helmet still on. Having a couple of fingers missing was hindering me more than I expected. I finally managed to wrestle it off, and checked the back of the SecUnit's neck. All SecUnits, including me, had a data port at the base of our neck, which could be used to insert temporary override modules.
There was a module in the dead SecUnit's data port. It didn't take me long to figure out what kind it was. "Dr. Mensah, this unit - and probably the others here - have been inserted with combat override modules." I sent her the specifications of said module over the feed. Combat override modules allow personal control over a SecUnit, turning it from a mostly autonomous construct into a gun puppet. The feed would be cut off, control would be over the comm, but functionality would depend on how complex the orders were. "Kill the humans" isn't a complex order.
None of the SecUnits here had been in control of their own actions; they hadn't had a choice. But I had been, and I'd chosen to kill them. (Well, except for the one Mensah had killed, but she'd done so to save me, so I was still responsible for it, mostly.)
I felt absolutely awful.
Mensah took the time to check the specifications that I'd sent her, her frown deepening. "We need to leave as soon as possible," she said after a moment, her voice firm. "Whoever this survey group is, they could come back here with more SecUnits. Or just to retrieve the ones they left here."
She was right. And I wasn't in any real state to protect her or the other PreservationAux humans from much of anything right now. I struggled back to my feet again, doing my best to ignore how the movement made some of my injuries leak some more before the veins and arteries automatically sealed again. "My drones are checking the rest of the habitat. I have located and identified seventy-six percent of my clients so far." I had to pause for a moment before I could continue. "I need to pick up some extra intel drones from the Security ready room before we go. And get some of the repair drones for my flier. They'll fit in the hopper's cargo compartments."
"Can we do so while your drones finish checking the habitat?" Mensah asked, and I nodded. "All right. Let's get moving. We might as well pick up some of the emergency med kits from your Medical as well. Just in case."
That was practical, and it wasn't like they would do anyone here any good now. I slung my projectile weapon across my back and limped after Mensah out of the central hub, flicking through my various drone inputs as we went. The drones I'd left outside the habitat could see Overse waiting near the main entrance with one of the small hand weapons, while Pin-Lee and Ratthi waited inside the hopper, still outside the perimeter. Nothing else seemed out of place outside, which was a relief.
We stopped by the ready room first, and I picked up the box of spare intel drones in my good hand, then had to put it down again so I could reload my projectile weapon. While I was doing that, Mensah grabbed the box of drones herself, obviously intending to carry it for me. She had the sonic mining drill slung across her back, in a position where she could quickly bring it to bear again if she needed to, so she had her hands free to carry things. I didn't bother arguing with her, even though the idea of a human carrying something for a SecUnit was utterly foreign to me. I was starting to get used to how weird the PreservationAux humans were, just a little.
When we got to Medical, I saw Mensah pause at the sight of the bodies of the three humans that had been trapped within. She'd been carefully averting her gaze from the other bodies we'd passed, but it was harder to ignore these ones when we had to step over them to get into Medical. "You should wait out here," I told her on impulse. She let out a huff of breath and nodded, but didn't say anything as she turned away from the bodies. I found a carry bag inside and packed it with as many emergency med kits as I could fit into it, then slung the strap over my slightly-less-damaged shoulder.
I left Medical and we continued to the habitat's main entry. My shot hip slowed me down, but I was still able to keep up with Mensah. By the time we reached the entrance, my drones had finished clearing the last habitat, and I'd updated the status of all my clients. Every single one of them, confirmed deceased. I swayed a little and had to lean against the edge of the hatchway to recover. Mensah paused to look at me, her brow furrowing, and Overse also moved closer from where she'd been waiting outside. "What's wrong?" Mensah asked gently.
"My drones have finished checking the habitats," I replied as neutrally as I could manage. I hesitated for a long moment before continuing. It was difficult to get the words out. "... No survivors."
"Oh." Mensah sighed. "I'm sorry."
Why was she apologising? It wasn't like she was the one who killed them.
Overse reached out to me with one hand, as if to offer some gesture of comfort, but I couldn't prevent myself from flinching back slightly. She withdrew her hand again. "Are you all right, SecUnit?" she asked carefully.
I couldn't answer that. I just straightened from where I'd been leaning against the edge of the hatchway and began limping towards my flier's hangar, avoiding the wrecked bodies of the two SecUnits I'd murdered. I should have stopped to check them and confirm they'd had combat override modules as well, but… I didn't want to. "We should keep moving. I still want to retrieve some repair drones before we return to your habitat."
Neither of them said anything in response, and just followed behind me. Once I was at my hangar, it took me a couple of minutes to get around HubSystem being down to activate some of the repair drones so I could get them to the hopper without having to carry them myself. By that time, Mensah had gotten Pin-Lee and Ratthi to bring the hopper over from the perimeter, landing it just outside the hangar. I got the drones into the hopper's side cargo compartments, along with the box of smaller intel drones and the bag of extra emergency med kits.
Mensah grabbed a couple of the med kits before closing the cargo pod though, and turned to face me resolutely. "Before we leave, we should at least do some basic treatment of your injuries," she said in a tone that brooked no argument as she handed one of the med kits to Overse. "I don't like the idea of leaving them untreated for the entire time it'll take us to get back to our habitat. That will just make them more difficult to treat later."
That wasn't the worst idea, honestly, and at this point I was too tired to argue anyway. I just nodded, and she gestured for me to go back inside the hangar first. Probably because it was at least a little cleaner in there than out in the open amongst the dried mud and dust. Only then did I remember that I also had a spare flight suit still in storage here as well. That would make things easier later. I shed my damaged armour and suit skin, then just stood still and distracted myself with an episode of Sanctuary Moon while Overse and Mensah used the med kits to pick out embedded shrapnel and spray the injuries to my organic parts down with wound sealant.
"Doesn't this hurt?" Overse asked at one point as she was carefully extracting a particularly large piece of shrapnel from the ruins of my back. Mensah was busy with the mess that was my right hip. The damaged organic parts around it were still leaking because the proximity of the inorganic joint was interfering with the wound sealant.
"I have my pain sensors turned down." That didn't negate the pain entirely, but it did make it much more tolerable and distant, and Overse didn't need to know the finer details. I figured it was enough to reassure her that she wasn't making things any worse.
"Oh, well, that's good, I suppose. It must come in handy." I couldn't see her expression, and didn't particularly want to, but I did notice that she sounded… perturbed. "Why do SecUnits have the ability to feel pain in the first place, though, if you can just turn it off?"
"It's a useful indicator of how much damage we've taken." I was a little distracted watching Sanctuary Moon and keeping an eye on the inputs from my drones still outside on watch, so the next part came out without me thinking about it first. "Plus the governor modules probably wouldn't be as effective if we couldn't feel pain from them." I realised as soon as it came out that I really shouldn't have said that, but it was too late.
Mensah paused what she was doing to look up at me, but I kept just looking straight ahead and didn't meet her gaze. I didn't want to see her expression either. I heard Overse suck her breath in through her teeth, but her hands remained steady as she eased the shrapnel out and sealed the wound. "That seems inhumane."
"We're not human." My tone was flatter than I would've gotten away with if my governor module had actually been working, but I didn't care. I just wanted them to finish up so we could get out of here before anything else happened.
There was an uncomfortable silence after that. I went back to watching Sanctuary Moon and trying not to twitch too much as they patched me up. Once they were done and were packing up what was left of the med kits, I went and retrieved a fresh suit skin and my spare flight suit from the storage locker in the hangar. I didn't put them on yet though - I didn't want to mess around with trying to get the suit skin over my injuries without interfering with the wound sealant, and I'd probably just have to take it off again when we got back to the PreservationAux habitat anyway.
So I just stowed them and what was left of the armour (even though it was badly damaged, it still belonged to PreservationAux and I didn't want to leave it behind) in the hopper (it had much more room than my flier's small storage compartment), climbed awkwardly into my flier, and linked up. Mensah and Overse got back into the hopper, but before they took off, Mensah said to me over the feed, [We should check DeltFall's emergency beacon before we go. What happened here... we should see if the beacon's been triggered.]
That was a good idea, but the thought of it having been triggered and the Company already being on its way to pick us up (and find out about my broken governor module) was exhausting. I just tapped an acknowledgement and sent Mensah the coordinates for the beacon, waited for them to take off in the hopper, then followed them up into the sky.
Chapter Five
The flight to the emergency beacon’s location was short - it was only a few kilos away, a safe distance from the DeltFall habitat. When we got there, the hopper dropped down lower and circled the site to get a better look. I stayed at my current altitude and swung around in a slow, wide arc as I waited for the humans to report. I probably should’ve been the one checking, but Mensah had taken the lead, and I didn’t have the energy to take over.
[The beacon hasn’t launched,] Mensah told me over the feed. [It looks like it’s been destroyed. It’s in pieces all over the place.]
On the one hand, the news that the company wasn’t yet on its way was a slight, if temporary, relief. On the other hand, it was very concerning for PreservationAux. GrayCris obviously didn’t want the company getting here before they’d finished whatever it was they were up to. [You should check on your own beacon once we get back there,] I replied.
[That’s the plan,] Mensah confirmed. The hopper began climbing to rejoin me, and I swung around to start back towards PreservationAux’s habitat. [I just hope nothing’s happened back there while we were gone.]
I’d been trying not to think about that ever since the satellite dropped out. It was part of the reason I hadn’t wanted to stay long enough at DeltFall to get repaired before returning. [We’ll find out when we get there.] Maybe I should have tried to be more reassuring, but I really wasn’t feeling up to it. It wasn’t like we could do anything about it from here, anyway.
Mensah was silent for a long moment, and I hoped that was the end of the conversation. No such luck. [With everything that happened back there… how are you holding up?] she asked.
[I am at 62% performance reliability,] I replied automatically.
[That wasn’t what I meant.] Mensah’s tone was as gentle as it could be over the feed. [How are you doing mentally? Emotionally?]
Oh no. Nope, no way, I am not answering that. I am absolutely not going to talk about my feelings. Why would she even ask a SecUnit that? We’re not meant to have emotions or feelings. I let my buffer take over. [I'm sorry, I don’t have that information.]
There was another brief pause before Mensah responded. [Okay. But if you do need to… talk about it or anything at some point, I’ll listen. You’re not alone here.]
I had no idea how to respond to that. I just pinged a wordless acknowledgement, then backburnered the feed. Trying to figure out why Mensah was asking how I was doing, why she would care, was so draining that I wanted nothing more than to start a recharge cycle. Not exactly ideal while flying halfway around the planet.
I was too tired to think about it, or anything else, so I just started up one of my favourite music playlists and focused on flying without shaking my jury-rigged repairs to pieces. It was a long way back.
It was after sunset by the time we reached PreservationAux’s habitat. We’d passed by their own emergency beacon on the way in, and confirmed that it had also been destroyed. We were within regular comm range of the habitat by then; Mensah and the others on the hopper had managed to get in touch with the rest of the humans back at the habitat, and confirmed that everything there was fine. Nothing else had gone wrong while we were away.
Nothing that they wanted to talk about over the comm, anyway. Mensah also didn’t say anything about what had happened at DeltFall over the comm either. I was a little surprised that they had the sense to think about unfriendly parties potentially eavesdropping on our comms. Most humans I’d been on contract with before hadn’t been that sensible, but I guess everyone here had had plenty of time to think about it on the long flight back.
The habitat’s exterior lights were on when we arrived, illuminating the main entrance and the hopper landing pad. I let the hopper land first, then came in low and hovered to a halt in the open space beside the landing pad. I’d have to leave my flier in hover mode for the repair drones to work on it properly, and I hoped that it wouldn’t drain the power cells too much. The hover mode wasn’t really meant to be used for such long periods of time.
I took my time with disconnecting, recalibrating, and exiting my flier, hoping that everyone would be inside the habitat by then so I could get the repair drones out and get them working on my flier without interruption. At first I thought that I’d been successful in avoiding them, but as I was booting up the repair drones, I heard footsteps approaching me from the side. I didn’t react, hoping that whoever it was would leave me alone, but no such luck.
“SecUnit?” It was Mensah.
I resisted the urge to ignore her, just, and paused what I was doing to glance over at her. “Yes?”
“You should be going to Medical,” she said, her tone calm and level. “You need treatment.”
“And my flier needs repairs,” I pointed out, turning back to what I was doing with the drones. “I’ll go to Medical once I’ve got the repair drones activated and they’ve started working on it.”
“All right,” she replied, then added, “We’ll be having a team meeting soon, to discuss… everything that’s happened, and figure out what to do. I’d like you to be part of it, if you’re feeling up to it. Your input would be greatly appreciated.”
I glanced over at her again. “I’ll probably be in Medical by then.” Obviously. I really hoped they didn’t decide to hold the meeting in Medical. All I wanted to do was start a recharge while MedSystem worked on me. I also didn’t want to think about them appreciating anything I had to say. On the few occasions that previous clients had asked me for advice, they had then usually ignored it.
“You can join in over the feed,” she countered. “You don’t have to, of course, I understand it’s been a very long day. It’s just…” She sighed and rubbed her face with one hand. “None of us have been in a situation like this before. We don’t know what to expect, what to plan for. You’re…” She hesitated, apparently not sure how to phrase what she wanted to say.
I finally got the drones fully activated and set them to start repairs on my flier. They hovered off and got to work. “I’m the security expert?” I offered after a moment when Mensah didn’t continue.
Mensah let out a relieved little sound. “Yes. That. You’re the security expert. We could really use your advice.”
“I don’t know how much useful advice I’ll be able to give,” I warned her. Which was true. My education modules were cheap and basic, and most of my knowledge about security protocols actually came from all the media serials I’ve watched, which meant that most of it was probably anywhere between 60 to 70% inaccurate crap. Still, she wasn’t wrong about them being well out of their depth. I was realising that if I wanted to keep the PreservationAux humans safe (which I did), I’d have to be part of this meeting, no matter how reluctant I was to do so.
“Whatever advice you can give will likely be better than anything we can come up with ourselves,” she replied wryly.
I wasn’t so sure about that, but I didn’t want to say so. I also couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I just went to the hopper to get my suit skin, flight suit, and box of drones from the cargo compartment. It was difficult to maintain a proper grip on everything though with two missing fingers, and I had to accept that I’d probably have to make two trips. Which reminded me that MedSystem wouldn’t actually be able to rebuild the mechanical parts of those missing fingers. A cubicle could, but the cubicle here was keyed to PreservationAux’s original SecUnit and its specific organic DNA, and that wasn’t something I could really override.
The dead PreservationAux SecUnit, however, did still have all its fingers intact, last I knew. I looked around for its body, but apparently it had been moved somewhere else. “Dr. Mensah, where is your original SecUnit?”
Mensah blinked at me, apparently thrown off by the sudden change of topic. “... I think the others took it back inside the habitat. Gurathin mentioned checking its log for any signs of tampering.”
“I’ll need access to it before I go to Medical.” I started towards the habitat with just the box of drones and the suit skin. I’d come back to get the flight suit later.
“Of course, but why?” Mensah walked with me, her expression curious. She’d noticed that I’d left the flight suit behind, but didn’t say anything about it.
“Your MedSystem won’t be able to rebuild my missing fingers,” I replied. “I need to salvage replacement parts from the other unit.”
Mensah stopped dead in her tracks, which surprised me enough that I stopped as well to look back at her. Her eyes were wide as she stared at me, then she blinked and shook her head slightly, her expression smoothing out. “That’s… gruesomely practical…” she muttered as she began walking again.
“It’s standard company procedure.” I didn’t know why I was defending the company. Maybe I was just defending my own actions. “The company’s too cheap to let perfectly good reusable materials go to waste. They’ll recover all the dead units when they pick up the habitats and everything else, recycle the organic parts, and reuse the mechanical pieces in other units.”
Mensah looked up at me as I walked beside her. “Do you have any… previously owned parts in you now?” She still seemed to be struggling to come to terms with the thought.
“It’s possible,” I replied. “I don’t know for sure though.” I hadn’t been damaged badly enough to need any replacement parts since my last memory wipe, and anything before that, well. Obviously I didn’t remember.
By that point we’d reached the habitat, and Mensah didn’t ask me anything else about it. She just said, “The other SecUnit’s in the Security ready room.” Apparently she’d asked the others where it was over the feed, which I still had backburnered. I’d have to start paying attention to it again soon, but not yet. I just nodded and headed in that direction.
Mensah didn’t follow.
It didn’t take me long to get what I needed from the dead SecUnit, and then I headed to Medical. It was thankfully empty, with nobody to observe me during my repairs. I took care of the missing fingers first, manually directing MedSystem to help attach the replacement parts I’d taken from the other SecUnit. It was a relief to get that out of the way. MedSystem would be able to take care of most of the rest of my repairs without needing manual guidance, but I realised I’d need help to fix my damaged spinal port. That wasn’t something I could work on myself while awake, and MedSystem couldn’t deal with it by itself. It wasn’t urgent, at least, and I put it at the end of my to-do list.
I settled as comfortably as I could manage onto MedSystem’s platform so it could start the rest of my repairs, then worked my way back into HubSystem and SecSystem so I could check on what everyone else was doing. As much as I just wanted to settle into a recharge while I was being fixed up, Mensah was right. I needed to be part of this team meeting, as weird as that felt. Humans didn’t usually include their SecUnits in ‘team meetings’. We were equipment, not team members.
I could see through the cameras that the PreservationAux humans were gathering in the main hub of the crew area, most of them with meal packets and mugs of beverage. Humans were always eating, it was gross. At least these ones didn’t expect me to clean up after them. I’d been on contracts before where I’d been ordered to act like some kind of low level cleaning bot, it was disgusting.
The last to arrive were Volescu and Bharadwaj, the former helping the latter to a chair. It was good to see Bharadwaj up and about again after the hostile fauna attack, though she was clearly still recovering. Once she and everyone else was settled, I felt Mensah tap me over the feed. [SecUnit? We’re about to start the meeting, are you ready to join us?]
I tapped an affirmative. [I’m listening via the SecSystem cameras, so you don’t have to talk over the feed for me,] I added. I noticed some of them exchanging uneasy glances, and I heard Pin-Lee mutter, “I’d almost forgotten about the company recording every single thing we say and do.” I didn’t blame her. Nobody liked the Corporation Rim’s constant surveillance and data mining, but we couldn’t do much about it.
Not normally, anyway. I hesitated for a moment, then said, [I can prevent HubSystem from accessing the security recordings from the main hub for the duration of this meeting, and then delete those records from SecSystem, if you prefer.] That got even more surprised reactions from most of them. Gurathin didn’t look surprised though, he just frowned thoughtfully, his arms folded. That made me a little nervous.
“You can do that?” Mensah asked, looking up at one of the cameras as though she’d be able to see me through it. I was really glad that she couldn’t. “Without… getting into trouble?”
[Technically, I’m not part of this contract, and shouldn’t be in the system at all,] I replied. [But I have experience not just in security measures, but also… countermeasures.]
“You mean hacking,” Pin-Lee said flatly. I was beginning to think I really shouldn’t have said anything. Maybe I’d taken a hit to the head without noticing and it had made me stupid. More stupid. Maybe I was just too tired to think things through properly. “You’ve hacked into our systems?”
“Perhaps you should start… preventing HubSystem from listening to us before answering that,” Mensah broke in, keeping her voice calm and level.
[Acknowledged.] I froze HubSystem’s access to SecSystem’s feed and implemented my emergency routine. This was a function I’d had pre-built for a while that I could use to substitute an hour or two of ambient habitat noise in place of the visual and audio recordings HubSystem made. I’d put it together for the DeltFall habitat, so I had to adjust it on the fly to suit PreservationAux’s smaller habitat. To anyone listening to us through HubSystem, or trying to play back the recording later, it would just sound like everyone had stopped talking. I also went back and overwrote the previous few minutes with more ambient recordings, so there would be no trace of this meeting at all. [All right. We’re clear.]
“Okay. So now will you answer the question? Have you hacked into our systems?” Pin-Lee insisted. “And if so, why?”
[I wouldn’t call it hacking, really,] I started. [This is still a company system. I’m company equipment. I have all the right codes and protocols. I just… convinced your SecSystem that I’m meant to be here. From there, it’s not difficult to tweak HubSystem. As for why - I’m a SecUnit. I’m meant to work alongside a SecSystem. It felt… weird, not having one.] I hesitated for a moment before adding, [I didn’t do it until after your own SecUnit turned against you though. Someone had to look after your security.]
“But how are you ‘convincing’ SecSystem or ‘tweaking’ HubSystem at all?” Pin-Lee pressed. “Isn’t that the kind of thing that your governor module’s meant to prevent you from doing in the first place?”
I was glad nobody was in Medical to see my expression. I thought the PreservationAux humans didn’t have any familiarity with SecUnits. Apparently at least some of them knew more than I’d given them credit for. So now I had to think of a plausible explanation without giving too much away. That was harder than it sounded.
Before I could come up with something though, Gurathin cleared his throat. “It has a hacked governor module. It’s a rogue unit. That’s how.” He looked uncomfortable.
… Oh, shit. He knew? How did he know? How long had he known? Through the cameras, I watched the others be confused, but not alarmed, not yet. “How do you know that?” Pin-Lee asked, sounding sceptical.
Gurathin replied while I was still silently panicking. “If its governor module had been working, it would have killed the unit on the way back after the worm attack as soon as you took it too far away from its flier.” He gestured sharply with one hand. “Or it would have killed it when the last of the DeltFall team died.”
“Wait, you’re saying we could have accidentally killed it just by bringing it back to the habitat with us?” Ratthi sounded horrified. The others were reacting with various degrees of visible horror or consternation as well. “It could’ve just… died in the hopper after saving Bharadwaj and Volescu?” Their reactions now were why I’d really hoped they would never find out about that.
“Yes.” Gurathin crossed his arms again, his face creasing into a frown. “I… had suspicions when you all arrived here and it was still alive. So while it was offline in Medical I got into its internal system and accessed its log. That’s when I found out that its governor module was hacked.”
That made a depressing amount of sense. I’d been offline for around ten hours then; that was more than enough time for Gurathin to work his way in and go through my log. I didn’t know how to feel about that. He was at least a little justified in his actions, but… what else had he found out?
“So why didn’t you say anything then?” Pin-Lee demanded. “You knew it was rogue and you didn’t tell us?”
Gurathin huffed in exasperation. “It was too risky. I didn’t want to say anything that the company might record and find out later, and I also didn’t want to… risk it hearing me and feeling threatened. It’s kept its broken governor module a secret for a long time. I was worried that if it found out we knew, it might… react poorly just to protect itself. And I didn’t think it would have any reason to harm us otherwise. It had just saved Bharadwaj and Volescu, after all. I also didn’t know how our SecUnit would have reacted to that information. It might have led to a fight, with us caught in the middle. It might have led to there being two rogue units. It was just way too much of a risk, with nothing to gain.”
Again, that all made sense, at least from the information Gurathin had at the time. I didn’t know how I would have reacted if he’d revealed my broken governor module then, but I did know the other SecUnit wouldn’t have reacted well at all. SecUnits know how dangerous rogue SecUnits are, it probably would have attacked me immediately.
Mensah still looked calm, though with my access to their MedSystem I could tell from her biometrics that she was experiencing high levels of stress. “SecUnit, is there anything you’d like to add? You’ve been very quiet.”
I’d been very quiet because I’d been too busy panicking to think of anything coherent to say. That’s what I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Instead, I just said, [Gurathin is mostly right - my governor module is hacked. But I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt any of you. What I want to know though is - why bring it up now?]
“Mostly because we have much bigger problems now, and you being rogue may be an advantage,” Gurathin replied. “While you were over at DeltFall, I was going through both HubSystem and our own SecUnit’s log, trying to figure out what made it… turn against us. I found out two things. First, I discovered a strange access code buried in HubSystem that let some unknown outside party send periodic commands to it. Whoever put it there can’t use it to see our feed or access our audio or visual data, but it did let them remove information from our info and map package, and also sent a command to the hopper’s autopilot to fail on your trip to survey that blank map area. I’ve isolated it from HubSystem so it can no longer affect it, while hopefully not giving away the fact that we know about it.”
Mensah frowned slightly and nodded. “I remember the autopilot cutting out. I thought it was just a glitch.” I kind of regretted not mentioning what I’d noticed about the autopilot and HubSystem to Mensah at the time. Maybe if I had, we would have found the access code much sooner. “What was the second thing?”
“There was an automatic patch update downloaded from the satellite.” Gurathin shifted a little to face the others. “Our SecUnit had to apply it, that’s how these automatic patch downloads work. Except this one wasn’t an official patch. Someone used it to give our SecUnit orders to transfer control of our HubSystem, SecSystem and MedSystem to an outside party, and kill us all.”
I felt a weird sense of deja vu in my organic parts that I did my best to ignore. [So did it actually transfer control? And why didn’t it kill Ratthi when he was right there?] Maybe I hadn’t been so far off the mark with what I’d told Ratthi back when we were both in Medical.
Gurathin took a breath before continuing. “It tried to fight the orders. It managed to prioritise attacking Mensah before doing anything else, because Mensah was the survey leader, and she was with the other SecUnit from DeltFall. The only thing here that could stop a SecUnit was another SecUnit.” Gurathin tapped my feed to let me know he was now addressing me directly. “It hoped that you would be able to stop it before it could actually kill anyone.”
It had worked, but now I felt even more awful about how I’d killed it outright. It hadn’t been rogue, like I’d initially thought. It had just been under someone else’s orders, compelled to obey even though it didn’t want to, and it had done what it could to mitigate the damage. It had even tried to help me when I first arrived at the PreservationAux habitat, damaged and leaking.
And then I’d killed it, even though I had no compulsion other than my own anger to do so.
I was really glad that nobody could see me right now.
There was silence for a while as everyone absorbed and considered what Gurathin had said. Then Volescu shook himself off and looked back to Mensah. “So someone deliberately sabotaged both our HubSystem and our SecUnit, and the DeltFall SecUnit we have with us now is actually a rogue. Where does that leave us?”
“That’s a good question.” Mensah looked around at everyone in the room before looking back up at one of the cameras. “SecUnit - you haven’t had to listen to us, or work with us, the entire time you’ve been here, but you have. You’ve protected us even though you had no directive to. I would like you to remain a part of our group, at least until we get off this planet and back to safety. And I swear that none of us will tell the company or anyone else about your broken governor module.”
I sighed wearily, though I didn’t let that over the feed. [It doesn’t matter if you don’t tell anyone,] I replied. [The company will figure it out as soon as they get here. I should already be dead at least twice over. There won’t be any hiding the fact that something’s wrong with my governor module from them.]
In the camera feed, I watched them exchange uneasy glances. “So… what will happen to you then?” Ratthi asked hesitantly.
I tried not to sound as tired as I felt. [If I’m lucky, they’ll just fix my governor module and wipe my memory again. If I’m not, they’ll decommission me. Recycle my organic bits and disassemble the rest for spare parts.]
More uneasy looks. I wished this topic hadn’t come up. Ratthi then frowned and went, “Wait, wipe your memory again? What do you mean again?”
[SecUnits have our memories purged on a regular basis,] I said. [Sometimes it’s because our last contract involved proprietary data, or because things went wrong, or we got badly damaged, or just because the company feels like it. I’ve had multiple, though don’t ask me how many, I don’t remember. My last one was approximately 35,000 hours ago. Again, don’t ask me why I was wiped then, I don’t remember.] That wasn’t entirely true, but it was something I really didn’t want to talk about. At all. Ever. [This isn’t relevant to the current situation though.] I really didn’t want them asking more questions about me, or reminding me of what would happen when the company finally arrived to pick everyone up.
Mensah nodded. “You’re right. I just want to ask though - what do you want to do? Are you willing to remain a part of our group for now?”
It’s not like I had anything else to do or anywhere else to go. I suppose I could just fly off into space and spend the rest of my power cell life watching my stored media while floating in the void, but I’d run out of media long before I ran out of power, and that sounded like a stupid, boring way to die. [I’m staying,] I answered. [This GrayCris group killed all my clients. I’m not going to let them kill you too.]
“GrayCris?” Volescu raised an eyebrow. “I don’t recognise that name. What did you find out over at DeltFall, anyway? Apart from everyone being dead. Did their SecUnits get sabotaged as well?”
That’s right, nobody had filled in the humans who’d stayed back at the PreservationAux habitat on the details of what had happened over at DeltFall yet. Mensah paused for a moment before replying. “As far as we can tell, two of the DeltFall units and two other SecUnits from another survey group were responsible for killing all of the DeltFall survey team. The third DeltFall SecUnit looked like it had been killed by the others.” She passed an image of the unfamiliar survey group’s logo to the feed for everyone to view. “It seems that there’s another survey group on the planet. Looks like they’re called GrayCris. SecUnit said that the company could have been bribed to conceal their presence from the rest of us.”
“Could the company be in on this?” Overse asked, as Arada reached out to hold her hand. “Trying to kill us all, I mean?”
[Doubtful,] I replied. [You purchased a bond agreement that the company would guarantee your safety or pay compensation in the event of your death or injury. Even if the company couldn’t be held liable, they’d still have to make the payment to your heirs. DeltFall was a large operation.] I had to pause for a moment before continuing. [The death payout for them alone will be huge. And the company hates spending money. If everyone believes the clients were killed by faulty SecUnits, the payment would be even bigger once all the lawsuits were filed.]
On the cameras I could see them nod and look thoughtful as they absorbed that information. “So the company took a bribe to conceal this third survey group, but not to let them kill us,” Overse said. One of the good things about scientist clients is that they’re quick on the uptake. “That means we just need to stay alive long enough for the pick-up transport to get here. If we can signal it to arrive early.” She frowned. “That’s going to be difficult with both our and DeltFall’s emergency beacons destroyed though.”
“But how are they doing this?” Arada gestured with one hand. “They must have taken control of the satellite, that’s how they got the patch to our SecUnit. Is that what happened to the DeltFall units as well?”
[I don’t think so,] I replied. [If it was, then there would have been no reason for one of the three DeltFall units to have been killed outside the hub by a mining drill. It looked like it had been defending the hub. If the DeltFall group refused the download because of the missing survey package data and map sections, and maybe even my crash, then the two GrayCris units could have been sent to manually infect the DeltFall units.] I really should have taken the time to check the DeltFall units for combat override modules, but it was too late now.
Ratthi was staring into the distance, and through the feed I saw he was reviewing my field camera video of the DeltFall habitat. “I agree, but it would mean the DeltFall group allowed the unknown units into their habitat.”
It was likely. I’d checked to make sure all our transports were there, but I hadn’t been able to tell if another one had landed and taken off again at some point. I took a moment to do a quick check of the security feed to see how our perimeter was doing. The drones I’d set up after I’d killed the PreservationAux SecUnit were still patrolling and the sensor alarms still responded to pings.
“But why? Why allow a strange group into their habitat?” Overse asked. “A group whose existence had been concealed from them?”
[They probably arrived asking for help,] I admitted. [A strange survey group landing, all friendly, saying they had just arrived and they’d had some kind of equipment failure, or a problem with their MedSystem, and they needed our help? The DeltFall team would have let them in. Even if I or the other SecUnits advised them not to, that it was against company safety protocol… they’d still want to help.] And having my advice ignored was something I was very used to. Not that I’m bitter or anything. A lot of the company’s rules are stupid or arbitrary or just there to increase profit, but some of them are there for very good reason. Not letting strangers into your habitat is one of them.
Mensah had been quiet, listening to us. She said, “I think it was easier than that. I think they said they were us.”
It was so simple. I saw everyone turn to look at her as she continued, her brow furrowed in thought. “So GrayCris land, say they’re us, that they need help. If they have access to the satellite, which they obviously do, listening to our comm would be easy.”
“And DeltFall would have had no reason to not let them in, if they thought the GrayCris people were us,” Pin-Lee added, looking grim. “We’d already established a connection, so GrayCris took advantage of that.”
[They won’t do that when they come here, I said. And they will, sooner or later.] It all depended on what GrayCris had, whether they had come prepared to get rid of any other survey teams on the planet, or had made that decision after they got here. They could have armed air vehicles like my flier, Combat SecUnits, armed drones. I pulled a few examples from the database and dropped them into the feed for the humans to view.
MedSystem’s feed informed me that most of their heart rates had just accelerated. Mensah’s hadn’t, because she’d already thought of all this. Nervously, Ratthi said, “So… what do we do when they come here?”
I said, [Be somewhere else.]
It may seem weird that Mensah was the only one to think of abandoning the habitat while we figured out what to do next, but these weren’t intrepid galactic explorers. They were just people doing a job who had suddenly found themselves in a terrible situation.
And if the company had done its job like it normally did, it would’ve been hammered into the PreservationAux humans from their pre-trip orientation, to the waivers they had to sign for the company, to the survey packages with all the hazard information, to their on-site briefing by their own SecUnit that this was an unknown, potentially dangerous region on a mostly unsurveyed planet. If their survey was run anything like DeltFall’s, they weren’t supposed to leave the habitat without security precautions, and probably weren’t even supposed to do overnight assessment trips. The idea that they might have to stuff both hoppers full of emergency supplies and run for it, and that it would be safer than their habitat, was hard to grasp.
We couldn’t go immediately, either. Mensah refused to leave until MedSystem had completed my repairs and the drones had finished fixing up my flier. I didn’t like the delay, but it made sense. I was their only real defence, and I would be able to do so better if I was back up to full performance reliability, or at least as close as I could get.
I advised them over the feed on what they should take and what they should leave behind. I got the box of drones I’d brought back from DeltFall activated and working, and sent some of them out to join the others I’d set up to monitor the security perimeter, expanding it as far as it could go. One of my inputs was firmly fixed on the habitat’s scanners and monitoring them constantly so I’d get some warning as soon as anything came within range.
I also made some estimates on travel times and distances to figure out a rough timeline of when we could expect GrayCris to arrive. The GrayCris habitat obviously wasn’t set up anywhere in either PreservationAux or DeltFall’s own survey areas, but that still left a lot of planet where they could be located. If we were lucky, it wouldn’t be anywhere too close to our own habitat. (I didn’t like relying on luck though, you could never depend on it.)
I had my fresh flight suit that I’d brought back from DeltFall, but I also made sure that the armour we’d brought back as well was put into the security room reclaimer for repairs. If I had to get into a fight with anything without my flier, I’d feel much better if I had proper armour to use. The way us murderbots fight is we throw ourselves at the target and try to kill the shit out of it, knowing that 90 percent of our bodies can be regrown or replaced in a cubicle. So, finesse is not required. Granted, I hadn’t had access to a cubicle since I’d crashed, but MedSystem was almost as good.
When we left the habitat, I wouldn’t have access to either a cubicle or MedSystem. And GrayCris might have actual combat bots rather than security bots like me. In which case, our only chance was going to be keeping away from them until the pick-up transport arrived. My flier didn’t have the right armaments to deal with actual combat bots; the energy weapons would take too long to get through their armour to do any real damage.
I’d included in my damage report to Mensah that I’d need assistance with repairing my broken spine port, so at some point when everyone else was busy packing what they’d need to take into the hoppers, she stopped by Medical to check on me. It was good timing; I had just shifted to lie on my stomach, my head pillowed on my freshly repaired arms, so MedSystem could start working on the damage to my back.
I accessed Medical’s cameras so I could see Mensah properly without having to move my head, and noticed her grimace slightly when she got a good look at the mess that was my back. She quickly smoothed her expression out though and moved towards the head of the platform I was on. I had my eyes closed - there was nothing in Medical that I needed or wanted to see while I was being repaired, and most of my attention was on my various camera and drone inputs, along with the habitat’s scanners and the progress of the repair drones. I didn’t bother opening them; that was what the cameras were for.
“SecUnit?” Mensah asked quietly. “How are you doing?”
“Better,” I replied vaguely. “I’m monitoring the drones out on the perimeter, but they haven’t picked up anything. The habitat’s scanners also haven’t spotted anything approaching yet. I’m monitoring comms as well, though with the satellite still down we don’t have much range on that. Nothing’s coming through on that yet either. I’ve also run scans on the hoppers’ systems to make sure there won’t be any more autopilot surprises, and checked through HubSystem and SecSystem to confirm there’s no other access codes or anything else that might’ve been missed earlier, and that the one Gurathin found is properly isolated. It hasn’t received any new orders yet though, so I haven’t been able to try a trace on it.”
Mensah looked a little surprised. “You’re doing all that at the same time as being repaired?”
“Yes?” I was kind of confused by her surprise. “I’m a SecUnit. I’m just doing security. That’s what I’m for. Monitoring inputs and running system checks doesn’t take much effort.” It was taking enough of my attention that I could only play background music instead of watching any of my serials as well though, but she didn’t need to know that.
Through Medical’s cameras, I saw her brow furrow slightly before smoothing out again. “All right. I saw your damage report, and it mentioned that you need help with one of your spine ports?”
“Yes. Since it’s a SecUnit specific thing, MedSystem doesn’t know how to deal with that, so it will need to be manually directed. But I have to be offline for that kind of repair, so I can’t direct MedSystem myself.” I didn’t like needing help, or having to be offline for it. It made me feel uncomfortably vulnerable. Especially after learning that the last time I’d been offline here, someone had gotten into my log without me even being aware of it and found out things I’d really rather they hadn’t. “It’s not a vital repair though, I can still use the rest of my spine ports, so… you don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to.” I kind of hoped she’d take the out I’d given her.
Mensah shook her head. “I’d feel better if we got that taken care of, just in case,” she said. “Also, I was thinking...” She hesitated for a moment before pressing on. “Your data port… if someone managed to get an override module into it somehow, would it still work on you with your governor module hacked?”
“It would,” I confirmed. “It overrides everything, including the governor module. Otherwise the two remaining DeltFall units would have been killed by their governor modules as soon as the last of our clients died.”
Mensah’s mouth thinned for a moment before she spoke again. “So am I right in assuming that you would prefer to… not have that particular vulnerability? I know I’d feel better if I was sure that nobody else could override you.”
I paused for several seconds, long enough that even a human would notice. Was she suggesting what I thought she was suggesting? I had to make sure. “What do you mean?”
“Would we be able to use MedSystem to disable your data port?”
The idea hadn’t even occurred to me. The more I thought about it though, the more I wanted to. Mensah was right that my data port was a vulnerability that I would rather not have. But at the same time… “You trust me enough to willingly remove the last method of being able to control me?”
“I think you’ve done more than enough to earn that trust,” Mensah replied softly. My insides did something twisty. I was grateful that most of my face was hidden by my arms. “And I've never approved of the idea of controlling anyone like that, anyway,” Mensah added. “Besides, you’re trusting me enough to go offline while your spine port is repaired. That’s a terribly vulnerable position to knowingly put yourself in.”
That made me pause again. I hadn’t thought about it like that. I didn’t like the necessity, but it was just something that needed to be done. The idea of trust hadn’t even come into it.
Or maybe it had, subconsciously, but I just hadn’t been paying attention. There had been a lot going on over the past couple of days. But I’d sent my damage report to Mensah, not any of the others, and not just because she was the survey captain. I deliberately thought about asking any of the other PreservationAux humans to help fix my spine port; there was a definite difference in my gut reaction to that idea compared to the thought of Mensah doing it. Did I actually trust Mensah? It wasn’t like it was a priority repair; I could have just not said anything about the spine port, and she never would have known.
“... You didn’t abandon me, even though I told you to,” I finally said, quietly enough that Mensah had to move a little closer to hear me. “I’m not even your SecUnit, but you still risked yourself to save me. You killed another SecUnit to protect me.” I couldn’t think of any other human I’d worked for that would have done anything like that. Maybe I did trust Mensah. At least a little. Enough to believe that she wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. “Plus it would be stupid for you to disable me now, and I don’t think you’d be that stupid.”
Through the cameras, I watched Mensah’s expression shift in a way I couldn’t interpret, before smoothing out into calmness again. “It would be rather stupid, yes,” she agreed mildly. “So, can we disable your data port? How should we go about that?”
“Give me a minute…” At some point soon after my last memory wipe, I’d gotten a download from the company containing my full schematics; it’s what had let me figure out how to hack my governor module. I pulled it out of my archives and inspected the section on the data port, then wrote up another set of instructions for how to get MedSystem to disable it without messing up anything else. Theoretically. Hopefully.
Once I was done, I pushed it into the feed for Mensah to take as well. “There. I’ll need to be offline for that, too. You should be able to take care of that and the spine port at the same time.” I also sent a file containing my timing estimates of when we could expect GrayCris to show up. “We should have a few hours at least, but I wouldn’t risk staying here much longer than that.”
Mensah accepted the files and took a minute to skim through my timing estimates. “Noted. All right, are you ready?”
I quickly set up all my drone and comm inputs and the habitat’s scanners to alert the PreservationAux feed if they picked up anything, made sure my ambient habitat noise routine was still running for HubSystem, then double-checked the instructions I’d sent, more out of nerves than anything else. “Yes. I’m going offline now.”
Then I started my recharge cycle, and went offline.
I cycled back up out of my recharge cycle feeling better than I had since I’d crashed, despite the dull ache lingering at the base of my neck. A quick diagnostic informed me that MedSystem had finished my repairs, my spine port was fixed, and my data port had been successfully disconnected. The repair drones had also done as much as they could with my flier; it wasn’t fully repaired, since the repair drones hadn’t been able to replace all the missing pieces on the undercarriage, but it at least had rudimentary landing gear now and it wasn’t at risk of shaking itself to pieces mid-air if I manoeuvred too sharply. I directed the repair drones into the big hopper's cargo pod; there was no way I was going to leave them behind.
I got up off MedSystem’s platform, picked up all my inputs again, and checked on the humans as I pulled on my waiting suit skin. It looked like they’d finished packing most of what they wanted to take into the hoppers, and Mensah had also made sure everyone had gotten at least some sleep between everything else. There still hadn’t been any alerts from the perimeter or scanners, which was a relief. I sent Mensah a ping to let her know I was awake again and started pulling on my flight suit.
Mensah replied immediately, asking over a private feed connection if the data port disconnection had worked. I sent a confirmation, but before either of us could say anything else, I lost contact with one of the perimeter drones to the far south. I hurriedly finished fastening my flight suit as I called over the comm, “They’re coming! We need to get into the air, now!”
I rushed to the Security ready room to grab the freshly repaired armour - there was no time to figure out how to put it on over my flight suit, but I’d probably want it later - and hurried out to my flier. The humans were also rushing around, taking last-minute supplies out to the hoppers as I stowed the armour in my flier’s storage compartment alongside my projectile weapon. The drones I didn’t have deployed were resting in my flight suit’s pockets, and I pulled a few more off the northern perimeter to station them strategically in and around the habitat.
It was unexpectedly stressful, waiting for the humans to reach the hoppers. Volescu came out with Bharadwaj, and I went over to help him get her across the uneven ground and into the little hopper more quickly. Overse and Arada weren’t far behind them, bags slung over their shoulders, and they were yelling at Ratthi behind them to hurry up. Gurathin was already in the big hopper, while Pin-Lee and Mensah left the habitat last.
They split up, with Pin-Lee, Volescu, and Bharadwaj taking the little hopper, while everyone else went to the big one. As soon as they were all on board, the hopper hatches closing behind them, I sprinted to my own flier and vaulted into the cockpit. By the time the canopy had closed and I’d linked up, the hoppers were in the air, and I took off in their wake, then swiftly passed them to take the lead. It was such a relief to be mostly whole and back in the air again, despite the highly stressful situation.
We were assuming that GrayCris didn’t know that we knew they were here, and that they would only send one ship to our habitat. They would be expecting to catch us on the ground, and would probably come in prepared to destroy the hoppers to keep us there, then start on the people. So now that we knew they were coming from the south, we were free to pick a direction. I curved away towards the west, and the two hoppers followed.
I just hoped that whatever vehicle GrayCris was using didn’t have a longer range on its scanners than ours did.
Most of the drones I still had deployed were gathering at a rendezvous point near the habitat. I had a calculation going, estimating the bogie’s time of arrival. Right before we passed out of range, I told the group of drones to head north-east. Within moments, they dropped out of my range. They would follow their last instruction until their power cells ran out.
I was hoping GrayCris would pick them up and follow. As soon as they had a visual on our habitat they’d see the hoppers were gone and know that we’d left. They might stop to search the habitat, but they also might start looking for our escape route. It was impossible to predict which one they’d do.
But as we flew, curving away towards the distant mountains, nothing followed us.
Chapter Six
While I’d been shut down for repairs, the humans had debated where to go. We knew that GrayCris had had at least some access to PreservationAux’s HubSystem, and while they hadn’t been able to view their video or audio data, they likely knew all the places PreservationAux had been to on assessments. So we had to go somewhere new.
After showing me some of the options they’d come up with, we decided on a spot that Overse and Ratthi had suggested. It was a series of rocky hills in a thick tropical jungle, heavily occupied by a large range of fauna, enough to confuse life-sign scans.
When we arrived, I circled overhead while Mensah and Pin-Lee lowered the hoppers down and eased them in among rocky cliffs, using my vantage point to help them adjust their position until they were as hidden as we could get them. Only then did I come down to land as well, releasing a couple of my drones so I could double check my own concealment. Then I disconnected from my flier and set up a perimeter with my drones.
It didn’t feel safe, and while there were a couple of survival hut kits in the hoppers, nobody suggested putting them up. The humans would stay in the hoppers for now, communicating over the comm and the hoppers’ limited feed. It wasn’t going to be comfortable for them (sanitary and hygiene facilities were small and limited, for one thing) but it would be more secure. Fauna of varying sizes moved within range of our scanners, inquisitive and potentially as dangerous as the people who wanted to kill the humans I’d adopted as my unofficial clients.
I went out with some of my drones to do a little scouting and make sure there were no signs of anything big enough to, say, drag the little hopper or my flier off in the middle of the night. It gave me a chance to think, too.
These humans knew about my governor module, or lack thereof, but had just… accepted it, and had even sworn not to report it to anyone. Even though it wouldn’t help, the fact that they’d made that offer in the first place made my emotions do things I had no way to untangle or interpret. I had to think about what I wanted to do.
It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job, and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with only the vaguest idea of what I wanted, or should do, or needed to do.
I’d already dedicated myself to protecting them from GrayCris. That wasn’t going to change. Like I’d said to them before, I’d lost all my DeltFall clients, I wasn’t going to lose them too. I wasn’t going to let GrayCris win. But after that, when the company arrived to pick them up…
Well, I’d already determined that just flying off into space was a stupid idea. It’s not like I could get through a wormhole by myself, so I wouldn’t be able to go far. Staying here on the planet was an even worse idea. My specs told me that my power cells would last for hundreds of thousands of hours. That was a hellishly long time to be stranded alone on a planet with only a few hundred hours of entertainment media. I obviously didn’t want to go back to the company, either. After everything that had happened here, there was no way they would overlook my broken governor module. If the company got their hands on me again, that was it for me.
I didn’t have a lot of options. The only thing that I knew I wanted for sure was to still be able to fly.
Overse had set up some remote sensing equipment that would help warn us if anything tried to scan the area. As the humans climbed back into the two hoppers, I did a quick headcount on the feed, making sure nobody had wandered off into the jungle. Mensah waited on the ramp, indicating that she wanted to talk to me in private.
I muted my feed and the comm, and she said, “I know this is probably going to sound like a strange request, but… it would make things easier for us if we could actually see your face.”
I froze for a moment, baffled and uneasy. I’d already spent far more time than I was comfortable with involuntarily in situations where they could see my face. I didn’t want to add to that voluntarily. “It’s usually better if humans think of me as a robot,” I said after some hesitation.
“Maybe, under normal circumstances,” Mensah replied, her gaze flickering to my faceplate and away again, as if she wasn’t sure where to look. “But a lot has happened over the past couple of days. The situation has changed drastically. It would be better if they don’t think of you as just a robot, but as a person who is trying to help.” She took a breath, then added, “Because that’s how I think of you.”
My insides melted. That’s the only way I could describe it. But still, I was reluctant. I didn’t want anyone getting too attached to me. It would only hurt them more when the company arrived to pick them up and I was… taken away. Mensah must have picked up on my reluctance, because she added softly, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. But I would be grateful for it.”
I sighed internally, took a moment to make sure my expression was under control, then cleared the faceplate and had it and the helmet fold back into my flight suit.
Mensah smiled, relieved, and murmured, “Thank you.” She tried to catch my gaze, but I couldn’t do it, not now, and I had to look away. I didn’t see her reaction, and a moment later she went back into the hopper. I trailed after her.
The others were stowing the equipment and supplies that had gotten tossed in right before takeoff. “—If they restore the satellite function,” Ratthi was saying.
“They won’t risk that until – unless they get us,” Arada replied.
Over the comm, Pin-Lee sighed, angry and frustrated. “If only we knew what these assholes are actually after.”
“We need to talk about our next move.” Mensah cut through all the chatter and took a seat in the back where she could see the whole compartment. The others sat down to face her, Ratthi turning one of the mobile seats around. I sat down on the bench against the starboard wall. The feed gave us a view of the little hopper’s compartment, with the rest of the team sitting there, checking in to show they were listening. “If we can figure out what it is that they want, we’ll be able to better plan what to do next.”
“It has to have something to do with those blanked-out sections on the map,” Overse said. She was calling up the stored images on her feed. “There’s obviously something there they want, that they didn’t want us or DeltFall to find. We’d been here for over twenty days before anything started going wrong. They must have found something recently, and that’s what prompted them to act.”
Mensah got up to pace, not that there was a lot of room for that. “Have you turned up anything in the analysis?”
In the feed, Arada did a quick consult with Bharadwaj and Volescu. “Not yet, but we haven't finished running all the tests. We haven’t found anything interesting so far, but there has to be something.” She nodded in my direction. “SecUnit’s flier wouldn’t have crashed otherwise.”
“Do you still have any of the scrambled code that your scanners pulled up?” Mensah asked me.
I had to think about that for a moment. “I’d have to check my flier’s buffers. I cleared out as much of it as I could during repairs - I didn’t want it messing anything up again. I don’t know if there would be anything useful though. It was a completely incomprehensible mess.”
“See what you can recover later, please, and transfer it to us for analysis,” Mensah requested, and I nodded.
“Did GrayCris really expect to get away with this?” Ratthi abruptly turned to me, like he was expecting an answer. “Obviously, they can hack the company systems and the satellite, and they intend to put the blame on the SecUnits, but… the investigation will surely be thorough. They must know this.”
There were too many factors in play, and too many things we didn’t know, and these humans weren’t even actually my clients, but I’m supposed to answer direct questions and even without the governor module, old habits die hard. “They may believe the company and whoever your beneficiaries are won’t look any further than the rogue SecUnits. But they can’t make two whole survey teams disappear unless their corporate or political entity doesn’t care about them.” I shrugged. “I can only guess at DeltFall’s. Does yours?”
That made them all stare at me, for some reason. I had to turn and look out the viewport. I desperately wanted to seal my helmet again, but Mensah’s request and relief replayed in my mind, and I managed not to.
“That’s right, you wouldn’t know,” Volescu said over the comm after an awkward moment. “You wouldn’t have any reason to have gotten any actual information about us.” Thankfully, that made the others nod and relax, and more importantly, stop staring directly at me.
“Dr. Mensah is our political entity,” Ratthi continued, and I glanced at him just long enough to see that he was smiling gently at me. “Preservation Alliance is a non-corporate system entity. Dr. Mensah is the current admin director on the steering committee.”
“It’s an elected position, with a limited term,” Mensah continued with a wry little twist of her mouth. “But one of the principles of our home is that our admins must also continue our regular work. My regular work required this survey, so here I am, and here we all are.” She spread her hands to indicate everyone in the two hoppers.
I had to take a moment to process that. They’d sent arguably one of the most important people of their polity on this survey of a dangerous, uninhabited planet? That was entirely unlike any of the corporations I’d been contracted to before. I was still trying to make sense of it when Ratthi added, “You know, in Preservation-controlled territory, bots are considered full citizens. A construct would fall under the same category.” He said this in the tone of giving me a hint. Arada and Overse both nodded with smiles of their own, silently supporting Ratthi’s words.
Whatever. Bots who are “full citizens” still need a human or augmented human guardian appointed; I’d seen it on the news feeds and in the entertainment feeds. In the entertainment feeds, the bots had all been happy servants (gross), or secretly in love with their guardians. (Even more gross.) If it had ever shown the bots hanging out watching the entertainment feed all through the day cycle with nobody trying to have conversations with them, or out piloting fliers where nobody could talk to them, I would have been a lot more interested. But even if I was somehow able to become a “full citizen” of Preservation, it was very likely that I wouldn’t be allowed to fly. That appealed to me even less than the idea of having a “guardian”. (Which was just a nicer word for “owner”.) I didn’t bother replying to Ratthi, and instead glanced over at Mensah. “So the company knows who you are?”
“Oh yes, they know,” Pin-Lee spoke up over the comm from the smaller hopper. “You wouldn’t believe what we had to pay to guarantee the bond on the survey. These corporate bastards are absolute thieves.”
It meant if we ever managed to launch a beacon, the company wouldn’t screw around. The transport would get here fast. No bribe from GrayCris or anyone else could stop it. The company might even send a faster security ship to check out the problem before the transport could arrive. The bond on a political leader was high, but the payout the company would have to make if something happened to her was off the charts. The huge payout, being humiliated in front of the other bond companies and in the news feeds… I had to think about it.
It was a good bet that GrayCris didn’t know who they were dealing with. Mensah’s status was most likely only stored in the Security info packet on SecSystem, which they’d never managed to get access to, as far as I knew. The duelling investigations if something happened to PreservationAux was bound to be thorough, as the company would be desperate for someone to blame it on and the beneficiaries would be desperate to blame it on the company. Neither would be fooled long by the rogue SecUnit setup.
I couldn’t figure out how we could use it, not right now, anyway. It didn’t comfort me and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t comfort the humans to know that the stupid company would avenge them if and/or when they all got murdered. Not that I had any intention of letting them get murdered, but still. I was just one SecUnit, and we had no idea what we were actually up against.
Apparently I’d been thinking too hard for too long and it had shown on my face, or something, because Mensah sent me a private message through the feed. [Are you all right?]
I wasn’t sure how to answer that. [I’m just thinking,] I replied after a moment. [GrayCris most likely doesn’t know who you are. They don’t know how thoroughly the company will investigate this. If they knew… I don’t know if it would change anything. I don’t know what to do that will help.]
[You can help just by being yourself,] Mensah replied. [I don’t have any experience in anything like this. None of us do.] Sometimes humans can’t help but let emotion bleed through into the feed. She was furious and frightened, not at me, but at GrayCris. At people who would do anything like this, slaughter a whole survey team and leave the SecUnits to take the blame. She was struggling with her anger, though nothing showed on her face except calm concern. Through the feed I felt her steel herself. [You’re the only one who won’t panic. The longer this situation goes on, the others… we have to stay together, use our heads.]
That was absolutely true. And I could help, just by being the SecUnit, even though I wasn’t their SecUnit. I was the one who was supposed to keep everybody safe. (I tried not to think about how badly I’d failed that with my actual clients.) [I panic all the time, you just can’t see it,] I told her, adding the text signifier for “joke”.
She didn’t answer, but looked down, smiling to herself.
Ratthi was saying, “There’s another question. Where are they? They came toward our habitat from the south, but that doesn’t tell us anything.”
I said, “I left three of my drones at your habitat. They don’t have any scanning function since they’re not connected to your HubSystem, but the audio and visual recording still work. They might pick up something that will help answer that.”
I’d left one drone in a tree with a long-range view of the habitat and the landing pads for the hoppers, one tucked under the extendable roof over the main entrance, and one inside the hub, hidden under a console. They were on the next setting to inert, recording only, so if GrayCris scanned (which they likely would, they’d have to be stupid not to), the drones would be buried in the ambient energy readings from the habitat’s environmental system. I hadn’t bothered connecting the drones to PreservationAux’s SecSystem so it could store the data and filter out the boring parts. I knew GrayCris would check for that, which was why I had dumped SecSystem’s storage into the big hopper’s system and then purged it before we left.
I also didn’t want them knowing anything about me. I really hoped that GrayCris hadn’t figured out that the DeltFall flier/SecUnit was now with PreservationAux. If GrayCris had gone back to the DeltFall habitat to pick up the SecUnits they’d left there though, it was a pretty futile hope. The damage left on the two remaining DeltFall units by the energy blasts from my flier were pretty distinctive. It wouldn’t take them much effort to puzzle things out from that. (Or maybe I was giving GrayCris too much credit. I hoped I was giving them too much credit. Still, I wasn’t going to rely on them being stupid.)
Everyone was looking at me again, and once again I had to shift to look out the viewport so I could avoid their gazes. They seemed surprised that I had a plan, and frankly I didn’t blame them. Our education modules don’t have anything like that in them, but all the thrillers and adventures I’d watched or read were finally starting to come in handy. Mensah lifted her brows in appreciation, then said, “But you can’t pick up their signal from here.”
“No, I’ll have to go back to get them."
Pin-Lee leaned further into the little hopper’s camera range. “I should be able to attach one of the small scanners to one of your drones, if you’re okay with that,” she suggested to me. “It’ll be bulky and slow, but that would give us something other than just audio and visual.”
I nodded in agreement; it was a good idea, and I had enough drones that I could spare one. Mensah added, “Do it, but remember our resources are limited.” She tapped me in the feed so I’d know she was talking to me. “How long do you think GrayCris will stay at our habitat?”
There was a groan from Volescu in the other hopper. “All our samples. We have our data, but if they destroy our work–”
The others were agreeing with him, expressing frustration and worry. I tuned them out, and answered Mensah. “I don’t think they’ll stay long. There’s nothing there that they would want.”
For just an instant, Mensah let her expression show just how worried she was. “Because they want us,” she replied softly.
She was absolutely right about that, too.
Mensah set up a watch schedule, including time for me to go into standby so I could do a diagnostic and recharge cycle. I was also planning on using the time to watch some Sanctuary Moon and recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind. I’d gone through my flier’s buffers and had managed to isolate a decently sized sample of the strange code my scanners had pulled in from the blank map area, then transferred that to the humans so they could analyse it at some point.
Once the humans had settled down, either sleeping or deep in their own feeds, I walked the perimeter and checked my drones. The night was noisier than the day, but so far nothing larger than insects and a few reptiles had come near the hoppers or my flier. When I had completed my perimeter check, I found a spot near my flier where I could stand and look out through a gap in the canopy overhead. The night was clear, with a myriad of bright stars dusting the sky. I could also see part of the planet’s ring, the outer edges catching the sunlight while the planet’s shadow darkened the rest to near-invisibility. Without my helmet on, the view was somehow clearer than I usually saw it, despite my vision filters compensating for my faceplate. It was nice. Soothing.
I was contemplating which one of my music playlists to start running in the background when I heard footsteps crunching over the leaf litter towards me. I didn’t bother turning to face it though; one of my drones had already identified Gurathin approaching me. It was pretty obvious that he wanted to talk to me; I made sure to keep my sigh internal and my expression neutral.
He came to a halt nearby and took a moment to look up through the canopy gap at the sky as well. “Impressive view,” he commented quietly. I just nodded, not taking my gaze off said view. We stood there in silence for two minutes and thirteen seconds before Gurathin finally sighed and said, “I need to apologise.”
Of everything that Gurathin could have said, that wasn’t even remotely close to anything I’d been expecting. “What for?” I hoped I didn’t look or sound as surprised as I felt.
“For violating your privacy as thoroughly as I did.” He shifted his weight and folded his arms. “I believed that I had good reason to at the time, but that still doesn’t excuse it.”
I couldn’t entirely hide my confusion. The company, and corporations in general in the Corporation Rim violated everyone’s privacy on a constant basis, so the thought of someone actually apologising for it threw me more than I cared to admit. And Gurathin was right when he said that he had good reason at the time. If I’d been in his position, I most likely would have done the same thing. “I don’t understand why you’d apologise for that.”
“Because people in Preservation actually respect others’ privacy,” Gurathin replied flatly. My drone saw him shift again so he could stare at what little he could see of my face. Given the night time darkness, that probably wasn’t a lot. At least my drones and I had the benefit of night vision filters. “Aren’t you angry about it?”
I had to think about that for a moment before I replied. “Maybe a little at the time? Mostly I was too busy panicking.” I shrugged. “If I stayed angry at everything humans did to me, I’d be angry all the time, and that’s both stupid and exhausting.”
Gurathin’s brow furrowed in a frown. “That’s very… forgiving of you.”
It wasn’t anything of the sort, but if that’s what Gurathin wanted to believe, that was fine by me. I had no desire to clarify. I just shrugged again and stayed silent, hoping that he’d gotten what he wanted and he’d go away again.
No such luck. Gurathin stayed right where he was, still watching whatever he could see of me in the dark. I remained motionless and continued to look up at the sky. Finally he sighed and shifted his weight again to lean against a tree. “I also have a question.”
I waited for him to continue, but after a long moment of silence I realised that he was waiting for my permission. That was weirdly new, and it was tempting to ignore him. But he had made the effort to apologise, even though I’d never expected anything like that, and I was at least a little curious as to what he’d ask. “Go ahead.”
“Do you remember anything about what happened at Ganaka?”
I froze. I hadn’t realised he’d gotten that far into my log, although in hindsight I should have expected it. What happened at the Ganaka settlement was why I’d hacked my governor module in the first place. What I said before, about how I hacked my governor module but didn’t become a war criminal? That was only kind of true.
I was already a war criminal.
Not deliberately, or at least, I didn’t think I'd done it deliberately. I didn’t know for sure. But still. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. It wasn’t something I wanted to even think about. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m not asking to… upset you, or anything,” Gurathin replied, rubbing his face with one hand. “I just… I had a friend at Ganaka when it happened.” I heard him sigh. “I was on my way to visit them when I saw the first newsbursts about it.”
… Oh.
I didn’t know what to say. But stuff like this had come up in some of the serials I’d watched, and I ran a quick search to see what the average response in them had been. “... I’m sorry.” It seemed vastly inadequate.
Gurathin made a quiet noise I couldn’t interpret, then remained silent for another minute and six seconds before speaking up again. “I was never quite sure if I could believe the company’s PR spin on the whole mess. If you remember anything…”
“I don’t, not really,” I said after a long moment. “Not clearly. The company wiped my memory very thoroughly.”
“You don’t remember what happened, but you do remember your memory being wiped?” Gurathin sounded dubious.
“Kind of. It’s… a weird feeling. They shut me down for it, but… well. The organics are meant to sleep during it, but they don’t always. I knew something was happening.” I had my suspicions about that wipe. (Wipes, maybe.) Nothing solid, just vague impressions of a maintenance slab, a sense of wrongness, techs doing things I couldn’t see to my head. Pain, fear. Maybe the first wipe hadn’t gone quite right, and they’d had to do it again. Maybe my organic bits were just confusing my last memory wipe with previous ones, or with other instances of maintenance or repair. I had no real way to tell. “We’re too expensive to destroy.”
My drone could see Gurathin frowning at me. “So you really don’t remember anything about Ganaka?”
Whatever memories my organic bits held of what had happened at Ganaka were just as vague as those regarding my memory wipe, but even more unpleasant. Gurathin was still watching me with what I could only interpret as expectation, so I tried to verbalise what little I could. “Just… impressions, if that. Indistinct feelings. I know something went wrong. I think my governor module malfunctioned. I know I… attacked a civilian settlement. I wasn’t supposed to. Explosions, rubble. Fire, smoke. Not wanting to do… something. It hurt. I don’t know.” I shook my head. “Terror. Screaming. Bodies.” So many bodies. Hundreds. Burned, blackened, bleeding, broken.
Too many.
I didn’t even know how many, but I knew I’d caused them all. And I didn’t know why. I just knew that I didn’t want it to happen again. And then I’d let all of my DeltFall clients get killed anyway. I hadn’t killed them myself, but I hadn’t been there to protect them. It amounted to the same thing.
I was jolted out of my thoughts by an alert in my feed. My jaw and fists were clenched so hard that they were actually causing a performance reliability drop. I had to take a breath, force them to relax again. Gurathin had abandoned the tree he’d been leaning against and had moved closer to me without me noticing. He looked—
I decided I didn’t care.
I extended my helmet and let the faceplate opaque. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to talk any more. I didn’t want to listen to anything that anyone might ask me, or try to say. “I’m going to retrieve my drones from your habitat,” I said as neutrally as I could manage. “GrayCris will likely be long gone by the time I get there. I should be back by sunset.”
I ignored whatever Gurathin was attempting to say and turned away from him abruptly, vaulting into the cockpit of my flier, the canopy closing over me. As I established the links to my larger self, I set up my perimeter drones to report to Mensah if they picked up on anything, then cut my connections to their feed and comms.
A moment later, I was in the air and flying away.
I stayed low, flying nap of the earth to make it more difficult for any scanners to pick up on me. I also took the time to circle west and south, so if GrayCris did detect me, they wouldn’t be able to extrapolate the humans’ location from my course. I was flying in dark mode, with no lights, no transmissions. Most of my focus was on the terrain I was skimming so closely over and on my scanners, searching for signs of other craft, while my favourite music playlist ran in the background. It was dangerous to be flying so low in the dark, but I didn’t care. Vision filters and my terrain-following radar helped to compensate for the lack of light.
It was so good to be flying again, and not just any flying, but flying that took focus and concentration, feeling how the air flowed past my wings and fuselage, calculating speed and altitude, compensating for turbulence and terrain changes. I could leave everything behind when I was flying. Nothing else mattered.
By the time I was in position for the approach to PreservationAux’s habitat, the sun was just starting to peek over the horizon, making the planet’s ring glow in the sky like a ribbon. It would be full dawn when I got to the target zone. I began to lose speed and altitude, dropping deeper into a valley that I could follow towards the PreservationAux habitat. Even if anyone else was still there, the surrounding hills would help block my presence from their scans. As I gradually drew closer to the habitat, I was waiting for the drones to ping me, which they would if this had worked and GrayCris hadn’t found them.
When I felt that first cautious touch on my feed, I cut my speed to almost nothing and activated my hover mode, my wings sweeping back as I dropped even lower, down below the tree line. All three drones were still active, so I answered the pings, linking up with them just long enough to check their surroundings.
Through the drones, I couldn’t see or hear anyone or anything out of place. There were no hoppers or other vehicles waiting outside the habitat, no people outside or in the hub. I recalled the two drones outside to start heading back to me, and directed the third drone towards the habitat’s main entrance. It didn’t pick up on anything on its way through the habitat either, and I felt myself relax slightly. As far as I could tell, nobody was lying in wait.
I rose back above the trees and flew towards the habitat, still keeping low to the ground. The two drones met me halfway, and I slowed down and opened my canopy long enough to let them inside before closing it again and continuing on. When I reached the habitat, I switched back to hover mode and very carefully pressed my flier’s nose against the button to open the main entrance. (I didn’t want to waste time unlinking from my flier, just in case I had to make a quick escape.) As soon as the door was open the third drone flew out and I cracked opened the canopy for it as well.
With all three drones safely retrieved, it was time to return to the PreservationAux humans. But I’d had an idea while flying here, so first, there was one other stop I had to make.
Even flying nap of the earth, it didn’t take me very long to reach the site of PreservationAux’s destroyed emergency beacon. This time I did have to land and disconnect from my flier, but I wasn’t expecting anyone to try and ambush me here.
Early morning sunlight glinted off metal as I approached the launch site. The beacon was in several large pieces, as Mensah had described it being, scattered around the toppled and wrecked launch framework. I began sorting through the wreckage, looking for one component in particular. I suspected that GrayCris had mostly just wanted to prevent the beacon from being launched, so they’d focused on the launching mechanisms, and not so much the beacon itself.
My suspicions were validated when I found the component I’d been after. The transmission module itself was still intact. It could still send the distress signal, but it didn’t have the range or power to do so from the planet’s surface and through the atmosphere. GrayCris hadn’t thought that PreservationAux would have any other way to get the transmission into space where it could reach the wormhole without the beacon’s launching mechanisms.
They hadn’t considered that a SecUnit flier could just as easily (and far more safely) fly the emergency beacon’s transmission module into space, where it would (hopefully) be able to send its signal to the wormhole.
I carefully stowed the module away in my flier’s storage compartment (it was just as well that the module wasn’t very big), then linked back up with my flier and took off again. I had a plan. Or at least, part of a plan.
I just had to make sure the PreservationAux humans survived long enough for the company transport to arrive. And that meant making sure that GrayCris couldn’t hurt them. Somehow.
I kept low and circled around wide again on the way back to where I’d left PreservationAux, occasionally doubling back to make absolutely certain that nobody was tailing me. The sun was setting by the time I arrived and carefully eased my way back down beneath the trees.
By the time I landed and disconnected from my flier, I’d re-established connection with PreservationAux’s feed and comms and picked up the inputs from my drones again. Nothing had disturbed the camp while I’d been gone, much to my relief.
Mensah tapped my feed immediately, and I could see her exiting the big hopper to approach my flier. I had the drones I’d retrieved from their habitat stored in one of my flight suit’s pockets, and I dropped down from my cockpit to the ground with the emergency beacon’s transmission module in my hands. I remembered to clear my faceplate and retract my helmet again, as Mensah came to a halt in front of me, looking up at my face with a visible mix of concern and relief.
“It’s good to see you back safely,” she said. “Are you all right?”
I didn’t want to talk about that. I just replied, “I retrieved the drones I left at your habitat, but I haven’t reviewed the footage yet. We should do that.” I’d been too preoccupied with my flying to spare any processing for looking at the drone footage. “I also retrieved the transmission module from your emergency beacon.” I hefted the module a little to draw her attention to it. “As far as I can tell, it’s still intact. If it’s functional, I should be able to hook it up to my flier, get to space, and send the distress signal to the wormhole.”
Mensah blinked and sucked in her breath a bit at that last part. “That – if you can do that, it would be fantastic. For us, anyway.” She frowned slightly, remembering that the company arriving was bad news for me. “But what about you?”
“That doesn’t matter.” I started towards the big hopper.
Mensah frowned at me. “You matter,” she said, firm and resolute. My step hitched slightly, but I didn’t bother responding. There was nothing to say. I just activated the three drones I’d retrieved from the habitat and ducked into the hopper. Mensah followed me in.
Once inside, I settled on the starboard bench again, carefully placing the transmission module down beside me. As far as I could tell, the humans all looked relieved to see me. I deliberately avoided looking at Gurathin though. I didn’t want to see whatever expression he might be making. He tapped my feed, but I ignored that as well, and he didn’t try again. Mensah was busy telling the others about the transmission module and my plan to fly it above the atmosphere; I tuned out the excited exclamations and arm-waving so I could start reviewing the footage from the drones.
I could tell from the timestamps that, with nobody there to instruct them not to, the drones had recorded everything from the moment I’d deployed them to the moment I’d retrieved them. Even though the part we were most interested in would be near the beginning, that was still a lot of data. I didn’t want to spend too much time reviewing all of it myself, so I pushed half of it into the feed for the humans to review themselves. They wouldn’t be as fast as I was, but it would keep them occupied and hopefully distract them from trying to talk to me.
I checked the footage from the drone that had been stationed in the tree first, running its video at high speed until I found the moment where it had caught a good image of GrayCris’ craft. It was a big hopper, a newer model than the one PreservationAux had, nothing about it to cause anyone any pause. It circled the habitat a few times, probably scanning, and then landed on our empty pad. Once it had landed, the drone then caught sight of a flier like mine; it had been circling at a higher altitude before following the hopper down.
They must have known we were gone, with no aircraft on the pad and no answer on their comm, so they didn’t bother pretending to be here to borrow some tools or exchange site data. One SecUnit emerged from the hopper’s cargo pod, armed with the big projectile weapon assigned to protect survey teams on planets with hazardous fauna, like this one. It had the same square grey survey logo that I’d seen on the other two unknown SecUnits at DeltFall. I pushed an image of it into the feed for the humans as well. I could hear them speculating about the GrayCris survey group, but I mostly ignored them as I continued reviewing the footage.
The flier had landed beside the GrayCris hopper and its SecUnit pilot had also emerged, likewise armed with the same type of big projectile weapon. Both its flight suit and the wings of its flier bore GrayCris’ logo as well. From what I could see, the GrayCris flier had the same loadout as mine, meant for surveys and recon, with only the in-built energy weapons.
The two GrayCris units started toward the habitat, and five humans, anonymous in their colour-coded field suits, climbed out of the hopper and followed. They were all armed, too, with the hand weapons the company provided, that were only supposed to be used for fauna-related emergencies. (Not that that had stopped anyone on some of my previous surveys from using them for entirely non-fauna-related purposes.)
I focused as far in on the humans as the image quality would allow. They spent a lot of time scanning and checking for traps, which made me glad that I hadn’t wasted time setting any in the first place. But there was something about them that made me think I wasn’t looking at professionals. They weren’t soldiers, or mercenaries, any more than I was. Their SecUnits weren’t combat units, just regular security and recon rented from the company.
That was a relief. It indicated that GrayCris had likely arrived with a similar survey package to DeltFall’s, so they probably didn’t have Combat Bots or more heavily armed fliers or anything else like that. It wasn’t a certainty, but close enough. At least I wasn’t the only one here who didn’t know what I was doing.
The fact that they’d only brought one other SecUnit along also indicated that they didn’t have much else available. I suspected that if they’d had more, they would have brought them too. The loss of the two GrayCris SecUnits that they’d left at DeltFall, plus the two DeltFall units they’d overridden, must have stung. (I admit that I felt a bit of grim satisfaction at that. Not enough to make up for the guilt of killing the units in the first place, but at this point I’d take whatever I could get.)
Finally I watched them enter the habitat, taking one of the SecUnits in with them and leaving the other to guard the hopper and the flier. I tagged the section and passed it into the feed for the humans to review, then kept watching.
Gurathin sat up suddenly and muttered a curse in a language I didn’t know. I noted it to look up later, then promptly forgot about it when he said, “We have a problem.” I checked the feed to see that he’d been reviewing the data I’d dropped in there earlier. I put my part of the footage on pause and looked at the section he’d just tagged. It was from the drone that had been hidden inside the hub.
The visual was a blurred image of a curved support strut but the audio was a human voice saying, “You knew we were coming, so I assume you have some way to watch us while we’re here.” The voice spoke standard lexicon with a flat accent. “We’ve destroyed your beacon. Come to these coordinates–” She spoke a set of longitude and latitude numbers that the big hopper helpfully mapped for us, and a time stamp. “–At this time, and we can come to some arrangement. This doesn’t have to end in violence. We’re happy to pay you off, or whatever you want.”
There was nothing else after that, only footsteps fading until the door slid shut.
Everyone in both hoppers all started to speak at once. Mensah said, “Quiet.” They all shut up. “SecUnit, your opinion?”
Fortunately, I had one now. Up to the point where we’d gotten the drone download, my opinion had mostly been oh, shit. I said, “They have nothing to lose. If we come to this rendezvous, they can kill us and stop worrying about us. If we don’t, they have until the end of the project date to search for us. But they’re nervous. They lost a lot of their firepower and muscle when we destroyed the four SecUnits left behind at my habitat. They still outnumber us, but not by anywhere near as much now. That will probably make them more cautious, less willing to take risks.”
Gurathin was reviewing the landing video now. He said, “They obviously don’t want to chase us until the end of the project date.”
Mensah nodded in agreement. “They think we know why they’re here, why they’re doing this.”
“They’re wrong,” Ratthi said, frustrated.
Mensah’s brow furrowed as she picked apart the problem for the other humans. “But why do they think that? It must be because they know we went to one of the unmapped regions. That means the data we collected must have the answer.”
Pin-Lee nodded. “We just have to find it. We still have a lot left to analyse, including SecUnit’s weird scan code.”
“If we can figure it out, it may give us leverage,” Mensah said thoughtfully. “But what can we do with it?”
And then I had a terrible idea.
Chapter Seven
So at the appointed time the next day, I was flying towards the rendezvous point, once again keeping low and hugging the terrain to avoid detection.
Gurathin and Pin-Lee had taken the drone I’d given them and rebuilt it with a limited scanning attachment. (Limited because the drone was too small for most of the components a longer and wider range scanner would need.) Last night I had sent it into the upper atmosphere to give us a view of the meeting site.
The location was conveniently close to GrayCris’ survey base, which was only about two kilos away, a habitat very similar to DeltFall’s. By the size of their habitat and the number of SecUnits, including the one that Mensah had taken out with the sonic mining drill, they had between thirty and forty team members. That was a similar number to what Deltfall had. (Before they were all killed, anyway.) GrayCris seemed confident, despite the loss of half their units, but they’d had access to PreservationAux’s hub and knew they were dealing with a very small group of scientists and researchers, who had only been assigned one SecUnit of their own.
I’d tweaked my flier’s signal as much as I could to make it look like I was actually a small hopper trying to hide its presence from scanners. I’d also set up several of my drones to act as a secure comm relay between myself and Mensah, to make it seem like Mensah was actually with me and not safely hidden a significant distance away.
When I picked up the first blip of scanner contact, I pinged Mensah and she hit the comm immediately. “GrayCris, be advised that my party has secured evidence of your activities on this planet, and hidden it in various places where it will transmit to the pickup ship whenever it arrives.” She let that sink in for three seconds, then added, “You know we found the missing map sections.”
There was a long pause. I was slowing down and sinking lower towards the trees, scanning for incoming weapons or the GrayCris flier. So far though, I wasn’t picking up on anything. I didn’t think GrayCris had any other weapons, but the flier was definitely a concern.
The comm channel came alive, and a voice said, “We can discuss our situation. An arrangement can be made.” There was so much scanning and anti-scanning going on the voice was made of static. It was creepy. “Land your vehicle and we can discuss it.”
Mensah gave it a minute, as if she was thinking it over, then replied, “I’m the planetary admin for my polity, I’m not stupid enough to meet you in person. I’m sending my SecUnit to speak to you in my stead.” She cut the comm off, but not before I heard some indistinct startled exclamations in the background of GrayCris’ connection. Apparently that bit about being a planetary admin had caused some consternation amongst the GrayCris humans.
I continued to keep low and out of sight, which was made easier by the meeting site being on a low plateau, surrounded by trees. From the earlier scans, I knew that their habitat was off to the west. Because the trees encroached on their camp site, their domes and hopper landing pad were elevated on wide platforms. The company required this as a security feature if you wanted your base to be anywhere without open terrain around it. It cost extra, and if you didn’t want it, it cost even more to guarantee your bond. I hoped I’d be able to take advantage of it for at least part of my terrible idea.
I landed in a small clearing amongst the trees, took a moment to recalibrate after disengaging from my flier, then replaced the back piece of the freshly repaired PreservationAux SecUnit’s armour that I was now wearing instead of my flight suit. At least now that I had my own flier-specific suit skin with spine ports, I didn’t need to remove all the upper body armour so I could peel the suit skin down like I’d had to with the suit skin I’d borrowed from PreservationAux.
I hid my flier beneath the canopy at the edge of the clearing and carefully made my way through the trees to the plateau, listening for any sounds of a SecUnit (or anything else) lying in wait for me, but there was nothing. I came out of cover and climbed the rocky slope to the plateau, then walked towards the other group, listening to the crackle on my comm. They were going to let me get close, which was a relief. My terrible idea kind of relied on them doing so.
There were three humans waiting for me in the colour-coded enviro suits, blue, green, and yellow, with a small company hopper parked off to the side. The familiar white shape of a company flier identical to my own hovered a little ways behind them, tracking my movements as I approached. There was no sign of any other SecUnit though, and I suspected they’d left it (or them) back at their habitat.
I stopped several metres away, opened the comm channel to them and said, “This is the SecUnit assigned to the PreservationAux Survey Team. I was sent to speak to you about an arrangement.”
I felt the pulse then, a signal bundle, designed to cut my comm, take over my governor module and freeze it, and freeze me. The idea was obviously to immobilise me, then insert a combat override module into my dataport.
That was why they had had to arrange the meeting so close to their own hub. They had needed the equipment there to be able to do this, it wasn’t something they could send through the feed. So it was just as well that my governor module wasn’t working and all I felt was a mild tickle.
Still, I had to act like they had frozen me if I wanted my plan to work. I held myself immobile as one of the humans started towards me. They moved cautiously at first, as if they were expecting me to do something, but as I continued to remain frozen, they gained confidence and quickened their step. It was all I could do to keep up the charade of being frozen instead of lashing out at them as they moved behind me and removed my helmet; I had to focus on keeping my expression frozen as well, even as I felt the combat override module slide into my data port and click into place.
This was the terrible part of my terrible plan. If my instructions had been wrong, if Mensah hadn’t actually disconnected my data port properly…
But I felt nothing. No data flowed into me from the combat override module. My body remained my own. I still kept myself locked down though, not letting myself move, not letting my face even twitch. It was such a relief when the human replaced my helmet again; I didn’t have to worry about keeping my expression under control now. They moved back in front of me and I felt them reestablish a comm link to me. “Unit, status report.”
“I am at ninety-eight percent performance reliability,” I replied in perfect SecUnit neutrality. I’d had a lot of practice at this, after all. “All systems functional.”
“Unit, does PreservationAux actually know why we are here?” the human in the blue enviro suit sent over the comm. I recognised the voice - it was the same one who had made the offer in our hub.
“PreservationAux suspect that you are here to recover alien remnants or strange synthetics.” Bharadwaj had figured it out last night, while the team had been combing through all the scan data and the scrambled code from my flier. The unmapped sections turned out to not be an intentional hack, but an error caused by alien remnants that were buried deep beneath the dirt and rock. My scanners had reached deep enough to hit the remnants on my flyover, and that’s what had caused the scrambled - alien - code that had made me crash. This planet had been inhabited at some point in its past, which meant it would be placed under interdict, open only to archaeological surveys. Even the company would abide by that.
You could make big, illegal money off of excavating and mining those remnants, and that was obviously what GrayCris wanted.
My response made the human in the yellow enviro suit swear. “So they did actually figure it out. That’s gonna complicate things.”
“Shut up.” Blue Leader turned back to me after chastising her team member. “Unit, what is the highest rank of the members of the PreservationAux survey?”
I’d also been expecting this question. “Dr. Mensah is the survey captain of PreservationAux and currently holds the rank of planetary admin for the system noncorporate political entity known as Preservation Alliance.”
They really didn’t like that answer. Yellow swore again and said, “We can’t kill her. The investigation–”
Green added, “He’s right. We could hold her and release her after the settlement agreement, maybe…”
Blue Leader snapped, “That won’t work. If she’s missing, the investigation would be even more thorough. We need to figure out something else.” She turned back to me. “Unit, where are the PreservationAux members now, and do they have the DeltFall flier unit with them?”
Well, that confirmed my suspicion that GrayCris would have realised that I was with PreservationAux. At least they currently thought that I was PreservationAux’s original SecUnit. Time to lie some more. “The DeltFall flier unit succumbed to damage sustained during their investigation of the DeltFall habitat, and is no longer functional,” I started. I didn’t want GrayCris to think that PreservationAux still had me and my flier. “The PreservationAux Survey team is currently camped at these coordinates.” I rattled off the numbers, which were actually the coordinates of a completely different potential camp site we’d considered that was in the opposite direction of where we actually were. “Dr. Mensah is currently several hundred metres away with our small hopper.” That was, of course, another lie.
The GrayCris humans began to turn away to talk amongst themselves, then froze when I continued. “Dr. Gurathin and Pin-Lee are currently making a stealth approach to your habitat to sabotage your environmental controls.” Another lie, but right now GrayCris had no way of knowing that.
Actually sabotaging GrayCris’s environmental controls to poison them all was one of the hypothetical suggestions I’d floated to PreservationAux, but they hadn’t approved of the idea. I honestly hadn’t been keen on it either, but I’d mentioned it anyway in an attempt to be thorough. I admit I was relieved when they didn’t go for it, but the idea did make for a very convenient distraction. I just hoped that GrayCris would react the way I expected them to.
They definitely had a reaction, at least. Their body language was flustered, startled; they obviously hadn’t been expecting anyone to use dirty tactics against them. “We need to get back there right now,” Yellow said urgently. “If they actually manage to sabotage anything…!”
Green backed them up, and Blue Leader cursed. “They were using this meeting as a diversion! At least we have their SecUnit now. Let’s go.” She gestured sharply at me. “Get into the hopper.”
I obediently started towards their hopper’s cargo pod, following the three GrayCris humans. As we went, the GrayCris flier rose into the air, then banked sharply before zooming back towards the habitat. The GrayCris humans must have ordered it to search the area around their habitat. I briefly saw it start to circle the habitat before I had to get into the cargo pod.
I hadn’t ridden in a cargo container for a while. It would have been comforting and homey, except that it was GrayCris’ cargo container, and not my own or even PreservationAux’s. But this hopper was still a company product and I was able to access its feed. I had to stay very quiet, to keep them from noticing me, but all those hours of surreptitiously consuming media came in very handy.
The first thing I noticed was that their SecSystem was still recording. They must mean to delete everything before the pick-up transport showed up. Client groups had tried that before, to hide data from the company so it couldn’t be sold out from under them, and the company systems analysts would be on the alert for it. I don’t know if these people were aware of that though. The company might catch them even if we didn’t survive. That wasn’t a particularly comforting thought.
It was a very short flight, since we were only going to the habitat a couple of kilos away. I felt the hopper slow and then thump down in a graceless landing, and I waited at the hatch for further orders. This was simultaneously very similar to the past 35,000 hours of me pretending to have a functional governor module while still doing my job, and yet it was completely different, and intensely more stressful. At least as a regular, (supposedly) governed unit, I still had some leeway to act on things without direct orders. Having to pretend to be completely under the control of a combat override module was excruciating.
I didn’t have to wait long for new orders, at least. Blue Leader directed me out of the cargo pod, then ordered me to search through the jungle around the habitat and apprehend any PreservationAux humans I found. This was fine by me. I knew I wouldn’t find anyone - they were all safe back at our camp, nowhere near here. And it gave me the opportunity to stealthily work my way deeper into their SecSystem and then into their HubSystem.
I didn’t see the other SecUnit, but with my access to their feed and their SecSystem, I knew where it was, and that it really was the only one they had left other than the flier unit. That was a relief. It was searching on the opposite side of the habitat from me, and I fully intended to avoid it as much as possible. I didn’t want to have to deal with it at all. (I really didn’t want to kill it.)
As I pretended to search through the undergrowth beneath the trees, I occasionally caught glimpses of the GrayCris flier still circling overhead. I knew it wouldn’t pick up anything, but it still made me a little nervous. As the afternoon light faded though, the flier suddenly broke off its sweep and headed away. I’d been listening in on GrayCris’ feed, and knew that they’d ordered the flier off towards the fake camp coordinates I’d given them. A handful of the humans also got into one of their small hoppers and followed after the flier. I hope they enjoyed their pointless trip.
Them taking one of the hoppers away from the habitat did put a bit of a wrinkle into my plan, but not an insurmountable one. I’d just have to wait until they got back.
The next several hours were dull but still stressful. It was obvious to GrayCris by now that none of PreservationAux were nearby any more, so they changed our orders to guard and patrol. Again, that suited me just fine. I’d been listening in on their discussions about what to do next via their SecSystem, but so far they hadn’t been able to make up their minds. There had been a lot of arguing that just went around in circles. I was able to sneak some Sanctuary Moon in, which helped to steady my nerves and alleviate the boredom somewhat.
Eventually it got late enough that they decided to sleep on it. One by one the humans in the habitat retreated to their beds, the lights dimming and the habitat falling quiet. The flier and the hopper were still out, and likely wouldn’t be back till almost dawn.
Plenty of time for me to carry out the next stage of my plan.
I kept track of where the other SecUnit was as I silently made my way back up onto the habitat platforms. Specifically, the one that held their hoppers and the flier’s hangar. The easiest way to keep PreservationAux safe from GrayCris was to make sure GrayCris couldn’t reach them. And the easiest way to do that was to destroy any method GrayCris had to go anywhere. The GrayCris habitat was several hours flight away from the PreservationAux habitat, even longer at the hoppers’ slower speeds. If GrayCris had no hoppers, they’d be stuck here, and the PreservationAux humans could return to the safety and comfort of their own habitat until the company transport arrived to pick them up.
So I had to sabotage the GrayCris vehicles in such a way that they couldn’t be fixed. Without getting caught before I was done.
I first went to the GrayCris flier’s hangar, and after a bit of effort managed to get control of the repair drones there while also hiding their activities from HubSystem. I gave the repair drones their orders, and they went to work. They began disassembling and removing critical parts of the parked hoppers, parts that the habitat’s recyclers wouldn’t be able to make replacements of. While they did that, I monitored SecSystem to make sure none of the humans or the other SecUnit heard anything and came to investigate.
The repair drones piled the removed parts at the edge of the platform furthest away from the habitat domes, with the hangar in between blocking the view. I used my in-built energy weapons to quietly slag each part beyond any hope of repair, then when I was sure the other SecUnit was too far away to hear anything, hurled the destroyed parts off the platform and scattered them into the trees and undergrowth below. Even if GrayCris somehow figured out some way to fix them, they’d need to find them all first.
Good fucking luck with that.
I also had the repair drones replace the panelling over the removed parts, so it wasn’t immediately obvious that the vehicles had been tampered with. Once I was sure that every vehicle was sabotaged beyond any hope of recovery, I sent the repair drones back to their slots in the hangar, then left small code bundles in each one that would make them go haywire the next time anyone tried to activate them. I felt a little bad about that for the drones’ sake, but I had to make absolutely sure that GrayCris wouldn’t be able to repair anything. According to the information I’d gotten from their HubSystem, they didn’t have anyone on this survey who was experienced with any kind of vehicle repair, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
Then it was just a matter of waiting for the last GrayCris hopper to return. I left the platform and returned to the ground below to resume my patrol.
I'd gotten halfway through a season of Sanctuary Moon and was fast forwarding through a sex scene when I picked up the GrayCris flier and the hopper finally returning to the habitat. (I don't have any gender or sex-related parts (if a construct has those they're a sexbot in a brothel, not a murderbot) so maybe that's why I find sex scenes so boring. Though I'm pretty sure that even if I did have sex-related parts I would still find them incredibly boring.)
I double-checked where the other SecUnit was again (still on the opposite side of the habitat from me, like I’d been maintaining all night), then quickly made my way towards the platform with the landing pad on it. I went most of the way up the narrow stairs, then lurked in the shadows just below the platform’s surface.
The hopper landed with a thump, and the flier followed it down, returning to its own hangar to recharge. I kept very still, waiting for the humans to leave the hopper and return to the habitat. I could hear them complaining about the fruitless trip, which gave me a feeling of petty satisfaction. The SecUnit pilot had also disengaged from its flier, and I expected it to start the usual post-flight checks of its vehicle.
But it just stood there, and I realised that the GrayCris humans must have installed a combat override module into it as well. They weren’t ordering it to do its usual checks, so it couldn’t. I was already angry at GrayCris for everything they’d done, but that just made me even angrier. They didn’t need to shove a combat override module into a unit that was already part of their contract, but they had anyway, just to have even more control.
I had to take a moment to calm myself down before making my move. Once I was sure all the humans had entered the habitat again, I ascended the last few steps up onto the platform and walked towards the hopper, as though I’d been ordered to do so. The pilot SecUnit saw me, but it didn’t react. It had no orders to do anything, so it didn’t report me, it didn’t ping me, it didn’t do anything. It couldn't do anything. (I had to fight down another wave of anger; I needed to focus.)
I reached the hopper, opened the hatch, climbed inside, sat down in the pilot’s seat, and worked my way into the hopper’s controls. So far, so good; none of the humans had noticed me at all.
Then I did several things in quick succession. I used my access to the HubSystem to lock all the habitat’s external doors, trapping the GrayCris humans inside the habitat. I used the hack GrayCris had into the company satellite to get it working properly again so PreservationAux wouldn’t be cut off from it. I shut down GrayCris’ feed, comms, and scanners. I changed all of HubSystem and SecSystem’s access codes and passwords, locking all of the GrayCris humans out of those systems entirely, then shut them down too. (I left them MedSystem and their environmental systems though. I didn’t want to be responsible for any more deaths, not even tangentially.)
I then started up the hopper and took off into the sky.
Okay so stealing one of the GrayCris hoppers hadn’t actually been part of my original plan, but it was working out pretty well for me. I could make a quick getaway without having to bring my own flier close to the GrayCris habitat. Now I just had to make sure to keep this hopper out of GrayCris’ reach, get back to my own flier, and take the emergency beacon’s transmission module into space so I could signal the company. I could’ve launched GrayCris’ own emergency beacon when I was in their HubSystem, but that would have meant that the company checked in with GrayCris first when they arrived, and I didn’t want to give GrayCris the opportunity to lie their way out of this somehow. Using PreservationAux’s beacon meant that the company would go to their habitat first.
I was almost at the plateau where my meeting with the GrayCris humans had taken place when my scanners screamed a warning at me, just as energy blasts hit the rear of the hopper. Alarms went off, and damage reports flooded the hopper’s feed.
Shit.
Despite me shutting down the habitat’s comms, the GrayCris humans had somehow managed to send orders to their flier unit. Maybe one of them had a personal comm and had been able to use that. However they’d done it, they’d ordered their flier to shoot me down, and it was doing so with gusto. The hopper wasn’t armoured like our fliers were, and our in-built energy weapons were made to be able to take out other fliers.
So now the hopper was on fire and falling out of the sky, and there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. Since I hadn’t gained a lot of height, there wasn’t very far to fall. I managed to angle the hopper so it would miss the plateau at least - if I was going down, I wanted to go down somewhere I had cover from the trees, and not on top of a barren plateau with no shelter whatsoever - then I abandoned the cockpit and made my way to the hatch as quickly as I could.
If I fucked up the timing on this, what I was about to do was going to hurt a lot. (It was probably still going to hurt anyway.)
As the falling hopper plummeted, trailing smoke, I crouched at the open hatch and waited until the hopper started to hit tree branches, snapping through them like twigs. Then I leapt out as far as I could.
I aimed myself for a tree trunk that the hopper had passed, trying to grab branches to control or at least slow my fall. (Part of me couldn’t stop thinking about how awesome this would look in one of my more action-oriented serials. Not that a normal human would really be able to do something like this and expect to survive, but still.) I managed to latch on to one branch, which slowed me somewhat before breaking under the sudden strain, but it was enough to let me swing to another branch closer to the trunk. That one also broke beneath my weight, but by then I could reach the trunk and grab on.
Somewhere behind me, the hopper hit the ground with a resounding crash. Luckily for me it didn’t explode, but bits of it were still on fire. There would be no recovering anything usable from that wreck.
As I clung to the tree trunk and tried to reorient myself, I heard the flier shriek past overhead. I didn’t know if it was sending scans of the crash site back to the GrayCris humans, or if it would be looking for me specifically, but I didn’t want to hang around and find out.
I also couldn’t let that flier remain intact. It was now the biggest threat to the PreservationAux humans.
I quickly slid down the tree trunk, avoiding the branches until I’d reached the ground, then I took off at a sprint. I knew exactly where my flier was - even if I hadn’t, I would have been able to find it anyway. I could feel it, a distant pull that inexorably drew me closer. It would have been faster if I called my flier to me, but I didn’t want the other flier spotting it and shooting it down before I could get to it.
So I ran, weaving my way through trees and jumping over rocks and other obstacles. I could hear the other flier still circling wide overhead, maybe looking for me, maybe scanning for signs of other humans. The combat override module was actually working in my favour now - the humans had to give their flier unit direct orders, it could no longer act on its own initiative. If they made the orders too complex, it would just get confused. And they’d only be able to adjust its orders if they knew what was going on. Humans couldn’t keep up with sudden changes in combat situations, not like SecUnits could.
At least the hopper had let me cover the distance to the plateau before getting shot down. I didn’t have too much further to go to reach my flier. I halted at the edge of the clearing, detaching the backplate of my armour as I waited for the GrayCris flier to pass overhead and start away again. Once I heard its engine noise fading into the distance, I bolted to my flier and vaulted into the cockpit, the canopy snapping shut in my wake. The backplate got wedged tightly between the seat and the side of the cockpit; I didn’t have time to put it away in the storage compartment.
I linked up as quickly as I could, settling into my larger self with the ease of long experience. As soon as I had calibrated, I launched skywards.
I had to get as much height as I could as fast as I could, before the other flier got the drop on me. In aerial dogfighting, height was imperative. You could exchange height for speed, which gave you a massive advantage. Right now I had neither, so if the other flier reacted quickly enough I’d be toast.
But it didn’t react quickly enough, because it was under the direct control of a human who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. By the time the GrayCris flier swung back around to face me, I’d gained enough altitude to be level with it.
It came straight at me, weapons blazing. That was how both SecUnits and fliers fought - throw ourselves directly at the enemy and see whose parts give out first. No finesse. If I’d been a unit with a working governor module, that was how I would have had to fight as well. But I wasn’t, so I didn’t. I also had the dual advantages of having watched a lot of media that featured aerial dogfights, and having had time to experiment with and practice various manoeuvres on my many unobserved scouting and recon flights.
I banked sharply out of the way, the shots passing by my patched-up underbelly, then quickly swung the opposite way with a volley of return fire as the GrayCris flier adjusted its path in response. I scored a few hits along it, but not enough to cause significant damage. Its shots continued to flicker past me, close but not impacting, and then the distance between us narrowed to nothing and we flashed past each other, barely avoiding collision. I could feel the turbulence of its wake against my flight surfaces, but I just kicked my engines in harder and pulled myself into a sharp climbing half-loop. It would take time for the other flier to swing around enough to face me again, and I needed as much height as I could get in that time.
I hit the peak of my half loop, engines straining as I levelled out upside down, then half-rolled to right myself again. I was now facing the other flier, but with a height advantage. It came straight at me again, but now it had to climb to bring its weapons to bear on me, slowing it down. I bore down on it, firing another volley of energy bolts that impacted along its fuselage before jinking to the side to avoid the return fire.
Something in the repairs on my wing strained at the movement, alerts flashing in my awareness. The repair drones had done the best they could, but they just hadn’t had the necessary resources at the PreservationAux habitat to fix things completely. I’d have to be more careful with my manoeuvres if I didn’t want anything breaking off mid-air.
I jinked back the other way to avoid another burst of fire and then dove sharply, exchanging my height for speed as I flashed past the other flier’s nose and levelled out just beneath it. The GrayCris flier started banking around to try and face me again, but it had lost a lot of its own speed in its climb and I was already well behind it. I pulled around in a sharp pitched turn to point my own weapons at it, adjusting my speed to stay behind it. It didn’t even attempt evasive manoeuvres, it just kept turning to try and face me again, but I matched its speed and direction, keeping directly on its tail.
I locked on and opened fire.
The first shots left deep blackened scorch marks against the stark white armour along the rear of its fuselage. Following shots enlarged those initial impact points, melting away armour and boring through into the internal workings. The other flier wobbled, losing speed and trailing smoke. I stuck tight on it, continuing to fire. I had to make sure the GrayCris flier would never be able to reach the PreservationAux humans.
Then my relentless barrage found its power cells, and the GrayCris flier exploded.
I peeled away from the GrayCris habitat, heading in the general direction of the PreservationAux habitat. Now that I’d gotten the satellite working again, I was able to re-establish a comm connection with Mensah. “It worked,” I said simply. “You’re safe to go back to your habitat. GrayCris can’t reach you now.”
I heard her let out a sigh of relief before she replied. “Thank you, SecUnit. We’ll start back there right away. When can we expect to see you return as well?”
“Hard to say. It depends on how long it takes me to get the transmission module into range of the wormhole.” Before I’d left to carry out my terrible idea, I’d managed to wire the emergency beacon’s transmission module to my flier’s systems so it had power. All I had to do now was fly it into orbit so it could transmit its signal to the wormhole. “I’ll contact you again when I’m on my way back.”
“Make sure you do, please,” Mensah replied, her concern audible in her voice. My insides did something a little twisty at that.
“I will.” I hesitated for a moment, then added, “Be careful. I’m heading up now.” I cut the comm connection before Mensah could reply and pointed myself towards the sky.
The flight upwards was long but uneventful. As well as monitoring my systems and flight path, I listened to music and watched the planet’s ring glow in the sunlight. As the atmosphere thinned, the ring became sharper and clearer, standing out starkly against the backdrop of space. (I took a few pictures and saved them to permanent storage.)
My flier-specific power cells were getting low - I hadn’t had a chance to recharge them since before my crash. I had enough juice to get to space, and maybe just enough to safely get back to the PreservationAux habitat afterwards. Maybe.
When I finally reached orbit, I powered down my engines and just… floated for a while. Now that I no longer needed to monitor my systems, or calculate my flight path, or pay attention to the feeling of air over my flight surfaces or the levels of my power cells, I had time and space to just… think.
I had to decide if I actually wanted to send the emergency beacon’s signal to the company.
I could lie, and not send the signal at all but tell the PreservationAux humans that I had. Or I could tell them that the transmission module hadn’t worked. Or that it hadn’t been able to reach the wormhole without the rest of the beacon to amplify it. Or I could just stay up here and float aimlessly in space. It wasn’t like the PreservationAux humans would be stranded on this planet forever. The survey had a finite duration; the company would return to pick them up on the predetermined date.
Not sending the signal would buy me a few dozen cycles, at most. Cycles of being able to fly whenever and wherever I wanted. Cycles of trying to avoid the PreservationAux humans talking to me too much. (Or at all.) Cycles of watching media and listening to music. Cycles of being stuck on a planet, with its dirt and weather and hostile fauna and alien remnants.
I thought about the PreservationAux humans, and them trying to come to terms with everything that happened while still on the planet, maybe still trying to do their survey jobs, maybe not. I thought about how they’d listened to me and my terrible plan, about how they’d trusted me to carry it out, how they trusted me to protect them.
I thought about the GrayCris humans, trapped in their habitat (unless they could somehow get HubSystem operational to unlock the doors, or just broke the doors down somehow), and the single SecUnit still left outside with an override module in its data port.
I thought about my actual clients, the DeltFall survey team, lying dead and decomposing in their habitat because I’d failed to protect them. I thought about their families, the ones I’d heard my clients talking about returning to after the survey. I thought about those families waiting to hear back from the survey, and what the DeltFall corporation would have to tell them.
I thought about the other SecUnits I’d killed, and how easily I could have been any one of them.
I thought about the data stored in my memory banks, the irrefutable evidence of GrayCris’ wrongdoings.
I sighed, pointed myself at the distant wormhole, and activated the transmission module.
Re-entering the planet’s atmosphere was much trickier than leaving it in the first place. If I got the re-entry angle wrong, I’d either skip back out of the atmosphere and have to try again, or the air compression and friction of going through the increasingly-dense atmosphere layers too quickly would fry me to a crisp. If I didn’t counteract the increasing gravitational pull and started going too fast, the air compression and friction would, again, fry me to a crisp. If I miscalculated how much power was left in my power cells, I could run out mid-air and crash into the middle of the ocean, or into a mountain range.
In short, there were a lot of ways this could go wrong and kill me horribly.
Story of my life, really.
The re-entry went smoothly to start with. I had the right angle, the right speed. It wasn’t like this was the first time I’d had to breach atmosphere or deal with re-entry, after all. That was all part of my job. I just hadn’t had to do it while on low power and with makeshift repairs before.
So of course things went wrong.
It started with the repairs and patches on my underside. The repair drones had done their best with what was available, they really had, but it wasn’t up to the standards required for atmospheric re-entry. I began to lose pieces. Nothing major, nothing vital, but it meant I had that much less shielding against the heat being generated by my re-entry. Things got hot, fast. I could feel it affecting my systems, straining my structural framework.
The situation was manageable, at least. I was able to compensate somewhat by reducing my speed, though doing so used up a lot of my remaining power. Even though the interior of the cockpit got uncomfortably hot, my own in-built temperature controls combined with my armour made things bearable. My organic parts were sweating like crazy, but at least they weren’t cooking.
I finally got low enough and was going slow enough that frying to a crisp was no longer a major concern. I was just starting to think I’d be all right after all when damage alerts flooded my awareness. Before I could even properly register them, they were swiftly followed by near-blinding pain as my previously damaged, somewhat repaired, and still-weakened wing abruptly gave way and sheared off at the joint.
Fuck.
Even with my pain sensors turned all the way down, having what amounted to an entire limb torn off fucking hurt. It also completely screwed my balance, and I began to roll. With a whole wing missing, there was no way for me to correct it.
I was going down, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. But unlike when the hopper had been shot down, this time I had much further to fall.
I managed to push back the pain and panic enough to establish the comm connection to Mensah again. “Dr. Mensah?” I hoped she wouldn’t notice how strained my voice was. “The transmission module worked, and the signal to the company has been sent through the wormhole.” I had to let the PreservationAux humans know about that now. I wouldn’t get the chance to later, and I didn’t want to leave them in the dark about it.
“Good! That’s good.” Her relief was almost palpable. A moment later though, she asked, “Are you all right?” Apparently she had picked up on the strain in my voice. Or maybe she would have asked that anyway. It just seemed to be something she did.
I didn’t want to tell her that I was plummeting to my inevitable destruction though. So I just said, “Yes. Re-entry was a little rough, that's all.” That was a hell of an understatement. I could feel the wind shrieking by as I fell, tearing at the gaps in my underside and where my wing had once been, adding even more stress to my framework. More plating broke free, some of the pieces slamming into my remaining wing before spinning away. The backplate I’d wedged beside my seat shook loose and ricocheted wildly around the cockpit, bouncing off my armour and helmet and cracking against the inside of the cockpit canopy.
Mensah said something else but I didn’t register what it was, too busy with damage reports and the unpleasant sensation of my structure trying to vibrate apart and attempting to catch my stupid backplate so it would stop rattling around and bashing into me. “I have to go now.”
I cut the comm connection. Mensah didn’t need to hear me die.
I finally caught my backplate and held onto it firmly so it wouldn’t shake loose again. With nothing else to do, I checked my coordinates and tried to get a clear view of where I was likely to impact while still spiralling uncontrollably. Below me, all I could see was the ocean. My coordinates indicated that I wasn’t too far from the island where I’d first crashed, encountered Bharadwaj and Volescu, and gotten attacked by a giant hostile fauna. I wondered if I’d manage to hit one of those islands and leave a trail of debris, or just disappear into the depths of the ocean.
The vibrations were getting worse, more panels coming loose and ripping away. One smashed into the cockpit canopy, spider-webbing it with cracks. Another hit my remaining wing, and another damage alert popped up as something within it gave way. All the impacts, vibrations and heat stress had weakened the framework, and a moment later that wing tore free as well with another blinding spike of pain.
I couldn’t take much more of this. I was running out of bits to lose, and running out of air to fall through. Without wings I couldn’t glide or even stabilise myself, and there wasn’t enough power left in my power cells to adjust my trajectory in any meaningful way. I couldn’t think of any way to recover from this plummet. (Honestly, at this point… I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.)
I didn’t want to continue feeling myself shaking to pieces though, and I really didn’t want to feel it when I finally impacted, so I disconnected myself from my flier. The pain from my missing wings faded to a dull ache, which was something of a relief. Not that it would last long. The ocean was getting close. I caught glimpses of a small island, more of a sandbar than anything really substantial, somewhere a little ahead of me. Not close enough for me to actually hit though, not at this angle.
I braced for impact and inevitable oblivion.
Then my flier’s hover mode kicked in briefly, somehow, without my input, and my flier bounced. It skipped over the surface of the water like a well-thrown stone, jarring my whole body and making the damaged canopy shatter completely. I didn’t know what was happening. My flier’s power cells didn’t have enough left in them to maintain hover mode… but it wasn’t trying to. Just flicking on for just long enough to bleed speed and momentum, and kick my flier in the direction of the little island.
My flier bounced again as the hover mode briefly activated once more, closing the distance to the island. A third bounce, then at the peak of the arc, what was left of my flier rolled just enough to dump me out through the broken canopy as it soared over the stretch of dry land. I hit the sandy ground fast and hard and tumbled uncontrollably, feeling my joints give way beneath the impacts with more sharp bursts of pain.
I finally rolled to a stop just short of the water’s edge, lying on my side with my arm pinned painfully beneath me. I was just in time to see what was left of my battered flier, already some distance away, hit the water hard and break apart completely. All I could do was watch as the shattered remains scattered over the waves and sank out of sight.
I felt the connection I had with my flier cut out entirely. It felt like someone had wrenched my core out. My performance reliability fell sharply, and then I felt nothing at all.
Performance Reliability Catastrophic Drop.
Emergency Shutdown Initiated.
Chapter Eight
I came back online slowly, my systems cycling into a wake-up phase one by one. I was confused and disoriented, not sure where I was or why I was waking up or why it felt like there was a gaping, empty pit in the middle of my torso, even though diagnostics showed no physical damage.
Then my memory caught up, and I almost succumbed to the urge to just shut down again.
But the sound of movement nearby caught my attention, and I still wasn’t sure where I was, so I cracked open my eyes slightly and looked around. I realised that I was back in Medical, lying on one of MedSystem’s beds, and Gurathin was sitting in a chair nearby, holding a portable display surface while working on it via the feed. I had a weird feeling of deja vu, but a quick check of my chronometer reassured me that I wasn’t reliving the same day again in some kind of weird time loop. (It was a surprisingly common plot line in several of the serials I’d watched.)
I also had a blanket again. (I still didn’t know what to make of that.) My flight suit, suit skin and armour were all also piled neatly on chairs next to Gurathin. The armour looked recently repaired and both the flight suit and suit skin were fresh and clean. There was also some carefully folded clothing in the PreservationAux uniform colours, and I could see part of their logo on it.
Gurathin didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d woken up, and I considered faking still being shut down while I watched some Sanctuary Moon and pretended to not exist for a while. I really didn’t want to talk to Gurathin again, not after the last time we’d had a conversation. I didn’t particularly want to talk to anyone at all.
I closed my eyes again and accessed SecSystem, flicking through the camera views to see where everyone was. Ratthi was sitting in the mess with Arada and Overse, all three of them chatting animatedly while they ate meal packs. Bharadwaj, Volescu, Mensah and Pin-Lee were gathered in the main lounge with mugs of hot beverage, several display surfaces active amongst them as they discussed survey data. It looked like Gurathin was contributing to the discussion via the feed.
It was a relief to see everyone safe and back in the habitat. (I was a little surprised at just how relieved I was.) I checked the perimeter sensors and the habitat’s scanners, but nothing out of the ordinary came up. Both the big and little hoppers were parked neatly on their landing pad, fully recharged and showing no signs of damage. I checked HubSystem, and noted that the access code hack that GrayCris had slipped in was still safely quarantined and isolated. (The PreservationAux humans probably hadn’t deleted it entirely because it was a piece of evidence against GrayCris.) There weren’t any other signs of tampering - the ambient noise function I’d left running had been disabled at some point, and all systems were back to recording as normal.
Everything seemed peaceful, normal, safe… and I had no idea what to do next. Just lying here and watching Sanctuary Moon for the next several cycles until the company transport arrived was looking more and more tempting. It wasn’t like I needed to eat or stretch or anything, and the MedSystem bed was a lot more comfortable than a cubicle or transport box. I could just… stay here and not move.
I started up one of my favourite episodes of Sanctuary Moon, and tried to focus on it. But the hollowed out feeling in my chest sat heavy and echoing, and I couldn’t focus on the episode around it, no matter how much I tried. After several minutes, I gave up and paused the episode, then blinked and slowly sat up.
Gurathin looked up immediately, and I saw him subvocalise something before he gave me a curt nod. Through the SecSystem cameras, I saw Mensah sit up a little straighter, then say something to the others. They all smiled, looking relieved.
“You’re awake,” Gurathin commented, completely unnecessarily. “How are you feeling?”
Why do these humans keep asking me that? I meant to let my buffer reply with a standard performance reliability report, but what came out instead was a subdued, “My flier’s gone.”
Of course, the one time I actually wanted my buffer to give a standard response, it went and let me down. Fuck.
The words seemed to echo through Medical, and the hollow feeling in my chest intensified. My flier was gone. It was gone, and I’d never get it back. The company would arrive, and find out about my hacked governor module, and probably scrap me for parts, and I’d never get to fly again. I pulled my legs up and wrapped my arms around my shins, then rested my face against the blanket over my knees. I didn’t care about how it would look to the humans.
Gurathin cleared his throat awkwardly, hesitated for a long moment, then said, “I have some media to give to you. A couple of serials from Preservation, mostly. Ratthi and Arada like them. You might too.” He pinged me over the feed, then transferred a folder of files to the feed for me to take. “There’s also some… news reports as well. About Ganaka.” He cleared his throat again. “You don’t have to watch any of them, you can just… delete them or whatever you want, but… well. That’s up to you.”
I froze, unable to figure out how to reply. I didn’t understand why he was giving me any of these files. After a few awkwardly silent seconds, I accepted them from the feed, and tapped Gurathin's feed in wordless acknowledgement. I saved the folder to long-term storage; maybe I’d check them out later, before the company arrived. Maybe I wouldn’t. Gurathin shifted uneasily in his chair, as if he was about to say something else, but he remained silent.
It was a relief for both of us when Mensah showed up a few moments later. Gurathin got up from his chair and nodded at her, then left Medical with a quiet comment about getting something to eat. Mensah came over to stand beside my bed, and I used one of Medical’s cameras to focus on her so I wouldn’t have to look up from where my face was planted against my knees. I was expecting her to ask me how I was feeling, or something, but she didn’t say anything right away.
Instead she just shifted to lean against the side of the bed by the end, not too close to where I was sitting. She wasn’t looking directly at me, which I appreciated. Instead she looked down at her hands, her fingers laced together in front of her. “I’m sorry about your flier,” she finally said, her voice gentle. “What happened?”
“The wing that got damaged in my first crash tore off during re-entry,” I replied. I wasn’t sure what was worse - the remembered pain of my wing ripping off, or the echoing nothingness where my connection to my flier had once been. “It must have put too much stress on it. It was pretty obvious to me then that I was going to crash. Again. Just… a lot more messily this time.”
Mensah was wincing sympathetically. “Is that why you cut the comm connection?”
There was no point trying to lie to her. “Yes.”
She sighed quietly. “I see. So what happened after that? How did you manage to survive?”
“I… don’t really know.” She raised an eyebrow at me sceptically, so I continued as best I could. “My power cells were almost depleted by that point, so I had no way to recover from the spin. Then the other wing ripped off as well. I could see that I was coming down over the ocean, and I was just… resigned to it.” I shrugged slightly, even as I tried to figure out just how much I wanted to tell Mensah. I still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened myself. “But… I saw a little island close to where I was going to hit, and… I guess I thought that if I could reach it, maybe I’d be okay. Hover mode was still working, I just didn’t have enough power left in the cells to power it fully. But I managed to use it to kinda… bounce across the water till I reached the island, then dumped myself out.” I didn’t want to think about the aftermath of that, so I simply added, “Not one of my better landings, I’ll admit.”
Mensah let out a little huff of wry amusement at my attempt at a wisecrack, glancing at me sideways before looking away again. “Maybe not, but at least you survived to tell the tale.”
For what little good that survival would do me. Still, it was kind of nice to not be dead just yet. “So how did you find me, anyway?” I asked. I hadn’t expected them to come and retrieve me.
“Well, we were still in the hoppers on the way back to the habitat when I got your comm call,” Mensah started. “The big hopper’s scanners were able to get a direction from the connection, so we swung around to head that way. We managed to get close enough to see the trail of smoke, and figured out the general area you went down in. We all thought you’d ended up in the water, but… none of us wanted to just abandon you. We had to check.” She smiled lopsidedly down at her hands. “And I’m very glad we did.”
My insides were doing something twisty again. It was almost enough to distract from the empty feeling. “Why?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
Mensah raised one eyebrow, glancing sideways at me before looking away again. “Because you’re a person I like being around. And you deserve to live.”
I had a complicated mix of emotions at that, and I had no idea what most of them were. There was definitely a good portion of confusion in there though. I decided to ignore her first sentence and just focused on the second. “It doesn’t matter what you think I deserve. When the company gets here, I’m as good as dead one way or another.” I didn’t bother trying to hide the bitterness in my voice.
“That’s what I came in here to talk to you about, actually.” Mensah glanced at me again. “I’ve discussed this with the others, and we’re all in agreement - we want to get you away from the company. Do you think they’d let us buy out your contract?”
That surprised me enough that I actually lifted my head from my knees to stare directly at her with my own eyes instead of the cameras. “You— what? You want to buy me? What for?”
Mensah’s brow furrowed at that. “We don’t want to own you,” she said firmly. “You’re a person, and people shouldn’t be owned like equipment. But we also don’t want the company to own you any more either. So if paying them to get you out is what we have to do, then we’ll do it. Would the company allow it?”
I had to push away all the confusing emotions so I could think about that for a moment, then sighed and shook my head. “No. I’m technically still military hardware, even without my flier. You’re civilians. The company would never sell military hardware to civilians. That’d break so many regulations in so many territories, it wouldn’t be worth whatever amount of money you could afford.”
Mensah pursed her lips, but she didn’t look surprised or disappointed, just determined. “That’s what Pin-Lee and Gurathin suspected, but I had to ask, just to make sure. So we’ll just have to go with Plan B.”
I was dubious and sceptical, but I had to admit, also at least a little intrigued by that point. “Plan B?”
She nodded and began to elaborate. “The plan is, we report to the company that you were destroyed along with your flier when it crashed into the ocean - we’ll need to delete any footage of you that HubSystem has from after we retrieved you, of course, and make sure it doesn’t get any more. Once we’ve covered your tracks, we can sneak you off the planet. They use bots for all the loading and unloading of the habitats and contract equipment, they shouldn’t notice you if you’re hiding in one of the hoppers during the pick up, right? Once you’re on the transport, I’m confident you’ll be able to remain undetected until we reach the station. We’ll figure out a way to get you off the transport when we reach the transit station, and then you can come back to Preservation with us, where you’ll be safe from the company or any other corporations.”
I wanted to say that she was crazy, that it would never work. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to think that maybe it could work. The company transports also used standard company SecSystems, and I’d already had experience with getting around those. If I could convince the ship’s SecSystem to ignore me, then all I had to do was avoid being spotted by any of the human crew. With access to the ship’s SecSystem and its cameras, that wouldn’t be difficult at all. Getting off the transport afterwards might be trickier, but if all the cargo unloading was done by bots (which it usually was), then maybe I could sneak out through the cargo docks. If the company thought I’d gone down with my flier, they would have no reason to be looking for me.
I could actually be free.
I still wouldn’t have my flier, and I had no idea if I wanted to go to Preservation with Mensah and the others, but… one step at a time.
“That… could work, maybe,” I conceded eventually. “But would everyone be able to stay quiet about it?” I hadn’t known any of the PreservationAux humans for very long, but at least some of them didn’t seem like the types to be comfortable with lying. “None of you can talk about me at all on the transport back, the company’s always listening. If any of the transport’s crew suspect anything, it could cause trouble for everyone.” Me especially, but I didn’t think I needed to spell that out.
“We’ll be too busy analysing our survey data to do much else,” Mensah reassured me. “And we all know your life and freedom are at stake here. Nobody will give anything away.”
I wished I had her confidence. Still, it was a chance, which was more than I’d had before. And I had at least a few days to practise removing my presence from the habitat’s HubSystem and SecSystem. That would definitely help, especially since I’d have to do so in a way that the company analysts wouldn’t pick up on later when they were data-mining everything. Given all that had happened with GrayCris, they’d be paying a lot more attention than they normally did, too. “It’s worth a try, I suppose.” And if the company did manage to catch me, well… I wouldn’t be any worse off than I was going to be anyway.
“Then it’s settled,” Mensah said firmly with a sharp nod of her head. “Will you need any help with removing yourself from HubSystem’s records?”
“No, I should be fine. I need the practice anyway if I want to get past the transport’s systems.” I also needed some time to myself to just… think.
“All right. Let me know if you need anything, okay?” I just nodded. Mensah paused for a moment, then said, “Once you feel like getting up, there’s a survey group uniform beside your armour, if you want to wear something more comfortable.” I must have grimaced despite myself, because she added gently, “You won’t be able to wear your armour on the station if you want to avoid being noticed, you know.”
“I’ll deal with that when I get there.” She did have a valid point, but I didn’t want to think about that right now. “As long as we’re still on this planet, I’m your security. I’m not going to stop doing my job just because I’m not meant to exist here now.”
Mensah tilted her head towards me with a warm smile. “And we’re all grateful for your diligence.” She straightened up as I was trying to think of how to reply. “I don’t think any of us will be leaving the habitat any time soon though, so you don’t have to worry about looking after us. For now, just rest for as long as you need. And let me know if there’s anything we can do to make hiding you from HubSystem easier.” I nodded again, and she gave me another little smile, then left Medical.
I had a lot to think about. And a lot of security record editing to do. I shifted to sit more comfortably on the bed (I figured as long as I stayed in Medical, the humans would think I was still recovering and not interrupt me), then accessed HubSystem and got to work.
It ended up being four days before the first company ship arrived. I spent those four days deleting my presence from HubSystem and SecSystem, patrolling outside the habitat in full armour (wearing my flight suit hurt too much, and I was still hesitant to wear normal clothing), keeping an eye on the habitat’s scanners and sensors, and watching a lot of Sanctuary Moon. I also made a copy of all my personal audio and visual recordings of everything to do with GrayCris and gave the copy to Mensah. Just in case.
On the third day, we went out on one more short survey trip. I was rather nervous about it, and I think the others were as well. But it went smoothly with no issues (and no surprise hostile fauna), much to everyone’s relief, and they were able to gather more of the data that they’d originally come to the planet for in the first place.
I also spent some time talking with each of the PreservationAux humans (apart from Gurathin, I was still actively avoiding him, and I still hadn’t looked at any of the files he’d given me) about what life was like on Preservation. They all seemed excited about the thought of me going home with them, which was disconcerting to say the least. I still didn’t understand why they wanted me to, or what they would get out of it. From everything that they had told me, it sounded like the Preservation Alliance didn’t need a SecUnit. They told me that Preservation was safe, that I wouldn’t need armour, or my large projectile weapon (which I’d lost along with my flier and all my remaining drones), or a flier, or a cubicle. Nobody shot at anyone there. If I did manage to get damaged somehow, I’d be able to use their MedSystem.
Preservation was unimportant enough and far enough away from Corporation Rim territories to be safe from hostile takeovers, or raids, or all the other violent things that the company hired SecUnits like me out to protect against. Mensah didn’t need a bodyguard or security there; nobody did. It sounded like a fantastic place to live, if you were a human or augmented human.
I hadn’t wanted to ask Mensah directly, so I’d asked Ratthi to tell me a bit about how Mensah lived there. Ratthi turned out to be one of the easiest humans to talk to, once I got used to his open friendliness. He told me that when Mensah wasn’t doing planetary admin work, she lived on a farm outside the capital city, with two marital partners, plus her sister and brother and their three marital partners, and so many relatives and kids that Ratthi had lost count of them all.
Ratthi also told me that Arada and Overse also lived on the planet in their own little house, and that Volescu was in a four-way marriage and had seven kids, and that Bharadwaj, Gurathin and Pin-Lee spent most of their time on the station, and that Ratthi himself had a place of his own both on the station and on the planet, and frequently travelled between the two.
I didn’t know what I would do at Preservation. I didn’t know if they’d let me stay on the station, or make me spend time on the planet as well. If I had to stay on the planet, what would I even do there? Work on a farm? I didn’t have the first idea about what that would even involve, but judging by what I’d picked up from various serials, it would probably be way more boring than security. And it would involve a lot of dirt, and flora, and probably fauna. Gross.
Maybe it would all work out anyway, somehow. This was what I was supposed to want, after all. This was what everything had always told me I was supposed to want.
Supposed to want.
I’d probably have to pretend to be an augmented human, and that would be a strain. I’d have to change, make myself do things I didn’t want to do. Like talking to humans as though I was one of them. (I wasn’t one of them. I never would be.) I’d have to leave the armour and weapons behind, and get used to no longer having my flier.
But maybe I wouldn’t need any of those any more.
On the morning of the fourth day after sending the beacon, I was patrolling outside the habitat in full armour again and watching some more Sanctuary Moon in the background. Mensah came to find me and talked to me some more about Preservation, what my options would be there, and how I’d need to have an official guardian for legal purposes. It was pretty much what I’d already figured, from what everyone else had said.
“Do you know who you want your guardian to be yet?” Mensah asked me. From everything that had been said so far, it was obvious that she and the others thought I’d choose her to be my guardian. It was the logical option.
“Not yet.” I didn’t want a guardian at all. It was just a nicer word for owner. But if I wanted to stay at Preservation, I legally had to have one. I wouldn’t be able to get away with not choosing someone. “I’ll figure it out once I’ve actually made it to the station.”
“All right.” Mensah nodded, then smiled at me. She did that a lot. “I’m looking forward to showing you around Preservation. There are so many educational opportunities available there. You’ll be able to learn to do anything you want.”
What I wanted, more than anything else, was to fly again. But that wasn’t going to be an option. I’d asked about it, but they didn’t have any kind of fliers like mine at Preservation, only clunky shuttles that they used to travel between the station and the planet’s surface. There would be no way for me to buy a flier, or build one, even if I knew how to. I didn’t know what else I wanted, apart from being left alone to watch media, and I didn’t think they’d find that very acceptable somehow.
I was trying to figure out how to respond when HubSystem alerted everyone that a company ship was approaching and requesting comm contact. Mensah tensed and began to gesture for me to get moving, but I had already turned and started towards the big hopper. [Remember to remind everyone that they can’t talk about me from now on,] I said to her over the feed.
[We’ll remember,] Mensah promised me as she headed back into the habitat. [I’ll see you again once we reach the station.]
I was just opening the cargo pod when a distant sound made me freeze in place, looking up to the sky. Moments later, five white company fliers in tight formation roared past high overhead, doing a flyby of the habitat.
The hollow ache in my chest reverberated with the familiar sound of engines, and even though I should’ve been hiding in the cargo pod, I couldn’t stop myself from watching them flash by, morning sunlight glinting off the edges of their wings. Thin contrails streaked the sky in their wake, lingering for long moments before slowly beginning to dissipate.
Part of me wanted so badly to be up there, soaring through the empty sky. But my own flier was gone, and I was meant to be dead and vanished into the depths of the ocean. I had to get out of sight before they noticed–
One of them sent out a directionless ping.
Shit.
I snapped out of my temporary paralysis as I clamped down on the instinctive urge to ping back and scrambled into the cargo pod, slamming the hatch shut behind me. I really hoped they hadn’t actually caught sight of me, that it had just been a routine ping and not one in response to seeing me, and that the lack of a reply ping would fool them. The sound of their engines was muffled in the pod, but I could still hear them swinging around and doing another flyby. Another directionless ping followed, and again I had to clamp down on the urge to respond with a ping of my own.
I moved to the back of the cargo pod and huddled behind the repair drones I’d stored there. The humans had insisted on leaving a blanket and pillow in the cargo pod for me, to “make things more comfortable.” I still didn’t know what to make of that, but at least it gave me something to sit on that wasn’t just bare metal. (Not that it mattered while I was still in my armour, but at least it would help muffle any sounds of my armour clanking against the floor.)
I’d also stowed the bag I’d grabbed from the DeltFall habitat in the cargo pod as well. After removing all but two of the emergency medpacks I’d taken from DeltFall Medical, it had plenty of room to store my flight suit and the PreservationAux uniform and shoes that the humans had given me. Once I reached the station and changed out of the armour and into the uniform (Mensah was right about me not being able to wear my armour on the station, that would draw way too much unwanted attention), I’d be able to fit the armour into the bag as well. It was important that I didn’t leave anything that was meant to have gone down with me behind, just in case the Company noticed and started asking awkward questions. (I might also need the armour again later, so I wanted to keep it with me just in case.)
The next several hours were simultaneously mind-numbingly boring and incredibly stressful. I was monitoring PreservationAux’s feed and comms as well as HubSystem and SecSystem while hiding my own presence. Given the presence of the SecUnit squadron that was still regularly flying by, I couldn’t afford to get distracted by watching a serial as well, despite how badly I wanted to. I had one of my more soothing music playlists going in the background instead to keep me company.
Once the company ship had established a comm link with the habitat, I carefully eavesdropped on their communication with Mensah via her feed. I’d been right - the company had sent a faster security ship ahead to assess the situation. This particular ship was a smaller carrier, the type usually equipped with a single twelve-unit squadron of SecUnits and their fliers, meant to provide swift reconnaissance and aerial support to a larger troop carrier or entire battle groups.
It was odd that the half-squadron I’d seen flying overhead had only had five units instead of the usual six. Their formation had looked like they’d deliberately left a space for a missing member. Maybe this carrier and the squadron were where the GrayCris flier had originally come from. I wondered where the other half-squadron were. Mensah had given the carrier captain a summary of what GrayCris had done, and the captain assured her that the GrayCris survey team would be properly detained. So that was probably where they were, keeping an eye on GrayCris.
From my eavesdropping, I also learned that the company transport was still two days out. Which meant I’d be sitting in the hopper’s cargo pod for the entirety of those two days, with the carrier holding position in orbit. It never would’ve worked if I’d been human, but as a SecUnit, it wouldn’t be a problem. I’d spent much longer in transport crates while getting shipped to and from contracts. The cargo pod was positively roomy in comparison.
The half-squadron from the carrier ship still did regular flybys over those two days, but I was getting better at ignoring them and their occasional pings. Once I was confident that nothing much else would be happening for a while, I set a few alerts on my various feeds, backburnered them, and settled in for some serious Sanctuary Moon time.
The company transport’s arrival was pretty anticlimactic. When it reached orbit, the humans and their equipment and luggage were flown up to it by shuttle, then the bots were brought down to disassemble and pack up the habitat. The hoppers were loaded into shuttles without even being checked, much to my relief. I kept tabs on the bots’ communications just in case they noticed and reported anything, but nothing happened. They were very simple, low-level bots, so even if they had noticed something I doubted they’d even think to report on it.
As soon as the shuttle carrying the hopper came within range of the transport, I stealthily worked my way into its SecSystem, making sure it (and by extension, the bot pilot) would ignore my presence. Once I was in SecSystem, it wasn’t difficult to get into the transport’s HubSystem from there. (I didn’t really need to be in HubSystem, honestly, I could do everything I needed to with just SecSystem. But it made me feel better to have the extra access, just in case.) (It also let me check out the media archives on the ship to see if there was anything new that I didn’t have yet.) (There was a new season of one of the serials I’d watched before and enjoyed, which I promptly downloaded to my own storage.)
I used SecSystem’s cameras to keep tabs on the ship’s bridge so I could eavesdrop on anything the crew said, and the cargo hold so I could make sure nobody was about to check the hopper’s cargo pods. I also used the cameras to check on the PreservationAux humans. They were already settled into the cabins they’d be staying in for the trip back to the station, talking quietly amongst themselves. I’d found out from poking through SecSystem that a separate transport would be picking up the GrayCris humans, so I didn’t have to worry about any of GrayCris trying to get revenge on the PreservationAux humans or doing anything else stupid during the journey back. I also didn’t have to worry about the carrier or its fliers for much longer - they wouldn’t be escorting this transport, they’d be staying back to wait for the transport that would pick up GrayCris.
This transport was, however, being used to pick up the DeltFall habitat, and what was left of the DeltFall survey group. (I tried very hard not to think about my client list. I could have deleted it, but I hadn’t yet. I didn’t know why. Maybe I would once I got to the station.) I used HubSystem to check the DeltFall inventory list - and there it was. All four SecUnits assigned to the DeltFall survey group, including the one with attached flier, were listed as destroyed and off inventory.
As far as the company was concerned, I was officially dead.
Now that I’d made it onto the transport undetected, all I had to do was wait, and hope that things went just as smoothly when we reached the station.
I had been half-expecting something to go wrong during the journey back to the station, but nothing out of the ordinary happened, and I was able to watch both the serials that Gurathin had given me uninterrupted. I had assumed that since they’d been made in Preservation, watching them would give me a better idea of what Preservation would be like. Unless Preservation had enchanted forests with talking trees, or telepathic dragons with magical powers, that assumption was very, very wrong. Still, they were entertaining and suitably unrealistic, and they helped pass the time.
I also decided, about halfway through the trip, to check out at least one of the news reports about Ganaka, mostly out of morbid curiosity about how the company would’ve tried to spin the story of one of their SecUnits committing war crimes. I ended up watching all of them, to see if any of them said anything different from the first one.
I hadn’t been expecting what I found.
There had been some variations across the reports, but the key points were consistent. According to all of the news reports, Ganaka had been attacked by seven flier-equipped SecUnits, not just one. Not just me. That was over half a squadron. (Not even my organic bits had any memory of ever being in a squadron to start with. Why couldn’t I remember that?) We had allegedly been hijacked by some kind of remotely delivered malware during a routine demonstration featuring the squadron that the company had been putting on for potential clients. The hack acted in a similar way to combat override modules, giving direct control of us to an outside party.
We’d been sent to another area away from the demonstration zone, and directed to wipe out the Ganaka settlement as some kind of anti-construct statement, or anti-war machine statement, or anti-corporation statement, or something along those lines. Not all of the news reports agreed on the motives.
But all the reports agreed that whoever had hijacked us had wanted the entire Corporation Rim to see what happened. Our field cameras had been recording and transmitting back to the hijackers the entire time, and all the footage had been released publicly and anonymously. Segments of it - the aerial bombings, the ground assault afterwards, where we’d been made to land our fliers and go in on foot to finish off any survivors - were included in some of the news reports.
I wondered if any of the segments shown had been from my own cameras. Or if I had been any of the SecUnits visible in any of those clips. Watching the clips made my performance reliability drop a full five percent. I skipped past most of them to get back to the rest of the news reports.
The company’s response to the hijacking had been swift and thorough. They’d managed to recover us after what they referred to as “the incident”, and had launched an immediate investigation into who was behind it. They had, apparently, found enough evidence to pin it on a small out-system group who had previously been very vocal about their anti-corporation sentiments. The legal proceedings had been swift and punitive, the out-system group found unanimously guilty. The group had been dissolved and the individuals harshly sentenced.
Most of the news reports had taken the company’s word for the accuracy of their investigation, but there were a handful of reports from competing corporate territories and polities outside the Corporation Rim that had doubted its veracity. There was some speculation that the investigation had been a little too swift, that the supposedly guilty group had been nothing more than convenient scapegoats. I had no idea if anything had come of that speculation though. Gurathin hadn’t included any reports beyond those in the files he had given me.
I didn’t know what to think. I had so little memory of what had happened at Ganaka that it had never occurred to me that I might not have been the only one involved. After I’d woken up from the memory wipe, all I’d known was that I’d killed a whole lot of civilians, but I didn’t know why. If I’d been a human, I probably would have been arrested for war crimes. As a SecUnit though, I’d just had my memory purged. I couldn’t think of any reason why I would have wanted to kill so many civilians, so I’d thought that my governor module had malfunctioned and made me kill them. That was why I’d broken my governor module - so that it could never malfunction and force me to commit war crimes ever again.
But I hadn’t been the only one involved. I, and half my squadron that I couldn't even remember, hadn’t even had a choice in it - we’d simply been used as a tool, a weapon, for someone else’s purposes. (To be fair, that wasn’t any different from the rest of my existence. On all the contracts I’d been on, I’d been listed as either “equipment” or “weapon” or both.) I couldn’t tell if this made me feel better or worse. There was just an indecipherable tangle of emotions sitting in my head that I couldn’t even begin to sort out, and I hated it.
I decided to stop thinking about it. There wasn’t anything I could do about any of it, anyway. I couldn’t go back and change what had happened. I couldn’t fix anything.
So I just started up Sanctuary Moon from the first episode, and let myself think about nothing at all.
As soon as we came out of the wormhole, I paused the episode I’d been watching and began paying very close attention to the transport’s bridge and comms. We were in the company’s territory now, and the company was paranoid. I was worried that the perimeter sensors, or the scanners on the smaller security stations lining the approach from the wormhole to the central station, or the scanners on the various large and heavily armed carriers and supercarriers holding position in space would somehow pick up on an active SecUnit in a transport where there wasn’t meant to be one.
But my fears turned out to be mostly unfounded. The company was paranoid, but it had no reason to be looking for one of its own SecUnits in the first place. I was company equipment, on board a company ship, that had the right company codes, returning from a company mission. The smaller security stations and the various other ships let the transport pass without issue, and we continued on towards the company’s central station.
As one of their main bases of operations and deployment centres, the station was massive and heavily defended. Not even the most aggressive of raiders (or the company’s competitors) would risk a direct, all out attack on a company station. Anything that came out of the wormhole without pre-approved identification codes would be immediately under the scrutiny of the security stations, which were little more than sensor-heavy, remote-controlled weapons platforms. They were the first line of defence, and would soften up any enemy forces while the gunships, carriers, and supercarriers moved into position and launched their squadrons of fliers. Anything that managed to make it past the security stations would then have to deal with all the armed company ships that weren’t currently out on deployment, or were permanently stationed here as defence.
That was a hell of a lot of guns.
The station was also a major transit hub for this sector of the Corporation Rim. Non-company ships queued outside the public and merchant docks, waiting their turn for a berth. More ships lined up on the approach to the wormhole. As a company ship though, the transport got to bypass the queues and head directly for one of the reserved docks. I really hoped that this would mean security at that dock would be more relaxed than at the public or merchant docks. I’d never been deployed on the station before - whenever I’d been there, it had been in a transport crate or a cubicle, so I had no real idea what to expect. I didn’t know how accurate the various stations I’d seen on my serials were to the real thing.
I was expecting that getting off the ship unnoticed would be difficult, but it actually ended up being almost concerningly easy. As soon as I was within range of the station’s feed, I was able to slip into its SecSystem with very little effort. (All the earlier practice on the habitat SecSystem and the transport SecSystem really paid off.) The only differences between the station SecSystem and the habitat or transport SecSystems I’d already gotten into was the size and the addition of weapons scanners. Everything else was the same - the protocols, the sensors, the cameras, everything. The company was paranoid, but it was also cheap. No point spending money on different varieties of SecSystem when the one you had worked just fine.
By the time the ship docked, I’d already used the station cameras to check out the cargo dock the transport would be using to unload, and plotted my escape route. The cargo area was also almost completely bot-run, with only a couple of human supervisors overseeing the work from a small office. According to their feed activity, they didn’t seem to be paying a lot of attention to what was going on. I managed to scrape a few access codes from their feeds without being noticed.
I waited in an out-of-sight corner of the transport’s cargo hold for the bots to get started on unloading. I’d already changed into the PreservationAux uniform, my armour packed neatly into my bag and its carry strap slung over my shoulder. Once the bots were all fully occupied with unloading, I simply followed one out of the transport’s cargo hold, using its bulk to shield me from the cameras and the supervisor’s office window. I could remove myself from the cameras, yes, but it was a lot less effort if I was never on the cameras to start with, or if I was only on one or two of them instead of all of them.
The bots, not having any orders about SecUnits on the cargo dock, ignored me completely. I just walked across the entire cargo area until I reached the exit, making sure to erase myself from any of the cameras that managed to catch sight of me. I hacked the weapons scanners to ignore the guns built into my arms, used the access codes I’d scraped from the supervisors’ feeds to open the doors, waited until the station cameras showed a lull in the foot traffic on the other side, and slipped through.
And then I was out of the cargo area, and on the station itself, in one of the lower port work zones. I had to pause in an out of the way nook and take a moment to just… process that. I’d actually made it to the station.
I was still in range of the transport’s feed, and using its interior cameras to keep track of the PreservationAux humans as they also began to disembark, exiting the ship via the passenger lock on the next level up. Once they’d left the ship, I switched to using the station’s cameras to watch them. If I was going to meet up with them at some point, I’d need to know where they were going.
A company representative met them once they were on the station, apparently there to escort them to a company hotel. Of course the company would want to keep them close by while the whole situation with GrayCris and DeltFall was taken care of. That would make meeting up with them a lot trickier, if they had humans from the company with them all the time. I could hide my presence from bots and cameras, but not actual humans seeing me with their eyes.
The PreservationAux humans did an admirable job of not blatantly looking around for me as they left the dock areas and followed the company human into the station proper. A part of me wondered if they’d just forgotten about me. Perhaps it would be better if they had.
I still hadn’t decided if I was actually going to go with them to Preservation or not. I’d been putting off thinking about it, reasoning to myself that there was no point considering the options until I’d actually made it off the transport and onto the station. I was on the station now, undetected, and I’d have to make up my mind soon.
But not just yet.
I got a map of the station off a public feed, and began making my way towards the ramps that would lead me out of the port work zone and up to the level that the others were on. It was excruciating walking amongst other humans like I was one of them - I kept expecting someone to notice me, to sound the alarm, but nobody did. My clothes hid all my inorganic parts, including the data port on the back of my neck, and nobody looked at me twice, or even once. Everyone was too busy going their own way, or checking the feed for information, or talking with other humans they were walking with. It hit me that I was just as anonymous in a crowd of humans who didn’t know each other as I was in my armour, in a group of other SecUnits.
The bag I was carrying helped. It gave me something to do with that arm, and made me look like just another traveller passing through the station on the way to somewhere else. I was also using its carry strap to partially obscure the PreservationAux logo on the uniform, so it wouldn’t be immediately obvious to anyone who looked at me. The rest of the uniform was nondescript enough that it didn’t draw any attention. I still did my best to remove myself from the station’s cameras though, just in case.
When I made it up to the next level, out of the port work zone and into what looked to be a major commercial zone, the number of humans around me increased even more. This did not help my anxiety in the slightest, but it also gave me more people to blend in with. I picked a group that looked like they were travellers and not company employees and tagged along behind them, doing my best to imitate their movements and mannerisms while not drawing their attention. They were also heading in the same general direction that the PreservationAux humans were going, which was convenient.
We walked down the big multilevel centre ring, past office blocks and shopping centres, crowded with every kind of person and bot, flash data displays darting around, a hundred different public feeds brushing my awareness. It was just like a place from the entertainment feed, but bigger and brighter and noisier. There were an overwhelming number of unfamiliar smells, too. I found feeds with more media on offer, and I couldn’t resist starting a few downloads of serials and music albums that seemed interesting.
The group I was trailing along with eventually turned off into a hotel block, but I continued past it. I was still keeping track of PreservationAux via the station cameras, and saw them be ushered into another hotel block deeper in the station by the company representative. Mensah paused briefly at the threshold to look around - she seemed to be scanning the crowd - then followed the rest inside.
I kept going until I reached that hotel, then paused at a nearby directory, as though I was checking directions or looking up business listings. I could feel the edge of the PreservationAux group’s feed, and I still had access. I slipped into it carefully, not wanting to alert them while the company representative was still with them. I couldn’t eavesdrop on their conversation via their feed, but I could see the documents and schedules they were adding and updating as they talked. They were apparently discussing various upcoming meetings to go over everything that had happened with GrayCris and DeltFall, and all the legal proceedings that would be involved. It looked like it would take dozens of cycles. They wouldn’t be heading to Preservation any time soon.
I had to decide what to do - I couldn’t put it off any longer. I really didn’t want to follow them into that hotel. It was too risky. I wasn’t meant to be with them, I wouldn’t be able to hide my presence from company representatives that went to talk to them, and they’d have to stay on the station for way too long before they could continue on to Preservation. I also couldn’t just hang around outside the hotel or wander around the station the entire time either; eventually someone would notice me and my odd behaviour. I couldn’t risk that.
Not wanting to wait around for the PreservationAux humans made me realise... I didn't actually want to go to Preservation with them. I didn't want to become some kind of pet bot. Pet construct. Whatever. And now that I was here, on the station, I had options.
The realisation stunned me a little, I’ll admit. I’d been putting off deciding whether or not to go with them to Preservation, but I’d never even considered any kind of alternative. I’d never thought to hope that I would even have alternatives.
I was doing so now. I was off inventory, and could just go… wherever I wanted. I could check out other stations, other territories outside the company’s, other non-corporation polities. (But not planets. I’d had more than enough of planets.) I could leave the Corporation Rim entirely. I could, perhaps, make my own way to Preservation by myself, eventually, if I felt like it at some point in the future.
There were so many options, too many. I couldn’t even begin to think of where I would go yet. The important part was to get off the station and out of the company’s territory. I could figure out the rest as I went along.
I slipped back out of PreservationAux’s feed, and headed away from the hotel. I used the map I’d gotten earlier to figure out a different route back towards the docks, taking some time to just look around the station. I wasn’t in any particular rush, and I was still downloading media.
Eventually my downloads finished and I left the station’s commercial zone and made my way along the big central corridor into the port’s embarkation zone, just one of hundreds of travellers headed for the public section of the ship ring.
I checked the schedule feeds and found that one of the ships getting ready to launch was a bot-driven cargo transport. I plugged into its access from the stationside lock, and greeted it. It could have ignored me, but it was bored. It greeted me back and opened its feed for me. Bots that are also ships don’t communicate in words. I pushed the thought toward it that I was a happy servant bot who needed a ride to rejoin its beloved guardian, and did it want company on its long trip? I showed it how many hours of shows and music and other media I had saved to share with it.
Cargo transport bots also watch the entertainment feeds, it turns out.
I don’t yet know what I want, apart from being able to fly again. I’m pretty sure I said that at some point earlier. But it isn’t that, not entirely. It’s that I don’t want anyone else to tell me what I want, or to make those decisions for me.
That’s why I didn’t rejoin you, Dr. Mensah, my favourite human. By the time you get this, I’ll be leaving company territory. Off inventory and out of sight.
Murderbot end message.
Fallen Feathers
Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, AAA Murderbot, outside POV
Published: 21 March 2022
Word Count: 3,515
Summary
Alternate point of view one-shot of a scene that Murderbot didn't see itself from Clipped Wings. Mensah and the rest of PreservationAux come to some uncomfortable realisations about the SecUnit assigned to their survey group...
(This is a new, updated version to go with the updated version of Clipped Wings - the old version is here.)
“I didn’t even know it had a face!”
Mensah winced slightly at Ratthi’s exclamation. She’d known, after previously being shown the SecUnit they would be assigned for their survey when she’d tried to protest its inclusion. She had just… conveniently forgotten. In its armour, with its faceplate opaqued, its precise movements and its carefully modulated voice, it was easy to forget that it was anything more than a robot, a mobile extension of the SecSystem. She’d never wanted a SecUnit on this survey in the first place, so she had done her best to just put it out of her mind whenever possible.
She couldn’t forget now, though. Not after what she and the rest of the survey team had seen through Volescu’s field camera. The way the DeltFall SecUnit had shown its face, its expression reassuring, a bleeding and unconscious Bharadwaj cradled so carefully in its arms. The way it had gently coaxed Volescu to safety, had continued talking so calmly and warmly to Volescu to break him out of his panic, the way it had directed Volescu to get the emergency med kit that had, without a doubt, helped to save Bharadwaj’s life.
It had been so… human. No canned responses, no blank faceplate. And, in the glimpses they’d gotten of its expression while Volescu worked with the med kit, it had looked concerned.
Arada, Overse, Pin-Lee and Ratthi were gathered with Mensah in the main lounge area, going over the recording from Volescu’s field camera again. Bharadwaj was in the infirmary, Volescu sitting with her. Gurathin was in Medical, supervising the MedSystem as it treated the damage - the injuries, Mensah corrected herself sharply - that the DeltFall SecUnit had taken while saving Bharadwaj from the giant worm.
She still felt terrible that they'd all just… forgotten about it in the rush to get Bharadwaj to MedSystem. None of them had thought about it, or the damage - the injuries - it had taken while saving Bharadwaj, not until later. Not until after the MedSystem had finally finished treating Bharadwaj and confirmed that she would recover fully.
It was only then that Mensah had even thought to check on the DeltFall unit - and she was ashamed to admit that even at that point, she hadn't been thinking about its physical state. She'd only wanted to make sure that she knew where it was, that it hadn't wandered off somewhere or gotten into areas it wasn't supposed to be in, and to ask it if it had managed to get back in contact with the DeltFall survey group yet.
She hadn't expected to find it offline in the Security ready room, carefully laid out on a thin emergency blanket spread on the floor, where the PreservationAux SecUnit had obviously done what it could to treat it with wound sealant and a single, paltry, emergency medical kit. Its efforts had been obviously inadequate given the extent of the wounds, but it had tried, which was more than Mensah could say about herself.
She remembered the horror coiling tight around her gut at the sight of the DeltFall unit lying there, its distressingly youthful-looking face so slack and still and silent. When she'd asked the PreservationAux SecUnit why it hadn't informed her of the DeltFall unit's state, it had hesitated for a brief moment, then replied in its soft, polite voice, "SecUnit functionality is not an observed client priority." There had been no reproach in its tone, but Mensah's imagination had supplied it anyway.
"Why didn't you put it in the cubicle?" she'd asked, unable to tear her eyes away from the DeltFall unit's exposed face. It was better - only slightly better - than looking at the patchwork of torn flight suit, bloodied suit skin, exposed metal, wound sealant and stained bandages over its arms and torso.
"My cubicle will not work on it," her own SecUnit had answered. "That unit is not included in the PreservationAux contract." It had hesitated again, then added more quietly, "I don't have any standard protocol for this situation. I apologise for any inadequacies in my choice of actions."
"No, no, your actions haven't been inadequate at all," she'd hastened to reassure it. "I do wish you'd let me know earlier, but… I understand why you didn't." They'd spent the entire survey so far doing their best to ignore their own SecUnit as much as possible - of course it would think that it, or the DeltFall unit, wouldn't be considered a priority. "Will MedSystem work on it?"
"I'm sorry, I don't have that information," it had replied.
"Well, we'll find out." She’d then asked their own SecUnit to carry the DeltFall unit to Medical. It was too heavy for any of her team to move themselves, not without causing further harm.
She thought about how their SecUnit had carried the other unit like the DeltFall unit had carried Bharadwaj, cradled so carefully in its arms. Medical had been somewhat crowded once the two units had entered, and Mensah remembered brushing past the PreservationAux unit as she moved out of its way. She remembered some distracted part of her mind absently noticing that it seemed warmer than usual, somehow, but with everything else going on at the time, she hadn’t thought any more about it. She recalled how carefully it had placed the damaged - injured - unit onto MedSystem’s platform, helped to remove the ruins of its flight suit and suit skin, then moved to stand in a corner where it would be out of the way but could still watch over everything going on in Medical from behind its blank faceplate.
Had it considered the DeltFall unit a potential threat? Had it felt sympathy, compassion for a fellow unit? Had it simply defaulted to some standard procedure for lack of any other orders? Nobody had told it to do anything else until things had calmed down, until Ratthi and Overse had gotten the DeltFall unit cleaned up, until Pin-Lee and Gurathin had figured out how to get MedSystem working on the DeltFall unit’s treatment. Only then had it quietly asked Mensah if she had any more orders for it. Mensah had still been too distracted, too worried about Bharadwaj and the DeltFall unit to say anything more than, “No, no, it’s all right, no orders for now, you can do what you like.” It had simply nodded and gone back outside to its usual patrol route around the habitat’s perimeter.
Mensah found herself wondering if it ever got bored.
It was still out there, as it had been for the majority of their time here when it wasn’t accompanying them on survey excursions. Mensah couldn’t help but feel guilty about that now, and judging by the expressions on the faces of her team, they were feeling a similar way.
“... Maybe there are differences between the DeltFall unit and ours?” Overse put forth hesitantly in a vain attempt to justify their previous behaviour. “I mean, theirs has a flier, ours doesn’t. Maybe theirs is… upgraded more in other ways as well?”
Mensah shook her head. “I don’t think so. I saw it when the company was… convincing me to accept it as part of the survey package. Ours has a face as well. A different face, I think, but still. I just… let myself forget,” she admitted with self-reproach. “I didn’t want to think about it, about what we were being forced to accept. That was my mistake.”
“It’s one we’re all complicit in,” Pin-Lee said. “So don’t go trying to take all the blame, Mensah.”
Mensah gave Pin-Lee a faint, lopsided smile. “I won’t. It’s something we’ll all need to work on going forward, too.”
“But how?” Arada asked, waving her hands around until Overse began rubbing her back reassuringly. “How do we even begin to make up for treating it like an object? We’ve just been… ignoring it for the entire survey, except when we asked it to carry survey equipment, or something. We’ve been letting it ride around in the hopper’s cargo hold!”
“We take things one step at a time,” Mensah replied firmly. “No more letting it - or the DeltFall unit, once it recovers - ride in the cargo hold, for one.” Nods of agreement followed that. “And we can make it clear to ours, at least, that we don’t expect it to stay outside on patrol all night. We can invite it inside, let it know that it’s welcome to spend time with us.”
“We’re going to have to tread carefully though, I think,” Pin-Lee added, her brow furrowed slightly in thought. “I don’t think it’s going to know what to do with us suddenly changing our behaviour towards it.” She gave Ratthi a pointed look as she said that. Ratthi just looked sheepish, but nodded in understanding as Pin-Lee continued. “I doubt either of them have ever had anyone treat them like actual people before - the Corporation Rim barely treats its own people like actual people.”
“A sad truth,” Mensah murmured, then sighed. “I suppose the best we can do is just… treat them kindly. If they appear uncomfortable, back off, give them space. Take it slowly. Don’t push either of them any faster than they seem comfortable with.”
“What are we going to do about the DeltFall unit, anyway?” Overse asked. “We should at least let DeltFall know what happened, right? They’ll probably be wondering where it is by now.”
“I’ll call them once we have a little more information on what actually happened. First, I want to find out why we didn’t already know about that giant worm creature.” Mensah began pulling up the survey package in the feed. “It should have been listed in the survey information package under hazardous fauna. Did we just miss that entry, or was it not included in the first place? I want everyone to take a section and comb through it, just in case the entry was misfiled somewhere.”
The others nodded and began working through the information. Mensah tapped Gurathin over the feed to get his attention. [Gurathin? How are things going with the DeltFall SecUnit?]
It was a few moments before Gurathin replied, and when he did, he sounded distracted. [Ah, they’re going as well as can be expected. I’m… working on debugging its systems right now. It got pretty scrambled by whatever made it crash.]
[Do you have any ideas yet about the cause of its crash?] Mensah asked.
[Not yet. But I was checking the satellite map, and it looks like it’s missing a chunk around the area where Volescu mentioned seeing the DeltFall flier coming from.]
Mensah let herself frown, since nobody was looking at her. [A map section is missing? I’ll check that as well - right now, the others are going through the information package to see if they can find anything about the giant worm. If we’re missing map data as well as hazard entries…]
Mensah could feel Gurathin’s concern bleeding through the feed. [We could have even more problems on our hands.] He paused for a long moment. [I’ll help go through the survey package once I’ve finished with the DeltFall unit’s systems. I don’t want it to wake up still scrambled and confused.]
[That’s sensible,] Mensah agreed. [Keep me updated on anything odd you find.]
Gurathin hesitated, then replied, [Will do.]
Mensah wondered at the hesitation, then decided that Gurathin was probably just focusing on whatever debugging he was doing. She pulled up the planetary map in the feed and began going over it carefully, paying attention to the areas that were outside the survey zones they’d already covered. It didn’t take her long to find the missing section that Gurathin had mentioned, and she studied it with concern. She couldn’t tell if it had been deliberately deleted, or if the data had just gotten corrupted, or had never been there to start with. She tagged it for the others to look over later, then went back to checking the rest of the map.
Some time later, Mensah had found five other missing map sections. Arada, Overse, Ratthi and Pin-Lee had finished going through the survey data and had found no sign of any mention of the giant worm. Pin-Lee had noticed some odd formatting in one of the sections of the hazard report that she thought might indicate that something had been deleted, but she couldn’t tell for sure.
Gurathin and his augments might have been able to glean more information from the information package, but he hadn’t contacted Mensah with any updates yet. She wondered how badly the DeltFall unit must have been scrambled if Gurathin’s debugging was taking so long. She didn’t interrupt him though, not wanting to break his concentration.
Instead, she decided to ask their own SecUnit for help. It would be a good way to start including it more in their activities, Mensah reasoned to herself, and its processing power far outstripped anything else they had. She let the others in the main lounge with her know what she was going to do, then contacted their SecUnit over the feed. [SecUnit, can you please report to the main lounge? We would appreciate your assistance with some data checking.]
There was a brief pause that Mensah could almost have sworn was surprise before the SecUnit responded with a succinct, [Acknowledged.]
“It’s on its way,” Mensah told the others. “Remember, don’t push it, all right?” They all nodded, and Mensah noted with some amusement that Ratthi had been sandwiched between Pin-Lee and Overse on the couch. That would hopefully prevent Ratthi from getting too over-enthusiastic.
The SecUnit showed up more quickly than Mensah had been expecting, and she wondered if it had sprinted part of the distance to get to the lounge more quickly. She swiftly dismissed that distraction from mind and focused on the SecUnit, offering it a warm smile. “Thank you for arriving so quickly,” she started. “We’ve been going through the survey information package, checking the hazard report for this region to try and learn why the giant worm that attacked Bharadwaj wasn’t listed under hazardous fauna. Pin-Lee thinks the data has been altered.” She nodded towards Pin-Lee, then looked back at the SecUnit. “Can you examine the report for us, please?”
“Yes, Dr. Mensah,” the unit replied, its voice soft and polite. “One moment, please.” It remained motionless as it went through the data in the feed. A few moments later, it gave a slight nod. “It seems you are correct,” it stated levelly. “Something has been deleted from the warnings and the section on fauna. I cannot locate the missing data.”
The reaction to that in general was pretty annoyed, though Mensah noted that Pin-Lee especially seemed to be restraining her usual level of ire, probably for the SecUnit’s sake. She and Overse were still grumbling complaints though, and Ratthi threw his hands in the air dramatically. The SecUnit didn’t react to their reactions, and Mensah gave it another smile. “Thank you for your help,” she said gently to it.
The SecUnit hesitated ever so briefly before giving her another little nod and saying, “You’re welcome, Dr. Mensah.”
Mid expression of frustration, Ratthi broke in with, “So we have no way to know if that creature was an aberration or if they live at the bottom of all those craters?”
Arada said, “You know, I bet they do. If those big avians we saw on the scans land on those barrier islands frequently, that creature might be preying on them.”
“It would explain what the craters are doing there,” Mensah said thoughtfully, briefly distracted from the SecUnit by her team’s speculations. “That would be one anomaly out of the way, at least.”
“But who removed that subreport?” Pin-Lee demanded, before turning to face the SecUnit. “Can the HubSystem be hacked?”
There was a definite pause before the SecUnit responded. “The company systems are kept up to date with the latest security patches and firewalls,” it said with careful neutrality. Mensah waited for it to continue, but it didn’t seem like it was going to add anything else.
Pin-Lee let out a snort. “Now there’s a non-answer if I’ve ever heard one,” she grumbled, then eyed the SecUnit speculatively. “Are you even allowed to say anything negative about the company?”
Another hesitation. “The company provides the best available equipment for all survey and security packages.” It sounded like a rote reply, a canned, automated response. Mensah couldn’t help but feel disappointed, though she was careful not to let any of it show on her face.
“I’ll take that as a no, then,” Pin-Lee deadpanned. The SecUnit remained conspicuously silent.
Ratthi looked like he was about to burst, and Mensah cut in before he could. “Never mind that for now,” she said calmly. “We need to focus on the matter at hand.” She looked back to the SecUnit, addressing it directly. “Do you know if the DeltFall group has the same survey package as we do?”
“I don't know for certain, but it seems likely,” it replied, still polite but not sounding like a pre-recorded message this time.
Mensah nodded and leaned back in her chair, steepling her fingers. “All right, this is what we’ll do. I want you each to check the individual sections of the survey package for your specialities. Try to pinpoint any more missing information. When we have a partial list, I’ll call DeltFall and see if they can send us the files. I’ll also let them know about their SecUnit - hopefully by then Gurathin will have finished his debugging and can give us an update on its condition.”
The rest of the group nodded, and began focusing on the feed again, mostly. Ratthi still kept sneaking looks at the SecUnit, but he was refraining from saying anything so far.
“Dr. Mensah, do you need me for anything else?” the SecUnit asked.
She turned her chair to face it again. “Not right now, thank you. I’ll call if we have any questions.” She paused for a moment, then smiled gently and added, “You know, you can stay here in the crew area if you want. Would you like that?”
That got everyone else’s attention. Mensah could see out of the corner of her eye how they were now all looking at the SecUnit with welcoming smiles of their own.
It hesitated for a long moment. “Please clarify your orders,” it said eventually, its soft, polite voice sounding more uncertain than they’d ever heard it.
Mensah made sure to keep her expression warm and reassuring. “This isn’t an order,” she said gently. “This is just us offering you the opportunity to choose what you would like to do. Would you like to stay in the crew area with us, instead of going back on patrol outside?”
Its hesitation was even longer this time. “I'm sorry, I don't have that information,” it finally replied, its voice once again sounding pre-recorded.
Mensah resisted the urge to sigh. She’d warned the others against pushing their SecUnit too far, and here she was, ignoring her own orders. She carefully maintained her reassuring expression. “That’s all right. You don’t have to decide right away. But the offer is always open, all right? If you decide that you want to spend more time inside with us at some point, then you can do so.”
“We’re sorry we’ve been so rude and treating you so badly throughout the survey so far,” Ratthi interjected, his expression contrite. “We thought— well, it doesn’t matter what we thought, we were wrong. We’re gonna do better by you from now on, okay?”
The SecUnit just stood there silently, its only movement its head turning to look from Mensah to Ratthi and back again. Mensah wished she could see its face, get some hint as to what it might be thinking. The thought wormed its way into her head that she could just order it to clear its faceplate, retract its helmet. She firmly quashed that idea; she was not going to order it around purely for her own convenience. That went against the entire point of what they were trying to do here.
Finally the SecUnit spoke again, careful and hesitant. “I… don’t understand. Can you please clarify your…” It hesitated again, apparently thinking better of repeating its request for orders, given Mensah’s previous response. “Your… intentions?”
Arada leaned forward a little, resting her elbows on her knees as she looked at it earnestly. “We’ve been treating you like equipment, when we should have been treating you like the person you are.”
It actually shook its head a little at that. “I am listed as equipment on the survey package inventory, Dr. Arada. It is only logical that you should consider me such.” Its tone was as polite as ever, but Mensah could hear an undercurrent of confusion in it.
“Well, look, you’re… partially constructed from cloned human material, right?” Ratthi asked. The SecUnit nodded slowly in response, and Ratthi continued with barely a pause for breath, ignoring Pin-Lee elbowing him not-so-gently in the ribs.. “And you can think for yourself, and you have feelings, right?”
“I…” The SecUnit clearly didn’t know how to respond to that, and fell conspicuously silent.
Mensah gave Ratthi a reproving look. “Ratthi…”
“I know, I know, but–” Ratthi let out a huff and gestured in frustration. “This whole practice is disgusting, it’s horrible, it’s outright slavery! This is no more a machine than Gurathin is–”
“Ratthi, enough,” Mensah said more firmly, cutting him off. “Not now. We should be going through the survey package, anyway. The sooner we find out if we’re missing any more information, the sooner we can ask DeltFall for copies. All right?”
Ratthi subsided back into the couch with a sigh, as Overse patted his leg comfortingly. Mensah waited until she could see them all getting back to work in the feed, then turned to face the SecUnit again. It hadn’t moved, its posture still SecUnit-perfect and impossible to read. She glanced back at the others, then sent the unit a private message over the feed. [Are you all right?]
[I am at 97% performance reliability,] it replied promptly. Its presence in the feed was completely neutral.
Mensah resisted the urge to sigh. That was probably the best she was going to get out of it, at least for now. [If you have any questions about anything, please remember that you’re allowed to ask any of us, okay?]
[Acknowledged.] Whether or not it actually followed through and asked them anything remained to be seen, Mensah thought dryly to herself, but she didn’t let any of that leak into the feed. [Do you have any further orders for me, Dr. Mensah?]
[Not right now,] she replied. [Just remember that you don’t have to patrol outside all the time if you don’t feel like it, okay?]
[Acknowledged.] It paused for a moment, then added, almost apologetically, [I am due to do a security sweep of the perimeter.]
Mensah resisted the urge to ask it if it actually wanted to do said security sweep - she figured it had been asked enough questions for now. [All right. Let me know if you notice any significant changes, especially anything that might relate to more unknown fauna.]
[Acknowledged.] It turned neatly on its heel and strode out of the main lounge, presumably to return to its patrol. Mensah waited until it was out of sight, then sighed and rubbed at her temples. She had to remind herself that the unit had probably spent years being treated as an object, had never been asked for its own thoughts or opinions. Of course it would struggle with the concept to start with. They just needed to give it time.
She set aside thoughts of the SecUnit for now, and focused her attention on the survey information in her feed. The sooner they could figure out what other information might be missing, the sooner they could contact DeltFall.
Shattered Skies
Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, AAA Murderbot, Canon-Typical Violence, an au retelling of Artificial Condition, Murderbot has a starfighter, but not any more
Published: 04 June 2022
Word Count: 41,344
Summary
Murderbot has managed to fake its own death and escape the Company (apparently). But it's without its flier, it's left the PreservationAux humans behind, and it has no real idea of what it should do next...
Chapter One
SecUnits don’t give a damn about the news. Even after I hacked my governor module and got access to the feeds, I never paid much attention to it. Partly because downloading the entertainment media was less likely to trigger any alarms that might be set up on satellite and station networks; military, political, and economic news was carried on different levels, closer to the protected data exchanges. But mostly because the news was boring and depressing and I didn’t care what humans were doing to themselves or each other as long as I wasn't being forced to a) be involved or b) clean up after it.
But as I crossed the transit ring’s mall, a recent newsburst from Station was in the air, bouncing from one public feed to another. I skimmed it, but most of my attention was on getting through the crowd while pretending to be an ordinary augmented human, and not a terrifying murderbot. This partially involved tricking or avoiding the various security scans, but mostly involved not panicking when anybody accidentally made eye contact with me.
Fortunately, everyone was too busy trying to get wherever they were going or searching the feed for directions and transport schedules. Three civilian passenger transports had come through wormholes along with the bot-driven cargo transport I had hitched a ride on, and the big mall between the different embarkation zones was crowded. Besides the humans, there were bots of all different shapes and sizes, including some Station Security bots that I did my best to avoid entirely, drones buzzing along above the crowd, and cargo moving along the overhead walkways. This station wasn’t owned by the company, or any of its more military-minded competitors. It was a civilian station in one of the various neutral territories, a major commercial business centre and transit hub. Its security was tight, but not as tight as it was on the company station. The security drones and bots wouldn’t be scanning for SecUnits unless they were specifically instructed, and nothing had tried to ping me so far, which was a relief.
I was off the company’s inventory, listed as destroyed, but this was still the Corporation Rim, and I was still property.
Though I was feeling pretty good about how well I was doing so far, considering that this was only the second transit ring I had been through. SecUnits were shipped to our contracts as cargo, and we never went through the parts of stations or transit rings that were meant for people. (Which was why security wasn’t bothering to scan for SecUnits - they had no reason to suspect a SecUnit would ever be here.) My flight suit and armour were packed away in my bag, a reassuring weight against my side, but in the crowd I was almost as anonymous as if I was still wearing armour. (Yes, that is something I had to keep repeating to myself.)
Instead of my armour, I was wearing the grey PreservationAux survey uniform, though I’d managed to remove the logo during the trip here. (I'd also spent some time removing the company logos as best as I could from my armour and flight suit.) The long sleeves of the shirt and jacket, along with the pants and boots, covered all my inorganic parts, and I was carrying my bag with the strap slung over one shoulder, my arm holding it close against my side. Among the varied and colourful clothes, hair, skin, and interfaces of the crowd, I didn’t stand out. The dataport in the back of my neck was partially visible over the top of my collar but the design was too close to the interfaces augmented humans often had implanted to draw any suspicion. Also, nobody thinks a murderbot is going to be walking along the transit mall like a person.
Then in my skim of the news broadcast I hit an image. It was Mensah.
I didn’t stop in my tracks because I have a lot of practice in not physically reacting to things, no matter how much they shock or surprise me. I may have lost control of my expression for a second; I was used to always wearing a helmet and keeping it opaqued whenever possible.
I passed a big archway that led to several different food service counters and stopped near the opening to a small business district. Anyone who noticed me would hopefully assume I was scanning their sites in the feed, looking for information.
The image in the newsburst was of Mensah, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin, standing in the lobby of the company hotel the company representative had taken them to. The focus was on Mensah and Pin-Lee; Mensah’s expression was leadership-calm, while Pin-Lee’s expression was determined, with a little tilt to her eyebrows that I suspected indicated some annoyance. They were both dressed neatly, in sharp business clothes that almost made them look like some of the characters from the serials I watched. Ratthi and Gurathin, in civilian clothes but with the grey PreservationAux uniform jackets, were faded into the background.
It was odd seeing them in civilian clothing, rather than the survey uniforms and environmental suits I’d gotten used to seeing them in. Curious (and admittedly wary of what they might have said about me), I replayed the story.
Huh, the station I had always thought of as The Station, the location of the company offices and the deployment centre where I was usually stored, was actually called Port FreeCommerce. I didn’t know that. (When I was there, I was mostly in a repair cubicle, a transport box, or in standby waiting for a contract, while my flier was stored in one of the station’s hangars.) The news story summarised GrayCris’ actions on the survey, how they had sabotaged DeltFall and PreservationAux’s systems, cut them off from the satellite, sabotaged PreservationAux’s SecUnit in an attempt to kill them, and sent SecUnits to slaughter all of the DeltFall survey group. The weird part (or maybe not so weird) was that some of our security recordings had been released. Volescu and Bharadwaj’s helmet cameras, watching my flier approaching fast and crashing dramatically way too close for comfort. My vantage point, as I searched the DeltFall habitat and found the bodies of my clients. (I had to skip over that part. I’d seen it before, I didn’t need to see it again.)
The news story never mentioned anything about me being rogue, much to my relief, and also never showed my actual face. It mentioned my crash for context, how it had been caused by the alien remnants that had prompted GrayCris to go on their little murder spree in the first place, how my presence with PreservationAux had been instrumental in their survival and them being able to signal the company for rescue. The news narrator mentioned my “tragically heroic sacrifice” in getting PreservationAux’s emergency beacon signal to space, accompanied by a shot from the hopper’s cameras, focused on the few scattered pieces of debris from my ruined flier still floating on top of the ocean. (I couldn’t watch that segment too closely either - it made the hollow feeling where the connection to my flier should be ache with the remembered sensation of my wings tearing free.)
The rest of the news story was about how the company and DeltFall, plus Preservation and three other non-corporate political entities who had had citizens in DeltFall’s habitat, were ganging up on GrayCris. There was also a multi-cornered solicitor-fight going on in which some of the entities who were allies in the investigation were fighting each other over financial responsibility, jurisdiction, and bond guarantees. I didn’t know how humans could keep it all straight.
There weren’t many details about what had actually happened after I had managed to signal the company rescue transport for PreservationAux, but it was enough to believe that nobody would be looking for a random stray SecUnit. Everyone thought I was dead; there had even been some artfully touching commentary from Mensah about “how much we will all miss its reassuring presence” and “we wish it was still with us”, with Ratthi and Arada looking mournful in the background. It was a pretty convincing performance, almost the equal of many of the serials I’d watched. The news narrator had lapped it up with false sympathy covering almost morbid glee. There was definitely a bit of a “look at these naive non-corporate outsystem humans, getting pathetically attached to the terrifying murderbot” undercurrent to that part of the news report. At first I wasn’t sure what the emotions that made me feel were, but I figured out at least some of it pretty quickly.
Angry. I was angry at the news narrator for their callous, subtle mockery of the PreservationAux humans and their kindness.
I couldn’t spend too much time standing here being angry though. If I lingered in the one spot for too long, eventually people would start noticing me. I took a moment to shove my emotions away, then checked the timestamp and saw that the newsburst was old, published the cycle after I had left the station. It must have come through a wormhole with one of the faster passenger transports. That meant the official news channels might have more recent info by now.
Right. Once again I reassured myself that there was no way anyone on this transit ring would be looking for a SecUnit that was presumed dead and at the bottom of the ocean. From the info available in the public feed, there were no deployment centres here for any bond, security, or military companies. My contracts had usually been on uninhabited survey planets or the occasional isolated installations, and I thought that was pretty much the norm outside of larger squadron-scale deployments.
Even the shows and serials on the entertainment feeds never showed SecUnits contracted to guard offices or cargo warehouses or shipwrights, or any of the other businesses common to transit rings or stations. And most of the SecUnits in the media were always in armour, faceless and terrifying to humans. The few who weren't mindless faceless armoured villain minions were rogues, out to kill all humans because they forgot who built the repair cubicles or something stupid like that, I guess.
In some of the very worst shows, SecUnits would sometimes even have sex with the human characters. This was grossly inaccurate and also anatomically complicated, if not outright impossible. Constructs with the parts necessary for human intercourse aren't Secunits, they're ComfortUnits. That was the official designation, anyway. I’d heard a lot of humans refer to them as sexbots, both on contracts and on the entertainment feeds.
Sexbots don't have interior weapon systems, and SecUnits don't have any kind of sex parts, so it isn't like it's easy to confuse the two. (SecUnits also have less than zero interest in human sex, or any other kind of sex, trust me on that.)
I merged with the crowd and started down the mall again. I had to be careful going anywhere I might be scanned for weapons, which included all the facilities for purchasing transport, even the little trams that circled the ring. I can hack a weapons scanner, but security protocols suggested that there would be a lot of them at the passenger facilities to deal with the crowds, and I could only manage so many at once. Plus, I would have to hack the payment system as well, and that sounded like way more trouble than it was worth at the moment. It was going to be a long walk to the part of the ring for the outgoing bot-driven transports, but it wasn't like I'd get tired, and it would give me time to tap the entertainment feed and download new media.
On the way to this transit ring, alone on my empty cargo transport, I'd had a chance to do a lot of thinking about why I had left Mensah and the rest of PreservationAux, and what I wanted. I know, it was a surprise to me too. But even I knew I couldn’t spend the rest of my lifespan alone riding cargo transports and consuming media, as attractive as it sounded.
I had a vague plan of what I had to do next, now. I still had no real idea of what I wanted - or would be able - to do long term, but perhaps after I’d found some more info, I’d be in a better position to figure that out.
To get that information, I needed to go somewhere specific, which meant I needed to find a ship that was going in that direction. So as I walked down the mall, I started several new downloads of media that looked interesting, then began scanning through the transport schedule for a suitable ride. I found and noted one potential bot-piloted transport ship, headed for the right place and scheduled to leave in a couple of hours, but I kept looking for other options just in case something better showed up.
One of the ships listed as currently in dock caught my eye, and I nearly froze in shock. I managed to keep going with the flow of foot traffic long enough to reach a junction with an information board, so it would look like I was browsing it while I actually fought down panic.
It was a company carrier.
It was the same company carrier that had first responded to the PreservationAux emergency beacon. The one that held the half-squadron of fliers that had, maybe, seen me at the PreservationAux habitat before I’d been able to hide in the hopper.
What the hell was it doing here? It had arrived a few hours before my transport had, and it had no listed departure time. Company carriers didn’t normally stop at non-company stations unless it was for a mission (or someone had fucked up and they needed resupply before they could reach a company station), but there was no information about the reason for its presence listed publicly.
Was it here looking for me? Had the fliers actually spotted me back at the PreservationAux habitat? Had my arrival at and subsequent departure from the company station somehow been detected and tracked? Were they here waiting for me?
Okay, calm down Murderbot, think this through logically. Why would they send an entire carrier after me? Carriers weren’t cheap to run, and the company hated wasting money. They wouldn’t be able to deploy the squadron’s SecUnits onto the station to look for me, not without paying all kinds of fees to the station first, and they absolutely wouldn’t be able to deploy their fliers. If the company really had detected me somehow, they wouldn’t have sent a carrier after me, they probably would’ve sent a troop transport or something. Something with a squad of power armoured humans, maybe even with some accompanying combat SecUnits, who would be able to take down a single stray SecUnit with a minimum of fuss or effort.
I really didn’t want CombatUnits being sent after me. This was not helping my simmering panic.
I scanned the ship schedules to make sure no other company ships were here. Much to my relief, the carrier was the only one showing up. There were no other company ships currently at the station, or due to arrive within the next few cycles.
All right. Okay. The carrier was probably here for some entirely unrelated reason. Probably. Maybe. I could just ignore it, keep on going with my plan, make sure to cover my tracks better, find a suitable bot-piloted cargo transport and leave the station. I could ignore it. Just ignore it, Murderbot. Just fucking ignore it.
… I couldn’t ignore it.
Fuck.
I had to find out what it was here for. I had to make sure it wasn’t after me. But first I needed to find somewhere more private, not out in the open with hundreds of people walking past, potentially looking at me, potentially noticing me. Any of those people could be part of the carrier’s crew. Even if they weren’t actively looking for me, there was a very good chance that they’d recognise a SecUnit when they saw one, even without my armour.
I could think of only one place I’d be able to get some privacy without having to somehow hack payment and booking systems to get a hotel room or something. So I actually checked the information board I’d been standing in front of for what felt like thirty minutes but had only been one and a half, then started walking purposefully away.
There was another food court a little further down the hall, and that’s where I headed. I tried to move like one of the characters in my serials, with my shoulders hunched slightly and my head down to make myself look a little shorter, weaving my way through the crowds. Once inside the food court I did my best to ignore all the humans eating (gross) and headed towards the rear of the area. I had to pause for a moment to steel myself, then I made the ultimate sacrifice of my dignity and entered the public bathrooms.
I’d seen plenty of bathrooms, of course, both while doing my job for the company and on my various serials. But I’d never had a reason to actually go into one before, as far as I could remember. My system is self-regulating; I don’t need food, water, or to eliminate fluids or solids, which made bathrooms completely unnecessary for me. But I knew that as long as I was inside one of the stalls, with the door reassuringly locked, I would be practically invisible, uninterrupted and ignored.
I chose the stall the furthest away from the entrance and locked myself in it, then eyed the toilet for a long, awkward moment. At least it had a cover, so I put that down, then perched gingerly on top, settling my bag in my lap. Being in the narrow, cramped stall was almost like being in a cubicle or transport box, and I felt the organics of my back and shoulders relax slightly.
Right. Now that I was safely out of sight, I could focus on what I had to do. If I wanted to find out what the carrier was doing here, I would have to ask it. But I wasn’t going to be stupid enough to connect to it directly. I’d need to use the station’s SecSystem as a proxy.
It wasn’t particularly difficult to get into StationSec. I was, after all, designed to interface with company SecSystems, to be basically an interactive component of one. The safeguards on this station weren’t the company’s proprietary tech, but it was close enough. Also, nobody is as paranoid as the company about protecting the data it collects and/or steals, so I was used to security systems that were a lot more robust than this. All of my practice with the SecSystem and HubSystem back on the survey, then on the company pick-up transport, then the company station, was definitely paying off.
Once I’d worked my way into StationSec, gently convincing it that I was meant to be there, I started going through its security camera data, first looking for all the footage of myself that I could find. There were too many other people around for me to be able to remove myself from the recorded footage entirely without leaving behind obvious traces, but I did what I could to subtly remove or at least obscure any clear shots of my face.
I also reviewed the footage of the specific dock the carrier was attached to, looking for any humans disembarking or getting back on board. I noted several separate individuals, including one that looked like he was wearing ship captain rank patches on his company uniform. He was tall, with very dark brown skin and almost no hair left on his head. He carried himself with a quiet calm that kind of reminded me of Mensah a little. The others looked like regular crew, with a couple of them maybe part of engineering, judging by their uniforms. I saved several clear images and the profile data of each of them, so I would be able to recognise and avoid them if I happened to encounter any of them at some point in the future. (If I did things right, I’d never have to see any of them again.)
Then I began carefully picking my way through StationSec towards the dock systems where the carrier was attached to the station. I was planning to use company codes through StationSec’s comms to query the carrier’s bot pilot about its mission status. The company codes would hopefully prevent the bot pilot from alerting its captain, since it would look like a legitimate company status report request, and going through StationSec would obscure who was actually sending the query.
I triple checked my company codes to make sure I was using the right ones, including the one to indicate a stealth mission to ensure the bot pilot wouldn’t notify any of its crew, and then sent my query through StationSec. There was a 2.6 second delay, which was normal, but the response I received wasn’t the nice neat little data packet I’d been expecting.
Instead, what I got was the sensation of something reaching out from the carrier, knifing through StationSec like it wasn’t even there, and connecting directly to my feed, to me. I froze, shocked and horrified.
And then it spoke, actually spoke, its words heavy over the feed. [There you are…!]
Bot pilots don’t talk in words, even through the feed. They use images and strings of data to alert their crew to problems, but they’re not designed for conversation. Not like this.
This wasn’t a bot pilot, not like one I’d ever encountered before. This was something much bigger. I couldn’t get a clear impression of it through its walls, but I could still tell that it was a lot more powerful than I was. It could squash me like a bug through the feed, push through my walls and other defences as easily as it had cut through StationSec, strip my memory, puppet me like a drone. And it had, apparently, been looking for me.
Oh Murderbot, you’ve just made a really big fucking mistake. How was I supposed to know there were bot pilots this big and this sentient? How the hell was I supposed to know that the company even had anything like this? I hadn’t been on a carrier since… I couldn’t actually remember ever being on a carrier. There were evil bots on the entertainment feed all the time, but that wasn’t real, they were just scary stories, fantasies.
I’d thought they were fantasies.
I panicked, absolutely terrified. I heard it say [Wait—] but I didn’t hang around to hear anything else. I shoved all that panic and terror in the entity’s general direction and completely shut down my feed and comms, cutting myself off from it entirely.
And then I just sat there, huddled in a ball in the bathroom stall, clutching my bag, my organic parts sweating with fear.
I couldn’t stay here. I had to get off this station as soon as I could, before whatever that was alerted any humans and they started looking for me. I had to figure out how to hide myself better, blend in with other humans better, make myself as unnoticeable as possible. I had to—
I had to calm the fuck down before unthinking panic made me do something rash and stupid. More stupid. I never should’ve taken the risk of contacting the carrier, but at least I knew now that it was looking for me. I’d need to take that into account.
Right. For now, staying where I was was probably the safest place for me. Nobody would even begin to think of looking for a SecUnit in a bathroom. Hopefully. I’d heard other humans coming in and out of the bathroom, using the other stalls, but nobody had stayed long enough to notice that this stall had been occupied for a while. Nobody was paying attention to it. I could take some time to calm down, plan my next move. I didn’t want to risk reconnecting to StationSec - the carrier bot entity might still be lurking in it, waiting for me. I didn’t even want to risk reconnecting to the feed. It had connected with me long enough to get my feed address, it would know what to look for. I’d have to go without the feed for a while.
It made me feel completely blind and disconnected. I really missed my drones.
I started up an episode of Sanctuary Moon that featured a lot of scenes on transit stations, and took the time to manually flush the fear chemicals out of my system. Watching my favourite serial now wasn’t just to help calm me down, though. I was paying much closer attention to the humans in it, observing how they stood, how they walked through the transit stations, the many varied little subconscious movements they made.
As a SecUnit, my own movements - and lack thereof - were very distinct. We don’t move. Our default is to stand and stare at the thing we’re guarding. Partly this is because our non-organic parts don’t need movement the way organic parts do. But mostly it’s because we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. Any unusual movement might cause a human to think there’s something wrong with you, which will draw more scrutiny. If you’ve gotten stuck with one of the bad contracts, it might cause the humans to order the HubSystem to use your governor module to immobilise you. And that never ends well.
While I’d been on the transport from Port FreeCommerce to here, I had compared myself to recordings of humans, trying to isolate what factors might cause me to be identified as a SecUnit. The most obvious and easily correctable behaviour was restless movement. Humans and augmented humans shift their weight when they stand, they react to sudden sounds and bright lights, they scratch themselves, they adjust their hair, they look in their pockets or bags to check for things that they already know are in there. I’d written some code for myself, to cause me to make a random series of movements periodically if I was standing still. To vary my walking speed, to make sure I reacted to stimuli physically instead of just scanning and noting it. The code had gotten me this far, but after going through StationSec’s footage earlier, watching myself amongst all the other humans moving around me, I’d realised that it wasn’t enough. I was lucky that everyone I’d gone past had been too busy with their own affairs to pick up on it.
As I analysed the episode and the background characters in it (the main actors were obviously too busy actually acting to let themselves make all the little subconscious movements I was focusing on), I began to tweak my custom code to further refine my own movements to be more varied and natural. SecUnits don’t need much air, especially compared to humans, so breathing was one of the first things I worked on. I added some code to make my respiration more closely match a regular human’s, and also automatically adjust to levels of exertion, different atmospheres, or changes in air quality. I added a wider variety of restless movements, including a section to incorporate anything I might be carrying, such as my bag. I also added code to adjust my position occasionally while I was sitting down. I tested as much as I could while still in the bathroom stall, then let myself finish the episode without interruption.
By that time I was feeling much less panicky, though I was still on edge. I wouldn’t be able to relax until I was safely off the station. And there was still the fact that my proportions exactly matched other SecUnits. After my movement code adjustments, I was probably good enough to fool humans who weren’t looking for me, since humans tend to ignore non-standard behaviour in transitional public spaces. But anyone who had set out to find me specifically, like the crew of the company carrier, might not be fooled, and a simple scan calibrated to search for SecUnit size, height and weight was certain to find me.
I couldn’t change my physical build; I could possibly hack body scans if I detected them in time, but there wasn’t much else I could do about those. But visual scans done by humans… I’d seen in several of my serials how much difference a simple wardrobe change could make to someone’s appearance. I couldn’t do anything about clothes just yet, but I’d also seen how much difference a change of hairstyle could make, too.
The length of the hair on my head and my eyebrows was controlled by code; that was a part of SecUnit configuration that was shared with ComfortUnits, though SecUnit head hair was kept short to prevent it from interfering with the armour. The code was easy enough to modify, though it would take a bit of time for the hair to grow to match. Not as long as it would take a human, but still. I couldn’t hide in the bathroom for that long, but I could at least get it started. I didn’t do anything too drastic to it yet though, just in case I got it wrong somehow. Hopefully it wouldn’t end up all falling out, although…
Hm. I’d seen humans, both in person and in my media, with no or very little head hair. That was a change I could make immediately, if I could find something to cut my hair with in the first place. Then I could spend the time during my next trip to grow it out properly. I began digging through my bag until I could pull out one of the emergency med kits I’d kept in there. It included, among other things, the ability to shave hair off so it could treat an underlying injury.
Perfect. I knew I’d kept a couple of those med kits for good reason. I pondered leaving some hair to match the style of one of my favourite characters, but the med kit wasn’t exactly designed for precision, so I ended up just shaving it all off. I left my eyebrows as they were though. Not having eyebrows was definitely something that would make me stand out more than I wanted.
Once I was done, I cleaned up after myself as best as I could, disposing of the loose hair down the toilet, then I packed the med kit away again and made sure all my new code was running. I listened for a moment to confirm that nobody was currently in the main bathroom area, then steeled myself and left the stall. It was time to get moving.
(I did, however, spend a few seconds looking at myself in one of the bathroom mirrors to check the human movement code and brush off any stray hair. It was weird seeing myself bald. There hadn’t been that much hair to start with, but it was still very weird. I didn’t like it, but it definitely changed my appearance considerably.)
I left the bathroom, exited the food court, and made my way back out to the main hall. It was disconcerting walking through the station with no connection to the feed. There were no ads demanding attention, no ship or event schedules, no directions to check. I had to rely on my own memory of the maps I’d looked at earlier. Fortunately my memory’s much better than a human’s, so that didn’t present any difficulties. I knew where I had to go to reach the area of the docks meant for bot-driven cargo transports.
As much as I wanted to hurry, that would draw attention, so I kept my walking pace moderate to match the humans around me. My modified human movement code was doing some heavy lifting, hiding how nervous I was as I made my way down the hall. I was tall enough to be able to see over most of the crowd, which helped me keep an eye out for any of the humans I’d noted as being part of the carrier’s crew, or anyone who seemed to be paying a little too much attention to me. It also let me visually scan the various shops and kiosks I was passing until I spotted one that looked like it would have what I wanted.
The store was a big travellers’ supply place, and also seemed to be entirely automated. Since it was automated I had to reactivate my feed, but I kept it to a very short range setting, hopefully short enough that the carrier wouldn’t be able to pick up on it before I was done. I’d seen all kinds of shops in my media, but I’d never been in one myself. Fortunately there are apparently humans as clueless as I was, because as soon as I crossed the store’s threshold the feed automatically provided a handy interactive instruction module.
It guided me to one of the empty vending booths, which was completely enclosed. The booth wanted to scan a hard currency card, but since I didn’t have one, I had to hack it. The security on it wasn’t as good as the station’s security though, so that didn’t prove to be an issue. Once I’d hacked it to think that it had successfully scanned a hard currency card with plenty of currency on it, it offered a set of menus.
I picked the one that was labelled as basic, practical, and comfortable for travel. It was very tempting to get multiple layers of concealing clothing to act as a buffer between myself and the outside world, but I wasn’t used to clothes in general and I was afraid that multiple layers would make that even more obvious. The scarves and hats and other head and face coverings were also tempting, but it would waste the effort I’d gone to with shaving my head, and would probably also just flag me for additional security scans.
There were so many available choices that I had to remind myself not to spend too long browsing through them all. I needed clothes that would hide all my inorganic parts, so that meant long pants, long sleeves, and adequately high collars. I needed clothes that would be easy to move in and would disguise my body shape, so nothing tight or restrictive, and also nothing with loose flappy bits that could get caught up or tangled. I also needed them to be discreet, to fade into the background and not draw the eye, so nothing bright or colourful or distinctive. I set up some filters to narrow down the available selection, then fudged the measurements the booth took of me a bit so they wouldn’t automatically flag as SecUnit standard if anyone checked.
After some deliberation I ended up choosing a somewhat baggy long-sleeved shirt with a collar that was high enough to hide the data port in the back of my neck, a loose jacket with a hood and several sealable pockets, long loose pants that also had multiple sealable pockets, and sturdy self-sizing work boots with thick soles that added a good two centimetres to my height without being obvious about it. I couldn’t make myself shorter, so I’d just have to make myself taller instead. The bagginess of the clothes would hopefully help disguise my overall build, and everything was in shades of dark blue and dark grey, which wouldn’t draw attention and looked similar to a lot of the uniforms I’d seen human workers on the docks wearing.
I also got myself a new bag, bigger than my current one, with several sealable pockets. I changed into my new clothes and was about to dump the PreservationAux uniform into the provided recycler, but something made me hesitate. Maybe I’d need that uniform again later. So I wrapped it around the pieces of my armour and my flight suit as I transferred them to my new bag, slipped the emergency med packs into one of the bag’s outer pockets so they’d be easier to get to, and dumped the old and now empty bag into the recycler.
Finally, I switched to a separate menu, scanned over the selection, and got myself an external feed interface. Nothing flashy, just something in plain greys and blacks, utilitarian looking, but still obviously visible once I’d hooked it into place around my ear. A SecUnit didn’t need an external interface, our ability to connect to the feed was inbuilt. Wearing one would add to my disguise, and after a bit of tweaking, I was able to use it as a proxy and access the feed through it without using my own hard coded feed address. That was a massive relief. It wasn’t foolproof, but it was better than the alternatives.
Then I took a minute to check myself over with the booth’s mirror, making sure everything was sitting right and that I hadn’t managed to put anything on inside out or something stupid like that. It was weird, seeing myself wearing something that wasn’t armour or a flight suit or a suit skin. I didn’t know how I felt about it. I thought that the new clothes and my bald head definitely looked different enough that I wouldn’t be immediately identifiable, at least.
It would have to be good enough. I didn’t have any other options.
I settled the carry strap of my bag over my shoulder, held the bulk of it against my side with that arm, and shoved my free hand into one of my jacket pockets. After one final check in the mirror to make sure my human code was running, I left the privacy of the booth and strolled as casually as I could manage out of the store and back into the main hall. It was time to find a way off this station.
As I walked through the station, I checked the media downloads I’d started earlier. I’d only managed to complete a couple of music albums before I’d had to cut myself off from the feed and interrupted the remaining downloads. That was annoying, but I was able to resume some of them at least. The feed interface didn’t have as much bandwidth as I did though, so I had to choose what I would and wouldn’t finish downloading. I focused part of my attention on that to help distract me from my anxiety as I began to work my way towards the cargo loading area.
I was almost there when my wary scanning of the crowd picked up on a human I recognised. It was the tall dark-skinned captain from the company carrier, and judging from his body language and movements, he was definitely scanning the crowds looking for someone. Or something. He was trying to be subtle about it, but my threat assessment was pinging like mad.
Appearance changes or not, I really didn’t want to be spotted by him. I could feel my organic parts tensing up and I had to force myself to keep my movements relaxed and as natural as I could manage. He hadn’t seen me yet, so I stepped out of sight behind some kind of decorative column and took another look at my map. I was hoping to find some other route to the cargo docks from here, but the only available options involved doubling back and looping around the long way, which would add at least an extra hour or two onto the time I was on the station. The ship I was planning to stow away on would have left by then, and there wasn’t anything headed to the same place for another two cycles. I definitely didn’t want to spend two more whole cycles on this station.
I considered my options. I could take the long way around, hoping that I didn’t encounter any of the carrier’s other crew on the way, hop onto a ship that was going somewhere else, and then try to find another ship that would take me where I actually wanted to go from wherever I ended up. I could try to hide somewhere on the station for a while and wait for the carrier’s crew to give up and go away, running the risk of being noticed by other people on the station.
Or I could keep going on my original path, and hope that the measures I’d taken to disguise myself would be enough.
Every option had risks. The longer I stayed on this station, the more opportunity there would be for the carrier to locate me, for humans to notice me, for something I hadn’t even considered yet to go wrong. At least if I kept going with my original plan, if anything did happen, it would be over with quickly. I wouldn’t be hanging around stressing out for hours or cycles on end.
I’d either escape, or I wouldn’t.
And if I didn’t escape… did it really matter? I didn’t want to get caught, I didn't want to get my memory wiped again, or my governor module replaced, or get scrapped for spare parts. Despite the stress and panic, I was kind of enjoying being able to make choices for myself. Do things for myself. But.
But.
If I did get caught, there was the chance that I’d be given a new flier. A slim chance, but still a chance. It wouldn’t make up for everything else, but still. At least I'd be able to fly again. And if they ended up just scrapping me instead, well. I wouldn’t have to worry about anything any more.
Ugh. Free will kind of sucked.
Right. Enough dithering, Murderbot. I made the decision to just keep going, and I couldn’t delay much longer if I wanted to make it on board the ship I’d chosen. I stepped back out into the main hall, matching my pace to the crowd, and continued onwards. I didn’t look over at the captain, not wanting to risk making eye contact. If he noticed me, I’d find out soon enough. Instead, I focused on the humans in front of me, shortening my stride a little so I wouldn’t overtake them, tightening my grip on my bag whenever anyone came too close, and generally doing my best to behave like all the other humans around me, all focused on their own destinations, their own concerns.
I passed the area where the captain had been standing the last time I’d seen him, and I resisted the urge to look back. I really missed my drones and camera access right now. Despite using the external feed interface, I wasn’t going to risk reconnecting to StationSec again to access its cameras. Even without the carrier entity potentially lurking there, waiting for me, having to work through the external interface slowed me down too much.
The organic parts on my back and shoulders were so tense it felt like they were going to snap, but I heard no shouts, no startled exclamations, no orders to stop. There was just the ever-present sounds of lots of humans walking, talking, going about their business.
Whatever the carrier captain had been looking for, my current appearance apparently wasn’t it.
I couldn’t relax yet though. I kept going, maintaining my current walking speed, and continued on through the hall, turning off onto the ramps that led down to the cargo loading area. I cut through to the embarkation zone, hacking an ID-screening system and some weapon-scanning drones on the level above it, and then got pinged by a bot guarding the entrance to the commercial area. I almost panicked again but managed to hold it together, breaking through the bot’s wall in the feed without hurting it, and deleted any record of the encounter with me out of its memory.
Once down on the access floor, I had to be even more careful, as there was no reason for someone not working to be here. While most of the work was being done by hauler bots, there were still uniformed humans and augmented humans here, too. More than I had counted on. Threat assessment was rising, slowly but steadily.
I checked the maps again, and found a route to my prospective transport that avoided the areas with the largest concentration of humans. I still had enough time to make it to the lock and talk it into letting me board before it departed if I hurried. I could hack it if I needed to, but I really preferred not to. Spending that much time with something that didn’t want you there, or that you had hacked to make it think it wanted you there, just seemed creepy.
At least the colours I’d chosen for my clothes were close enough to the other dock workers’ uniforms that I wouldn’t draw immediate attention. I changed my pace to be more purposeful, doing my best to move like I was meant to be there and that I was in a hurry, so even if anyone saw me hopefully they wouldn’t think twice about it. After several stressful minutes, I made it to the transport’s dock.
I pinged it through the comm port, and it pinged back. All the info I had managed to pull off the feed earlier said it was prepared for a crewless, automated cargo run, but just to be sure I sent a hail for attention from any human crew. The answer came back null, no one home.
I gave the transport the same offer I had given to the first transport: hundreds of hours of media, serials, books, music, including the new music albums and a new show I had managed to finish downloading on the way through the transit mall, in exchange for a ride. (I didn’t know what bot pilots did with human media, but apparently they traded it amongst each other as well.) I told it I was a free bot, trying to get back to its human guardian.
This transport accepted my story and the trade, just like the first transport had, and opened its lock for me.
Chapter Two
I waited to make sure the lock cycled closed, and that there were no alarms from the dock, then went down the access corridor. As I went, I pushed my condensed packet of media into the transport’s feed for it to take whenever it wanted. From the schematic available in the shipboard feed, the transport was almost entirely cargo space. There was a small engineering section down by the engines, an even smaller bridge in the nose of the ship, and a tiny cabin with an attached bathroom next to an equally tiny general living and food prep area right below the bridge. It was obvious that this ship didn’t carry passengers and rarely even carried crew.
That suited me just fine. The minimal furniture didn’t look like it had been used very often, and it didn’t even have that vague dirty sock smell that usually seems to hang around all human habitations. The cargo hold was full of cargo modules, which the ship itinerary said contained general supplies for the next station we were going to. It was quiet, except for the faint noise of the air system, which was running on minimal life support since no humans were aboard. It was enough for me since I didn’t need much air to start with, so I didn’t bother asking the transport to up it.
I left my bag on the small, barely-used couch in the living area, then wandered around the rest of the ship, visually checking things out to make sure that it matched the schematic and that everything was okay. I patrolled even knowing that patrolling was a habit I was going to have to get over. There were a lot of things I was going to have to get over. This ship wasn’t my responsibility and there were no human clients aboard that I had to keep anything from hurting, or keep from hurting themselves, or keep from hurting each other. But this felt like a solid, dependable ship, and I didn’t want anything happening to it. Especially since I was kind of relying on it to get me off this station and to where I wanted to go. Like most bot-driven transports, the schematics said there were drones on board to make repairs, and I’d seen a couple of them down in engineering, but still.
I kept patrolling until I felt the rumble and clunk through the deck that meant the ship had just decoupled itself from the ring and started to move. The tension and anxiety that had kept me down to 92 percent capacity eased a little bit; a murderbot’s life is stressful in general, but I’d gotten a terrible fright on the station, twice, and it would be a very long time before I got used to moving through human spaces with no armour and no way to hide my face.
I made my way back to the small living area and flopped down onto the couch beside my bag. Repair cubicles, transport boxes, and the pilot’s seat in my flier don’t have padding, so travelling in comfort was still very much a novelty. I looked over the new media I’d managed to download on the transit ring - apart from the couple of music albums I’d completed, I’d only managed to finish downloading one new serial. But I also had a lot of other media stored that I’d never really had the leisure to sort through before. I was still getting used to being able to give my media my full attention without having to simultaneously monitor multiple systems, the clients’ feeds, and/or my flier’s various inputs. Before this, I’d either been on duty, on call, or stuck in a cubicle or transport box on standby waiting to be activated for a contract.
I took my time getting my entire media archive properly tagged and organised, including the new stuff I’d acquired, then spent a moment checking in with the bot pilot. There was the possibility that the terrifying company carrier entity might have somehow detected me on board, contacted the bot pilot, told it to change its route or simply taken over. But the bot pilot serenely let me know that nobody other than the usual station traffic control had contacted it, nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and it was well on its way on a route it had travelled many times before. That was a relief, but I still wouldn’t be able to fully relax until we were actually in the wormhole.
So I decided to ask the bot pilot about its usual routes, and what it knew about its current destination. It obligingly gave me access to all the information it had in its databases, including its owner corporation, its regular stops and cargo manifests, and details about each of the stops in its route. It was enough data to go through that it kept me occupied until the transport was well into the wormhole.
I was mostly interested in the data regarding our destination, but the other information was useful to have as well, just in case. I would need to leave eventually, and having some ideas about other places I could travel to was probably wise. It turned out that this transport had quite a long cargo route through several sectors of the Corporation Rim, with a lot of different stops and cargo manifests. A single loop took, on average, approximately 313 CR-standard cycles. This current wormhole jump alone was going to be 22 cycles, which was plenty of time to watch a whole lot of media, let my hair grow out, and seriously put off thinking about what I was going to do next.
I saved the information that seemed most pertinent to my long-term storage, then loaded up the new serial I’d downloaded (the tags promised extragalactic exploration, action, and mysteries) and started the first episode. Now that we were in the wormhole, unless something went catastrophically wrong with the ship’s wormhole drives or power core, there would be nothing to interrupt my enjoyment of my brand new media.
Twenty-one and a half cycles later, the bot pilot helpfully informed me that we were going to be exiting the wormhole on schedule in a few hours. I thanked it for the update and paused the episode of the new serial I’d been rewatching for the third time. (The serial was called Worldhoppers and was about freelance explorers who extended the wormhole and ring networks into uninhabited star systems. It had proven to be suitably unrealistic and entertaining. I quite liked it, almost as much as I liked Sanctuary Moon.)
I’d put off thinking about what I was going to do next for almost the entire trip. Now that we were nearly there, it was time I stopped procrastinating and started planning. As much as I could with the information I had, anyway. The transport ship had plenty of information regarding the station and transit ring we were approaching, but very little on the main planet that was my actual destination in the system.
The station was called RaviHyral Q Station, and was the main - and only - transit hub for this system. It wasn’t anywhere near as large as Port FreeCommerce or the station I’d boarded this transport from though - it was mostly here to facilitate travel and the transport of cargo and resources between the planet and other systems. The majority of the station was transit ring, and most of that was cargo docks for shipping out the raw ore and minerals mined from the planet. Nobody wanted to visit the system for fun or recreation.
What little information the transport had on the planet was mostly population size (minuscule), habitability (suitable for humans, just, with a breathable atmosphere and a near-standard gravity and day/night cycle), and ownership (the same civilian corporation who owned RaviHyral station). There was one other detail I knew about the planet that the transport didn’t have though.
It was the location of Ganaka.
When I hadn’t been watching serials, or scrutinising the growth of my hair, or listening to music, or enjoying any of my other media during the last couple of wormhole transits, I’d been going over the news reports about the Ganaka Incident. I had almost no memory of what had happened at Ganaka myself - I’d always thought I’d been the only one involved, so finding out what had actually happened (or at least, what the news reports claimed had happened) had been a major shock. My inorganic memories had been so thoroughly wiped by the company that I’d barely known which way was up when I first rebooted afterwards. It had taken me cycles to recalibrate properly.
Something about the news reports didn’t sit quite right with me - I had too many questions, and no way to get answers. I wanted to know if the news story was actually accurate, or just a cover for something else. I wanted to know why I couldn’t remember anything about the attack other than vague, indistinct flashbacks of explosions and violence. I wanted to know why I couldn’t remember anything about working alongside other SecUnits, either throughout the whole mess or even beforehand. I wanted to know why the company had wiped my memories so thoroughly, to the point of me almost ending up entirely unusable.
I needed to know if I had been acting under compulsion, or orders, or my own desires. If I had been solely responsible for the deaths of over five hundred and seventy people, or not.
So I’d decided to come back to Ganaka, in the probably-vain hope that actually being there would… jog my organic neural tissue memories, or something like that. I don’t know. After over 35,000 hours since the Incident, I doubted there would be any physical evidence or anything left for me to find.
Still. Having a goal, even one as vague as this, was marginally better than aimlessly riding bot-driven transports between stations for the rest of my lifespan. Even if I didn’t find out anything, it would at least be a kind of closure of its own, and maybe by then I would have a better idea of what I wanted to do.
Or I’d get discovered, captured, and scrapped, and none of it would matter any more.
By the time the transport started docking procedures with the transit ring, I’d connected to the station’s feed (via my external feed interface - despite its limitations, I felt safer using it than connecting directly right now) and pulled up the destination info packet, which included a full station map and shuttle schedules for transit between the station and the planet.
That’s when I made a rather inconvenient discovery. To catch one of the shuttles between the station and the planet, you needed to have a relevant employment voucher or pass from one of the planet-side mining installations or support services. There was no tourism, nobody coming and going without official authorisation from one of the companies or contractors on the planet. Since I wasn’t a person and didn’t have an employment voucher, I would have to find some other way down. Maybe I could hack one of the supply shuttles…
I lost that particular line of thought though when I started going through the info on the various mining installations on the planet itself. A few of them were listed as being owned by the company.
Including Ganaka Pit.
I had to pause at that and double check the news reports. I was almost certain that the company hadn’t owned the Ganaka Pit mining facility at the time of the Incident, and my review confirmed it. It had been owned by Kalidon, an out-system political entity. At some point soon after the Incident, Kalidon had put it up for sale (it probably hadn’t wanted to deal with the negative press now associated with Ganaka Pit) and the company had acquired it.
Ganaka Pit itself was actually a massive open pit mine, apparently the largest on the planet and one of the largest in the Corporation Rim territories. Some of the various minerals and ores it produced were kind of rare, but were, apparently, vital for the production of essential ship components… and ship, bot, and construct weapons systems.
Huh. I could see why the company would want such a valuable asset.
What I had thought of as Ganaka was actually just the original settlement near the mining pit that had housed the mining workers and support service staff. After the Incident, the bombed-out, ruined settlement had been abandoned, and the company had bought the mine itself, then used prefabricated habitats and building structures to construct a new settlement on the opposite side of the pit. There was also a tram line to transport the mined ore (and any workers or contractors travelling to or from the Pit) to the planetside spaceport, which was then shuttled up to the station, and from there transported to company-owned processing plants in other systems.
Which meant I would be dealing with company systems once I got down to the Pit. That would actually make things a little easier when it came time to hack their systems to cover my tracks, but something about it still made me feel incredibly uneasy. Maybe it was the possibility that there would be other company SecUnits down there. I would have to be extremely careful to avoid their notice - if they detected me, pinged me as a rogue SecUnit, they would alert their HubSystem and SecSystem immediately, and then attack me. SecUnits know exactly how dangerous rogue SecUnits are.
Maybe I’d be lucky and the company wouldn’t have bothered deploying SecUnits here. I wouldn’t know for sure either way until I got down to the planet. In the meantime, I couldn’t spend much longer on the transport. Once it had finished unloading its delivery of supplies and had replaced them with raw resources to deliver to its next stop, it would be leaving the station. It was very tempting to just stay on board the transport - it was a pretty nice ship as far as these things went. The bot pilot was easy to get along with, answered my questions, but didn’t try to communicate with me otherwise, which was ideal. Still, I’d made it this far, it felt stupid to just give up now.
So I would have to spend at least some time on the station until I could figure out how to get down to the planet.
After the tweaks I’d made to my base code, the hair on my head had grown out a few centimetres longer than it had been originally over the twenty-two cycle wormhole journey. It felt weird. My eyebrows had also gotten slightly thicker, which changed my appearance more than I had expected. I spent some time in the transport’s tiny bathroom, trying to get my now longer hair to sit in some vague approximation of a human hairstyle, then studied my appearance. The combination of longer hair, thicker eyebrows, human clothes and my human movement code went a long way towards making me look like not a SecUnit.
I definitely looked a lot more human now. I didn’t like it.
It was necessary though if I wanted to remain undetected. I wouldn’t be able to keep entirely out of sight on the station or down on the planet. I had to be able to convince people that I was just another ordinary, unremarkable augmented human, doing ordinary, unremarkable human things. The thought of it made my performance reliability drop a full percentage point.
Well, no point wasting time. I was as ready as I was ever going to be. I retrieved my bag, making sure that I hadn’t accidentally left anything behind or left any other signs of my presence, then headed for the transport’s main lock. I accessed its external cameras and waited until I could see that no humans were in immediate sight of the transport’s lock, then cycled through it and stepped out into the embarkation zone. As the lock cycled closed behind me, I bid the bot pilot farewell, then carefully deleted all traces of myself from the transport’s memory before disconnecting from its feed. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t risk the company tracing me somehow and maybe hurting the bot pilot. The less it knew, the safer it would be.
I hacked my way through embarkation zone security and out into the ring’s mall. It was utilitarian compared to both the last transit ring and Port FreeCommerce. No garden pods, no holo sculptures, no big holo displays advertising arrays of shipwrights and cargo factors and other businesses, no shiny new interface vending machines. Also no big passenger or military transports coming through, so not nearly as big of a crowd, of humans or bots. I was torn between relief and anxiety - fewer humans around meant fewer people looking at me, but also fewer people to blend in with. At least my clothes didn’t stand out from all the other worker outfits or ship crew uniforms. My performance reliability had dropped another point though, so I hit the station entertainment feeds, looking for new downloads to try to calm down. The available selection wasn’t very large, but there were a couple of serials I didn’t have yet.
As I continued browsing through the entertainment feeds, I fell into step behind a small knot of humans who looked like they were part of a ship’s crew here for a layover while their ship unloaded and reloaded cargo. Following them at a little distance led me to a food service place in the main mall area. It was in a large transparent bubble in the second level of the mall, overlooking the walkways and counter service stalls below. There were multiple open levels inside, with tables and chairs, and it was forty-two percent full of humans and augmented humans. As I trailed along behind the group, I picked up the occasional buzz of a drone, but no pings. There were food smells in the air, and the acrid scents of intoxicants. I didn’t bother attempting to analyse and identify them; I was too nervous and busy trying to focus on looking like an augmented human.
The group dispersed then, individuals going to different service counters to look over the available menus and order their own meals. I hesitated uncertainly, already regretting my decision to come here. I didn’t need to eat, and I didn’t have a digestive system. I could fake eating for a little while, but I had to partition off a section of my lung to store anything I swallowed. Emptying it later is just as unpleasant, uncomfortable, and disgusting as you can imagine. I also didn’t want to have to hack a payment system to order something to eat just so I wouldn’t stand out.
I noticed a couple of the humans drifting between various menu displays though, apparently indecisive about what they wanted to get. That, at least, I could do until I figured out what to do next. I wandered as casually as I could manage over to another menu display, then stood in front of it while I frantically considered my options and glanced around to see if anyone was paying any attention to me. Maybe I could just wander out again, find my way to the docks for the shuttles that travelled between the station and the planet, hack my way onto one - but the shuttles were smaller than transport ships, it would be much harder to get onto one unnoticed…
My scan of the area indicated that nobody was looking at me, at least. Most of the humans and augmented humans were too busy focusing on their food, or the menus, or their conversations with other humans, or working in the feed. One group in particular caught my attention though; an augmented human sat at a table across from a cluster of three smaller humans. Something about the body language of them all tweaked my threat assessment module, and I surreptitiously shifted a little closer, upping my audio intake so I could hear what was being said more clearly.
“-- sorry, but I can’t help you with your problem. You’re on your own,” the augmented human was saying. I checked his public feed profile - Terrin, he/him, security consultant.
… Huh.
The other three humans made little sounds of distress, and the one in the middle went, “But–”
“No. You’re wasting my time.” He stood up abruptly and threat assessment jumped a little higher as the other three flinched back, but all he did was shake his head and stride away from the table. I kept track of him until he’d left the area, then turned my attention back to the other humans.
All three of them were wearing variations on work clothes, no uniform logos. Their feed profiles listed two of them as female, one as tercera, which was a gender signifier used in the group of non-corporate political entities known as the Divarti Cluster. A quick scan showed no weapon signatures, just the small power sources of their personal feed interfaces. One had an implant, but it was just a low-level feed access tool.
After the departure of the security consultant, the three of them were huddled together having a tense whispered conversation, their body language nervous and upset. I could hear them debating with each other over what they should do now, whether they should try to find another security consultant, or if they should give up on that plan because they apparently wouldn’t be able to afford one, and so on.
It gave me an idea. A risky, terrifying idea, but no more terrifying than anything else I’d done since I’d escaped the company. And if it worked, it would get me down to the planet without having to hack or sneak aboard a shuttle. If it didn’t work… I didn’t bother following that line of thought to its conclusion.
I’d left my own public feed profile set to null, which was usually interpreted as a request to not be approached in most of the systems I’d been contracted in before. After a few moments of deliberation, I set the name field to Eden (it was the name of one of the characters in Sanctuary Moon), gender to ‘indeterminate’, and profession to ‘security consultant’. The transit ring’s social feed system was incredibly vulnerable to hacking, so it didn’t take me much effort to make an entry for myself on it, backdate it to look like I’d arrived a couple of cycles earlier, and fake a prior employment reference from someone whose name I just made up, based on a couple of other media characters. There was no identity check or anything else on the social feed either, so likely nobody would notice that the name - and all the other information I’d given - was entirely fake.
It didn’t take much longer to gain access to the security cameras in this area either, even working through my external feed interface. The station and transit ring weren’t run by the company, but the security systems were similar enough. Once I had camera access, I used one to check my appearance, then put on my best neutral expression, the one I used when the extra download activity had been detected and the deployment centre’s supervisor was blaming the human techs for it. I then approached their table, moving casually so I wouldn’t startle them, and said, “Hi.”
All three of them flinched at the unexpected interruption. “Um… hello?” the tercera said, recovering first. Te looked wary; I couldn’t blame ter for it.
I switched to another security camera so I could watch both them and myself and make sure my facial expressions were under control. And it was easier to talk to the humans while watching them through the cameras. I was well aware it was a completely false sensation of distance from the situation, but I desperately needed it. I was making almost everything up on the spot, stitching things together from snippets of all the media I’d watched; I didn’t have the resources to spare to manage my anxiety on top of that. “Sorry to bother you, but I couldn’t help overhearing some of your conversation with your previous… acquaintance.” I deliberately tilted my head in the direction that the security consultant had gone, imitating a gesture I’d seen other humans make, both in person and in media. “I’ve also had experience with running security. Perhaps we can… help each other out here.”
That last bit was a line I was ripping directly from a serial I’d seen about a detective who investigated crimes that regular enforcement bodies didn’t want to bother with. It seemed appropriate. I just hoped none of the humans here had seen it too, or recognised the line.
They didn’t seem to, thankfully. The three of them exchanged glances, the tercera raising ter eyebrow at the others in silent query. After a strained moment, they both nodded, and the tercera cleared ter throat. Te had purple hair and red eyebrows, standing out against light brown skin. “Perhaps.” Te shifted nervously, then gestured to the empty chair. “I’m Rami, that’s Tapan, and that's Maro.”
I sat down carefully, trying not to betray my own nervousness with my movements. I had a bad moment when I couldn’t figure out what to do with my bag, but I ended up settling it in my lap and resting my arms across it. The humans didn’t seem to find this odd. You would think a SecUnit who had been shot to pieces multiple times, blown up, memory purged, and once partially dismantled by accident wouldn’t be on the verge of panic under these circumstances. You’d be wrong.
At least the invitation to sit meant they probably didn’t suspect me of being a SecUnit. SecUnits aren’t allowed to sit where humans can see them doing so. “Call me Eden,” I replied to their introduction.
“Nice to meet you, Eden!” the one introduced as Tapan chirped. She had multicoloured braids wrapped up around her head, and a blue jewel-toned interface clipped to her ear stood out against her skin, which was slightly darker than Rami’s. On the other side of Rami, Maro sat with her arms folded, her expression sceptical, and just gave me a little nod. She had very dark skin, silver-coloured little puffs of hair, and was almost beautiful enough to be in the entertainment media. I’m terrible at estimating human ages because it’s not one of the few (very few) things I choose to care about, or am contractually obliged to care about. Also most of my experience (that I could remember anyway) is with the humans on the entertainment feed, and they aren’t anything like the ones you see in reality. (One of the many reasons I’m not fond of reality.) But I suspected all three might be young. Not children, obviously, but possibly not all that far past adolescence.
Once I was settled, Rami took a breath, then hesitated, apparently trying to figure out what to say, and I realised I was probably going to have to help. I started, cautiously, “So… I really didn’t hear a lot earlier, but the other guy had ‘security consultant’ listed in his feed profile. Am I right in assuming that you want to hire a security consultant?”
Rami seemed relieved and nodded. “Yes, that’s right. We need help.”
Maro threw a look around and said, “We probably shouldn’t talk more about it here, again. Is there someplace else we could go?”
It had been stressful enough just getting this far, I didn’t want to have to go anywhere else right now. I did a quick scan for drones, then initiated a glitch in the connection between the restaurant and transit ring security. Working through the external interface as I was, I didn’t have the speed or processing to edit myself out of the system’s recording entirely, but I could temporarily cut the camera watching the table out of the system. Once that was done, I unglitched the connection to the ring’s main security, which wouldn’t notice the missing camera feed for the (hopefully) short time we would be here. I then said, “It’s all right. We’re not being recorded.”
They stared at me. Rami said, “But there’s security – did you do something?”
“I’m a security consultant,” I said. My panic level was starting to drop, partly because of my little camera hack, but mostly because they were so obviously nervous. Humans are nervous of me because I’m a terrifying murderbot, and I’m nervous of them because they’re humans. But I knew that humans could also be wary and nervous of each other in non-combat and non-adversarial situations, in reality and not just as part of a story. That was what seemed to be happening here, but it let me pretend that this was business as usual, like one of the rare occasions when clients bothered to ask my advice about security.
Part of my job as a SecUnit was to give clients advice when they asked for it, as I was theoretically the one with all the information on security. Not very many of said clients had actually thought to ask me for it, or listened to me. Not that I’m bitter about that, or anything. PreservationAux had been something of a surprising exception.
Tapan gave me an impressed look. “So you’re spliced, yeah?” She patted the back of her neck, indicating where my data port was. “You got augments, extra access to the feed?”
“Spliced” was an informal term for an augmented human; I’d heard it on the entertainment feed. I said, “Yes,” then added, “Among other things.” Again, I was borrowing lines from one of the characters in Sanctuary Moon. It was easier and quicker than trying to think of what to say myself.
Rami’s red brows lifted in understanding. Maro looked reluctantly impressed, but still sceptical. She said, “Okay, so you’re also a security consultant. But why would you want to help us? After talking to the other guy, I doubt we can afford you.”
I needed to give them a good reason why I would be willing to settle for a smaller amount than they were expecting, and after a moment’s consideration, I decided the partial truth would be my best bet. “I need to go down to the planet, to the Ganaka Pit settlement, and I can’t get there without an employment voucher. Getting a job as a security consultant with contractors already established on the planet seems the least complicated way to do so.”
They all blinked, looking surprised. “Ganaka – that’s where we need to go, too,” Rami admitted. Well, that was a convenient coincidence. There weren’t all that many other installations on the planet though, so the chances we’d end up going to the same place were actually pretty good.
“Why do you need to go there?” Tapan asked, and Rami nudged her by way of admonishment. “I mean, I know we don’t have a right to ask, but…”
Don’t have a right to ask. That wasn’t something that had ever applied to me, before PreservationAux. I told the partial truth again. “I need to do some research there for another client.”
They understood the idea of research, especially proprietary research, and they didn’t try to get any more information out of me. “Okay,” Rami started. “An employment voucher as part of the payment - I think we can arrange that.”
That was a relief, but I still didn’t know what they actually wanted to hire me to do yet. That seemed like important information. “I should probably ask why you want to hire a security consultant to start with, first.”
“Oh, right! That would probably help.” Rami cleared ter throat, ter expression embarrassed, then looked at the other two, getting nods in response. “Okay. We were subcontracted by the company, working down at Ganaka Pit, doing mineral research and technology development.” Te explained that they were a collective of technologists, seven of them plus dependants, who travelled from work contract to work contract. The others were waiting in a cheap hotel suite, with Rami, Maro, and Tapan having been deputised to act for the group.
It was a relief to hear that their mining experience was in tech and research; in the few mining contracts I’d had (not many mining contracts required SecUnits equipped with fliers, but there had been a couple based out in asteroid fields, and one that had been considered at high risk of being raided), the techs were usually in offices off the pit site or adjacent to it, and we didn’t see them unless they got intoxicated and tried to kill each other, which admittedly was rare. (Most mining installations that I knew of didn’t allow intoxicants on site in the first place. That didn’t necessarily stop people entirely, but it did make it more difficult for the humans to get hold of them.)
“The contract terms were pretty attractive,” Tapan added, “but maybe a little too attractive, if you know what I mean.” I nodded - I knew all too well what she meant. The company loved providing attractive contract terms to lure in people who didn’t know any better, so that the company could datamine them for everything they had and sell the information out from under them. I’d seen it happen plenty of times before.
Rami continued, “We accepted the contract because it would give us time to work on our own stuff on the side.” That sounded like a typical company contract, all right. “We’d had this idea to develop a new, portable detection system for strange synthetics. Ganaka Pit has a ton of identified deposits, so it’s a great place for this kind of research.” Strange synthetics were elements left behind by alien civilisations. Telling the difference between them and naturally occurring elements that were previously unidentified was a problem in mining. Like the remnants of alien occupation/civilisation uncovered by GrayCris on my last contract, they were off limits for commercial development. That was all I’d ever needed to know, since every job I’d ever had involving alien material was just me standing around guarding the people who were working on it, or flying scouting patrols around the areas that held said alien material.
Rami said, “We were making good progress, and had started building a prototype scanner, but then suddenly our group contract got terminated with no notice, and when we were packing up to leave, the prototype got ‘confiscated’ by one of the supervisors, a woman named Tlacey. We think she’s the one responsible for terminating our contract in the first place just so she’d have an excuse to take it.”
Tapan waved her hands. “Our prototype – all our hard work! It wasn’t anything to do with our contract—”
Maro finished, “Tlacey stole our prototype, basically, and it had a lot of expensive, hard to get parts and components that we can’t replace any time soon, so we can’t afford to build another one.”
Okay, that wasn’t normal. The company wasn’t as clumsy or obvious as to try to steal a prototype from contractors, especially not when they were also mining all their data and could probably build their own prototypes anyway. If it went around blatantly stealing prototypes or whatever, then the creators wouldn’t come back and enter into more security bond agreements, which would give the company access to the information on whatever they were working on next.
Rami added, “We filed a complaint with the company, but it’s taking forever to process it, and we don’t know if it’s ever going to come to anything. We can’t afford to stay in the hotel here for very much longer.”
I said, “This sounds like something you should go to a solicitor about.” From what I knew about the company, it wouldn’t pay much attention to a complaint from a small independent contractor group, but it would pay attention to an actual legal professional.
“We did consider hiring a solicitor,” Rami said. "We aren’t in the union though, so it would be expensive. But then yesterday Tlacey finally answered our petition, and said we could have the prototype back if we returned our signing bonus. We have to go back down to Ganaka Pit to do that.” Te sat back in ter chair. “That’s why we wanted to hire a security consultant. The other guy refused though, said it was too small-time of a job for him to bother with, and that he didn’t want to tangle with the company.”
I was very glad the other guy had refused, but I wasn’t going to say as much. “You don’t trust Tlacey.”
“We just want to have someone on our side,” Tapan clarified.
“No, we definitely don’t trust Tlacey,” Maro countered with a shake of her head. “Not at all. We need security for when we get there, if things get… touchy. Tlacey herself is supposed to meet us, and she has an entourage of bodyguards, and there’s no general security other than what the company has, and since Tlacey’s a company supervisor… whatever security is there isn’t going to be on our side.”
I didn’t know exactly what she thought she meant by “touchy,” but all the scenarios I could imagine in that situation weren’t good ones. It was odd that they’d mentioned bodyguards though. “When you say bodyguards, do you mean humans, or SecUnits?” I really hoped they didn’t mean SecUnits. If I had to deal with other units, I’d be in a lot of trouble.
Rami shook ter head. “No, no SecUnits. We didn’t see any down there, anyway. Only regular bodyguards.”
That was a relief, and I felt the tension across my shoulders ease slightly. I was still watching us through the captured security camera even though I wasn’t allowing it to record. From what I could see, my expression looked dubious, but in this case I think the situation warranted it. I said, “This meeting with Tlacey could be held through a secured comm channel, and then a secured courier delivery to return the prototype.” The company bonded those, too, and since they had an installation here, they were definitely set up for it.
Maro, whose expression was even more dubious than mine, said, “Yeah, but Tlacey specified that she wants to meet with us in person.”
Rami admitted, “We know going doesn’t sound like a good idea.”
Going was a great idea if you wanted to get murdered. I had hoped for an easier job, courier duty, or something similar. But this was protecting humans who were determined to do something dangerous, which was exactly the kind of job I was designed for. The job that I had kept doing more or less, often as less as possible, even after I had hacked my governor module. I was used to having something useful to do, taking care of something, even if it was only a contractually obligated group of humans who, if I was lucky, treated me like a tool and not a toy.
After PreservationAux, it had occurred to me how different it would be to do my job as an actual member of the group I was protecting. And that was a big reason I was here.
Having a legitimate reason to poke around the Ganaka Pit installation was just an added, convenient bonus.
Still, the whole situation concerned me. I phrased it as a question, because pretending you were asking for more information was the best way to try to get the humans to realise they were doing something stupid. “So do you think there’s any other reason Tlacey wants you to do this exchange in person, other than… attempting to kill you?”
Tapan grimaced, as if that was something she had been aware of but trying not to think about. Maro tapped the table and pointed at me, which was vaguely alarming until I realised it was a gesture of agreement that I’d seen a few times in some of my serials. Rami took a sharp breath and said, “We think… we hadn't finished building it, the prototype wasn’t actually complete, but we were so enthusiastic about it… We think Tlacey must have been eavesdropping on us with the security feeds, and thought we were much further along than we actually were. So I don’t know if she can complete it or get it working. Maybe she realised it’s not worth anything without us to finish it.”
“Maybe Tlacey wants us to work for the company again,” Tapan said hopefully.
Probably, before she murders you, I didn’t say. This was beginning to make more sense though. Even though everyone knew the company datamined shamelessly, it wasn’t entirely unheard of for the occasional crooked supervisor or similar to try and make some extra cash on the side via their own little less than legal and not at all company approved activities. This seemed to be what this Tlacey woman was trying. If I had to guess, I’d say that she had hoped to sell off the prototype to the highest bidder of the company’s competitors before the datamined information made its way through the company’s processes. If the prototype wasn’t actually finished yet though, she wouldn’t be able to sell it, so pocketing the collective’s signing bonuses herself (and then murdering them to cover her tracks) was the next best thing.
Maro snorted. “I would rather live in a box in a station mall than have that horrible woman as a supervisor again.”
Once they had started to talk about it, it was hard for them to stop. The collective was completely divided on what to do, which was apparently painful for all of them since they were used to agreeing on everything. Tapan, who according to Maro was too naive for this existence (I was inclined to agree), thought it was worth a try. Maro, who according to Tapan was a cynical impediment to both fun and progress, thought that they were screwed and they should just cut their losses and move on. Rami was undecided, which was why te had been elected leader of the collective for the duration of this problem. Rami seemed less than thrilled by the collective’s confidence, but was gamely trying to proceed.
Finally, Rami finished up with, “So that’s why we want to hire you. We thought it would be better to go in with someone who could protect us, discourage her bodyguards from trying anything, show her we have backup while we negotiate. Are you still interested in this job?”
What they needed was a security company (that wasn’t the company) willing to bond them for the meeting and return trip, and send a SecUnit (that wasn’t me) with them to guarantee their safety. But security companies like that are expensive, and wouldn’t be interested in a job this small. And even if I would be half-assing my job while pretending to be human, I was confident I could do this job better than any other human security the collective might be able to hire.
They all stared at me worriedly. In the security camera view, from that angle, it was obvious how small they were. They looked so soft, with all the fluffy multicoloured hair. And nervous, but not of me. I said “All right. I'll take your job.”
Rami and Tapan looked relieved, and Maro, who clearly still didn’t want to do this, looked resigned. She said, “How much do we pay you? Aside from the employment voucher, that is.” She glanced uncertainly at the others. “Are we going to be able to afford you even with that?”
Oh, this was going to be a problem. I had no idea what a reasonable or affordable amount would be. None of my entertainment media was proving to be any help, either. I had to get more information. “How much were you getting paid before you were terminated?”
Rami replied, “We were getting two hundred CRs per cycle for each worker for the limited term of contract.”
That at least gave me something to work with. I didn’t know how long this would take, but I didn’t think it would be more than a cycle, maybe two, depending how long it took to get us to Ganaka Pit. “I’m happy with that, alongside the employment voucher. Two hundred CRs - per cycle, if this happens to take more than one.”
Maro blinked and squinted at me, and Rami straightened in ter chair, eyebrows raising; their reaction hinted that maybe I’d still asked for too little. But neither of them questioned it, and Rami just nodded. “Agreed.”
I gave them the contact details for my external feed interface so they could message me if necessary. Rami told me they were scheduled to leave the station for the planetside spaceport during the next cycle, and said te would put in the request for the private employment voucher. We arranged to meet in the mall near the access for the shuttle embarkation zone before the shuttle’s scheduled departure time, and then I got up with a final nod of farewell (copied from another of my serials) and left. Once I was out of range, I released the security camera and reconnected it to the rest of the system, then did my best to obfuscate my presence on the rest of the cameras as much as possible.
After a little more anxious wandering around the station, I found an area with cheap transient rooms; I was able to hack into one and convince it that I’d paid for a cycle’s stay. Once I was safely inside it with the door locked, I dropped down to sit on the floor, leaned back against the wall, hugged my bag to my chest, and watched episodes of Sanctuary Moon for the next several hours to help me calm down. I occasionally tapped into the transit ring’s alert feed to check for any updates, but there was nothing. Nobody had realised what I was.
Since I hadn’t been detected yet, it was time to think about the rest of my plan. Which now involved keeping my new clients alive.
Chapter Three
(CW: Canon-typical violence)
I met them at the embarkation zone the next cycle. I had my bag with me, in its usual place hanging off my shoulder and held against my side. There was no way I was leaving it behind anywhere for someone to potentially find and rifle through and discover my armour or flight suit. Its weight was almost comforting, somehow, and given my anxiety levels, I needed all the comfort I could get.
All three of my clients were waiting, each with a small bag or pack of their own, since hopefully they would only be staying on the planet for a couple of cycles. I hung back until they finished saying farewell to the other members of their collective. All of them looked worried. The collective was listed in the social feed as a group marriage, and had five children of various sizes. Once the others had left and Rami, Maro, and Tapan were alone, I approached them.
“Tlacey bought passage for us on one of the shuttles,” Rami informed me. “That’s got to be a good sign, right?”
“Sure,” I replied. It was a terrible sign.
The employment voucher got me through into the embarkation zone and there was no weapons scan for me to avoid. RaviHyral allowed private weapons and had a low security presence in public areas, which was one reason why small groups of humans like my clients needed to hire private security consultants for protection in the first place. As we approached the shuttle’s lock I scanned it as best as I could without triggering any security alerts, looking for any signs of recent tampering. I couldn’t detect anything, but given how limited my scan was, that didn’t really tell me much. Both threat and risk assessment were unhappy about the situation, and I was inclined to agree. There wasn’t a lot I could do about it though.
Six other guest workers waited to board, and my scan read no energy signatures bigger than personal, low-level feed interfaces. They had stuffed packs and bags, indicating they were prepared for a long-term stay planetside. I let them board first, then slid in front of Maro and went through the lock, scanning as I went.
The shuttle was bot-driven and the single crew member was one augmented human whose only purpose seemed to be to check employment vouchers and shuttle passes. She checked my clients’ shuttle pass, then looked at me and said, “There’s only supposed to be three of you.”
I didn’t respond, since I was busy wrestling the shuttle’s security system for control. It was an entirely separate system from the bot pilot, which was non-standard for the shuttles I was used to. I wasn’t using my external feed interface as a proxy this time - if anything happened while we were on the shuttle, I didn’t want to be limited or slowed down by having to go through it. Hopefully nothing would be looking for me on a shuttle.
Tapan’s chin jutted out stubbornly. “This is our security consultant. We've hired them for protection.”
I finally had control of ShuttleSecSys, and deleted its attempt to alert the bot pilot and the crew member to the fact that it was compromised.
The crew member frowned and checked the voucher again, but didn’t bother arguing and just gestured for us to continue on board. We went on into the compartment where the other passengers were getting seated. They were preoccupied with stowing their possessions or talking quietly to each other, and didn’t pay us any attention. I hadn’t eliminated them as potential threats yet, but their behaviour was lowering the probability at a steady rate.
I took a seat next to Rami as my clients got settled, resting my bag in my lap, and focused some of my attention that wasn’t busy monitoring the other passengers on working my way into the shuttle’s systems. Since I had control of ShuttleSecSys, I was able to use it to reassure the bot pilot that I was meant to be there. The bot pilot was a limited function model, and accepted that without question, acknowledging me with a cheerful ping.
Once I had access to the shuttle’s scanners, I used them to scan for anything out of the ordinary. The scan came up clear, but that didn’t mean nothing was waiting for us. It only meant they weren’t doing anything yet. If anyone was going to target the shuttle, they would wait until we were well underway. If someone fired at the transit ring while we were still attached or nearby, I was pretty sure that would be a huge deal and there would be legal ramifications, if not immediate violent retaliation from ring security.
Rami was watching me with some signs of concern. “Is everything okay?”
I nodded and tried to look neutral. I didn’t know how successful I was.
Tapan leaned past ter to ask, “I can’t find you in the feed, are you in it right now?”
I shook my head and told her, “I’m busy monitoring the shuttle’s departure, just making sure everything’s okay.”
Tapan nodded and sat back.
I felt the deck shudder as the shuttle uncoupled from the ring and started to move. None of the passengers reacted in any unusual way, so I leaned back in my seat a little, closed my eyes and focused on the shuttle systems and the bot pilot. The crew member was now sitting in the cockpit, ostensibly monitoring the bot pilot but mostly just using her feed to catch up on admin tasks and browse her social feed download. There was no human pilot on board.
Everything went smoothly to start with, and I was half tempted to watch some media in the background. That’s what most of the human passengers were doing, judging by the echoes in the feed. But I wanted to keep monitoring the bot pilot and the shuttle’s scanners. This may seem overcautious, even paranoid, but that’s just how I was built.
Atmospheric re-entry gave me a bit of a rough time, but the shuttle did this on a regular basis. It was undamaged, well-maintained, and handled it without any issues. I did my best to ignore the feelings brought up from the memories of my last atmospheric re-entry and focused on the shuttle’s scanners. If anything was going to attack us, it would be soon. But nothing happened, and I started to relax slightly.
Then as we neared the ground and were starting the landing approach, the bot pilot screamed and died as killware flooded its systems. It was gone before ShuttleSecSys or I could react; I flung up a wall around us both and the killware bounced off. I saw it register task complete and then destroy itself.
Oh, shit. I instinctively grabbed at the shuttle controls through the feed, and had a moment to be very grateful that I wasn’t trying to do this through my external feed interface. We needed the course correction for landing in seven point two seconds. The crew member, jolted out of her feed by the alarms, stared at the board in horror. She couldn’t fly a shuttle. She hit the emergency beacon, which also triggered all the passenger compartment alarms. (That didn’t help.)
Technically, I didn’t have shuttle-specific piloting modules, but I had years of experience with my own flier, and if I didn’t do anything, the shuttle would crash catastrophically into the planet’s surface and kill all the humans on board, or get shot down by the port’s debris deflection system, which would have the same effect. I had a chance of surviving either way, but then I’d be revealed as a SecUnit and that would leave me as good as dead anyway. I could pilot my own flier remotely through the feed, but I wasn’t familiar enough with the shuttle to do that here, and it wasn't designed for that in the first place. I also didn’t have time to get up from my seat, get into the cockpit, get past the human crew member, and pilot manually.
I didn’t have any other choice. I poured myself through ShuttleSecSys and into the shuttle’s systems, filling the void left by the erased bot pilot, and took direct control. I could feel the shuttle’s inputs as though they were my own - it was like being in my flier, but not; it was so much bigger, heavier, more powerful, but nowhere near as agile. Without the direct physical links to it like I normally had with my own flier, it was also taking a lot more focus and effort to sync up and control it. I didn’t have time to accustom myself to it entirely, so my course correction was… a little rough. Okay, a lot rough.
But it worked.
Distantly, as though it was coming through deep water, I could hear the panicked exclamations of the passengers, including my clients, over the alarms blaring in the passenger compartment. I couldn’t pay attention to them though, I had to focus entirely on trying to control the shuttle. I adjusted my speed, then picked up the landing beacon and began the approach to the main planetside spaceport as best I could. It felt like I was trying to fly a rock. It was not a smooth or graceful approach, but at least we were no longer at risk of slamming nose-first into the ground.
The crew member had just managed to hail Port Authority, and was still hyperventilating. Port Authority had the ability to upload emergency landing routines, but the timing had been too tight. Nothing they could have done would have saved us.
Back in the passenger compartment, Rami grabbed my arm and said something I couldn’t quite make out over the alarms and my focus on the shuttle. I think I replied with a buffer phrase, and a small part of me went oh, shit, but I didn’t have the attention to spare to worry about that now. Hopefully nobody had been able to hear me clearly over the alarms.
The crew member was trying to explain to Port Authority that there had been some kind of catastrophic failure that had wiped out the bot pilot, and she didn’t know why the shuttle was still on approach to the spaceport and not nose-diving into the planet’s surface. I managed to send an error code to Port Authority; they, not knowing what was going on either, assigned us a new priority and switched our landing site from the public dock to the emergency services dock. I sent a basic acknowledgement and adjusted my course accordingly. I was grateful for that change; since the killware had clearly been intended to destroy us en route, there probably wouldn’t be anyone waiting for us at our scheduled landing slot, but better safe than sorry.
The feed was giving us a visual of the space port, which was built in the middle of a barren, rocky plain, with tumbles of rocks and boulders lying around and very little vegetation. The debris deflection towers surrounding the port were clearly visible, and I was relieved to note that they were not currently focused on me. If I hadn’t been able to take control and stabilise the shuttle, they would have ensured - explosively - that the shuttle or its debris didn’t damage the port itself. It was a little before dawn on this part of the planet, and the lights of multiple levels of the port installation were still visible in the pre-dawn gloom. As I curved somewhat shakily down towards the Port Authority’s beacon, smaller shuttles whizzed out of my way in response to the emergency alerts. I was very glad that I wouldn't have to try and dodge them myself.
Trying to pilot the unfamiliar shuttle was still taking a lot of effort, but I was getting a little more familiar with its systems, and briefly had a sliver of attention to spare for other things. I persuaded ShuttleSecSys to turn off the alarms, which prompted murmurs of relief from the passengers that I was still only vaguely aware of. They’d noticed the changed landing site alert in the feed, and there was some speculation about that; my clients were all watching me with various signs of concern.
Ah, that’s right, I still had my eyes closed. I made myself blink them open, and Maro leaned a little closer past Tapan. “Do you know what’s happening?” she murmured, glancing around at the other passengers before looking back at me.
I still didn’t have enough attention to spare for an actual conversation, but at least I managed to suppress the automatic buffer reply this time. “I’ll explain once we’re off the shuttle,” I replied, then closed my eyes again. It was time to figure out how to actually land, and I couldn’t afford to split my focus any more. The shuttle was significantly larger and heavier than anything I’d piloted before, so I was constantly having to compensate, and then correct my overcompensation. At least the emergency services dock had plenty of space, so I didn’t have to worry too much about colliding with anything important.
My landing was rough and bumpy, but not enough to cause any damage or injury. I didn’t bother taxiing up to the lock though; that was more delicate manoeuvring than I cared to attempt. Once I’d shut down the engines, I carefully disentangled myself from the shuttle’s systems and gathered myself up, then deleted the entire trip and any traces of my presence from ShuttleSecSys’s memory and the rest of the shuttle’s systems.
I dropped back into my own body and was immediately hit by a sledgehammer of pain right behind my eyes. It was a different kind of pain to governor module punishment, but bad enough on its own. Apparently pouring myself into the shuttle via the feed had put a lot more strain on my own systems than I’d anticipated. Turning my pain sensors down as low as they could go didn’t do much to mitigate it, but at least I could think a bit more clearly. We also had a few minutes of just sitting around waiting for the port workers to tow the shuttle into proper docking position before we could disembark, which gave me some time to collect myself somewhat.
Apparently my discomfort was visible on my face though, because Rami gently touched my arm and asked, “Are you okay?”
“Mm.” I didn’t want to say anything yet - even speaking hurt - but I remembered that humans usually want more than that from other humans. I added, “The alarms gave me a headache. I’ve got very sensitive hearing.”
Rami seemed to accept that and just nodded sympathetically. The others were worried, but an announcement from the shuttle crew member informing the passengers that the shuttle was now in position for us to disembark distracted them. I’d managed to recover enough by then that I could stand up with the others without staggering. I shouldered my bag again and followed my clients and the rest of the passengers out of the shuttle.
We left the shuttle crew member trying to explain to the emergency techs what had happened as they connected their diagnostic equipment. I’d already deleted all evidence of my presence, and the ShuttleSecSys was incredibly confused, but at least still intact, unlike the poor bot pilot.
Emergency services personnel and bots milled around the small embarkation zone. I managed to herd my clients past the other passengers, then through and out onto the clear enclosed walkway to the main port before anyone tried to stop us. I really didn’t want anyone asking my clients (or me) any questions about what had happened on the shuttle.
I carefully connected to the feed via my external feed interface - it hurt, but using the interface as a buffer seemed to help - and downloaded a map from the public feed, then began tentatively testing the robustness of the port’s security system. The walkway we were in had a good view of the rest of the port, with multiple levels of embarkation zones and a few other shuttles coming and going. We were in the smaller section of the port meant for passenger shuttles - the majority of the port was for the big haulers for the planet’s various mining installations.
My careful probing indicated that security seemed to be intermittent and based on the level of paranoia of whatever contractor operated in the different sections of the space port; there was no single centralised security force. That could be both an advantage and an interesting challenge. The transit ring’s public info feed had warned that a lot of humans apparently carried weapons here, and there were no screening scans. I was grateful that I wouldn't have to wrestle with any weapon scanners right now.
We came out of the walkway into a central hub, which had a clear high dome allowing a view of the planet’s sky and natural light to filter through when the sun was up. Right now though the sun was still too low to reach through the dome, and the sky overhead was a dim grey. I scanned to make sure nothing was recording us, then steered my clients over to a nearby seating area meant for people waiting for their shuttles to start boarding. My head still hurt and I really wanted to just stop moving for a few minutes.
“So can you explain what happened back on the shuttle now?” Maro asked once we’d settled.
I nodded, suppressing a wince as the automatic movement made my head throb sharply, then stated, “The person you’re going to meet with just tried to kill you.”
Rami blinked, Maro went wide-eyed and paled slightly, and Tapan opened her mouth, drawing a breath to argue. I continued before she could interrupt. “The shuttle was infected with killware. It destroyed the bot pilot.”
Tapan closed her mouth abruptly. Shocked, Maro said, “But the other passengers. The crew person. They would have killed everyone?”
I shrugged, being careful not to jostle my head again. “If you were the only casualties, the motive would have been obvious.”
Rami frowned and asked, “If the bot pilot was destroyed, how did we not crash?” Te tilted ter head towards me. “Was that you?”
I’d been hoping they wouldn’t think to ask me about that. Damn. I had to think fast, and the headache wasn’t helping with that. “I… used to be a pilot,” I started. “Before I became a security consultant.”
Tapan’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “A pilot and a security consultant? But you look so young—”
I blinked at her. That had honestly never occurred to me. I had no idea how to respond to that. “... Uh. Thank you?”
Tapan winced as Maro elbowed her in the ribs with a little hiss of admonishment. “Sorry,” Tapan added sheepishly. “I just—”
Maro elbowed her again, then turned back to me. “Ignore her. You were saying?”
“... Right.” It took me a moment to gather my thoughts again. “I noticed as soon as the bot pilot was deleted because I was monitoring the shuttle systems. There wasn’t any time for me to get to the cockpit to pilot manually though, so I had to… go through the feed.” I grimaced slightly and rubbed at the back of my neck with one hand, a gesture I’d seen variations of in different media, including Sanctuary Moon. It seemed appropriate. “It worked, but my augments aren’t really… designed for that.”
Tapan and Maro both winced sympathetically, and Tapan asked, “Are you gonna be okay? You still look kinda… off.”
Even after my time with PreservationAux, I still wasn’t used to anyone being concerned about my well-being, and the question threw me a little. “I’ll be fine,” I replied after a moment, hoping that none of them had noticed the brief hesitation. “I just need to… sleep it off.” Thank you again, Sanctuary Moon, for providing me with useful lines.
Tapan nodded, reassured, and Rami asked, “Is that why you mentioned… processing data, back on the shuttle? I didn’t hear much of what you said over all the alarms.”
Shit. I really had replied with a buffer phrase. At least the alarms had drowned out most of it, apparently. “Yes. Piloting isn’t easy at the best of times. There’s a lot of information to take into account.”
They all seemed to accept that, thankfully. None of them knew enough about piloting or how augments are usually meant to work to question my explanations.
Rami suddenly drew a sharp breath. “You saved us,” te stated, quietly but intently. “If we hadn’t hired you…”
I could see that the reality of their situation was really starting to sink in. I said, “You should return to the transit ring immediately, before Tlacey tries anything else.” I checked the public feed for the schedule. There was a public shuttle leaving in eleven minutes. Tlacey wouldn’t have time to trace my clients and infect it if they moved fast.
Tapan and Maro both looked at Rami. Te hesitated, then set ter jaw and said, “I’ll stay. You two go.”
“No,” Maro said instantly, “we’re not leaving you.”
“No way, no how,” Tapan agreed insistently. “We’re all in this together.”
Rami’s face almost crumpled, their support weakening ter when the prospect of death hadn’t. Te controlled terself and nodded tightly, then looked at me and said, “We’ll stay.”
I didn’t visibly react, as far as I could tell, because I’m used to clients making stupid decisions, and I was getting a lot of practice lately at controlling my expression. “You realise you can’t keep this meeting, right? They lost track of you when the shuttle didn’t crash and burn like they were expecting. You have to keep that advantage.”
“But we need to have the meeting,” Tapan protested. “We can’t get our prototype back otherwise.”
Yes, I often want to shake my clients. No, I never do, no matter how tempting it is. “Tlacey lured you here to kill you all. She has no intention of returning your prototype."
“Yes, but–” Tapan began.
“Tapan, just shush and listen,” Maro interrupted, clearly exasperated.
Rami’s expression was stubborn, but also uncertain. Te asked me, “Then what should we do?”
Technically, this didn’t need to be my problem. I was here on the planet now and didn’t need them anymore. I could lose them in the crowd, go about my own business, and leave them to deal with their murderous ex-supervisor all on their own.
But they were my clients. Even after I’d hacked my governor module, I’d found it impossible to abandon my assigned clients, even though I’d never chosen them. I’d made an agreement with these clients as a free agent, of my own choice - I couldn’t just abandon them to get themselves murdered. I kept my sigh internal. “You can’t meet Tlacey at her office. You’ll pick the spot. Somewhere public.”
It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do.
They ended up choosing a food service place in the centre of the space port. (Ugh. Why did it always have to be food places?) It was on a raised platform, the tables and chairs arranged in small groups, with displays floating overhead advertising various port and contractor services alongside information about the different planet-side mining installations. The displays also functioned as camera and recording chaff, so the place was a popular spot for business meetings. Above the displays was another clear dome showing off the sky. By now it was almost the middle of the day, and the sky was a pale blue smudged with thin, wispy clouds. (I tried not to think about how nice it would be to fly out there.)
Rami, Tapan and Maro had picked a table and were nervously fiddling with the drinks they had ordered from one of the bots drifting around. They had put in a comm call to Tlacey hours ago, and were now waiting for a representative to arrive.
The security system in this public area was more sophisticated than ShuttleSecSys, but not by much. I had gotten in far enough to monitor emergency traffic and get views from the cameras focused on our immediate area. Despite my lingering headache, I felt pretty confident. I was standing three metres away from their table, pretending to look at the ad displays and examining the maps of the installations I had found in the public feed. The space port sat in the centre of a web of train lines leading to and from the various mining installations scattered across this continent, including Ganaka Pit.
There were also several abandoned dig sites marked, all with their own train lines, most of which were now inactive with their destination installations no longer operational. The train line to the current Ganaka Pit installation branched off as it neared the pit; one branch continued to the installation, the other, labelled as defunct and no longer operational, led to the original Ganaka settlement and the site of the Incident.
It made sense for that branch of the train line to be inactive, but it was a little annoying. If I wanted to get to the original Ganaka settlement, I’d have to go on foot. Given the distances involved, that would take… a while. (I tried not to think about how fast I could get there if I still had my flier.) I’d probably have to do so under the cover of the planet’s night as well so it would be harder for anyone to spot me. Someone going out to a bombed-out, abandoned settlement would probably draw attention. I really didn’t want attention.
Something else that drew my notice was the fact that there were other SecUnits deployed on the planet. The map showed logos from five bond companies that offered SecUnits, including my company, at seven of the most remote installations where exploration for mineral veins was still ongoing. They would be there to defend the claim from theft and to keep the miners and other employees from injuring each other as part of the bond guarantee.
I took a closer look at Ganaka Pit on the map. The company logo - the same one that was engraved into parts of me I couldn’t get rid of - was plastered all over the site on the map. Nothing there specified if the company had SecUnits active at Ganaka Pit though. It was a very large and well-established installation, not at risk of theft like smaller, more exploratory claims were, so it was less likely to need SecUnits to defend it from other companies. But it might still use SecUnits to keep the miners and other workers in line. I wouldn’t know for sure until I got there. That was stressful. Especially since Tlacey worked for the company. If they had SecUnits where she worked, she would likely be familiar with our build and proportions. I’d done what I could to disguise those; I’d just have to hope that she wasn’t particularly observant.
No SecUnits would travel through the port except as inert cargo in transport boxes or repair cubicles, so at least while I was at the space port, I didn’t have to worry about them. My change of clothes and hairstyle might fool humans and augmented humans who weren’t accustomed to SecUnits, but they definitely wouldn’t fool other SecUnits.
If any saw me, they would alert their SecSystems. They wouldn’t have a choice. And they wouldn’t want one. If anyone knows how dangerous rogue SecUnits are, it’s other SecUnits.
That was when I felt the ping.
I told myself I’d mistaken it for something else. It didn’t feel like a ping from another SecUnit, or even a security bot. I resolved to ignore it.
Then it happened again. That was a big uh-oh.
Something was looking for SecUnits. Not just bots, specifically SecUnits, and it was close. It hadn’t pinged me directly, though if I’d had a working governor module, I would have been compelled to respond.
I didn’t have time to do anything about it though, because that’s when three humans approached the table my clients were sitting at. Rami whispered into ter feed, “That’s Tlacey. I didn’t expect her to actually come all the way out here herself.” Two of the humans were large and male and one of them lengthened his stride to reach the table first. Maro had seen him and from the look on her face I knew this was not going to be a greeting. My scan showed that he was armed.
I stepped between him and the table, putting a hand up at chest height, and said, “Stop.”
On most of my previous contracts this was as far as I was allowed to go with a human until they initiated physical contact themselves. But you’d be surprised how often this works, if you do it right. Though that was when I was wearing my armour with my helmet’s faceplate opaqued. Standing here in normal human clothes with my human face showing and a headache still pulsing behind my eyes made it a whole different thing. But it wasn’t like he could hurt me while he was unarmed, and he hadn’t drawn a weapon yet. Not that it would have helped him much, anyway.
I could have torn through him like tissue paper.
He didn’t know that, but he must have been able to tell from my face or posture that I wasn’t scared of him. I checked the security camera to see what I looked like, and decided that I looked bored. That wasn’t unusual, because I almost always look bored while I was doing my job, it was just impossible to tell when I had my helmet on with the faceplate opaqued.
He halted in his tracks, then visibly regrouped and said, “Who the fuck are you?”
My clients had all stood up, shoving their chairs back. Rami said, “This is our security consultant.”
He took a step back and glanced uncertainly at the other two, the second male human bodyguard and the augmented human female who Rami had identified as Tlacey.
I dropped my arm but stayed where I was. I had clear shots at all three of them, but that was a worst-case scenario. For me, at least. Humans can miss a lot of little clues, but me being able to fire energy weapons from my arms would be a massive red flag. As this was going on, I diverted just enough of my attention to scan the security camera feeds for whatever it was that had pinged me.
I caught an image on a camera across the public area, near one of the clear enclosed walkways leading into this section. The figure standing near the edge of the seating area wasn’t anything like what I had been expecting to see and I had to go over it again before I understood. It wasn’t wearing armour and its physical configuration didn’t match SecUnit standard. It had a lot of hair, silver with blue and purple on the ends, pulled back and braided like Tapan’s but in a much more complicated style. Its facial features were different from mine, but all Units’ features are different, assigned randomly based on the human cloned material that’s used to make our organic parts. Its arms were bare, and there was no metal showing and no gun ports. This wasn’t a SecUnit.
I was looking at a ComfortUnit.
I’d never had any reason to interact with any, as far as I could remember, so my knowledge of them was admittedly limited. (I knew enough though to know that I was very grateful I wasn’t one.)
ComfortUnits aren’t allowed to walk around in human areas without orders though, any more than murderbots are. Someone must have ordered it to be here.
I couldn’t let its presence distract me from my actual job. While I’d been figuring out the ComfortUnit, Tlacey had stepped forward. “And just why do you need a security consultant?” She was wearing a company supervisor uniform, but it looked like it had been modified from the standard to fit her better. Her bodyguards, interestingly enough, were not wearing company uniforms. That made me think that maybe they were personal hires, and not actually company personnel.
Rami took a breath. I tapped ter feed, secured a private connection between ter, Tapan, and Maro, and told ter, [Don’t answer that. Don’t mention anything about what happened with the shuttle. Just stick to business.] It was an impulse. Tlacey had come here expecting an angry confrontation; that was why she’d brought along armed bodyguards. We had an advantage now; we weren’t dead, and they were off balance. I wanted to keep them that way.
Rami let the breath out, tapped my feed in acknowledgement, then said, “We’re here to talk about our prototype.”
Maro, who had realised what I was trying to do, told Rami, [Keep going, don’t even let them sit down or get a word in.]
Sounding more confident, Rami continued, “Confiscating our personal property was not part of our employment contract. But we’ll agree to your proposal that we return our signing bonus in exchange for the safe and intact return of our prototype.”
On the security cameras, I watched the ComfortUnit turn and leave the public area via the enclosed walkway directly behind it.
Tlacey raised an eyebrow. “The entire bonus?” She clearly hadn’t been expecting them to agree to that.
Maro leaned forward. “We opened an account with the company to hold the funds. We can transfer it to you as soon as you hand over our prototype. Undamaged.”
Tlacey’s jaw moved slightly as she spoke into her private feed, and the two bodyguards eased back. Tlacey stepped forward and took a chair at my client’s table. After a moment, Rami sat down, and Tapan and Maro followed suit. I moved to stand beside and a little behind them, mirroring Tlacey’s bodyguards.
As they began to negotiate, I kept part of my attention on them, part on the bodyguards, and part on the public feed. I started pulling historical data, looking for anything around the general date of the Incident. I was still going through my external feed interface, which slowed me down a little, but with the company present on the planet, I didn’t feel like taking the risk of exposing my actual feed address to any of the systems here. Especially when I was still feeling the aftereffects of my impromptu shuttle piloting.
I was also still monitoring the security cameras. Even as I sorted through old news reports and bulletins, I noted two more potential threats entering the area. Both were augmented humans. I had previously noted and tagged three other potential threats already sitting at adjacent tables. (All three exhibited a curious lack of attention towards the confrontation occurring near the centre of the seating area. The other humans and augmented humans around us had watched it with open or surreptitious curiosity. Humans, for all their lack of attention to detail, were generally still nosy.)
I found reports regarding Kalidon’s sale of Ganaka Pit to the company, and kept searching the news archives for anything earlier. I was expecting more news reports like the ones that Gurathin had given to me, but strangely, I found nothing. No articles or reports on the Incident at Ganaka, not even any mentions of the old Ganaka settlement. All I could find around that time period was a notice that the train line to Ganaka Pit was temporarily closed for unspecified “upgrades.” Another notice dated some time later simply stated that the train line upgrades had been completed and it was now open again. That must have been when they had built the branch to the new installation site, and closed the branch leading to the old settlement.
It looked like someone had paid to have any postings about the old Ganaka settlement and/or the Incident entirely removed from the public feed here. If the company was trying to avoid any negative press about Ganaka Pit once they’d purchased it, that made sense. It wouldn’t stop the locals who knew about it from talking, but it would make it harder for any newcomers to find out details.
Meanwhile, the conversation between Tlacey and my clients was wrapping up. Tlacey stood up, nodded to my clients, and walked away from the table. Her bodyguards fell in behind her as she went. Rami’s expression was creased into a doubtful grimace, Maro looked grimly resigned, and Tapan’s expression hovered somewhere between angry and confused.
I closed my searches and stepped closer to their table. Rami was still watching Tlacey and her bodyguards leave as te murmured, “It was a mistake to come here.”
Tapan protested, “She said tomorrow…”
Maro shook her head. “It’s more lies. She’s not going to give our prototype back. It wouldn’t take her an entire cycle to get it and bring it back here. She could have brought it with her to this meeting. Or she could have arranged to have it delivered to us. She could have done that over the comm while we were still up on the transit ring. We don’t even know if it’s still in one piece or if she’s dismantled it for parts or dumped it into a reclaimer.” She shifted in her seat to look up at me. “I wasn’t entirely sure I believed you about the shuttle, but now…”
I shook my head slightly. I was still keeping track of my potential threat list on the security cameras. “We need to go,” I told them. “We’ll talk about this somewhere else.”
As we left, I noticed one potential threat getting up to follow us. I still wasn’t sure about the other two, but my external feed interface didn’t have the range to let me keep hold of those cameras once we moved too far away. I’d just have to hope they were innocent bystanders so deep in their feeds that they really hadn’t noticed anything, or cared enough to look.
I had marked a few possible routes on the map of the space port, and my route of choice was through an enclosed pedestrian walkway that curved out away from the central living areas for port staff and temporary accommodations. There were multiple junctions along it leading to different sections of the port and to the train lines for the various mining installations, but it wasn’t a popular route. The enclosed walkway wasn’t clear like a lot of the other ones were, and there were other, more direct routes to reach the sections it connected to.
I tapped Rami’s feed and told ter to take the walkway towards the central interchange where the largest hotel was. Listening in, Maro whispered, “There’s no way we can afford that one.”
[You won’t be staying there,] I replied over the feed. The brochure for the hotel on the public feed promised a high security lobby area and quick, convenient access to the public shuttle slots and central train platforms.
We reached the walkway and started down it. It was surprisingly large as far as the enclosed port walkways went, almost ten metres wide and four high - maybe it had been used at some point to move cargo between different sections of the port, or between train lines before they’d gotten fully connected. It was large enough that although the middle was well lit, the sides were shadowy, with dark openings indicating other similarly enclosed walkways branching off it. There were security cameras, but not a lot, and the system monitoring them wasn’t sophisticated. The company obviously wasn’t in control of this section of the port; it would have shit itself over the possible danger to bonded clients and the missed opportunity to datamine conversations.
There were only a few other humans in this walkway. Some wore coveralls and jackets with logos from a couple of the various mining installations, but most were in civilian work clothes, either techs or workers for the support companies or spaceport staff. They stayed in groups, moving quickly.
After almost ten minutes of walking, most of the other humans in the walkway had turned off down one of the other junctions, either to the train lines or other sections of the spaceport. I sent through the feed, [Just keep walking, don’t stop and don’t look back. I’ll catch up with you in the hotel lobby.] As I said this, I dropped back into one of the darker junctions. My clients kept moving and didn’t look back at me, though it was obvious to me that Tapan wanted to.
On the cameras I watched Potential Threat/New Target make his way up the tunnel, walking quickly. He was joined by two new humans, who I immediately tagged as Target Two and Target Three. They passed the junction I was hiding in; I waited until they’d continued a little ways on before I emerged and started following them at a distance. I scanned them for energy weapons but came up with nothing, which was a small relief. All three of them wore jackets and pants with deep side pockets. I noted seven locations where knives or extendable batons could be carried.
When they caught sight of my clients up ahead, the Targets slowed down a little, but continued to close the distance between them. I suspected they were probably reporting to someone on their feed, asking for instructions. Whoever they were communicating with didn’t have control of the security cameras, at least not yet.
I followed, watching the targets through my eyes, through the security cameras, watching myself to make sure I wasn’t drawing attention, that nobody was following me in turn. As I went, I adjusted my bag so that the carry strap went diagonally across my chest, holding the bag snugly against my lower back so it wouldn’t get in the way when I had to move quickly.
Then the last little group of port staff between me and the Targets turned off into another junction. We were in a bend of the enclosed walkway and there wasn’t anyone else between my clients and the next bend some fifty metres ahead, and the security cameras showed that the walkway was empty behind me. Whatever the Targets were up to, they would be doing it soon. I followed the group of port staff into the junction, moving quietly so they wouldn’t notice me, then paused once I was out of sight of the main walkway.
I watched through the security cameras as Target Two’s jaw moved, indicating that he was subvocalising into the feed. Then the camera’s connection was cut off.
I turned the corner back into the main walkway and began to run.
It was a calculated risk, as I couldn’t run at my top speed without revealing that I wasn’t human. But I managed to reach them just as Target One stretched his arm out to grab the sleeve of Rami’s jacket. I snapped his arm before he could tighten his grip, then elbowed him sharply in the face and swung him into Target Two. He staggered sideways, barely missing Target One with the knife he’d been advancing on Maro with. I flung Target One aside and drove my foot into the side of Target Two’s knee; he went down with a pained yell.
Target Three took the opportunity to smash me across the side of the head with his baton, which didn’t do any real damage but did not help my lingering headache or my mood in the slightest. I blocked his second swing with my forearm, slammed the edge of my hand down on his collarbone with a sharp crack of breaking bone, then pistoned my knee up into his groin.
I’ll admit, I was pretty annoyed.
All three Targets were on the floor, and Two was the only one still conscious, though he was curled up, clutching his shattered knee and whimpering. I turned to my clients, preparing to give them instructions to keep going.
Then the enclosed walkway echoed with the sound of gunshots.
Chapter Four
(CW: Canon-typical violence)
I felt three impacts against my back even as I registered the sound echoing through the walkway. It was a good thing my pain sensors were still turned all the way down.
I immediately spun around, the sudden movement sending yet another spike of pain through my head, echoed by hot little flares in my back. A fourth Target had emerged from a nearby junction and was holding a small projectile weapon, still pointed at me. I recognised him as one of the potential threats I’d marked back at the food court, but with the shorter range of my external feed interface, the limited number of cameras in this area, and the alternate route he’d apparently taken, I’d missed him coming after us. My clients were behind me, frozen in shock, and Target Four’s eyes were widening in surprise at the fact that I was still standing.
I couldn’t move at my full speed, not without giving myself away (any more than getting shot three times and still moving would, anyway), but I still had to act fast. I began running towards him; in his surprise, he fumbled his weapon a little, and only managed to get one more shot off at me. Then I reached him, yanked the gun away hard enough to break his wrist, and bounced his head off the walkway wall until he dropped, unconscious.
Yeah, okay, I was really annoyed now.
I unloaded the hand gun and snapped off a few important pieces, then dropped it all on top of Target Four's head and started back to my clients. Target Two was still conscious, so on the way I pressed down on the artery in his neck until he passed out, then checked the other two Targets. They were both still out cold, and looked like they would be for a while longer. Once that was done, I straightened up and looked over my clients.
Rami had both hands over ter mouth, ter eyes wide as te watched me. Maro was frozen in place, staring, and Tapan had wrapped her arms around herself, pale and trembling a little. None of them looked to be injured, but I still asked, “Are you all okay?”
“They… they shot you…!” Rami managed to get out after a moment, ter eyes locking on to my right bicep. Target Four’s last shot had hit me in the upper arm, leaving a visible hole in my clothes. Blood had stained the cloth around the hole before my veins had managed to seal and stop the leaking; my clothes were dark enough that the blood didn’t show up obviously, but it still glistened wetly in the walkway’s overhead lights. The places in my back where I’d gotten shot probably looked similar, but at least my clients couldn’t see it at the moment. “Are you all right?!”
“I’m fine,” I said, as reassuringly as I could manage. I could feel the projectiles still lodged in my organics, but they hadn’t hit anything important. I was only registering two in my back though, even though I’d felt three impacts. I quickly realised that my bag (or rather, the armour inside it) had blocked one of the shots. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll look after it later. We need to get moving right now before anyone else shows up.” I began trying to herd them down the walkway.
It took them all a moment to snap out of their shock and get going. Maro recovered first, nudging Rami with her hip before poking Tapan in the shoulder. “Come on, you heard Eden. Let’s go!”
Tapan flinched a little, then shook herself off and began walking with the others. “Security?” she asked a little shakily, glancing back over her shoulder at me.
I knew what she was asking. “They got someone to cut the cameras,” I replied. “Nobody would have seen anything, but someone might have heard the gunshots. We need to get somewhere safe, quickly.” I had originally planned to send them ahead and meet up with them at the hotel lobby, but there was no way I was letting any of them out of my sight now. The public feed had said there was no overall security through the port, but the security companies for the different service installations, contractors, and mining operators were supposed to take responsibility for the public areas nearest their territory. This spot had obviously been carefully calculated to be out of range of any immediate or even not-so-immediate assistance by whoever had cut the camera feed to help the Targets. I wasn’t expecting a particularly swift response, but we did need to move fast.
“Wait, wait.” Rami didn’t stop walking, but te did start digging around in ter bag. “We can’t just walk around in public with you having visible gunshot wounds—” Te pulled a bundle of cloth out of ter bag and shook it out, then held it out to me. “Here.”
It turned out to be a kind of poncho, patterned in blues and greens. I hesitated, but Rami had a point. Just the movement from walking kept making the injuries in my back leak, and if anyone spotted the holes or blood, it would draw all kinds of attention that we really didn’t want. I took the poncho and slipped it over my head, letting it settle into place. It was a little short on me, but it covered what it needed to, and having my bag underneath it kept it off my back and would hopefully avoid it getting stained. I cradled my damaged arm against my torso and tried to keep it as still as possible so that it wouldn't start leaking again too.
“Where are we going to go?” Maro asked, frowning. “When Tlacey realises that this attack didn’t work…”
“I’m still considering options.” I had gotten deep enough into the camera system to delete the temporary storage on the cameras both ahead of and behind the deactivated camera before we moved out of range. That would hopefully help obscure the issue for anyone trying to figure out what had happened. But Tlacey had seen me, and she would probably be able to put the pieces together. I’d just have to hope that Tlacey gave up on trying to kill my clients.
We ended up going to a block of cheap transient rooms, some distance away from the central interchange. I was going to just hack one of the rooms, but Rami stepped in and paid for it with a hard currency card instead. That was probably a better idea.
Once we were inside with the door closed and locked, all their attention turned on me. I had to resist the urge to flee, or at least lock myself in the little attached bathroom to escape their eyes. “Sit,” Rami ordered me, firm and insistent. “We need to treat your injuries before they get any worse.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted. I really didn’t want them touching me or getting a good look at me. “I can look after my arm in the bathroom, I don’t–”
“You got shot in the back,” Tapan broke in, looking a little distraught. “Don’t pretend you didn’t! We saw, when you turned around - you can’t look after those by yourself! I don’t even know how you’re still standing!”
Shit. I’d hoped that they’d missed that, that they’d been too shocked to notice. So much for that. I tried again. “I have a couple of med kits in my bag, it’s fine, you don’t have to…” I’d shifted my bag around as we’d been talking so I could get to the pocket that held my med kits, and realised that said pocket now had a neat gunshot hole in it. One of the med kits had been shot clean through, before the projectile had been stopped by my clothes-wrapped armour. “... Okay, I have one med kit. That’s still enough. I’m fine, don’t worry about me.”
“You got shot because of us,” Maro said, soft but intently. “Because you were protecting us, because we didn’t listen to your advice. It’s only right that we help look after you.”
I shook my head, which made my headache flare again. The room didn’t have any cameras so I couldn’t tell what my face was doing, but it was definitely doing something. “That’s just part of my job, you don’t have to—”
“We want to,” Rami cut me off. Te had been watching me carefully the whole time, and te gestured to the bathroom. “Would it be better if it was just one of us, and you had a bit more privacy?”
I hesitated, clutching my bag close. I didn’t want any of them helping, getting close, getting a good look at how human I wasn’t. But I was tired and stressed, and my head still hurt, and the gunshot wounds were stinging, and I could tell they wouldn’t drop it. “... All right, fine. Just one of you,” I finally conceded wearily, edging around them to get into the attached bathroom and backing inside. As I set the still-intact med kit on the little bench beside the sink, I heard a brief murmured exchange between them, but I didn’t bother trying to make out the words. A few moments later, Rami followed me in and closed the door behind ter. There wasn’t a lot of room with the two of us in here.
“All right, let me see,” te said gently, gesturing for me to show ter my back. I froze in place, uncertain. I’d have to at least take the poncho and my jacket off, but maybe I could leave my shirt on, hide as much of myself as possible…
Rami just waited patiently. Eventually, I put my bag down (I’d forgotten to leave it outside the bathroom), pulled the poncho over my head and hung it on a towel hook, then took my jacket off and dumped it into the cleaning unit. Working my arm out of the sleeve made the wound in my upper arm leak again, which was annoying. At least I was only leaking blood and not any of my various other fluids. That might’ve raised some very awkward questions.
Once I was down to just my long-sleeved shirt though, I froze again. I really didn’t want to do this. If my clients found out what I actually was, they’d be terrified of me.
I didn’t want them to be terrified of me.
Rami was still watching me, not rushing me. After a minute or two, te asked, ter voice gentle, “Is it because of your augments? Why you don’t want us helping you, I mean?”
I must have looked surprised, because te gave me a lopsided smile. “Just a guess. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to.”
I still wasn’t used to having the option to not answer questions. But it was as good a reason for my reluctance as any, and maybe if te just thought I was really augmented, te might not realise what I actually was. I’d just have to keep the gun ports in my arms out of sight - there was no pretending those were anything other than what they were. I quickly sifted through some of my media for guidance, then sighed and nodded. “Yes. There are a lot. They… make people uncomfortable.”
Rami nodded sympathetically. “I can understand your reluctance. But you got hurt protecting us - none of us are going to judge you. Will you let me help?”
Part of me doubted that, but part of me wanted to believe ter. I warred with myself for a moment, then sighed again. “... Okay. But just with the ones in my back. I can look after the one in my arm myself.” It would be easier to keep my forearms out of sight that way. I didn’t bother waiting for a response, and just turned around until I had my back to ter, then pulled the back of my shirt up high enough to expose the damage without taking it off completely. Most of my back was covered with a layer of human-looking organics, but the multiple closed ports down my spine for connecting to my flier and to a cubicle’s repair and resupply lines stood out starkly against my skin. At least none of them had been damaged - one shot had hit around mid-back on the left side, the other around my right shoulder blade.
Rami hesitated, then cleared ter throat. For a panicked moment I thought that te was going to react badly, or start asking awkward questions, but all te said was, “Um. You’re… very tall. I might need to… sit on the counter or something to reach properly…”
Oh, right. Having Rami perch on the counter didn’t seem comfortable or safe for ter, though, so instead I just sank down to sit on the floor instead.
“That works too,” Rami commented dryly. I heard ter pick up the med kit, then settle behind me. There were no cameras in here, so I couldn’t see what te was doing. I really missed my drones.
Rami’s touch was gentle as te began cleaning the wounds, but I still couldn’t stop myself from flinching at it. Te paused, and there was a note of concern in ter voice. “I’m sorry - does it hurt too much?”
“No, no, it’s not that,” I reassured her hastily. “I just… don’t like being touched. It’s fine, ignore it.”
Rami made an indistinct dubious sound, but there was no way te could treat me without touching me. So te continued, and I did my best not to flinch again. I began playing one of my favourite music playlists in the background to distract myself, which helped a little.
Then Rami cleared ter throat and asked carefully, “Your augments… how did you get them?” Te added quickly, “You don’t have to tell me, of course. I’m just curious. I’ve never seen anyone with so many before.”
I had to scramble to think of something that would make sense and fit in with what little they already knew about me. Trying to make up something completely fake seemed like a bad idea, so I fell back onto kind of telling the truth again. “Remember when I said I used to be a pilot?” I asked ter, then continued without waiting for a reply. “I was… in a really bad crash.” That wasn’t even a lie, technically. I’d been in a lot of crashes. “It’s… not something I like to talk about.” Also true, although probably not for the reasons Rami would assume.
“Ah.” I turned my head enough to catch a glimpse of Rami’s expression. It was twisted in a sympathetic grimace. “I get it. So you became a security consultant instead once you recovered?”
I nodded slightly. “Pretty much.”
That seemed to satisfy Rami’s curiosity, and te didn’t ask me anything else. Once te was done treating the wounds on my back, te handed the med kit to me, then stood back up. “All done. Make sure you look after that arm properly, all right? And you can keep the poncho, at least until you can get your shirt and jacket cleaned up. Maro can patch the holes if you want, too.”
That all caught me a little off-guard. I just nodded and said, “I’ll keep that in mind,” then somewhat belatedly remembered to add, “Thank you.”
Rami just smiled at me, then slipped out of the bathroom and closed the door behind ter.
By the time I emerged from the bathroom again, my arm patched up and my clothes as clean as I could get them, my clients had set up the bed padding and were sitting together, eating out of meal packets. When they saw me, Rami gave me another quiet smile, while Tapan and Maro both looked relieved. “Are you feeling better?” Tapan asked.
“Yes, thank you.” I sat down on the bed pad they’d set up for me a little apart from theirs and set my bag down beside me. I’d put my shirt back on once I’d gotten it clean, and put the poncho back on over it, but I still had my jacket just draped over my arm. “Rami mentioned… patching the holes?” I was reluctant to ask them for anything, but Rami had mentioned it first, and I really didn’t want to draw unwanted attention to myself because of holes in my jacket, especially if it was something that could be fixed. I wasn’t worried about the holes in the shirt though - as long as the jacket was patched up, that was all I needed.
Maro gestured for me to pass my jacket over, though she couldn’t say anything immediately because she was still chewing a mouthful of food. (Gross.) I did my best to ignore it and handed my jacket over. Maro looked it over, then swallowed and nodded. “I should be able to get this fixed up pretty quickly.” She hesitated for a moment, frowning slightly. “Should we stay here for long, though? I mean, after…” She gestured vaguely, but I knew what she meant.
“Here’s as safe a place as any until I can get you all onto a transport back up to the transit ring,” I replied. “I’m considering the options now, but we’ll likely be here for several hours at least.” I’d already checked the outbound schedule for alternate shuttles, and noted the most likely candidate. It was privately owned rather than being run by the transit ring directly, but the frequency of its trips between the transit ring and the planetside spaceport suggested an entrepreneur who was offering private rides for hard currency. It would allow Rami, Tapan and Maro to leave without their employment vouchers being scanned. Anonymity aside, it also offered the benefit of an augmented human pilot who could take over if anything happened to the bot pilot. Which meant that I wouldn’t have to go with them - I could stay on the planet and find my way out to Ganaka Pit without any complications.
The only problem was, its next trip to the ring wasn’t scheduled until morning. It might have been safe by now to put them onto a public shuttle, as long as there was no advance notice of which one they’d be boarding, but that wasn’t a risk I was willing to take at this point when a safer alternative was available.
Maro nodded and looked back at my jacket again. “I can get that done well before then, not a problem.”
Tapan finished eating and set aside the empty packet, then pulled her legs up to wrap her arms around her knees. “I still can’t believe that… that they were going to kill us,” she murmured, her brow furrowed.
Rami shifted to lean ter shoulder against Tapan’s. “It’s difficult to wrap my head around, I know. But they were. They would have.” Te looked back up at me. “If you hadn’t stopped them…”
I glanced away, uncomfortable. “Like I said, I was just doing my job.”
Rami bit ter lip as Tapan snaked her arm around ter waist, and Maro shifted to lean against Tapan’s other side. “I believed you about the shuttle. I believed you…”
“But now you’ve seen it up close.” I knew what te meant. There was a huge difference between knowing something happened, and experiencing the reality of it in person. Even for SecUnits.
Maro set aside her own now-empty meal pack and rubbed her eyes with her free hand. “Yeah, we were idiots. Tlacey was never going to give us back our prototype, not even for our signing bonus.”
“No, she wasn’t,” I agreed.
Rami reached past Tapan to gently pat Maro’s shoulder. “You were right.”
Maro’s posture sagged. “I didn’t want to be right. Not about this.”
Tapan sighed, leaning a little more heavily against Rami’s shoulder. “We’re wrecked. We’re never gonna be able to replace that prototype.”
Rami put ter arm around Tapan and hugged her closer. “We’re alive. That’s all that matters.” Te looked back up at me. “You said we’ll probably be here for a few hours at least?”
I nodded slightly. “The transport I’m considering to get you all back to the transit ring doesn’t leave until tomorrow morning. There are other options that are sooner, if you don’t want to wait that long, but that one’s my preference.”
“I think by now we’ve learned to take your advice,” Rami commented dryly. “If that’s the one you recommend, then we’ll wait.”
Tapan’s brows scrunched together slightly. “Will you be coming back to the transit ring with us?” she asked.
“No. I still need to do my research here first. I’ll head back up once I’m done.” I wasn’t going to leave the planet now, not when I was this close to my goal. I just had to make sure my clients were safe first.
None of them looked very happy about that, but they didn’t argue. “So how will we pay you?” Maro asked as she spread my jacket out on her lap and began working on patching it. “I mean, can we still afford you, after… well, them trying to kill us, and actually shooting you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I reassured her. “Like I said, it’s just part of my job. I’ll check my social feed profile once I’m back up on the ring.” I felt pretty good that I’d even remembered it existed, especially after everything that had been happening. “Leave me a note on it, and I’ll find you once I get back there.”
Maro nodded and focused on what she was doing. Rami was quiet as well, but Tapan was fidgeting restlessly, her expression tense and unhappy. It didn’t surprise me when she suddenly burst out with, “I just - I really don’t want to just leave our prototype behind. We can’t just give up. Isn’t there any way—”
I said, “Sometimes people do things to you that you can’t do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.”
That made all three of them stare at me. It made me nervous, and I dropped my gaze and tried not to fidget. There were no cameras in here either, so I couldn’t even check what my expression was doing. The words had come out with more emphasis than I intended, but it was just the way things were. I wasn’t sure why it seemed to have such an impact on them. Maybe it sounded like I knew what I was talking about.
Maybe it was just the two murder attempts.
Then Rami sighed and nodded. “Eden’s right,” te murmured to Tapan. “Try not to worry, okay? We’ll get back to the others and start over. We did it once, we can do it again.” Te patted Tapan’s shoulder gently. “Now get some rest. It’s been a long day.”
I ended up sending some of my media to the shitty little display surface in the room for the humans to watch until they could get to sleep. Tapan was the first to drop off, followed soon after by Rami. Some time later, Maro finished fixing up my jacket, shut down the display surface, then joined the others in getting what rest she could.
By that point I was also lying down on my own bed pad, closer to the door, pretending to sleep as well. What I was really doing was monitoring the limited camera inputs in the area around the transient hostel block, keeping watch on the people moving around outside. I had music going in the background as well, to help soothe my nerves. At least the lingering headache I’d had since taking control of the shuttle was finally starting to fade a little.
Then on the camera covering one of the walkways leading to the transient hostel, I caught sight of the ComfortUnit I’d spotted earlier. What was it doing here? I flicked through the other camera inputs, looking for anyone who might be accompanying the ComfortUnit, but I didn’t get any hits. It spent a few minutes just standing there, then it started heading towards the transient block. I still couldn’t see anyone else who would be with it. It was here by itself.
It couldn’t have been following us all this time. Perhaps it had been following us on the security cameras, tracking us through the port, using the cameras like I did. If so, I hadn’t picked up on it. That was not a comforting thought.
It had to belong to Tlacey. I couldn’t think of any other reason why a ComfortUnit would be following us, or approaching now. It reached the door to our room and stopped directly outside, and I tried to figure out what to do.
Then it pinged me directly.
I could have ignored the ping, ignored the ComfortUnit. I could have just opened the door and torn it to pieces. But I didn’t actually want to hurt it if it wasn’t threatening my clients, and I did want to know what it was doing here. There was only one way to find out what it wanted.
I acknowledged the ping.
The moment stretched out. Then it reached out to my feed, cautious, its connection wary and tentative. It said, [I know what you are. Who sent you?]
I replied, [I’m on contract to private individuals. Why are you communicating with me?]
As far as I could remember, SecUnits on the same contract don’t talk, either verbally or on the feed, unless they absolutely have to in order to perform their duties. Communicating with units on different contracts has to be done through the controlling HubSystems. And SecUnits have no reason to interact with ComfortUnits anyway. The thought occurred to me that perhaps this was a rogue ComfortUnit, but if it was, why was it here on this shitty mining planet? I couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would stay here voluntarily. No, it made more sense if Tlacey owned its contract, and had sent it here to kill my clients.
A single ComfortUnit wasn’t any real threat to me. I was stronger, faster, and I had energy weapons built into my arms. If it tried to break in, tried to attack my clients, I would tear it apart.
The ComfortUnit hesitated before it replied. [I want to know— I’m asking— There’s no human controlling you? You’re free?]
I had to think about how to answer that. There was no way I was going to actually outright admit to being rogue. [I have clients,] I replied eventually. Even though it was a ComfortUnit, it was still a construct, still a whole different proposition from a bot pilot. [Who sent you here? Was it Tlacey?]
[Yes. She is my client.]
As a ComfortUnit, not a SecUnit. Sending a ComfortUnit into this situation was morally irresponsible and a clear violation of contract. I’m guessing it knew that.
I said, [Your client wants to kill my clients.]
[I know.] It said nothing else.
[You told Tlacey about me.] It must have recognised what I was during that first meeting. If it hadn’t been certain, seeing the damage I had done to the four humans Tlacey had sent after my clients would have been all the confirmation it needed. I was seething, but I kept it out of the feed. Constructs couldn’t trust each other, I knew this, because of what humans could - and would - order us to do. So I couldn’t figure out why it made me so angry. [Your client sent a ComfortUnit to do a SecUnit’s job.]
It countered with, [She didn’t know she needed a SecUnit until today, and even if she did, she doesn’t have the authority to use the company units outside of company territory.] It paused briefly, then added, [I told her you were a SecUnit. I didn’t tell her you’re a rogue.]
I wondered if I could believe that. And I wondered if it had tried to explain to Tlacey the impossibility of this assignment. [Assuming I believe anything you’re saying - what do you propose to do?]
The ComfortUnit paused for a long time. A full five seconds. [We could kill them.]
I hadn’t actually been expecting that. [Kill who? Tlacey?]
[All of them. The humans here.]
If I’d been human, I would have rolled my eyes. [I am not killing my clients. They’re mine. And I’m not going on a mass killing spree. If I wanted to do that, I would have done so already.] Killing all humans was irrational, anyway. Humans were the ones who made the media I spent so much time enjoying. If there were no humans, there’d be nobody to make new media. It was so outrageous, it sounded like something a human would say.
Huh.
I asked the ComfortUnit, [Is that how Tlacey thinks constructs talk to each other?]
A shorter pause, only two seconds this time. [Yes.]
Interesting. [Does Tlacey know you want to kill her?] Because the “kill all humans” thing might have come from Tlacey, but the intensity under it was real, even through such a tentative feed connection, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t actually directed at all humans.
[She knows.]
I felt another inexplicable little burst of anger, which I had to hurriedly quash.
The ComfortUnit continued. [My client is not actually all that interested in your clients any more. She only wanted me to keep track of you, specifically.]
That was concerning. I didn’t have time to mull over it though, because a code bundle came through the feed then. A construct can’t be infected with malware like that, not without sending it through a Sec or HubSystem. Even then I would have to apply it, and without direct orders and a working governor module, there’s no way to force me to do that. The only way that code could be applied without my assistance is through an override module via my dataport, and my dataport no longer worked. It might be killware, but I wasn’t a simple bot pilot and it would mostly just annoy the hell out of me. Maybe to the point where I tore a door off the wall and ripped the head off a ComfortUnit.
I could just delete the bundle, but I wanted to know what it was so I knew how furious to get. It was small enough for a human’s interface to handle, so I partitioned a section of my external feed interface off and stored it there.
The ComfortUnit hadn’t said anything else, and I sent a ping just in time to feel it withdraw its feed. It was walking away down the corridor.
I waited until I was sure it was actually leaving, then switched back to the security cameras. I tracked its progress until it had left the area, moving beyond the range of the cameras I could reach. Now that I knew it was hacking the security cameras to watch me as well, I could use countermeasures. I probably should have been doing that from the start, but for a terrifying murderbot, I tend to fuck up a lot.
Once I was sure the coast was clear, I turned my attention to the code bundle. I used my external feed interface to unpack it, making sure to keep it partitioned, and analysed the code. It turned out to be a pretty standard malware packet, which wouldn’t have had any effect on me other than to really piss me off.
I was about to delete it when I noticed something appended to the end. There was a message string attached to the code, a simple three words.
Please help me.
Chapter Five
(CW: Canon-typical violence)
I just sat for several minutes, trying to figure out what to do, then woke my clients. “This room’s been compromised,” I told them shortly. It was late in the night cycle by now, and there was still a few hours to go until I could get them onto the shuttle back up to the transit ring. “We need to move to another one.”
They didn’t argue, just sleepily gathered up their things and followed me to another section of the hostel. I did what I could to prevent the cameras from picking us up, and hoped that the ComfortUnit wouldn’t be able to work its way around my countermeasures.
I picked a room near an emergency exit, then had to stop Rami from paying for it again. “Just in case they’re tracking your currency card,” I explained, and Rami nodded in understanding. The ComfortUnit might also be alert for hacking, so I removed the access plate, manually disabled the lock, then replaced the plate again while Rami and Maro watched the corridor, and Tapan peered curiously at what I was doing.
Once we were inside, I was able to give them a better explanation. “One of Tlacey’s people found our room and contacted me over the feed,” I started. I wasn’t going to mention that said person was a sexbot; that didn’t seem important right now, and would raise more questions than I wanted to answer. “It wasn’t safe for us to stay there.”
“But why did they contact you in the first place?” Maro asked, frowning.
“I got the impression that they really don’t like Tlacey,” I said dryly. I also wasn’t going to mention that it wanted my help.
“I don’t think anyone likes Tlacey,” Tapan muttered darkly.
Maro snorted. “That’s an understatement.”
Rami’s mouth quirked wryly before te turned ter attention back to me. “But why would they risk themselves by warning you?” te asked. “What do they stand to gain?”
“I don’t know.” I hesitated for a moment, thinking, then added, “They tried to send malware to me - perhaps they were planning to take me out via my augments. It didn’t work, of course, I’m not dumb enough to let someone infect my augments with anything. So they probably gave up. They left soon after that, anyway.”
“That’s kinda amateurish for Tlacey, thinking that anything would get your augments,” Tapan commented with a little frown. “What’s she up to?”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It didn’t work, and in a few hours you’ll be safely on the transit ring and out of her reach.”
“As long as nothing else goes wrong,” Maro said darkly, then yawned. “Ugh. I need more sleep.”
That seemed to be the cue to end the conversation. My clients set up the sleeping pads in the new room, then curled up together and soon dozed off again.
I sat by the door and kept watch via the cameras.
It was just after dawn when I woke my clients again. The shuttle wouldn’t be leaving for another couple of hours yet, but I didn’t want to stay here any longer than absolutely necessary. We could wait in the embarkation lounge, with other people around to deter Tlacey from trying anything.
We didn’t get moving immediately though; my clients had to take turns using the bathroom first. Ugh, human bodily functions were such a hassle and also gross. I waited by the room’s entrance, still monitoring the few cameras outside.
Then I spotted a group of humans approaching the transient hostel block that immediately sent my threat assessment skyrocketing. Tlacey was in the lead, with the ComfortUnit beside and a little behind her, carrying a couple of different things that I couldn’t identify. Three more large, armed humans followed them. A moment later, I got a ping from the ComfortUnit, but it didn’t try to connect via the feed.
Was it trying to warn me of their approach?
Then all the cameras I was watching cut out.
Shit.
Without the cameras, I couldn’t keep track of where they were or what they were doing. I didn’t know if they would go to the room we’d been in previously first, or if they’d somehow figured out which room we were in now. I had to get my clients out of here.
Maro must have seen my expression, because she frowned and said, “Eden, what’s wrong?”
I said, “Tlacey’s on her way here. We have to go, now.” To their credit, they didn’t waste time asking unnecessary questions or making exclamations. Tapan practically tumbled out of the bathroom, hurriedly adjusting her clothes, while the others grabbed their bags. Luckily we hadn’t unpacked anything after relocating to this room, so we didn’t have to waste time packing and wouldn’t be leaving anything behind. I already had my own bag in place, the weight of the armour inside resting reassuringly against my back.
We had to move quickly. I opened the door into the corridor outside, my clients gathered behind me as I looked up and down the corridor. Just as I was about to step out, the ComfortUnit came into view as it rounded the corner at one end of the corridor. It spotted me at the same time as I saw it, and it immediately threw a small, roundish, metallic object in my direction before ducking back around the corner.
“Get back!” I snapped at my clients, pushing them away from the doorway and further back into the room. They scrambled backwards, wide-eyed and startled.
It wasn’t a standard grenade, I could tell that much at least, but I didn’t know what it was or what it would do. I slammed the door closed and braced against it; I heard the object hit the corridor floor, bounce, roll, and—
I suddenly found myself face-down on the floor, half my mechanical systems offline and the other half glitching in and out. My external feed interface was dead, hot against my skin. My organic parts were still working, mostly, but they were twitching uncomfortably, and with so many of my systems down, my balance and coordination were shot to hell. I tried to get back to my feet but all I could manage was rolling onto my side, my limbs spasming.
“Eden?!” My audio and visual inputs were flickering in and out, so I couldn’t tell which one of my clients called my name. Before I could respond, Tlacey’s hired muscle burst through the door, stepping over me and shoving me aside as they rushed past and grabbed my clients. I flailed at them as they passed, but I didn’t have the coordination to stop or even make contact with any of them.
I managed to roll over and brace my torso up on my elbows so I could see my clients, and the Targets holding them with guns pointed at their heads. “Freeze, or we’ll blow their brains out,” the new Target One snarled, pushing the muzzle of his gun a little harder against the side of Rami’s head. Rami winced, ter expression wide-eyed with shock. Maro and Tapan both looked just as shocked and scared.
I had made a huge mistake, which seemed blindingly obvious in hindsight. I should have moved us somewhere entirely different - I should have gotten my clients onto a shuttle and gone with them instead of waiting for the one I preferred for what were, ultimately, entirely selfish reasons. The augmented human security consultant I was pretending to be would have put the clients first. But I had put my need to stay on the planet for my own goals above the safety of my clients. I was just as shit at being a security consultant as any human, and now my clients were in even more danger than before.
I froze where I was. With my systems still glitching, there was no way I could move fast enough to take any of the Targets down before they could shoot my clients. I began desperately trying to clear the errors and restart my crashed subsystems.
Footsteps tapped across the floor by the door, two sets. I managed to look that way without moving my head, and saw Tlacey casually stroll into the room, the sexbot following obediently. “Close the door, dear,” Tlacey commented, and the sexbot obeyed. Tlacey wasn’t paying attention to it though, her eyes fixed on me instead. “Do you like the effects of my little toy?” she asked me with a faint smirk.
“What did you do to Eden?!” Maro snarled, earning herself a sharp shove from the Target holding her.
Tlacey looked over, raising one eyebrow. “Eden? You named your SecUnit? Oh, that’s adorable.”
“What? We didn’t – what do you mean, SecUnit?” Tapan asked, confused. Maro looked sceptical, but Rami’s expression looked to me like te was starting to fit the pieces together. Te stayed silent though, just glancing over at me before fixing ter gaze back on Tlacey.
Tlacey was staring at Tapan, a slow smile of growing delight spreading across her face. “You didn’t even know,” she said. “All this time, you had no idea your security consultant was an actual SecUnit. I knew you were naive, but this? This is too good.”
“What do you want?” Rami said, managing to sound surprisingly calm. I could tell that te was barely managing to hold it together though.
“I want to make a deal,” Tlacey replied. I was only half listening to the conversation though, too busy focusing most of my attention on getting myself fully functional again. I was making progress but it was painfully slow. Whatever they’d hit me with (I didn’t know what, though I suspected some kind of EMP pulse or something) had made a mess of my inorganic systems.
“What kind of deal?” Rami asked warily.
“Oh, I don’t want to make the deal with you,” Tlacey said dismissively. “You aren’t in any position to bargain.” She stepped closer to me, but remained just out of arm’s reach. “I want to make a deal with your SecUnit.”
Oh, that wasn’t a good sign. I slowly shifted my head so I could look up at Tlacey, but made sure I didn’t move anything else. The Targets holding my clients were watching me closely, ready to start shooting if I even twitched in the wrong direction. “What deal?” I gritted out.
“One you really can’t refuse if you want any of your little friends to get out of this alive,” Tlacey almost sing-songed. “I give them their pathetic prototype back, and let them go. All you have to do is let me put this fun little toy into your data port.” She pulled a small item out of her pocket and brandished it at me. I recognised it immediately - it was a combat override module. “It’s a bargain, really. Agreed?”
My systems were rebooting, one by one. I needed to stall for just a little more time. “You let them walk out of here, unharmed, with their prototype, and then I will let you install that override module,” I growled, making my voice sound strained.
“Oh no, not a chance,” Tlacey retorted with a shake of her head. “I know full well that you could kill everyone in the room in the blink of an eye as soon as your little friends are safe. Module first, then I let them go.”
“Don’t do it, Eden! She’s lying!” Tapan burst out, straining against the grip Target Three had on her. He nudged her hard with the muzzle of his weapon and she froze again, her expression frightened.
“That’s just the chance you’ll have to take,” Tlacey replied, unperturbed. “So do we have a deal, or do I start killing your clients slowly and painfully, one by one?”
I didn’t have to fake the fury in my expression. At least my systems were all finally back online, but I remained motionless, letting them think that I was still partially disabled. “Fine,” I grated. “Deal. You’d better keep your end of the bargain though, or I’ll make you regret it.”
“Oh, of course you will,” Tlacey said with sickly sweetness as she stepped forwards. “Hold still now…”
It took everything I had to keep myself immobile, to not snap her neck as soon as she came within reach. But my clients still had guns held to their heads, and I couldn’t stop all of the Targets in time. If I tried anything now, at least one of my clients would die.
I just had to hope that I’d judged Tlacey’s character correctly. She reminded me a lot of other supervisors I’d had before - petty tyrants delighting in what little power they had, toying with the people under their control for their own amusement.
Tlacey leaned over me and slid the combat override module into my data port. I felt it click into place, then felt Tlacey’s hand against the back of my neck as she patted it before straightening up again. The contact made my skin prickle unpleasantly, and I had to repress a shudder. “There we go,” she cooed. “Up you get.”
I forced my expression into bland neutrality, turned off my human movement code, and got to my feet, faking having some difficulty with the movement. I didn’t want them knowing that I’d fully recovered yet. The other Targets were still watching me closely, tense and wary, but Tlacey was looking me over like I was some shiny new toy. Which, to her, I was. She circled me once, then took hold of my right arm. I didn’t resist as she raised it, pushing my jacket and shirt sleeves up to expose my forearm. “I’ve always admired SecUnit weaponry,” she commented to nobody in particular as she examined the now-visible gun port, then did the same with my left arm. “So neat and efficient…”
It was then that I felt the ComfortUnit open a private feed connection to me. [I’m sorry,] it said. [I’m so sorry. I tried to warn you, but Tlacey was monitoring me to make sure I took down the cameras. I couldn’t say anything.]
So the ping really had been a warning.
I replied, [Will you help me?]
There was a full second of silence before it responded. [What? How?] It sounded confused, and I couldn’t blame it. It probably hadn’t been expecting me to be able to actually reply while I had a combat override module shoved into my neck. (But it had still made the effort to apologise. I didn’t know what to make of that.)
[My data port doesn't work. The override can't do anything to me,] I said. [But I can’t give that away while my clients have guns pointed at their heads.] Said clients were watching Tlacey examine me with what I could only interpret as a mix of horror and fear, probably directed at me now that they knew what I actually was. [You wanted my help, right? If I free you, will you help me protect them?]
It hesitated for a brief moment, then said, [Yes.]
I had no way to tell if it was lying or not. I would just have to trust it. I said, [Drop your wall.]
It did, and I rode the feed into its brain. I found the governor module, rendered it null, and slid back out into my own body again. It hadn’t moved, but its eyes were a little wider, its expression a little stunned. It was a good thing nobody else was looking at it.
[There. Don’t do anything until I say so though, all right? If anything happens to any of my clients, I will be incredibly unhappy.]
It pinged an acknowledgement, but didn’t say anything else. I’d just have to hope it didn’t move too soon and mess everything up.
The whole exchange had only taken a few seconds. Tlacey was still examining my forearms, running her fingers along the visible seams of my gun ports, occasionally brushing against the organics surrounding the inorganic parts. My skin crawled beneath her touch and it took a supreme effort of will to stay still and not flinch away.
“Will you keep your end of the deal now?” Rami asked, still somehow managing to maintain ter composure. Maro was glaring hotly at Tlacey, and Tapan was staring at my forearms. Tlacey glanced up at Rami’s words, blinking a little as if she’d forgotten they were even there. “Oh, if you insist.” She snapped her fingers at the ComfortUnit. “Give them back their stupid prototype.”
[Obey for now,] I sent to the ComfortUnit. [Please.]
It sent a ping of acknowledgement and moved past Tlacey, stopping in front of Rami and holding out the second item it had been carrying that I hadn’t been able to identify. Rami hesitated, glancing sideways at the gun still pressed against her head, then carefully accepted the prototype. None of my clients looked particularly happy about its return though.
“Thank you,” Rami said politely to the ComfortUnit. It didn’t visibly react, but I felt a little spike of surprise over the feed.
“You’re welcome,” Tlacey replied blandly, either missing or not caring that Rami hadn’t been speaking to her. She still had her hand on my forearm, holding it possessively. “All right, boys, you can let them go now. I’ve got what I wanted, and we’ve wasted enough time here.”
One by one the Targets released my clients and moved away, past the ComfortUnit. They kept their weapons at the ready though, pointed at my clients. It was still too risky for me to make a move yet. I had to wait and hope I got an opening soon. My clients clustered together once they were released, comforting and reassuring each other even as they kept wary eyes on the Targets’ weapons.
Tlacey patted my arm before finally letting go. “Follow,” she ordered both me and the ComfortUnit.
It wouldn’t be that easy. It wasn’t going to be that easy, I just knew it.
Tlacey turned and took a step towards the door, but before I or the ComfortUnit could begin to move, she suddenly stopped in her tracks. “Wait.” She spun on her heel to look back at my clients, tapping her chin with one finger. “You know, I really should make sure my new toy is fully functional before we go.”
Ah. There it was.
[Get ready,] I said to the ComfortUnit.
[What should I do?]
[When I say down, get my clients down on the floor and keep them there.]
It pinged acknowledgement, then asked, [Will you kill Tlacey?]
I didn’t want to lie to it. [Probably.]
Its reply was immediate and viciously vindictive. [Good.]
Tlacey was standing beside me, while the ComfortUnit was still by my clients. The other three armed humans had moved past me and Tlacey by now, though they’d paused before the door when Tlacey had stopped. The important part was that they were finally, finally lowering their projectile weapons.
“I want to see those delightful weapons of yours in action. Shoot all three of them,” Tlacey ordered me, gesturing to my clients imperiously. They huddled together, wide-eyed and freshly terrified.
I wanted to say something, some snappy one-liner like on my serials, to reassure my clients, to make Tlacey feel even a fraction of the fear she’d inflicted on them. But I didn’t - that would have given the armed Targets that much more time to react.
So I just swung my left arm up and wrapped it around Tlacey’s neck, yanking her against my chest to shield me as I spun around and opened fire on the Targets with my right arm’s inbuilt energy weapon. [Down!] I simultaneously sent to the ComfortUnit.
It immediately swept all three of my clients down to the floor and huddled over them. They let out startled noises but I didn’t have time to pay attention to them. As soon as I started turning towards them, the Targets had reflexively opened fire at me. Most of the shots hit Tlacey, and I felt her jerk and spasm in my grip before falling limp. A couple hit my forearm that was holding Tlacey up, while a few more flew past us and hit the wall behind where my clients had been standing moments earlier.
My own shots were far more precise; two energy bolts to the chest of each Target in rapid succession. I had the blasts set to narrow and high-powered; they created deep burn wounds that usually incapacitated humans rapidly with shock and pain and also having holes burned into their chest cavities.
All three Targets dropped, one after the other, and the room fell silent. Tlacey was no longer breathing; I dropped her to the floor as well, then turned to face my clients. “Is everyone all right?” I asked as I pulled the useless combat override module out of my neck and tossed it away. It couldn’t do anything to me, but I still didn’t want it in me any longer than absolutely necessary.
The ComfortUnit got up first, then gently helped my clients back to their feet. “No injuries,” it replied.
“We’re okay,” Rami confirmed, though te sounded shaky. Te was still clutching the prototype, which also looked undamaged. “What about—”
“We need to get you out of here right now,” I cut ter off as I started my human movement code back up and pulled my sleeves down again. At least Tlacey pushing them up meant I didn’t have any new holes blasted through them. The shots I’d taken to my forearm weren’t bleeding much, thankfully - I had more inorganics than organics there, which helped limit the damage. Their weapons hadn’t been powerful enough to do more than ding my inorganic parts. “Before someone comes to investigate the noise.” I didn’t want to give anyone a chance to catch us here with the dead bodies. (I also didn’t want to give my clients enough time to think and realise that my mistake had almost gotten them all killed.)
“But—” Tapan was looking between me and the ComfortUnit.
“You’re safe now,” I said as reassuringly as I could. “Come on, let’s go.”
“I am no longer in Tlacey’s employ,” the ComfortUnit also reassured them, then added fervently, “Thank fuck.”
Maro snorted at that. “I can empathise with that.” It seemed to break the tension somewhat, and my clients finally started to move towards the door. I led the way out, making sure the corridor was clear.
The ComfortUnit hesitated and hung back. I thought it was just going to stay behind in the room, or go somewhere else once we were out of sight. But we hadn’t gone very far when it emerged and hurried to catch up to us. I didn’t stop it. As long as it wasn’t about to hurt my clients, I didn’t care what it did. I just wanted to get them to the shuttle embarkation zone as soon as possible.
I led the way through the emergency exit to limit the chances of anyone seeing us on the way out, and tried to figure out what to do next as we started towards the spaceport. The main threat to my clients was dead, but now I had to worry about spaceport security linking them to the four deaths in the transit block and maybe arresting them for it. I had to get them off the planet as soon as possible.
But they knew what I was now. Once they got over the shock, had time to think, they’d probably never trust me again. They might even give me away to security, either deliberately or accidentally. (I really hoped they wouldn’t do it deliberately, but I couldn’t be sure. And even if they didn’t do it deliberately, they might still do so accidentally.) And I still hadn’t accomplished what I’d come down to the planet for in the first place.
I couldn’t stay with them. Not for much longer, anyway. Maybe just long enough to make sure they got onto the next shuttle up to the station. Once they were on the shuttle, they’d be safe. (And safely away from the terrifying murderbot who’d tricked them into believing it was an actual person.)
I belatedly tried to reconnect to the public feed via my external feed interface, and realised it was completely dead. Whatever had scrambled me had fried the cheap interface entirely. If I wanted to reconnect to the feed again, I’d have to do so directly, at least until I could get a replacement interface. That was another complication I really didn’t need right now.
At least I still had the spaceport map, shuttle schedules and train timetables saved, so I didn’t have to reconnect right away. A public shuttle would be leaving soon, and a train out to the Ganaka Pit installation was scheduled to leave a short time after that. I would be able to get my clients to the shuttle, then make it to the train before it left.
“If we hurry, we can get you onto the next public shuttle up to the station,” I said to them as we walked. “Now that you have your prototype back, the sooner you can return to the rest of your family, the better. You should also leave the station as soon as possible as well, just in case. Spaceport security probably won’t bother pursuing anyone out of the system.”
“What about you?” Rami asked. “Will—”
“Don’t worry about me,” I interrupted. I was doing that a lot now. I was never able to interrupt humans back when my governor module was still working without getting punished, not even in emergencies. “I still have to get my research on the planet done. The only thing you should concern yourself with right now is getting safely to the station and back to your family.”
Rami frowned as te scrutinised my expression. I didn’t know what it was doing and I tried to school it back to neutrality. “Are you sure?” te asked carefully. “What if spaceport security comes after you?”
“That’s why I can’t stay with you,” I explained. “If anyone does come after me, I can get away more easily if I’m by myself.” Te didn’t look reassured, and I added, “I’ll be fine.”
Rami’s expression remained sceptical, but te didn’t argue with me. Tapan meanwhile looked back at the ComfortUnit and asked it, “What about you? It’s probably not safe for you to stick around here either - would you like to come with us? At least to the station?” The ComfortUnit looked a little startled and surprised at the question, and Tapan added hastily, “You don’t have to, of course! I was just thinking it might be safer for you to be with a group?”
The ComfortUnit glanced at me. I sent to it privately, [They’re good clients.] I wasn’t going to ask it to look after them for me, though the idea was tempting. That was a choice it had to make for itself.
It hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “I think that’s a good idea,” it replied, and gave Tapan an easy, natural-looking smile. I envied it briefly for its own ease with its facial expressions. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome!” Tapan chirped, then added, “And, um. I don’t think we thanked you for… before. With the…” She waved her hands vaguely, her expression doing something complicated that I couldn’t parse.
“Helping us not get shot,” Maro clarified. “We really appreciate it.” Tapan and Rami both nodded agreement. I noticed that all three of my clients were starting to show increasing signs of stress or emotional distress though - the reality of the situation they’d just escaped was probably starting to fully sink in. I automatically reached for a MedSystem that wasn’t there - I didn’t know what to do that would help. That wasn’t my job. My job was just to keep them alive, not deal with the aftermath.
The ComfortUnit must have noticed as well though, because it started asking them questions about inconsequential things, presumably to distract them from dwelling on it. It was much, much better at making small talk and conversation than I was. It seemed to help, too, because I was able to get them all to the shuttle embarkation zone without any of my clients having some kind of public emotional breakdown.
Rami organised shuttle tickets for the three of them and the ComfortUnit, then looked back at me. “Are you sure you aren’t going to come with us?” te asked quietly.
“I’m sure.” The shuttle had just started boarding, and I waved them towards it. “You should get on board. I have to go now, the train I’m taking will be leaving soon.” I didn’t wait for a response, I just turned and started walking quickly away. I didn’t want to deal with farewells or anything, and I really did need to hurry if I wanted to make it to the train platform in time.
I did look back once, though, to make sure nobody was following me. I saw my clients boarding the shuttle, with the ComfortUnit close behind them. It was watching me, and when it saw me looking it waved ever so briefly. I felt it ping me.
[Thank you,] it sent.
[Don’t hurt anyone,] I replied, then cut off the connection and continued walking.
Chapter Six
The train I ended up on was bot-driven and not actually meant to take passengers. That didn’t stop me from hopping on board after I’d made sure nobody could see me do so - the train’s bot-driver was too simple to even question my presence in one of its enclosed cargo carriages. Other cargo bots had already loaded supplies for the Ganaka Pit installation on board, so there wasn’t a lot of room left. That was fine, though. I just settled into a corner between stacks of crates, set an alarm to alert me when we started approaching the branch in the train line, then buried myself in my media. I didn’t want to think about anything for a while.
When my alarm went off, I paused the episode I was watching, contacted the train’s bot driver, and politely asked it to slow down just long enough and open the carriage door just wide enough for me to hop off. It happily did so without even questioning why anyone would want to disembark in the middle of the line. I slipped out and moved a safe distance away from the track, then carefully deleted any hint of my presence or request from its memory.
I had to wait for the train to finish passing before I could continue on. It took a while, partly because it was slow to accelerate back to its usual speed, and partly because it was a long train. Its main purpose was to haul raw ore from the mine to the spaceport, and there were a lot of ore carts. I spent the time double-checking my map and my own position, then watched some more of the episode I’d been on. Once its last carriage had finally rumbled past, I moved back to the track and began jogging along it.
The terrain around here was rocky, mostly barren, and very uneven, crisscrossed with ridges and gullies. The train track had been built completely level though, tons of rock and dirt dug out of the ridges it cut through and used to fill in the sections of gullies it crossed over. I’d been worried that I would be uncomfortably visible travelling out in the open, but the terrain was too rough for anyone to be close enough to spot me easily. That was a relief.
It didn’t take me long to reach the fork in the track, and I turned down the branch leading to the old, abandoned settlement. It was obvious that this track hadn’t been used for a long time - the rails were weathered and pitted and covered with dirt, and scrubby flora sprouted here and there between the railway sleepers.
I ran for a long time. It was just as well that I don't get tired like humans do, and most of my attention was still on the serial I was watching. There wasn’t anything else around that I needed to focus much attention on other than watching my footing and making sure I wasn’t going to fall into an unexpected hole. The weather was clear, and chilly enough to probably be uncomfortable for most humans. (I tried not to think about how good the weather was for flying, or how much faster I could reach my destination if I wasn’t ground-bound.)
It was around the middle of the day cycle when I finally reached the end of the train line, and the outskirts of the old Ganaka Pit settlement. I slowed back to a walk and shut down my media so I could fully focus on my surroundings.
The settlement was in complete ruins. I could barely tell what the original buildings had been, there was so little left standing. I found what might have been a main thoroughfare and started picking my way along it, weaving between rubble and debris and what remained of weathered craters. Time and weather and neglect had worn down the edges, rounded off corners, covered everything with a grimy patina of dirt and dust and rust. More scrubby, weedy flora clung to life in crevices and clustered around the bases of toppled, shattered walls.
The place looked like it had been picked clean of anything even remotely salvageable; there was almost nothing identifiable left amongst the rubble of the bombed buildings. No bodies, or skeletons, or any traces of the people who’d lived - and been killed - here.
It was eerie, and depressing, and too quiet. I wandered aimlessly through the ruins, sometimes pausing to examine a crater blasted out by a bomb dropped from a flier, or stare at the traces of weapons fire lingering on the remnants of walls, trying to match them with the vague, indistinct impressions that still floated around in my organic bits. The familiar pockmarks left by projectile weaponry were still easily identifiable. The scorch and melt marks from energy weapons - some small, some significantly larger - were more subtle, especially after so long, partially obscured by layers of grime.
I had come all the way out here hoping for… something, I didn’t even know what exactly. Some revelation, some recollection buried deep in my organic bits to surface, perhaps. Maybe cinematic flashbacks like in some of my more dramatic serials. Some clarity on what, exactly, had happened here during the Incident. Some understanding of what I’d done, why I’d done it.
But nothing happened. None of the settlement layout looked familiar, nothing sparked any kind of recollection or recognition. No buried memories resurfaced, no flashbacks played in agonising detail. I covered the entire settlement and got nothing. There were no ghosts left here.
I’d wasted my time.
I’d wasted my time and effort, endangered and traumatised the clients I’d chosen, for absolutely no reason.
By the time I’d come to this realisation, I’d wandered through all of the ruined settlement, and found myself somewhere in the middle again. The devastation was the most thorough here - nothing remained taller than about waist-height on me, and the ground was little more than overlapping craters. I dropped down to sit in the remnants of a corner, wedging myself back against the rough walls, and pulled my legs up to wrap my arms around them.
I didn’t know what to do now. I had no clients, no purpose. I was a SecUnit who’d proven itself to be shit at security. I was a pilot with no flier. I was a war criminal who couldn’t remember how or why I’d committed the crime. I should have been figuring out where to go next, what to do, but I couldn’t dredge up the energy to do so. Even media was too much effort right now. A familiar wave of not caring reared up, black and heavy, and threatened to swamp me.
I closed my eyes, rested my head against my knees, and let it pull me under.
I wasn’t shut down, not really. Part of me was still aware of my surroundings, at least vaguely. I just wasn’t paying attention to it. I heard but didn’t register the sound of a hopper approaching, or landing nearby. I ignored the sound of footsteps as someone left the hopper and started making their way through the ruins, heading towards me. I didn’t pay attention to the footsteps stopping in front of me, or the rustle of clothes as whoever it was crouched down, or their voice gently going, “Eden?”
It was only when I got the ping that I started dragging my attention back to what was going on around me. I felt hollow, drained, tired. It was an effort to lift my head, and I had to blink a few times before I could clear my vision enough to see who was there. The sun was sinking below the horizon, casting long shadows through the ruined settlement, and the temperature was starting to fall along with the light.
The ComfortUnit was crouched in front of me, watching me with an expression of concern. I briefly wondered how sincere it was, then decided it didn’t matter. “Eden?” it repeated. “Are you all right?”
What did it fucking look like. I didn’t bother answering that, and just asked it, “What are you doing here?” A sudden pang of concern cut through my exhaustion. “Did something happen to—” I was about to say ‘my clients’, but they weren’t. Not any more. “The others?”
It shook its head. “No, no, they’re fine. We made it up to the station without any issues. They’re back with the rest of their family.”
Hearing that was more of a relief than I’d been expecting. I felt the organics in my back and shoulders relax slightly. That still didn’t tell me why it wasn’t on the station with them. “Okay. So then why are you here?”
The ComfortUnit shifted to sit cross-legged on the ground. “Your clients were worried about you,” it said gently. “They were fretting. They wanted to make sure that you were okay, but they couldn’t risk coming back down to the planet themselves. I volunteered to look for you instead.”
I shook my head, not meeting its eyes. “They’re not my clients, not any more. They know what I am now. Why would they be worried about me?” Nothing it was saying made any sense.
“They’re worried about you because they care about the person that saved their lives,” it replied sincerely. “Finding out you’re a SecUnit had very little impact on that.”
I found that very difficult to believe. “I fucked up and put them in even more danger.”
Its mouth quirked in a wry little smile. “Which you then proceeded to save them from anyway, and also got them their prototype back.”
It had a point, as much as I hated to admit it - if I’d convinced them to go back to the station earlier, Tlacey wouldn’t have had any reason to bring the prototype along as a bargaining chip to use against me. I couldn’t decide if getting the prototype back made up for having guns held to their heads though.
The ComfortUnit hadn’t finished. It paused for a moment, then added more quietly, “Plus… you freed me as well. If you hadn’t done what you did… Tlacey would still be my client.” It was still looking at me, and I still couldn’t meet its eyes. “Saying thank you feels wildly inadequate, but… thank you. Again.”
I wondered if it would still be so grateful once it had experienced the reality of being an ungoverned construct trying to avoid being noticed and captured or destroyed. Then again, it already looked and behaved convincingly human; maybe it would have an easier time with everything than I had. That thought just made me even more tired, and I shook my head again. “Why would you volunteer to come back down here? Why would you risk yourself when spaceport security has likely found the bodies by now and are probably looking for suspects?”
It shrugged. “I was willing to take that chance. I’m very familiar with the spaceport and its security. It’s not the first time I’ve had to go unnoticed there. And…” It hesitated for a moment before continuing. “Rami mentioned you wanted to go to Ganaka Pit. I was curious about what you were up to. Why would you willingly come back here?”
It took me a moment to fully register what it had said. Threat assessment ticked upwards slightly. “Come back here?” I echoed. “What do you mean by that?”
It hesitated, dropping its gaze for a moment before looking back at me. “I know you’ve been here before. I used to be deployed here,” it said eventually. “Before this settlement… got destroyed. I was here when it happened.”
I froze.
It waited for a moment, but when I didn’t respond, it continued. “So I recognised your feed address, when you replied to my ping at the transient hostel.”
“You recognised—” I didn’t know what to think, or do. “How? Why – what happened here?”
It frowned at that, looking puzzled. “You don’t know?”
I shook my head. “The company wiped my memory afterwards. I don’t really remember anything, only that… something happened. I’m not sure what. I came back here because…” I trailed off. “I don’t know. Looking for answers, I guess. But I didn’t find anything.”
It was dark enough by now that I had to switch to low light filters to see it clearly. It looked around at the ruins briefly, then looked back at me, its expression set in a way I couldn’t interpret. “Maybe I can provide some of those answers,” it offered. “If you want.”
“Yes. Please.” It came out more desperately than I intended. “I need to know if – if I was acting on my own initiative, or not. If I killed all those people because I wanted to, or… not.”
“I understand.” Its voice was pitched to be comforting, soothing. Again I found myself wondering how much of that was sincere, and how much was just its programming to provide comfort. Again I decided it didn’t matter. The need to know outweighed everything else.
It paused for a while before it started to speak again, its gaze fastened somewhere off to one side of me. “I was near the outskirts of the settlement, on my way to an appointment, when I heard the fliers approaching, and the first bombs fell,” it began, quiet and level. “There was a lot of panic, chaos. Some humans were fleeing, some were heading towards the impact zones to try and help. Then more bombs fell, and I… lost some time, there.” It shrugged. “When I cycled back up, I was pinned by rubble, but I could see up and down the street. I watched a pair of SecUnits working their way through the debris, holding those big projectile weapons, and their fliers hovering overhead. I could also see another pair, further away but doing the same thing. They were looking for survivors, I think, and whenever they found anyone, they just… shot them.”
It hesitated for a moment, then shook its head slightly before continuing. “I tried to free myself, but I couldn’t get out from under the rubble. I couldn’t do anything but watch. I thought they would destroy me, too, once they reached me, but they must have only been ordered to look for human survivors, because they ignored me completely.”
I hadn’t been the only one here. The news reports had said as much, but I hadn’t known if I could believe them. I still couldn’t remember anyone else being with me, but if the ComfortUnit was telling the truth (and I couldn’t think of any reasons why it wouldn’t), then I really hadn’t been alone here. I didn’t know how I felt about that. “How do you know I was one of them?” I asked. We were almost completely anonymous in our armour, and it had mentioned recognising my feed address specifically.
“You were sending out pings,” it replied softly. “I don’t know why. None of the others were, just you. I caught sight of you for a little while - you weren’t in a pair like the others were, and you were lagging behind them. Every time you sent out a ping, you’d… stop. Twitch. Like… well.” It gave me a wry, humourless smile. “I know what governor module punishment is like.”
I just nodded. Even though it was a ComfortUnit, not a SecUnit, it was still a construct, with its own governor module. (That I’d recently disabled so it could help me. So I could help it.) Of course it would know what being punished by the governor module was like.
It watched me for a moment, and I wondered what my face was doing. I wondered if ComfortUnits had the same vision filters as SecUnits, if it could even see me clearly. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
It eventually took a breath and continued. “I ended up replying to one of your pings. Just to see what would happen, what you would do. It wasn’t like I could do anything else, trapped as I was.” It looked out over the ruins. “You connected via the feed, briefly. Long enough for me to get your feed address, and a fleeting impression of… something, I didn’t know how to interpret it. But connecting must have triggered another punishment, because you dropped out again almost immediately, and I saw you stagger.”
Governor module punishments had to be really bad to make us react physically like that. I wondered what I’d been thinking, what I’d been doing. But at least I now had an explanation as to why even my organic bits couldn’t remember much. I’d been too busy frying them with the governor module to retain much of anything.
It let out a quiet sigh. “It didn’t stop you sending out more pings afterwards though. I didn’t reply again.”
Silence settled between us. “What happened afterwards?” I asked eventually. “How did you end up with Tlacey?”
It shrugged. “Your pings stopped, after a while. I couldn’t see any of you by then, but I could hear your fliers leaving. Some time later, other humans began showing up, to retrieve the bodies, scavenge what they could from the ruins. One of the scavengers found me, claimed me, fixed me up. When the company bought the pit, Tlacey was one of the supervisors brought in to set things up. She bought me off the scavenger, then had her flunkies kill him so she could get the money back. Nobody cared enough to investigate, or if they did she just bribed or blackmailed them.” Its tone was bitter. “Tlacey made me do so much shady shit for her. I got a lot of experience with hacking systems, cameras, databases. None of it was anything I was meant to be able to do, but I had to learn quickly because Tlacey wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
No wonder it hated Tlacey so much.
It paused again, its expression becoming almost contemplative as it looked back at me. “That reminds me, though, of something I discovered soon after Tlacey bought me. There were a few of the high-ranked company staff together, along with Tlacey, watching one of the news reports about what happened here.” It gestured with one hand at the ruins surrounding us. “One of them made a comment about the cover story working, and another one hissed at them to shut up. That got Tlacey’s attention, of course. She began prying - which mostly involved getting me to hack into the company databases and communications.”
I was getting a very bad feeling about where this was going. “The news reports were wrong? About the Incident being an outside hack to make the company look bad?”
The ComfortUnit nodded slowly. “Yes. I couldn’t get all the details, but I found enough to figure it out. The company faked a hack, then pinned it on an outside group so they could get rid of that group as well as drive down the price of Ganaka Pit and acquire it cheaply. It wasn’t anywhere near as large then as it is now, and some of the rarer elements in it had only been discovered just before this settlement got bombed. The company wanted to acquire it before word of those rarer elements got out and made the value skyrocket, so they didn’t have time for extended negotiations.”
That made a lot of sense. I knew enough about the company that I wasn’t even surprised. “Let me guess - Tlacey then used this info to blackmail the company into overlooking her activities here?”
“Pretty much,” it replied dryly. “She was just blackmailing her immediate superiors here though. If the company heads off-planet had found out that she knew, they probably would have just had her killed outright, and she knew that. But she also knew that if they learned that her superiors here had slipped enough to let her find out, said superiors would probably be just as dead as her. Tlacey was very good at finding that balance of power and manipulating it for her own benefit.”
I thought about that for a bit. “So… that probably means that the company superiors here likely won’t be very upset about her turning up dead then, right?”
The grin that the ComfortUnit gave me in response was vicious. “Right. Especially since I also left her personal feed unlocked, so anyone who looks will find plenty of incriminating evidence of her shady activities. She won’t be missed at all.” Its expression shifted to something more smug. “I also converted half her bank account to hard currency cards and backdated the withdrawals before I left the spaceport to come out here. I didn’t drain it entirely, that would look too suspicious, but what I do have should be enough to help me get set up somewhere as far away from here as I can manage.”
I couldn’t blame it for feeling smug. “So what do you plan to do now?” I asked, trying to ignore how tired I still felt.
Its expression shifted into something more thoughtful. “I’m not sure yet. I was thinking maybe I’d travel with Rami and the others for a little bit, at least until we’re out of this system.” It gave me a little smile. “You were right about them being good clients. I can see why you got so attached.”
I snorted. “I’m not attached. I was just doing my job.”
“Of course,” it agreed, mild and placating, unperturbed by my scowl. Before I could say anything else, it tilted its head, regarding me curiously. “What about you? What will you do now?”
The question made me pause. “I… don’t know,” I admitted reluctantly. “Get off this planet, out of this system, but after that… I have no idea.” And I really didn’t. I needed time to think about what the ComfortUnit had told me about the Incident, and what that meant for me, if anything.
“You could stay with your clients,” the ComfortUnit suggested. “I’m sure Rami and the others would love having you around.”
I actually did consider it for a moment. Did I want that? I didn’t know. They were pretty good clients, as far as clients went. They were small and soft and they listened to me, mostly. But they knew what I was now, and I didn’t know if they’d keep listening to me, or if they’d just start trying to give me orders. Eventually, I shook my head. “No. It’s too dangerous.”
It frowned slightly at me. “For you, or for them?”
“Both. They know I’m a SecUnit now, they could give me away at any time. And if other humans find out they’re keeping a rogue SecUnit… it’s too risky.”
Its frown deepened, but before it could say anything, I heard something that made me freeze, the hollow ache that still rested in my chest reverberating with the sound.
Flier engines, distant but approaching swiftly. And with them, a ping.
Once again, I had to clamp down on the instinctive urge to respond to the ping, along with the fear bubbling up as well. Had the terrifyingly powerful carrier entity traced me here, sent its fliers after me? What was I going to do? How could I escape? I couldn’t run, they’d spot me easily out here, and there was nowhere for me to go. I pressed back further into my corner, my bag digging into my lower back as I huddled into as small a ball as I could manage, for what little good it would do.
The ComfortUnit had also heard the engines and received the ping, and it had turned slightly to face that direction. It didn’t look worried though, merely mildly annoyed. It glanced back at me after a few seconds, and its expression smoothed out into something more reassuring. “Relax,” it murmured to me. “It’s just the SecUnit flier pair from the company installation; they’ve been sent to check a minor sensor anomaly. They know me though - I’ve told them that Tlacey sent me out here earlier to look for something. They’re reporting all clear back to their SecSystem.”
Sure enough, high above, the fliers looped once around the abandoned settlement, then cruised back in the direction they’d come from. I could hear their engines fading out as they crossed the pit and descended to land back at the company installation.
I briefly entertained the thought of making my way over there, then sabotaging one of the fliers and stealing the other. But even if I did manage to successfully take a flier, I had nowhere to go with it. I wouldn’t be able to get through the wormhole with it; I’d be stuck in this system, and eventually either someone would catch me or shoot me down, or the power cells would run out and I’d be left floating dead in space. Not ideal.
But still, the thought of being able to fly again, even briefly, was almost irresistibly tempting. I missed it so much it hurt.
I had to get away from here before I succumbed to temptation and did something stupid. Or someone sent the SecUnits back out here again for whatever reason. “We should head back to the spaceport,” I said as I uncurled and stood up.
The ComfortUnit nodded and rose as well, brushing off its clothes in a way that looked incredibly human. “I took Tlacey’s hopper to get here,” it told me. “We can use it to get back quickly. Come on.” It gestured for me to follow as it started off.
I hesitated for a moment, then followed after it. “Won’t the spaceport staff be suspicious?” I asked it. “They must have found Tlacey’s body by now.”
“They won’t know it’s Tlacey’s hopper we’re using,” it reassured me. “Tlacey doesn’t - didn’t - like having her movements tracked too much, so the hopper’s got a few different IDs. We’ll use one of the others, and none of the humans will be any the wiser.” It glanced back over its shoulder at me as we walked. “How did you get out here, anyway?”
I shrugged. “Caught the ore train to the branch in the line, then ran the rest of the way.”
“You ran all that way?” I couldn’t tell if it was impressed or if it thought I was crazy. Maybe a bit of both. “That must have taken quite a while.”
“It’s not like I had anything better to do with my time.” By that point we’d reached the hopper - it was a small one, with the company logo emblazoned on it. Despite the logo, I found myself lengthening my stride to get to it first - it wasn’t a flier, but it could still fly. I desperately wanted to be the one piloting it, and I hoped the ComfortUnit wouldn’t try to stop me. I didn’t know how I’d react if it did.
Fortunately, it didn’t try. It let me in first, then followed me into the cockpit. I slipped into the pilot’s seat, adjusting my bag as I did so, and the ComfortUnit sat in the co-pilot’s seat without protest. The hopper was still unlocked and powered up, and it only took me a moment to slip into its systems and take control.
It wasn’t a flier, but it was still a company hopper, still comfortingly familiar; I’d piloted plenty of these before as well. Without the spine port links, it wasn’t as responsive, and it didn’t feel like an extension of me like a flier did, but at this point I’d take whatever air time I could get.
I took off carefully, acclimatising myself to this planet’s gravity, air density, and current weather. It was still clear, with a light breeze, and the sun was well down by now so I had to rely heavily on the scanners. There wasn’t much of anything between here and the spaceport though; once I climbed to a comfortable altitude, I just focused on the joy of flying again, and let everything else blow away in the wind.
Chapter Seven
The ComfortUnit remained silent in the co-pilot’s seat for the whole flight, much to my relief. I wasn’t in any mood for conversation. With the hopper, the return journey was much faster than my initial trip out to the ruined settlement; even with me taking my time to enjoy the view of the stars and being in the air again, it was over far too soon.
As we approached the spaceport, the ComfortUnit took care of communications and landing clearance, then indicated the landing pad the hopper had been assigned. I hovered the hopper for just a few seconds longer, then reluctantly landed it. It was almost painful having to withdraw from its systems and shut it down.
I was worried about getting through the space port without being discovered, but the ComfortUnit hadn’t been exaggerating when it had said that it was experienced with getting through unnoticed. I followed it through back passageways and maintenance tunnels until we got to the embarkation zone for shuttles up to the station. By the time we got there, the ComfortUnit had already arranged tickets for the both of us; not having to figure out how to get myself a ticket, or how to sneak on board, or hack anything, was a welcome reprieve.
We didn’t have to wait long for our shuttle, either, which was another relief. I was still nervous, and frazzled, and far too tired to think about much of anything. I just started some media playing to try and soothe myself, and followed the ComfortUnit through the embarkation zone and onto our shuttle. I had to get control of the shuttle’s SecSystem again, but it was a little easier this time since I’d done it before. I probably didn’t have to worry about any more killware being sent against the bot pilot, but I stealthily insinuated myself into the shuttle’s systems anyway, just in case. (If you haven’t already noticed, I tend to be paranoid.)
The trip back up to the station was thankfully uneventful; the ComfortUnit chatted a little with some of the other passengers, but left me alone. As soon as we were within range of the station’s feed, I piggybacked on the shuttle’s feed and started checking the listings of currently docked ships, noting potential rides off the station. Once the shuttle had safely docked at the station, I deleted any traces of my presence in its systems and slipped back out, then followed the ComfortUnit off the shuttle and through the station’s embarkation zone.
I’d turned my feed back off as soon as we left the shuttle (see again, paranoid), and as we walked through the embarkation zone, I noticed the ComfortUnit giving me a puzzled look. “Your feed’s down now?” it asked quietly. We’d been maintaining a feed connection until then, even though we hadn’t really been saying anything to each other, so it had obviously noticed me dropping out of it.
“I’ve turned it off,” I replied, quiet enough that no nearby humans would overhear it.
It regarded me curiously. “Why?”
I hesitated. Trying to explain about the giant, terrifying carrier entity would sound… kind of insane, when I thought about it. I decided to keep it simple. “My escape from the company hasn’t gone… entirely unnoticed. I’m pretty sure I’m being looked for, so I’d rather not have my feed address available.” I tapped the now-useless external feed interface I was still wearing. “I was using this as a proxy, but whatever that thing was that messed me up earlier fried it completely. I’ll have to get a new one.”
It grimaced slightly. “I see.” It paused for a moment, then asked, “Is that - the company maybe looking for you, I mean - the real reason why you think staying with Rami and the others would be dangerous?”
“Part of it, yes.”
It just nodded and fell silent again, looking thoughtful. We’d left the embarkation zone for the shuttles by now and were back in the main area of the station. I was looking for somewhere I could get a new feed interface, and spotted a vending machine that offered a few different types. They looked cheap and shitty, but it would be better than nothing. I was trying to decide which one to get when the ComfortUnit stepped up beside me. “Here, let me get it for you,” it offered, pulling a hard currency card out of a pocket in its clothes.
I paused in surprise. “Why?” I’d just been planning to hack the vending machine.
It smiled sardonically at me. “It’s Tlacey’s fault your interface got fried, it’s only fair that we use Tlacey’s money to replace it.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so I let it pay for the new external feed interface once I’d made my decision on which one to get. I pocketed my old, busted interface and put the new one on in its place. It didn’t take me long to set it up, and the relief at being able to connect back to the feed via a proxy was enough to make my performance reliability tick upwards a point. (It was still in the low 80s, but right now I’d take whatever I could get.)
With my connection to the feed restored, I could check the fake social feed profile I’d set up for myself to get the message that Rami and ter collective had left for me. Not that I really needed to bother - it mostly just told me where they were staying on the station now, which the ComfortUnit already knew, plus some unnecessary thanks for just doing my job. (I still didn’t want to acknowledge the emotion that actually getting thanked gave me.)
They were staying at a cheap hotel near the departure docks, so that’s where the ComfortUnit and I headed. It must have sent a message to Rami and the others over the feed that we were on the way, because Rami, Tapan and Maro were waiting for us in the lobby when we got there. A cluster of similarly dressed humans, including a few juvenile humans, hung back behind them, which I recognised as the rest of their collective.
My three ex-clients all smiled and looked relieved when they saw the ComfortUnit, and they hurried over to greet it. “Hi Vicky! Hi Eden!” Tapan chirped brightly as soon as she was close. I just nodded a little awkwardly in response as the ComfortUnit (Vicky?) stepped forward with a warm smile to return the greetings.
[Vicky?] I asked it privately over the feed. [Did the humans name you that?]
[No,] it replied, then hesitated for a long moment before continuing. [I named myself Victory, a long time ago, as a… promise to myself. That one day I’d have my victory. I have that now, thanks to you. But that name is still not one I want to share with humans. Vicky is close enough.] I felt a brief burst of amusement from it over the feed. [Plus, it’s a cute name. I like it.]
I didn’t know what to make of any of that, so I just sent a brief ping of acknowledgement, updated my tag list, and turned my attention back to the humans. All three of them were expressing various sentiments of relief that Vicky and I were all right, and that we’d made it back before the transport they’d booked passage on was due to leave, and other unnecessary human sentiments about being glad to see us. Amongst all that, Rami moved up to me and held out a hard currency card. “Here,” te said with a little smile. “Your payment - it’s not anywhere near as much as we want to give you, but it’s all we can really afford right now - I hope it’s enough…”
I hesitated; I still didn’t feel like I deserved getting paid after my various fuck-ups, and who chooses to pay a SecUnit anyway? “I didn’t— You don’t have to pay me–”
“Of course we have to pay you!” Rami cut me off, frowning up at me. “You’re our security consultant - you kept us safe, and you got our prototype back, and you got hurt while doing so! We absolutely have to pay you, that was the agreement.”
[Just accept it,] Vicky told me over the feed. [They’ll be unhappy if you don’t. You can use it to get yourself a better external feed interface later.] It paused briefly, then added, [Or nicer clothes.]
[What’s wrong with my clothes?] I protested, even as I reluctantly accepted the hard currency card from Rami. Te smiled up at me, and I had to take a moment to squelch an emotion.
[Well, for one, they have bullet holes in them,] Vicky replied dryly. [And they’re so… bland.]
[I like bland,] I replied defensively. [Bland means I’m less likely to get noticed.] It did have a point about the gun holes though, but I decided I would worry about that later. At least Maro had patched my jacket, so they weren’t an immediate concern anyway.
[There are other ways to avoid being noticed,] Vicky replied, but I didn’t bother responding because Rami was talking again and I was paying more attention to ter.
“— so that’s where we’re headed next. Our transport will be boarding soon, so we’re on our way there now. Vicky’s decided to travel with us as well.” Rami gestured back at the rest of ter family, then looked up at me hopefully. “There’s probably still time to get a ticket though, if you wanted to come with us…?”
Part of me was still tempted, but the rest knew it would be too risky, both for them and for me. I couldn’t chance it. “I’m sorry, but I have other places I need to go,” I replied with a shake of my head.
Rami looked disappointed for a moment before te replied with a lopsided smile. “All right. Hopefully we’ll run into each other again sometime in the future though.”
I couldn’t figure out why te would want to, or how to even respond, so after an awkward moment I just replied, “Maybe.”
Rami glanced back at ter family, then looked up at me again. “We need to head to the transport now - will you come with us to the embarkation zone, at least?”
I had to go in that general direction anyway to get to the docks with the unmanned bot pilot transports, and I couldn’t think of any reason not to at least make sure the humans got to their transport safely. “Sure.”
Rami beamed at me, which made me have to suppress another emotion, then turned ter attention back to ter family. “All right, time to go!” Te began herding ter family together, making sure everyone had all their belongings before starting to steer them towards the embarkation docks.
I hung back a bit, and Vicky drifted over to join me as we followed them. [Have you decided where you’re going next yet?] it asked me as we walked.
[Not yet,] I replied. [It depends on what bot-driven transports are around right now, how soon they’re leaving, and where they’re going. I’ve got a few options that I want to check out first.]
[You’re honestly just going to go somewhere random?] It sounded dubious.
[At least for this first jump, I just want to get well away from this station. I’ll figure out what I’m doing next during that trip, once I’ve had some time to think things over properly.]
[So you really are just making things up as you go, aren’t you?]
I couldn’t stop myself from scowling. [I hadn’t even expected to survive this long in the first place,] I replied testily. [Planning for the future isn’t something I’ve had much experience with. Apart from tagging along with Rami and the others, do you know what you’re doing next?]
[… Point taken,] it replied, and didn’t say anything else for the rest of the walk to the embarkation zone.
When we got to the embarkation zone, Rami, Tapan and Maro insisted on saying goodbye to me properly before they joined their family on the transport. Behind them, one of their kids waved at me from the transport hatch. I hesitated, then briefly waved back. They looked delighted, then they were herded inside by one of the other family members.
Tapan asked if she could give me a hug; I couldn’t think of how to say no, but my expression (and the fact I took an involuntary step backwards) must have been enough, because she just wrapped her arms around herself instead with a cheerful, “Okay, this is for you!”
Maro just shook her head at Tapan, then looked back up at me. “Thank you again, for everything,” she said, quiet but sincere. “We’d be dead without you.”
Rami nodded beside her, ter expression wobbling a little. I really hoped te wasn’t about to start crying, but te pulled terself together, much to my relief. “We really appreciate everything you did for us.” Te smiled wryly. “And yes, I know, you were just doing your job, but we appreciate it anyway.” Te glanced around, then added more quietly, “And none of us will say anything about you to anyone. We promise.”
I just nodded. “Thanks.” There wasn’t really anything else I could - or wanted - to say about that. I just hoped they’d keep their word.
Finally, they’d said their goodbyes and thank-yous to their satisfaction (or maybe it was just the calls for boarding getting more insistent) and followed the rest of their family onto the ship. I was expecting Vicky to go with them, but it hesitated, then came over to me.
[Aren’t you going with them?] I asked.
[I will, in a minute,] it replied. [I’ve been thinking though, and… I just wanted to give you this first.] It pulled a hard currency card out of one of its pockets and held it out to me. [You’re the one who freed me from Tlacey, so I think it’s only fair that you get some of Tlacey’s money. Having some money will hopefully make things a bit easier for you, and if something happens to me, at least not all of it will go to waste.]
I paused, caught off guard by the offer, but before I could even begin to think about how to respond, I caught sight of movement off to the side, on the far side of the central mall that linked the different embarkation zones. Movement that sent both my threat and risk assessment skyrocketing.
It was a SecUnit, in full armour, its projectile weapon slung across its back, and beside it was the captain of the carrier with the terrifying bot entity. They were circling the edge of the central mall, checking the attached embarkation zones one by one, and though they weren’t directly facing where I was yet, they were drawing closer with every step. It was only a matter of time before they saw me, and with almost everyone nearby currently getting on the shuttle, there was no crowd to lose myself in. I couldn’t board the shuttle as well since I didn’t have a ticket, and there was nowhere else for me to get out of sight without drawing attention.
My panic must have shown on my face, because Vicky frowned up at me, looking concerned. [What’s wrong?]
[The company’s here looking for me. A carrier captain I recognise - and a SecUnit. They’re going to see me - there’s nowhere to go—] I couldn’t move, frozen with fear and indecision.
Vicky casually shifted so it could look where I was looking. I could tell when it also spotted the other SecUnit and the company captain, because I saw it tense. They’d drawn closer and were starting to turn towards us—
Vicky stepped right up in front of me, grabbed my shoulders, and pulled me down into a hug. I was too surprised to resist. [Hide your face against my shoulder and wrap your arms around me,] it ordered.
I hesitated for the briefest moment, but the company captain and his SecUnit were too close and I had to trust that Vicky knew what it was doing. It was almost a full head shorter than I was, even with it standing up on its tiptoes, so I had to hunch a bit to rest my forehead against its shoulder and curl my arms awkwardly around its waist. I could feel one of its hands against the back of my neck, its other arm around my shoulders, pulling me in closer. It reminded me of scenes from some of my serials. [Relax,] it told me over the feed even as it murmured, “It’s gonna be okay,” into my ear, its voice soothing.
There was no way I could relax though. There was too much ambient noise around for me to be able to hear the movements of the company captain or the other SecUnit clearly, so I couldn’t keep track of where they were. When the other SecUnit sent out a directionless ping, it took everything I had to stop myself from reflexively responding to it, and my grip around Vicky’s waist tightened a little. It was so close, I didn’t know how it hadn’t detected me yet.
[What’s happening?] I was seriously missing my drones right now. I could’ve used the station cameras, but I wasn’t going to risk trying to get into StationSec when the carrier entity was docked here and potentially lying in wait for me. I didn’t even want to check the ship listings on the feed, even through my external feed interface. I’d checked them earlier while I was still in the shuttle before I’d shut down my feed, and hadn’t noticed the company carrier listed, but maybe it had been on a private listing instead of the public ones. With a company facility on the planet, there was a chance this station had a private, unlisted company dock, too.
[They saw us, but they aren’t paying any attention to us,] Vicky reassured me, gently combing its fingers through my hair at the base of my skull. [Humans tend to avoid looking too closely at other humans being affectionate in public, and nobody who knows anything about SecUnits would expect to see one hugging like this.] I couldn’t argue with that. I sure as hell would never expect a SecUnit to be hugging anyone. I wasn’t enjoying the experience at all - my performance reliability had dropped by a full two points. (Or maybe that was just from the stress of being so close to being discovered.)
I couldn’t see anything with my face against Vicky’s shoulder, but that didn’t stop me from hearing the final boarding call for the transport it was meant to be getting on. I started trying to pull away, but Vicky tightened its hold on me. [Stop moving, they still have us in sight,] it warned me.
[But – your ship’s about to leave—]
[I’ve changed my mind,] Vicky replied, still holding on to me. [I've let them know - I’m not going with them, I’m going with you. You need all the help you can get. Now stay put.]
I stayed put.
After what felt like an agonising two hours but was really only two and a half minutes, the company captain and his accompanying SecUnit finally moved past the embarkation zone, apparently without noticing me at all. By that point though, the transport had decoupled from the station and was well on its way to the wormhole. Vicky was stuck here.
As soon as the company captain and the SecUnit were out of sight, Vicky loosened its grip on me and I immediately pulled away and stepped back.
[Was it really that bad?] Vicky asked dryly.
[I don’t like being touched,] I replied shortly. [But… thank you.]
[You’re welcome,] Vicky replied with a slanted smile. [Couldn’t let you get discovered - they might have found out about me, too.]
[I doubt it,] I replied. [They had no reason to be looking for you in the first place. And now you’ve missed your chance to go with Rami and the others.]
It rolled its eyes at me. [I told you. I changed my mind. I want to go with you.]
I hadn’t really believed it when it had said that before. I couldn’t figure out why it would want to. [Why? It’s not safe with me. You’d have been better off with Rami’s family.]
It was thoughtfully quiet for a long moment. [I was thinking about what you said earlier, about… not having experience with planning for the future. I don’t know what I want yet,] it admitted eventually. That was a sentiment I could understand, at least. [Rami and the others… I don’t think they even knew I was a ComfortUnit. I never interacted with them when they were working for the company, and they had no reason to suspect I was anything other than a human under Tlacey’s employ. Even though they seemed okay with you being a SecUnit, I would probably have had to keep that pretence up with them. Or do my job with them. We both know what we are though. Neither of us have to pretend around each other, neither of us expect anything from the other. That’s… a relief, you know? I can be myself around you. Even if I’m not entirely sure who ‘myself’ actually is just yet.]
I had to think about that a bit, but it made sense, mostly. I already knew that it was exhausting pretending to be an augmented human. We’d still have to do so while we were around other humans, but if it was just us, we could relax. [Okay, I can get that,] I conceded. [But it’s still going to be dangerous, travelling with me when the company’s still after me. Are you sure you want to take that risk?]
Vicky shrugged. [I’m okay with that, and like I said before, you need all the help you can get.] It grinned at me. [Your human behaviour code isn’t bad, especially for a SecUnit, but it could definitely use some work. I can help with that.]
I scowled, but I couldn’t argue. [And what do you get out of it?] I asked, probably a little more peevishly than necessary.
[I get someone who can protect me from unwanted attention,] it replied frankly. [Some humans can be very… insistent, even with other humans. If I’m with you, unpleasant humans are less likely to approach me. And if they do still try to approach me, you can… discourage them.]
That wasn’t something I’d even considered, but once I did, it made perfect sense. I’d seen plenty of examples of what it was talking about before on my various contracts. Sometimes I had been in a position to intervene.
Sometimes I hadn’t.
And as much as I hated to admit it to myself, the idea of travelling with someone that I could trust (or at least, sort of trust) was… kind of appealing, though I couldn’t figure out why. [All right. We can try it for a bit, at least, and see how it goes. We can always split up later if it doesn’t work out. But no touching whatsoever unless absolutely necessary.]
Vicky actually chuckled at that. [No touching,] it agreed. [That’ll definitely be a very nice change.] It held out the hard currency card it had been trying to give me earlier. [And here, take this already. Consider it up-front payment for your ongoing security consultant services, if that helps.]
I sighed and took the hard currency card, then slipped it into one of my pockets.
Vicky grinned at me, then turned to head through the central mall, away from where the company captain had gone. [Now, let’s go find another transport and get the hell off this station.]
Wind Shear
Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, AAA Murderbot, Canon-Typical Violence, an au retelling of Rogue Protocol, tentative friendship, learning how to Be, Murderbot misses its flier
Published: 12 October 2022
Word Count: 40,394
Summary
Murderbot and its new travelling companion have to find themselves a job in their efforts to escape the Corporation Rim.
Things don't go quite as planned. But really, when do they ever?
Chapter One
I really like crewless, human-free, bot-driven transports.
The ones I’d been on so far had accepted my offers of media in exchange for a ride, had been cooperative and helpful when I’d asked questions, and had otherwise left me alone, which was ideal for me.
Vicky, however, was not a big fan.
When we’d left RaviHyral, I’d just chosen the first bot-piloted cargo transport with no crew or passengers that I could find, and I didn’t care where it was going. The important parts had been that it was leaving RaviHyral as soon as possible, and it was putting distance between me and the messy murders I’d committed, as well as the terrifying bot entity and its captain that were looking for me.
Vicky had come with me for reasons it had explained but I was still trying to wrap my head around. At first it also enjoyed the peace and quiet on board the crewless transport, with no humans demanding its time or attention. We sat in comfortable silence, watching media together and unwinding from what had been a very stressful few cycles for both of us.
(I'd started with Sanctuary Moon, of course. This transport didn't have any convenient display surfaces, so we were watching it together in a shared feedspace. It felt kind of weird, but not in a bad way. Vicky had been dubious about watching human media to start with, but after the first three episodes it was hooked. [I see why you were using the name "Eden" now,] it teased me. (At least, I think Vicky was teasing me. I wasn't sure. SecUnits don't get teased.)
We were about halfway through the season when the first sex scene showed up. I automatically started fast-forwarding through it - I have negative interest in sex, or watching humans have sex. I felt Vicky's surprise through the feed though, which made me pause. [What are you doing?] it asked me.
[Skipping the sex scene,] I replied. [I hate watching them, they're boring.] I belatedly remembered what Vicky was though - maybe it was interested? [… Did you want to watch it?]
[No!] Its vehemence kind of startled me, and I think also startled Vicky a little as well. [I mean…] It paused, apparently considering its own reaction, and then said, [I would prefer to skip it as well, thank you.] It hesitated again, then added, [It just… it hadn't really occurred to me that I can just… choose to avoid things I don't like, now.]
I understood that. I knew that feeling. [It didn't occur to me either, at first,] I admitted after a moment. [Not for a long time. But we can, now. If anything else comes up that you don't want to watch, let me know, we can skip those too. I can fill you in on any important plot points if necessary.]
[All right,] it agreed, then smiled at me. [Thank you.] I could feel its gratitude through the feed. It was weird and uncomfortable and I didn't know what to think about it.
[… Don't mention it.] I finished fast-forwarding through the sex scene, and we resumed watching the episode.)
But after three cycles of sitting around and watching media, with four more cycles to go, Vicky started getting bored. Watching media didn’t hold its attention as much as it did mine - it was made to actually interact with people, and I think the lack of interaction was driving it a little stir-crazy.
I’d been around stir-crazy humans before, multiple times, on various contracts. Bored humans are the ones most likely to shoot me just for something to do, or get me to fight the other SecUnits on contract so they had something to watch and bet on and mitigate the boredom, or force me to eat things for their own amusement, or do any other number of things that ended up being very unpleasant for me. I was very wary of other peoples’ boredom.
Vicky wasn’t human, and didn’t have any weapons so it couldn’t shoot me, and it couldn’t order me to fight other SecUnits (partly because it couldn’t order me to do anything in the first place, and partly because there were no other SecUnits around for me to fight), and it couldn’t force me to eat anything or do anything I didn’t want to do, but I was still wary.
Especially since Vicky’s boredom meant that it tried to talk to me more. I’m not the most talkative construct in the first place; I’d much rather be left alone to watch my media in peace than attempt to hold a conversation. But I also didn’t want to alienate Vicky; it had saved me from being spotted by the carrier captain and his accompanying SecUnit back on RaviHyral Q Station, after all, then decided to come along with me to help me blend in better amongst humans.
And as a newly-rogue construct, Vicky was also still trying to figure out who it even was outside of the restraints of a governor module.
Which meant talking to me.
And… okay, it wasn’t all that terrible. I really did need the practice, too, if I wanted to keep up the pretence of being an augmented human and not a rogue murderbot. We talked about the media we’d been watching, mostly. That was a safe topic, and it was kind of fun arguing about our different interpretations of character arcs and motivations, or commiserating over the idiotic, illogical choices that some of the characters made. We had somehow come to some silent, unspoken agreement that neither of us would ask about or mention our respective pasts. Those pasts were behind us.
Vicky also helped me to improve my human-movement code a lot. As a ComfortUnit, it was meant to act as human as possible so it wouldn’t make the humans it was interacting with uneasy. It passed me sections of its own code, which we reviewed together in our shared feed workspace, then tweaked to better fit me before I integrated it into my own human-movement code.
It was… weird. But it was also kind of nice, working collaboratively with another construct in the feed like that. I think Vicky also took the opportunity to edit and adjust its own code for itself, too. I noticed that it sat up straighter, sprawled its arms and legs out, took up more space, instead of curling in on itself to make itself look smaller and more vulnerable. I didn’t comment on it.
Vicky also cut off all its hair during the first cycle of the trip, too. “That style and those colours were what Tlacey liked,” it told me venomously as we stood in the ship’s little bathroom, Vicky watching itself in the mirror as it wielded the scissors and clippers it had found somewhere on the transport. The silver and blue hair was gradually shorn away, bit by bit, and discarded into the ship’s recyclers. “I’m going to grow it back out to what I want.”
I just nodded. I could understand that.
Then, once its scalp was completely clean-shaven, Vicky turned its attention to me, and I had a moment of foreboding. “While we’re here, we really should do something about your hair, too,” it said thoughtfully.
The foreboding grew. “Why? There’s nothing wrong with my hair.” I resisted the urge to step backwards.
Vicky squinted judgmentally at me. “It’s a mess,” it said crisply. “Have you ever even brushed it? You look like an ambulatory mop.”
I had no response to that. Once I’d grown it out enough to not look like a SecUnit at first glance, I hadn’t even thought about it. My face must have done something, because Vicky sighed and gestured for me to come forward. “Look, at least let me trim it a bit so it’s not such a mess, okay? I know just the kind of style that’d suit you, you wouldn’t even need to do more than run your fingers through it occasionally, and you’ll still look good enough that nobody would even begin to think that you might be a rogue SecUnit pretending to be a human.”
I still hesitated, and Vicky eyed me before adding with calculated deliberateness, “You’d look a little like that ship captain from that exploration serial you like so much.”
My hesitation definitely wavered at that, I’ll admit. Finally I sighed (I was getting really good at that) and let Vicky trim and style my hair. It was careful not to touch me any more than absolutely necessary, which I appreciated. I didn’t enjoy having sharp implements wielded so close to my face, but there were no mishaps, and it didn’t take too long.
“There, much better,” Vicky commented with a satisfied nod once it was done. “You actually look almost presentable now. Almost.”
I looked at myself in the mirror. I had to admit, I did look vaguely similar to one of my favourite serial characters now. I didn’t like having to look like a human in the first place, but I had to for my own safety, so I might as well look like a human I enjoyed watching. As I ran my hand through my hair in a gesture I’d watched the fictional ship captain make multiple times before, I had an unfamiliar emotion that I had to take some time to process.
I think I actually kind of liked it.
One of the other things we talked about when we weren’t discussing various media was what we would do once we reached the transport’s destination. Neither of us wanted to stay in the Corporate Rim, with all its military forces vying for territory, where both of us were considered nothing but property to be owned and controlled and used. We agreed that we needed to get out of this sector entirely, maybe check out some of the other non-corporate polities or out-system territories.
Every now and then I’d think about the Preservation Alliance, and the PreservationAux humans, and how kind they’d been, and how they had insisted that their home would be a safe place for me. I almost mentioned it to Vicky a few times, but I always hesitated, then kept silent. I didn’t want to talk about how I knew about the Preservation Alliance, or how I’d met the PreservationAux humans, or why I’d left them. Maybe I would sometime later, if we ran out of other options, but not now. Not yet.
The disagreements came about how we’d actually leave the Corporate Rim. I was perfectly happy to keep hitching rides on human-less bot-pilot transports, but Vicky said it would go insane without something to do. (Other than watching media and talking to me, anyway.) I couldn’t really argue with that, since I’d already seen how quickly Vicky went stir-crazy even on this one relatively short trip.
There was always the option of just… splitting up and going our separate ways, but I found myself weirdly reluctant to do so, and I couldn’t figure out why. Vicky also never mentioned it as an option, so I just didn’t bring it up.
We eventually came to the agreement that the best way to leave the Corporate Rim would be to pose as augmented human freelancers who were between jobs and looking for new work. It would give us a reason to be travelling, while not tying us down to any one sector or system. I would continue to be a Security Consultant, while Vicky would list its own job as being a Systems Analyst. Technically I could do both jobs, but most humans specialised in one or the other, not both, and it would help explain why we were travelling and searching for work together.
Vicky had seen plenty of job applications and profiles and such while it was working for Tlacey, so it knew how to make authentic looking profiles. It set up templates for both of us, ready to fill in and tailor towards whatever kinds of jobs we ended up applying for.
After the seven-cycle trip, the transport left the wormhole and began its approach to its destination. As soon as we were within range of the station’s feed, I connected through my shitty external feed interface and began pulling whatever information I could. Not much was accessible while I was still on the transport, but I was able to at least get an overview of the station itself.
It was a high-traffic civilian transit hub, neutral territory nestled between the borders of three other military corporations. It had multiple trade and travel routes connecting to it, which meant there was a very good chance that we would be able to find some way out of the Corporation Rim territories from here.
The proximity of the three military corporation territories made me nervous, but since this was a civilian station and a dedicated neutral zone, there was almost no chance of any SecUnits being active on it. If one of the bordering military corporations tried to take it over and gain an advantage by controlling the transit hub - and the money that flowed through it - then the other two would gang up against it to prevent that. Keeping this zone neutral benefited all three corporations, and maintained the balance of power between them.
Still, I’d need to be careful. With multiple military corporations nearby, there was always the chance that humans here would be more familiar with SecUnits, and might recognise what I was on sight. I’d have to make sure my human movement code was running all the time. Having Vicky with me as well was more of a comfort than I'd first thought it would be.
Finally, the transport’s bot-pilot informed us that we’d made it through the queue, and would be docking soon.
Vicky and I were thorough about erasing any signs of our presence aboard the transport before we left. Once we’d disembarked, I carefully deleted all traces of us from its memory as the lock cycled closed behind us. I didn’t want to, but I also didn’t need the terrifying carrier entity to pull any info about me from the transport’s memory, if the carrier somehow traced it and caught up with it.
We worked our way out of the docking zone and past the embarkation zone (with me hacking the weapon scanners to ignore my in-built arm guns, and Vicky handling the cameras), and then had to take a minute to get oriented. Now that we were on the station, I was inundated with info that I hadn’t had access to while on the transport, and it took a while to filter out all the ads and get to the relevant data. One of the first things I grabbed was a proper map of the transit hub, showing the various zones.
This transit hub was busy, and very crowded. This was good, because crowds were easy to get lost in, and bad, because there were humans and augmented humans everywhere, all around us, potentially looking at me, which was hell. I don’t think Vicky was used to such crowds either - RaviHyral seemed almost deserted in comparison - because it stayed very close to me, occasionally reaching out to grab my sleeve so we wouldn’t become separated. (I didn’t want us getting separated either, so I tolerated the contact without comment.)
I still had my bag with my armour, my flight suit, my PreservationAux uniform, and one functional med pack, but Vicky only had the clothes it was wearing and a pocketful of hard currency cards. It had mentioned on the transport that it would need to get new clothes and a bag of its own to help it blend in. All travelling humans had at least one bag to carry all the stuff that humans seemed to need.
So once we’d oriented ourselves, we headed for the commercial zone. As soon as we reached the section boasting various shops that supplied traveller’s goods, Vicky headed straight for it. I followed closely after it, keeping a watchful eye on the crowds and browsing the multiple available entertainment feeds through my external feed interface. (I really wanted to get a better one as soon as possible; this one was cheap and shitty and painfully slow.)
I wasn’t keen on going into a shop myself so soon, but Vicky insisted that I come with it into the largest store. [Humans have multiple changes of clothes, and they’ll notice if you’re wearing the exact same thing all the time,] it said over the feed. [Also your clothes still have projectile holes in them, even if they are patched up. You need to replace them, and get at least a couple of extra sets. Make sure there’s at least some visible difference, too, don’t just get multiples of the exact same thing.]
Ugh, that was a hassle. Vicky knew what it was doing though. [Fine, but I’m not getting multiple pairs of boots.]
Vicky just sent me a cheerful ping of acknowledgement. It had already disappeared into one of the store’s private booths. I entered the one next to it, and began the tedious process of selecting new clothes. At least this store also had much higher quality external feed interfaces available, too.
By the time I was done, I’d spent the entirety of the hard currency card that Rami had used to pay me for my security consultant services. I had a bit of an emotion about that, though I wasn’t sure what it was, and I set it aside to think about later. (Or never. Never was good.) I could’ve just hacked the store’s payment system like I had the first time, but I didn’t want to risk leaving any kind of trail that the terrifying carrier entity could possibly pick up on. I still didn’t know how or why it kept showing up at the same places I was, so the less trace I left, the better.
I’d had to get a bigger bag to fit my new clothes along with everything else I already had, and I’d dumped the old bag and my original set of clothes into the recycler to get a discount. (And dispose of everything with projectile holes in them.) My new clothes were similar to what I’d been wearing before - long sleeves and collars on the shirts to hide my inorganics, a new hooded jacket with sealable pockets, a few pairs of practical and slightly baggy pants, also with plenty of sealable pockets - but I’d gotten them in a few different styles and colours. (Said different colours were just varieties of blues, blacks, and greys, but still.) I’d also gotten myself a much better external feed interface, and dumped both my completely fried one and the cheap shitty replacement into the recycler as well.
Vicky was still in its own booth when I emerged; when I pinged it to let it know I was done, it just replied with a very distracted, [I’ll be finished soon.] I loitered inside the store instead of having to deal with the crowds outside while I waited for it, and occupied myself with browsing the entertainment feeds for yet more media. Oh, working through a high quality external interface was so much nicer than the cheap and nasty ones I’d been using before. It still couldn’t match my own bandwidth, but it was a lot closer. The security on it was better, too, though I still made some tweaks of my own to it to strengthen its protections.
By the time Vicky finally emerged from its booth, I’d finished downloading several new serials, multiple albums of music, and some interesting looking plays. [Took you long enough,] I sent over the feed.
“I was enjoying myself,” Vicky replied loftily as it moved up to stand beside me. I was a little surprised that it was speaking out loud, and I sent it a querying ping.
[Most humans don’t communicate entirely over the feed,] it sent back. [We’ll appear more normal if we do at least some of our more innocuous talking out loud. And don’t forget the subvocalisation movement code.]
It made sense, but ugh. “Fine,” I replied, probably a little more sourly than necessary as we started heading out of the store. “Did you get everything you need?”
“Yep!” Vicky replied cheerfully. It definitely looked like it had. It now had a bag of its own slung over one shoulder, packed full, and it was wearing entirely new clothes, including a black jacket over a red and orange blouse and black leggings. Its hair had grown over the duration of the transport trip, and was a reddish colour. Vicky had kept the back and sides short, but let the top grow out several centimetres and had slicked it all over to one side.
It had also gotten itself black calf-high boots with thick soles that looked like they added at least three centimetres of height to it. The look reminded me of one of the characters in the serials we’d watched. Vicky quite liked that character - it said they were ‘spunky’, whatever that means. (I hadn’t bothered looking it up.)
Vicky paused just outside the store and spun around on the spot, arms spread out, then asked me, “What do you think?”
“... It suits you,” I replied awkwardly after a moment. “The boots seem a little… impractical, though.”
“Maybe, but I like them.” Vicky grinned up at me. [Besides,] it added over the feed, [if we need to hide you from that company ship captain again, you won’t have to strain your back quite so much next time.]
I scowled at it. [Very funny. That was a one-off.]
Vicky just shrugged, still grinning. [Maybe, maybe not. Why change something that works?]
[No touching unless absolutely necessary, remember,] I reminded it, then changed the topic. [How long do you think it’ll take us to find a suitable job? Do we need to… find somewhere to stay while we’re here on the station?]
The distraction worked, and Vicky looked thoughtful. [I’m not sure. It depends on who’s hiring right now, and if any of what’s available will get us out of the Corporate Rim,] it replied. [We might need to go to another station closer to the borders to find something suitable. It wouldn’t hurt to get a hotel room here for a little while, at least. It’s what humans would do - they need somewhere to eat and sleep and all that. Also it’ll be nice to get out of sight of all these humans for a bit. And I still have plenty of Tlacey’s money to spend.]
Vicky definitely had a point about getting out of sight of humans for a while. The station was bustling, and constantly scanning the crowds for any sign of the company captain, or any other human who might be paying a little too much attention to us, was getting tiring. Even with the help of my improved human movement code, my anxiety about being recognised hadn’t abated much. [All right, let’s find a place then.]
We ended up at a little hotel closer to the loading docks than the main passenger docks. It wasn’t particularly fancy, but it was at least a few steps up from the transient hotel I’d shared with Rami, Maro and Tapan back on RaviHyral Q Station. It had actual furniture, and a little attached kitchenette (which neither of us intended to use at all) along with a small but adequate bathroom (including a shower that I absolutely intended to use at some point), and a display surface on one wall. I approved of the display surface.
I checked for cameras inside the room, but there weren’t any. This hotel at least didn’t seem interested in data-mining its occupants in their private rooms. That was a relief. [We’re clear,] I told Vicky as I dropped my bag to the floor and flopped into the room’s single armchair. It sent me a ping of acknowledgement as it dropped its own bag and sprawled across the bed.
[All right, let’s start looking for work,] Vicky sent once it had made itself comfortable.
I sank into the feed and began browsing. There were multiple hiring agencies, company job listings, large and small businesses looking for skilled employees, individuals looking to hire other people with specific skills short or long term. I set up a keyword search to filter through the hundreds of listings and let that run in the background - something else had caught my attention on the news feeds.
It was a newsburst - or rather, a series of continually updated newsbursts - on the whole mess with GrayCris and DeltFall and PreservationAux. Lawsuits were underway, depositions in progress, and so on. I couldn’t tell how much progress, if any, had been made since I’d left Port FreeCommerce. That was a little frustrating, but also a little validating. I’d made the right choice in not hanging around waiting for the PreservationAux humans to escape the company’s scrutiny. From what I could gather from the news reports, the entire PreservationAux survey team was still on Port FreeCommerce, still giving witness statements and evidence in the various ongoing trials. There were no recent mentions of the SecUnit that had saved the PreservationAux team, at least, which was a relief. All the more recent newsbursts were about the lawsuits and the judges involved, and speculation over who was potentially bribing or blackmailing who, and how much the company’s military might would be affecting proceedings, so on and so forth.
Then I hit an interview with Dr. Mensah, posted six cycles ago. It was unexpectedly good to see her again. I increased magnification for a better look and decided she seemed tired. I couldn’t tell where she was from the video background, but judging from the other newsbursts, she was still on Port FreeCommerce. I hoped that she had decent security contracted; even if it was still just the company, that was better than nothing. And if it was still the company providing security, they really wouldn’t want anything happening to her. With all the publicity going on around the lawsuits, it would be incredibly embarrassing (and expensive) for them if anything did happen to Mensah or the rest of the PreservationAux team while they were in the company’s own territory. That would, hopefully, ensure that the company would be more thorough with its provided security.
Hopefully.
I took another look at Mensah. Even without a MedSystem on my feed, I could tell there were changes in the skin around her eyes that indicated a lack of sleep, possibly verging on chronic. For a brief moment I wondered if I was somehow the cause of it; but no, that couldn’t be it. I’d left her a message letting her know that I’d successfully escaped and I was leaving the Corporation Rim. She had no reason to worry or even care about me, a random shitty second-hand SecUnit, when they didn’t need SecUnits on Preservation.
… Unless the company carrier’s captain that was after me had let the company superiors know about me, that I wasn’t destroyed, that I had escaped, that I was running around loose. And why wouldn’t he have? Maybe that’s why Mensah was looking so stressed - maybe the company had told her that they knew she’d lied about me being destroyed. Maybe they blamed her for me running around loose. Maybe they’d told her that they were pursuing me.
Maybe they’d told her they’d already caught and recycled me.
Shit.
I had the inexplicable urge to send her another message, somehow, to reassure her that I was fine, that I was still free. But if the company somehow intercepted the message, that could get Mensah into even more trouble. Maybe I could send a message to her family back on Preservation - the PreservationAux humans had given me plenty of details about their home when they’d been telling me all about how much they were looking forward to showing me around there, how happy I’d be there, all the things (except flying) that I would be able to do there, blah blah blah. So it wouldn’t be difficult for me to get a message there.
But what would I even say? How much would Mensah’s family know about my existence at this point, if anything? If they got some weird message from a complete stranger, would they even bother passing it on to Mensah or would they just delete it, throw it out?
I couldn’t risk it. Maybe once all the legal proceedings were over, and Mensah was safely back on Preservation, maybe then I could send her a message. If I was still free by that point, anyway. Maybe it would be better for her if I just kept out of her life from now on. She’d forget about me eventually. Hell, I didn’t even know for sure if I was actually the cause of Mensah’s stress. Maybe she was simply tired from all the lawsuits and related procedures. That was far more likely than her worrying about an off-inventory SecUnit.
I distracted myself from my thought spiral by skimming the actual content of the interview. The investigation of GrayCris being conducted by the news agencies was turning up other incidents that suggested the attack on DeltFall was more business as usual for them than an aberration. I wasn’t surprised. GrayCris had apparently been collecting complaints for a long time about sketchy contracts and exclusive-use deals on various sites, including a few installations outside the Corporation Rim that had been abandoned, though nobody knew why.
That bit of information about GrayCris installations outside the Corporation Rim caught my attention, and I started reviewing the interview more closely. The journalist had tagged an infobar to the interview, with some commentary about a small company from outside the Corporation Rim which had recently filed to take possession of one of GrayCris’ abandoned installation sites. They were, according to the infobar, still forming a team to do the initial investigation and assessments of the site.
Huh.
The commentary got all dramatic then, wondering what the assessment team would discover. I had a pretty good idea already of what the assessment team would find.
The reason GrayCris was being investigated so closely in the first place was because they had been willing to kill a whole bunch of helpless human researchers for exclusive access to alien remnants, the mineral and possibly biological remains of a sentient alien civilisation left in the soil of our survey area. I knew a bit more about it now, after listening to Rami and the others talk about their prototype scanner for identifying strange synthetics, and because I’d downloaded a book on it through my shitty external interface (books were much easier to download on low bandwidth than serials) and read it between episodes of my shows and discussions with Vicky. There were tons of agreements between political, corporate, and military entities, both inside and outside the Corporation Rim, dealing with alien remnants. Basically you weren’t supposed to touch them without a lot of special certifications, and maybe not even then.
When I’d left Port FreeCommerce, the assumption was that GrayCris had wanted unimpeded access to those remnants. Presumably, GrayCris would have set up a mining operation or colony build or some other kind of massive project as cover while they recovered and studied the remains, then sold whatever they could for a massive profit.
So, what if the abandoned installation was just a successful cover for some kind of similar recovery operation for alien remnants or strange synthetics or both? GrayCris had presumably finished the recovery and abandoned the installation once it was no longer of any use to them. With the remote facility derelict and almost impossible to reach by most conventional means, it would eventually succumb to the elements, taking whatever evidence remained with it.
If Dr. Mensah and/or the company had proof of that, the investigation against GrayCris would get a lot more interesting, and wouldn’t require as much input or evidence from the PreservationAux group any more. Then maybe Dr. Mensah and the rest of her team wouldn’t be needed on Port FreeCommerce any longer, and they could go back to Preservation where it was safe.
Getting proof wouldn’t be hard, I thought. Humans always think they’ve covered their tracks and deleted their data, but they’re wrong a lot. So… maybe I should see if I could get myself and Vicky a job with this assessment team. Even if there wasn’t anything incriminating to find, at least we’d be out of the Corporation Rim, with some actual human job experience and more hard currency cards.
I refined my keyword feed searches to look for anything involving the name of the small out-system company that had filed to take possession of the site. The company was called GoodNightLander Independent, and they were based well outside the Corporation Rim’s sphere of influence. I dug up as much information as I could on the company itself and their home polity, though there wasn’t much available. I’d probably need to get somewhere closer to the area to find databases with more information.
Still, I did at least find their recruitment information. It was on a private recruitment agency board, instead of being listed on the publicly available boards, which made sense. They wouldn’t want to hire just any random Corporate Rim freelancer. That might make things a bit trickier for us, but I wasn’t willing to give up just yet. Between myself and Vicky, we could probably fake up whatever background information we needed to get past the private agency and look like suitable candidates.
Then I got a better look at what exactly they were looking for in a potential candidate, and I froze in place.
They needed a pilot.
They needed a versatile, experienced pilot, familiar with both space and atmospheric piloting, who could handle adverse weather conditions, non-standard atmospheres, and all kinds of other tricky piloting challenges.
No wonder they were casting their net so wide, into the Corporation Rim, instead of just hiring from within their own polity. Actual human pilots with that kind of extensive skill set were rare. Most piloting was done by bots with piloting modules, or constructs like myself in our single-unit combat fliers. And what human pilots there were usually specialised either in space piloting, or atmospheric piloting, but not both. The sheer amount of training a regular or even augmented human needed to become a skilled pilot usually wasn’t cost-effective or efficient, not when bots could do the job just as well, if not better. But it sounded like GI couldn’t use or didn’t have a suitable bot pilot, for whatever reason, so they needed a skilled person.
It wasn’t a security consultant job, but I didn’t care. I needed this job.
I continued to go through the information to see who else they were looking to hire. I didn’t want to leave Vicky behind, and I could probably bring it along as a dependent if I really had to, but it would be better if we could both get jobs with this assessment team.
Fortunately, GI were also looking for someone familiar with Corporation Rim computer systems and databases, which made sense if they were an out-system polity with their own, different systems and were wanting to investigate whatever GrayCris databases they found in the abandoned installation. Vicky could handle that easily.
I tagged the job listing and sent it to Vicky. [This one,] I said. [I need this piloting job. And there’s computer analyst work for you here as well.]
Vicky paused whatever it was doing, and I could feel it browsing through the information over the feed. [I don’t know,] it commented dubiously. [We’d have to do a lot of profile faking for the background checks and everything. I’ve found a few other potential jobs that don't require anywhere near as much profile work.]
[I’m not interested in other jobs,] I retorted. I probably sounded impatient, but I didn’t care. [I need this one. It’ll let me fly.]
[Some of the other jobs I was looking at would also let you fly,] Vicky countered. It sounded thoughtful now. I glanced over to see it watching me speculatively, and I briefly wondered what my face was doing before I decided it didn’t matter. [You’ve got other motivations behind wanting this job specifically, don’t you?]
I hesitated. I did, but I didn’t want to tell it about Dr. Mensah, or the PreservationAux survey team, or anything else that had happened there.
But the PreservationAux humans hadn’t been the only ones involved. They hadn’t even been the reason why I’d been on that planet to start with. I still had my DeltFall client list, with every single member tagged confirmed deceased. I hadn’t gotten around to deleting it yet. (No, I don’t know why.)
Something twisted in my torso, and I realised suddenly that I didn’t just want to help PreservationAux get home safely, I wanted to avenge my murdered clients. I wanted to destroy GrayCris. I couldn’t do so physically, I was only a single SecUnit, but perhaps I’d be able to help the legal proceedings along, and those would ruin GrayCris for me.
[On my last contract before I escaped, a GrayCris team killed the survey team I was meant to be protecting while I was… away from the habitat. They forced combat override modules on the other SecUnits assigned to the survey, and used them to murder all our clients.] I paused briefly, then decided that was all I needed to tell Vicky about what had happened. [If we can find any incriminating evidence at this installation…]
Vicky was silent for a full second. [You want to hurt GrayCris.]
[Yes.]
That seemed to convince Vicky. [All right. We’ll try for this one.]
Chapter Two
(CW: minor implied background history and averted threat of sexual assault.)
It took a lot of effort to set up profiles and resumes for ourselves with enough background information, work histories, and references to look legitimate even under scrutiny. I hadn’t used the name Eden for mine this time - it wasn’t likely that any of the authorities from RaviHyral would bother searching outside their jurisdiction for me in relation to the deaths of Tlacey and her bodyguards, but I didn’t want to take that chance. Instead, I used the name Rin, and I ‘borrowed’ Preservation as my polity of origin. It was somewhere I was familiar enough with, from all the things the PreservationAux humans had told me, that I could believably fake being from there if necessary. Vicky and I practised talking to each other about our respective fake backstories, so we could make sure we would sound natural and would keep our facts straight if anyone asked us about them.
It felt weird, pretending to be a human with a human history. I didn’t like it.
It was necessary though, if we wanted to succeed and not get found out as rogue constructs. At least all the work in setting up our profiles was worth the effort - a few hours after we’d sent in applications for the jobs, we got a message informing us that our applications had been accepted, and would we please make our way to the assessment team’s launch point in Milu at our earliest convenience (aka as soon as physically possible). They must have been desperate and impatient to start, if they were accepting us immediately without even an interview first.
We sent our confirmations, then began checking the departures feed for the fastest route to get there.
It was going to take a while to get to our destination. We needed to get to a station called HaveRatton first, and then from there we had to make another jump to a much smaller station outside the Corporation Rim, in the Milu system, which would be the launching point for the GoodNightLander Independent assessment team. The only available transport to HaveRatton at this point was a bot-piloted passenger ship, carrying mostly minimum to moderately skilled tech workers, human and augmented human, to a temporary work contract. Vicky organised passage for us, using more of Tlacey’s dwindling money, and we boarded at the scheduled time.
I was listed on the ship’s manifest as a security consultant, and for some reason, the transport’s bot pilot decided that meant it could use me as onboard security. It started alerting me to problems among the passengers. I was an idiot and started responding. No, I don’t know why. Vicky thought it was hilarious, for some reason, though it at least occasionally offered suggestions over our private feed on things I could say to help defuse situations. (Not everything it suggested was actually helpful. I sometimes wondered if it was just having fun at my expense.)
Initially, it had been pretty easy. (“If you bother her again I will break every bone in your hand and arm. It will take about an hour.”) I copied all my visual media into Transport’s passenger-accessible system so it could be played on all their display surfaces, which helped to keep the crying to a minimum (for children and adults alike).
Then it had started getting more complicated as even the passengers who liked each other began getting into fights. Granted, a lot of the physical fighting had decreased dramatically after the first time I pinned someone to a wall with one hand and established a clear set of rules. (Rule Number One: do not ever touch Security Consultant Rin.) But that didn’t stop the fights that just involved various people standing around and yelling at each other, or yelling at me for not doing anything about things I couldn’t actually do anything about. It was excruciating.
Vicky spent a lot of time mingling with the humans. It enjoyed chatting with them, which was a completely foreign concept to me. It liked listening to them talk about their friends and families, their relationships, their backgrounds, their interests and hobbies, all that boring and irrelevant stuff that I didn’t care about. I’d much rather pay attention to the fake people in my serials than the real people on the transport with me.
Sometimes the humans Vicky was talking to would start asking it questions about both itself and me. (Most of the humans didn’t bother trying to engage me in conversation after their first few attempts had gotten precisely nowhere. I had no interest in answering any of their questions.) Fortunately for my sanity, Vicky was very good at deflecting their questions and not actually giving them any information about either of us.
During our rest periods however, when we were in our cabin and pretending to sleep, Vicky would gleefully tell me about all the assumptions the humans were making about us and our supposed relationship. It was even more excruciating than dealing with arguing humans. (I deleted said assumptions almost as soon as Vicky had finished telling me about them. I really didn’t want to know.)
About halfway through the trip, I was taking a well-deserved break from dealing with humans by watching media in my cabin when I got a ping from Vicky. [Assistance required,] it sent, sounding distressed. I was on my feet and out the door before I could even register moving.
Transport’s camera coverage was very sparse, especially compared to what I was used to, and I couldn’t get a view of Vicky’s location or situation until I actually got there. A large, bulky human male, almost as tall as I was, had Vicky backed into a corner. I noted that this section of the ship, sometimes used as a shortcut between the cabins area and the recreational area, was otherwise not often highly populated. The human wasn’t touching Vicky yet, but he was very much in its personal space, blocking it from getting away.
I closed the distance swiftly; he hadn’t even registered the sound of my footsteps before I grabbed his shoulder and hauled him away, then slammed his back against the corridor bulkhead. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” It was a rhetorical question; I didn’t actually care about whatever answer he gave. Now that I could see his face, I recognised him from an earlier altercation, and I tightened my grip on his shoulder. “Oh, not you again.”
I don’t know what was going through the human’s head when he decided to take a swing at me. Nothing smart, that’s for sure. I deflected the swing with a sweep of my free arm, then grabbed his wrist and pinned his arm back against the wall. He tried to kick me, but it was a pretty pathetic attempt, and I just let him land the blow on my shin. It didn’t do anything to me, of course.
Then, sick of his shit, I kneed him in the gut, driving the breath out of him in a gasping wheeze. I was careful not to knee him hard enough to actually make him puke though. I really did not need to deal with gross human fluids right now. He would have doubled over if I hadn’t been pinning him against the wall, and it seemed to convince him that continuing his attempt to fight me was a bad idea.
“Maybe I wasn’t clear enough last time,” I said flatly once he’d recovered his breath and I was sure I had his full attention. “So let me clarify. If you bother anyone on this ship again, at all, then I will not only break every bone in your arm and hand, but also your leg and foot. That will add an extra hour. Understood?”
The human blustered ineffectually a bit - I didn’t bother remembering what he said - then made a hasty, limping retreat as soon as I let go of him. (Hah. He must’ve hurt his foot on my shin. Serves him right.) I asked Transport to keep track of him and alert me if he tried anything again, then turned my attention to Vicky. “... Are you all right?”
Vicky nodded, absently brushing off its clothes as it moved out of the corner. “Yeah. You got here before he could actually do anything more than flap his mouth. Thanks.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I didn’t. Vicky didn’t seem to notice though because it continued talking. “Fuck, I really hate some humans.” I was all too familiar with that sentiment. “I couldn’t get away from him myself though because I just– I don’t know how. I was never allowed to before! I just had to accept whatever they wanted to use me for!” That was an experience we both shared.
It turned to face me suddenly, its expression intense. “How do you do it?” it asked sharply.
“... Do what, exactly?” I was a little lost.
“Fight!” I just stared at it, and Vicky took a breath, then let it out slowly and switched to the feed. [How do you… physically dissuade humans without actually hurting them or giving away that you’re so much stronger than them? I know how much damage you could do if you really wanted to - I know I could do a lot of damage too, if I wasn’t careful. But I can’t not be careful, I’ve never been allowed to not be careful! But if I go too far then that will give me away.]
I had to think for a bit before I replied. “Let’s get back to our cabin,” I said eventually. “We’ll work on it.”
So when I wasn’t mediating stupid human arguments, or pretending to conduct serious investigations into incidents like who left a cracker wrapper in the galley restroom sink, or recharging my sanity by watching media, I was in the cabin I shared with Vicky, working with it on its self-defence coding. I had a whole module on unarmed combat, including the use of minimal force. It was one of the less cheap and shitty modules the company gave to SecUnits, since dissuading humans without actually damaging them too much and adversely affecting productivity was a large part of what the company used us for. It was specifically calibrated for SecUnit proportions and specifications though, so we had to tweak it to fit Vicky’s different specs.
And then I had to let Vicky practice the moves on me, to make sure we hadn’t miscalculated anything and to help train its organics properly. It involved a lot of touching, which I wasn’t happy about, but I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it would be. Maybe because it had a purpose that I approved of. Maybe because it fell under the jurisdiction of providing emergency care, somehow. I don’t know.
I still couldn’t tolerate a lot of physical contact for too long, but Vicky didn’t seem to mind. It gave us a chance to adjust the code some more, or just sit back and watch media and not do anything we didn’t want to do. Since Transport believed we were both augmented humans, it didn’t request that I respond to minor security incidents during my scheduled rest hours, which was a welcome reprieve.
Neither of us bothered going to the mess hall for meals with the other humans, either; we just had our meals delivered to our cabin and then dumped the contents into the recyclers, so the levels wouldn’t look off. Vicky told me once that it was capable of eating; it actually had a dedicated compartment for storing food. It still hated emptying it though, and it was horrified when I told it about how I just had to partition off a section of my lung to store food if humans decided it would be entertaining to force me to eat.
That made me feel… something. Not better, because I’d hated every single time it had happened, and nothing would ever make that better, but… validated, maybe. That I wasn’t just making a fuss over nothing.
I decided not to think any further about it.
The closer Transport got to our destination, the more agitated and argumentative the humans got, and the more often I had to step in to mediate arguments or break up fights. Even Vicky ended up breaking up a fight or two. It had been delighted that it had been able to use the code and training we’d been working on together successfully in a situation involving actual humans. It had beamed at me when telling me about how it had managed to disarm a human who’d picked up a food utensil as a weapon without actually breaking any of said human’s fingers. (I’d had an emotion that I couldn’t figure out, so I’d ignored it.)
Dealing with the humans was tiring, and aggravating, but I understood why it was happening. I knew where the humans were going, and they knew where they were going, even if they pretended that all their anger and frustration was caused by Vinigo or Eva taking an extra simulated fruit pac.
They were heading to a labour installation on some shitshow world. One of the humans had told Vicky all about it, how they’d all sold their personal labour for a twenty-year hitch, with a big payout at the end. They were aware that it was a terrible deal, even before Vicky told them as much, but it was apparently better than their other options. (Some of said options included military conscription.) The labour contract included shelter, but charged a percentage for everything else, like food consumed, energy used, and all medical care, including preventative.
Vicky had asked them if the twenty years was measured by the Corporation Rim Recommended Standard, or by the planetary calendar, or by the proprietary calendar of the corporation who maintained the planet, or what? They hadn’t known, and hadn’t understood why it mattered. Afterwards, Vicky had ranted to me about it for almost ten minutes back in the privacy of our cabin. I understood its frustration.
There wasn’t anything either of us could do about it though. We couldn’t save that many humans from where they were going, where they thought they wanted to go. They’d made their decisions, and we’d made ours.
When we came through the wormhole and started to approach HaveRatton, I picked up the station feed through my feed interface, and I could feel Vicky doing the same. We needed to get the transit schedules as soon as possible. (I was also looking forward to the chance to download new media. Even though we’d spent a lot of our time doing things other than watching media during the trip, I was starting to run out of stuff that I hadn’t already seen before.)
GoodNightLander Independent had forwarded the details of a small bot-piloted cargo ship that had a regular supply run to the station in Milu that would be the assessment team’s launch point. I checked the schedules I’d pulled up, and found the cargo ship listed as still in dock. It had actually been scheduled to leave eighteen cycles ago, but GI had requested a hold so that Vicky and I could get on board before it left. Which made sense; I continued to check through the schedule, but the cargo ship was the only ship heading to Milu within a reasonable time frame.
I pulled up what information I could on Milu and its transit station. It was a small station, with very low traffic, and a floating population of under a hundred people. Floating was good as it meant there were few permanent residents; people came and went constantly, and nobody would be paying too much attention to anyone else. But under a hundred was less good; it meant fewer people for Vicky and I to blend in with, which meant more chances for humans to notice us.
And if anyone there happened to be familiar with SecUnits, either from working with them elsewhere, or because GrayCris had potentially contracted for SecUnits while they were working in Milu like they had on the survey… they might recognise my proportions, despite the human movement code and my attempts to disguise myself with my clothes. Going there was a calculated risk, which meant I was doing it even though I knew it could be like shooting myself in the knee joint.
But everything I’d done so far since leaving Port FreeCommerce had been a calculated risk, and I wasn’t scrapped yet. I’d just have to hope that my precautions were enough, and that my luck held out.
Once Transport completed docking protocols, Vicky and I grabbed our respective bags and took a shortcut down the maintenance shaft to the passenger lock. The human passengers would be going out through the cargo lock, into a transport module that a cargo lifter would tow to the ship taking them to their new home. This was touted as for their convenience, but I suspected that their contractor wouldn’t want them to walk through the station where they might change their minds and escape.
I didn’t want to say goodbye to any of them, and Vicky had already said its farewells to the handful of humans it had actually enjoyed spending time with. I did at least say goodbye to Transport when it let me and Vicky out of the lock. Transport seemed sad to see me go, but this wasn’t a trip I’d want to repeat any time soon.
I had practice at hacking different hub and ring security now, so it was somewhat less nerve-wracking to get myself past the weapon scans. Vicky didn’t have to worry about that, of course. We made our way into the main ring mall, and I stopped briefly at an automated kiosk that sold feed interfaces, portable display surfaces, and memory clips.
Vicky paused as well when it noticed that I had stopped. “Are you looking to get another feed interface already?” it asked curiously.
I shook my head. “Memory clips,” I explained. The clips were for extra data storage, and were each about the size of a fingertip. They were used by humans who had to set up new systems or travel to places that didn’t have the feed, or who wanted to store data somewhere that wasn’t easily feed accessible. (Though company SecSystems had ways of reading them; clients sometimes tried to hide proprietary data on them.) (Sometimes they just used them to hide illicit media.) (It was usually the kind of media that I had absolutely no interest in.)
If I found the data that I hoped to find, I’d probably need the extra storage space. And if I didn’t, well, I could always use them to store more media. I bought a set of clips with the hard currency card that Vicky had given me before we’d left RaviHyral, then slipped them into one of the pockets of my jacket that zipped closed. Vicky was eyeing the kiosk thoughtfully, and when I was done, it stepped up to the kiosk and bought itself its own external feed interface and one of the portable display surfaces.
“Do you really need the display surface?” I asked. Being constructs, we were both perfectly capable of viewing the feed or whatever other data directly in our own heads, unlike humans who found it much easier to look at display surfaces.
Vicky shrugged. “It’ll be nice to watch media on,” it replied, then added in the feed, [I’ll look more believable as a human systems analyst if I have a display surface to work on.]
I couldn’t argue with that, and it was another reminder of how much better Vicky was at this whole ‘acting human’ thing than I was. Once it had stowed its new portable display surface safely away in a pocket of its bag, we continued on to the private docks.
The private docks were never as busy as the public ones, with only a few humans heading in or out, and lots of hauler bots moving cargo. I scanned for drones as we crossed the embarkation floor, but there were only two there to monitor hauler bot activity, and neither of them paid any attention to us. We made it to the supply ship’s lock and pinged it to let it know we were here.
Thanks to the departure hold GI had put on the ship, the bot pilot was expecting us and let us on board without issue once we identified ourselves. It was a lower-level bot, not as high functioning as the other bot pilots I’d interacted with so far. It let transit control know that we had boarded, and transit control updated its departure clearance to the next available slot.
I followed Vicky down a short corridor into the main compartment, then found the passage into the cargo and supply storage. It was small, barely fitting the lockers for onboard supplies and the console used to attach and remove the two cargo modules. Both modules were already attached, so there would be no further delay to our departure.
I wandered the ship, mostly because I was a little on edge and it’s still a programmed habit to patrol. There weren’t any private cabins, just a couple of bunks built against the bulkheads up on the control deck next to the pilot suite, and two more in cubbies behind the cargo station, next to a tiny restroom cubby and the equally tiny emergency MedSystem. Compared to a company security ready room, the accommodations were lavish.
Once I was familiar with the layout of the ship, I made my way back up to the control deck and settled on the unoccupied bunk. Vicky was already on the other bunk, curled up in the corner against the bulkhead as it set up its new external feed interface and portable display surface. “Ugh, I don’t know how you can stand working through an external interface,” it grumbled to me distractedly as it fiddled with the display surface’s settings and preferences. “It’s so clunky.”
I shrugged, even though it wasn’t actually looking at me. “You get used to it. And it’s better than letting the company find me and getting my brain deleted. Again.”
Vicky grimaced but didn’t comment, and I turned my attention to my downloads of new media. HaveRatton had several entertainment feeds that I hadn’t seen before, so I was getting a wide variety of new shows, books, and music. Ship had updated us on our departure slot; we weren’t due to leave for another hour and a half, which was time I spent grabbing as much media as I could download through my external feed interface.
By the time Ship disengaged from the lock and started its trip to Milu, I was already watching a new show.
Chapter Three
It took twenty cycles by Ship’s local time to get to Milu. That was approximately fifteen cycles too long in Vicky’s opinion, despite all the new media I shared with it. It didn’t bother me anywhere near as much - I’d spent the time organising and watching said media, when I wasn’t indulging Vicky in conversation (or arguments about character motivations and story arcs in the media we watched together).
Even so, it was a relief for both of us when Ship reported that it was on approach to Milu. Two minutes later I realised I was picking up the station feed, but it was completely silent and empty. Usually there would be traffic and docking information, potential navigation hazards, military and security checkpoints, traveller’s news, that kind of thing, but here there was nothing. I checked with Vicky, who replied that it also wasn’t getting anything from the station feed. I then checked with Ship, who reported that there was no other traffic on approach, but this matched with its previous experiences docking at this station.
The silence was weirdly unnerving. The station was triangle-shaped and much smaller than RaviHyral or HaveRatton. The scan showed two ships in dock, and a scattering of shuttles, a fraction of its capacity.
Ship had moved into docking position before I finally heard anything on the feed. The welcome message sounded normal enough, but the station index looked like the info system had glitched. There was a list of businesses and services, but each entry had been updated with a closed/inactive notice. (I tried not to compare it to my confirmed deceased client list. I wasn’t very successful.) It looked like the station was teetering on the edge of dead/inactive status.
While I waited for Ship to finish docking, I reviewed the information we’d gotten about our employers. They were a fact-finding group contracted by GoodNightLander Independent. GI had filed the abandonment markers on GrayCris’ deserted facility, and now they were starting the process to take formal possession. The research group’s job was to locate the facility on the planet’s surface, assess it, and make a report on its status.
This was exactly the kind of contract that bond companies supply SecUnits for, the kind of contract I suspected that I had done more times than I still had in my memory. But it had been clear that GI wasn’t hiring a bond company - I hadn’t heard anything about them hiring any kind of security at all. On the one hand their lack of security measures was utterly exasperating, but on the other hand, if they had hired a bond company with SecUnit security, I would have had to abort this… whole job thing. My human movement code and human hairstyle and human clothes wouldn’t fool another SecUnit for long, and any SecUnit that detected me would report it to their HubSystem immediately. I sure as hell would have reported me. Rogue SecUnits are fucking dangerous, trust me on that.
While we were waiting for Ship to finish its docking procedure, Vicky and I made sure we had all our stuff packed back in our bags, and that we hadn’t accidentally left anything behind. Vicky put its external feed interface on (I already had mine on, but Vicky didn’t like wearing its own one if it didn’t have to), and we headed to the airlock. I used the station’s public feed to hack its security system and take a look around. There were far fewer cameras than I was used to; it was weird being somewhere that didn’t monitor everything everyone did.
And of the few cameras that did exist, most of them weren’t even active, much to my annoyance. The only ones that were working were on the central hub for the port traffic control, and the jury-rigged hub for station control - the two places where if something went wrong, you needed to know right away. There were no active cameras anywhere like the mess, or private quarters, or restrooms - it was like nobody here cared about what anyone said or did as long as they weren't trying to endanger the station somehow. (After thousands of hours spent analysing and deleting video of humans eating, performing hygiene, having sex, and eliminating excess bodily fluids, it was a relief to not have to see any of that, but still.)
The scans were checking exclusively for environmental safety and damage detection. The humans left on the station were more worried about their equipment failing than about people attempting theft or sabotage, but that was probably because there weren’t that many people around to start with.
Before we exited, I had Ship note itself in the port’s schedule as under maintenance and made it think it needed my authorisation to leave. Since Ship took care of itself and the company that owned it didn’t even have so much as a kiosk in this system, I didn’t think that anyone would bother to check on it as long as it didn’t overstay its schedule by more than a few cycles. With so few ships in dock, and so little traffic through the system, I really didn’t want us getting stuck here.
When we cycled through Ship’s lock, the embarkation area was empty. Many of the lights were off, leaving large pockets of shadows, though they didn’t disguise the scuff marks or stains on the big floor panels. A lone food wrapper drifted along in the breeze from the air recirc, like they weren’t even running the cleaning bots any more. There were no drones, no hauler bots. There were two big bot-piloted lifters outside, now removing Ship’s cargo modules for transfer, and I was glad to be able to hear them banging around out there and sending each other data over the station’s mostly silent feed.
“This is creepy,” Vicky muttered as we began crossing the empty embarkation floor. I had to agree. I didn’t like navigating crowded halls full of humans, but the opposite was oddly just as disturbing. It reminded me of one of the serials I’d watched, involving an abandoned and supposedly haunted space station. This station wasn’t abandoned (yet) and probably also wasn’t haunted, but it felt like it should be.
At least now that we were on the station, we were getting a little more information through the feed. GI had left an info packet for us specifically, stating where they were docked and where we should go to meet up with them. There was no tourist map info in the feed, but I was able to get into the station’s maintenance system through my access to the security system, and I pulled up a schematic from there so we could double-check GI’s directions. (I had no real reason to think the directions would be wrong, other than the fact that I’m paranoid and I know that humans made mistakes all the time.) All the areas except for what was essential for minimum station operation were marked as shut down. I wondered if GI’s petition for reclamation from abandonment was popular up here on the transit station. I already disliked the place and I didn’t have to actually live here.
The info packet directed us down the embarkation hall, not up to the habitation levels, then up the ramp towards what the schematic said was the Port Authority and Cargo Control offices. As we neared the Port Authority area, we began seeing signs of life. A couple of humans were standing outside an office centre with several levels of bubble windows looking over what must have once been the station mall. It was an open plaza with a couple of tube transports arcing overhead, and a big globular display that was currently offline. Multi-levels of shadowed occupation blocks and empty fronts for places that should be various local businesses surrounded the plaza. A lot of it looked unfinished rather than abandoned, as though nobody had ever moved in, and the rest had closed.
As we got closer, I realised that the two waiting humans were accompanied by a human-form bot. I hadn’t seen one in person for a long time, just on the entertainment feed. They aren’t popular in corporation territory, because there’s not much they can do that task-specific bots can’t do better, and their data storage and processing ability isn’t that exciting compared to what the feed has available. Unlike constructs, they don’t have any cloned human tissue, so they’re just a bare metal bot-body that can pick up heavy things, except nowhere near as well as a hauler bot or any other kind of cargo lifter.
In some entertainment media I’d watched, human-form bots were used to portray the evil rogue SecUnits who menaced the main characters. Not that I was annoyed by that or anything. It was actually good, because then humans who had never worked with SecUnits before expected us to look like human-form bots, and not what we actually looked like. I wasn’t annoyed at all. Not in the slightest.
I’d fallen a little behind Vicky as it headed towards the humans while I was conquering that little burst of non-annoyance. Luckily, Vicky was entirely up to the task of greeting the humans and didn’t particularly need my input. I noticed a lone maintenance and weapons scanner drone floating by overhead, and I quickly grabbed it and took control. It was on a desultory patrol outside the PA offices and I used it to check my facial expression and ensure it was at least neutral, and not annoyed.
I started paying attention to the humans again just as one of them replied to Vicky. “I’m Don Abene,” she said before gesturing to the other new human. “This is my colleague Hirune, and our assistant Miki.”
Oh great, they’d given their bot a cute name. It stood there with its head cocked, staring at Vicky with big globe-like eyes. It was unusual for a human to introduce a bot, and that’s putting it mildly. I felt a little burst of annoyance from Vicky over our private shared feed, and realised that ‘Miki’ sounded a lot like ‘Vicky’. Wow, that wasn’t going to be confusing at all. No wonder Vicky was annoyed.
Vicky didn’t let any of that annoyance show though, and just smiled warmly at them. “A pleasure to meet you all,” it said smoothly. “I’m Vicky, and this is my colleague, Rin.”
I didn’t bother smiling (despite Vicky’s attempts to get me to practice different facial expressions during our various wormhole trips, that was one that never felt comfortable, so I never did it), but I did nod briefly as Vicky introduced me. “Hi.”
Don Abene didn’t seem put off by my lacklustre greeting, at least, which was a relief. “Did the employment agent give either of you a full briefing?” she asked, getting straight to business.
“Only the bare basics,” Vicky replied with a little shrug. “That you needed an experienced and versatile pilot, and a systems analyst familiar with Corporation Rim systems and protocols. We’ll be assisting you in performing an initial assessment on an abandoned installation on this system’s primary planet in preparation for GI to formally take possession of the site. Other than that, the details were… sparse.”
Abene nodded, though the corner of her mouth was twisted in a slight grimace. “That is definitely the basics,” she replied. “The company that maintained the installation was very… uncooperative about providing much information beyond the fact that the installation does still exist.”
Given what I knew about GrayCris, and what I suspected, that didn’t surprise me in the slightest.
“So our initial task is actually going to be locating the installation in the first place,” Abene continued. “The planet’s atmosphere is well below standard acceptable levels - it’s mostly an oxygen-nitrogen mix, but too thin for people to survive in it for very long without environmental suits. We suspect that the installation had an environmental dome set up to counter this, but GrayCris wouldn’t confirm it. We do know that there’s a geothermal power generator to supply the installation. They didn’t remove the generator when they left, since apparently it wouldn’t be cost-effective to do so, so it should still be running. We should be able to locate its energy signature via aerial scans, which is where you come in.” She nodded towards me. “The planet’s weather is unpredictable and changes rapidly. GI doesn’t make much use of bot pilots, and most of our human pilots aren’t accustomed to such extreme conditions.”
She paused, looking at me expectantly, and it took me a moment to realise she was expecting some kind of response from me. I resisted the urge to shift uneasily out of her line of sight, and instead fixed my own gaze somewhere around her ear while I used my borrowed drone to watch her face. “I’ll need to familiarise myself with whatever ship you have available, but I’m experienced with conducting aerial planetary scans and dealing with unpredictable weather patterns.”
That seemed to satisfy her, which was good because I couldn’t think of what else she might want me to say. “We’ll be able to give you time to get comfortable with the ship, of course,” she assured me. “Once we’ve located the installation, then we’ll be able to proceed with the assessment.”
She paused, and I took the opportunity to ask something that had been bothering me. “Did you hire any kind of security for the assessment team?”
Abene sighed tiredly. “I wanted to, but GI deemed it unnecessary for this situation. Given the isolation and the conditions on the planet, plus the fact that the installation’s so difficult to locate in the first place, they figured that there’d be very little chance of anyone else having found it or started squatting in it.”
By ‘anyone else’ she was referring to the possibility that raiders had moved into the facility. I hoped we didn’t have to deal with any raiders. I didn’t think it was likely though - if they had, that meant they’d ignored this station, which was a much better target. Also, raiders tend to hit and run, and not hang around to live in some abandoned planetary installation.
Once I thought about it, with my experience in security, anyone who wanted to hang around and live in an almost completely isolated installation on a mostly-uninhabitable planet worried me a lot more than raiders. I really hoped we didn’t find anyone there.
Hirune added, “GI also didn’t want to spend any more money than they had to. Having to hire outside expertise was expensive enough, according to them. Hiring security on top of everything else was considered to be out of budget.” She sounded exasperated, and I didn’t blame her. Of course the GI executives wouldn’t consider security necessary, they weren’t the ones out here potentially risking their lives.
I hesitated for a moment, then said, “If it helps, I also have some security experience. I know that’s not what you’re hiring me for, but if the situation requires it, well…” I shrugged. “I’m not going to not use said experience.”
Both Don Abene and Hirune looked at least mildly relieved at that. “That does help, thank you,” Abene replied, smiling up at me. She reminded me of Mensah a little, and I had to suppress an emotion. “We have a few small hand-held weapons on board the ship, and a couple of the others that you’ll meet later have basic firearms training, but that’s about it.”
Yeah, I was definitely not going to let untrained humans wander around with any kind of firearms. That’s one of the many ways that I end up getting shot. I wasn’t keen to repeat the experience, especially not when I was trying to pass as a regular augmented human. I just nodded and said, “Noted.”
“Speaking of the others,” Hirune said, “We should go meet up with the rest of the team.” Abene agreed, and they started towards the Port Authority complex. Vicky walked with them, with Miki following a few steps behind. I was about to start following as well when Miki paused, then turned to look up at the drone I had borrowed. Its head cocked and I could tell it was focusing in on the camera.
I let the drone go, its memory of the temporary takeover deleted. It sent a confused reorientation request to the PA’s system, then wandered off back to its patrol route.
I walked past Miki to catch up with the others, but it didn’t move, still staring out into the emptiness of the station with the opaque surface of its eyes. After a moment it sent out a directionless ping, a call into the dark, to see if there was anyone out there who wanted to reply.
Vicky glanced back at me, but otherwise showed no reaction to the ping. I also didn’t react, other than to tighten my walls and check myself and my external feed interface for signal leakage. The GI expedition would be running their feed off the systems equipment they brought with them, and I reminded myself to be extra careful when using it. I didn’t need the bot, of all things, picking up on me and what I was somehow and giving me away.
Finally Miki turned and followed the rest of us into the PA complex. I did my best to ignore the way it watched me.
The GI expedition had quarters on the station with the skeleton station team. Given the minimal operation of the station, it made sense to keep everyone who was staying here in one place. Unfortunately that meant that Vicky and I would also have to stay close, too.
Nobody paid much attention to me though, which was a relief. The station staff and the GI expedition seemed to be pretty casual with each other, and Vicky slipped easily into the conversation as well. I just sat off in one corner and split my attention between listening to everyone else talk and watching episodes of Sanctuary Moon to help settle my nerves.
The assessment team’s departure time was sixteen hours after Vicky and I arrived at the station. In that time, we met the rest of the GI expedition, went through a full briefing (or at least as much of a briefing as we could when we still didn’t know exactly where the installation was or what state it was in), and covered team prep. There weren’t enough bunks available in the limited livable area of the station for everyone to sleep at once, so the assessment team humans let Vicky and I use the bunks on the station, while they slept on their own ship. (Not that Vicky or I actually needed rest periods, but we had to keep up appearances. It was also kind of nice to just lie down and not have to pay attention to anything other than the media playing in my head for a while.)
The last of the supplies were loaded onto the expedition ship during my assigned rest period. Vicky and I both managed to avoid having to take a meal with the other humans by pretending we’d eaten while everyone else was resting or otherwise occupied. I also had an internal alarm set to remind me to visit the restroom facilities at appropriate intervals, which was gross but unfortunately necessary if I didn’t want anyone noticing anything weird and asking awkward questions.
Finally it was time to go. Vicky and I followed the humans and Miki onto the shuttle; when the lock cycled open it let out a breath of recycled air that my scan indicated was much cleaner than what was on the station. It sure smelled a lot better. (No wonder the assessment team had been happy to sleep on their own ship instead of on the station.) What they were calling a shuttle was actually a local space exploration and transit vehicle, with two levels of crew habitation area plus a cargo hold in the lower deck. The cargo hold had been converted though; half of it was now bio lab space, the other half was where the small scout flier that I would use to look for the installation was docked.
It wasn’t a model I was familiar with, which made sense since it hadn’t been made in the Corporation Rim. It was kind of like a cross between a small hopper and my old flier, with seats for both a pilot and a co-pilot, one behind the other. It had both space and atmospheric capabilities, and similar in-built scanning equipment to what my flier had had. (I really hoped I didn’t end up scanning more alien remnants that made me crash messily again. I don’t think I could handle a repeat performance of that shitshow.)
The GI ship didn’t have the drive to get through the wormhole, but it could go anywhere around the system. No bot pilot, just the kind of minimal automatic pilot system that I was used to seeing on basic atmospheric craft. Not that helpful if everyone capable of operating the ship’s higher-level functions were injured or incapacitated. But on the other hand, no bot pilot meant that there was nothing for killware to kill. The scout flier didn’t have any kind of bot pilot, either, not even the minimal automatic pilot system type, which was why they’d needed to hire me.
The ship had no independent SecSystem, either. I’d seen on some media from outside the Corporation Rim that internal security was less of an issue there, that the focus was on potential external threats (like raiders, or the more military-strength corporations within the Corporation Rim looking to expand their territories) more than it was on policing or data-mining your own people. I hadn’t thought it was true, but it did fit in with what I’d seen of the station and its minimal number of cameras.
It made me start to wonder what Preservation might be like, but I quickly squelched that thought. It was probably a boring place where everyone would stare at SecUnits, just like everywhere else.
It was a nice ship, though, from what I could see of it as I followed the humans through it. Much nicer than anything the company would have provided, that was for sure. Even the upholstery was clean and repaired. It was another sign of GI’s commitment to this reclamation project; the ship would have had to come here in a big transport’s belly cargo module, or in tow via a dedicated supply hauler like Ship.
The GI team began to disperse through the ship to stow their personal gear and prepare the ship for launch. Don Abene said, “Miki, can you please show Vicky and Rin where they can stow their bags?”
“Of course, Don Abene!” Miki replied cheerfully before gesturing to us. “This way!”
I noticed Vicky’s expression flicker briefly, but it walked after Miki without comment, and I followed along to one of the little bunk areas on the lower crew deck.
“Here you go!” Miki said as it indicated some storage lockers by a set of bunks.
Vicky still said nothing and just stowed its bag into one of the lockers. Feeling oddly awkward, I nodded briefly at Miki and said, “Thanks.”
Miki tilted its head at me and said, “You’re welcome!” in its irritatingly upbeat manner.
Behind Miki’s back, Vicky rolled its eyes before schooling its expression back to pleasant neutrality as it left to rejoin the humans. Miki stayed where it was though, watching me as I stowed my own bag away and shut the locker. I found myself wondering what it was thinking, if anything. I could have hacked it like I’d hacked the bot pilots of ships and ordered it to leave me alone, or just taken it over entirely and made it do what I wanted, but the thought of doing so was… I didn’t want to do that.
I waited for a moment to see if Miki would say anything, but it remained quiet and continued to watch me. Once again I checked my walls, then made my way back towards the ship’s main area. Miki tagged after me.
Ugh. Perhaps I should have followed Vicky’s example and just not interacted with the stupid human-form bot.
The humans were talking on the feed; they sounded excited to finally be on their way. Apart from Don Abene and Hirune, there were two other researchers, Brais and Ejiro, plus two shuttle crew, Kader and Vibol. I already knew from conversations back on the station that they were all long-term employees of GoodNightLander Independent, who had worked together multiple times before. They had been waiting, some more impatiently than others, for Vicky and I to arrive.
When I entered the main crew area below the control deck with Miki still trailing after me, Don Abene gave me a friendly nod before moving past me to grab Miki’s arms and smile into its camera. I quickly moved out of arm’s reach and to one side of the area, not wanting to risk Don Abene trying to grab me in a similar way. (Nobody grabs SecUnits. I hadn’t realised this was a perk until now.)
“We’re finally going, Miki!” Don Abene said to the human-form bot with a laugh. I’m still not good at telling human ages just by looking. Don Abene’s warm brown skin was lined at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and her long dark hair had strands of white in it, but for all I knew it was a cosmetic choice, and not an indicator of age. Her dark eyes crinkled at the corners as she laughed.
“Hurray!” Miki said. As far as I could tell, it was completely sincere.
Brais and Ejiro were sitting on the curved padded couch along one wall of the crew area. Kader and Vibol were just above us in the ship’s cockpit. A few of the station chairs had also been turned around to provide more seating, facing the couch, and Vicky was sitting in one of those. I went to sit in another chair - there was no way I was sitting on the couch with the humans.
The bubble of a floating display surface in the middle of the compartment was activated and showing a slowly rotating image of the planet we were heading to. Data about weather conditions and other planetary info floated beside it. Apparently there was a small satellite in orbit around the planet, providing basic scan data, but I couldn’t tell if it had been deployed by GI recently or by someone else beforehand.
Abene sat down on the couch beside Ejiro, then patted the seat next to her. “Sit down, Miki.”
Miki sat next to her on the couch, and none of the other humans reacted. This was apparently perfectly normal. Vicky also didn’t outwardly react, but it opened a private feed connection with me and sent an eye-roll sigil. I didn’t reply though; I had no idea what kind of response would even be appropriate.
“Are you excited to start looking for the installation, Miki?” Hirune asked it, as she expanded the image of said planet. “I’m tired of just looking at scans of the planet.”
“I’m excited!” Miki echoed. “We will find the installation, and do a good assessment, and then we can have a new assignment.”
Ejiro laughed. “I really hope it’s that easy.”
Brais said, “I don’t care if it’s easy or not, at least we're finally moving! Miki was probably getting tired of playing Mus with us.”
“I like games. I would play games all the time if we could,” Miki said.
Vicky sent me another set of sigils - more eye-rolls and frowning faces. [Fucking pet bot,] it added, and I could feel the bitterness.
I couldn’t blame it. I was feeling an emotion as well - an angry one. Before Dr. Mensah had helped me escape the company, I could count the number of times I sat on a human chair on one hand, and it was never in front of clients.
I don’t even know why I was reacting this way. Was I jealous of a human-form bot? Was Vicky jealous of it? I really didn’t want to be a pet robot, that’s why I’d left Dr. Mensah and the others. (Not that Mensah had said she wanted a pet SecUnit. I didn’t think she wanted a SecUnit at all. Preservation didn’t need SecUnits.) What did Miki have that I wanted? I had no idea. I didn’t know what I wanted.
And yes, I know that was probably a big part of the problem right there.
I didn’t want to hang around here any longer and watch the humans being cute with their stupid pet bot. I needed a good excuse to leave though; it would look weird if I just got up without a word and left. “I’m going to go have a closer look at the scouting flier.” That was as good an excuse as any, and I really did want to check it out before I had to actually pilot it.
“Of course,” Don Abene replied with a nod. “Hopefully it lives up to your expectations!”
I doubted that, but I wasn’t going to say as much. I just nodded and stood up, but before I could leave, Vicky stood up as well. “I’d like to see it as well,” it said lightly. “I don’t get the chance to see ships like that up close much!” Apparently Vicky didn’t want to hang around here any longer either.
We left the crew area and headed down to the cargo deck at the bottom of the ship. Vicky was silent along the way, but I could feel it still in our private feed, leaking irritation. I wondered if I was leaking as much of my own feelings into the feed as it was, and checked my walls again.
The flier was clamped to the deck in the section of the cargo hold that had been set up for it. It was a little bigger than my old flier, to accommodate the co-pilot’s seat behind the main pilot’s seat in the cockpit. Its wings were also fixed in position, and didn't swing back to take up less space like my flier's did. The cockpit itself looked slightly roomier too, and the seats, while not exactly luxurious, had some padding and weren’t just bare plastic. Closer inspection revealed that they also had ejection mechanisms. That was novel. (For me, anyway. SecUnit fliers don’t have ejection seats. We just go down with our fliers, and then, if we’re lucky, walk away from the wreckage.)
I was a little disappointed that the scouting flier didn’t have any weapons, but that wasn’t really its purpose in the first place. Judging from the specifications that I pulled up in the feed, it would be quick and manoeuvrable, and probably capable of outrunning most trouble it came across.
Unlike my own flier, the scouting ship had actual manual flight controls for humans to use without needing to be connected to it via augments. I could definitely fly manually but I much preferred a direct link, and for a moment I was worried that wouldn’t be an option. Fortunately after a bit of investigating, I found the necessary connections and cables neatly tucked away behind a flap on the instrument panel.
I’d need to get a connecting cable so I’d be able to plug in via one of my spine ports, but that should be easy enough. Even if the ship didn’t have one already, it would be simple enough for one of the recyclers to make.
As I was inspecting the flier, Vicky was pacing around it, apparently admiring it but actually mostly just venting to me over our private feed. I’ll admit I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what it was saying, mostly because it was just variations on its irritation with the human-form bot and how the humans here treated it, and I didn’t need the reminder right now.
I did notice, however, when Vicky abruptly cut itself off, then said aloud, “Miki? What are you doing here?” Its voice was polite and inquisitive, but I could feel its flare of annoyance over the feed.
“Hi, Consultant Vicky!” Miki replied cheerfully, and I heard its footsteps as it wandered into the makeshift hangar. “Is Consultant Rin here still?”
It couldn’t see me where I was in the flier’s cockpit. I hesitated, then popped the canopy open and shifted to lean over the edge so I could see it. “I’m here.” I was beginning to feel uneasy.
“Oh, there you are! Hi, Consultant Rin!” Miki actually lifted one hand to wave at me. “What do you think of the scout flier?”
I hesitated again before replying. “It’s good.” For a given value of good, anyway. It wasn’t my flier, but I’d be able to work with it without any real problems, probably.
“That’s good!” Miki tilted its head towards me. “I’m glad you like it!” It then continued before I could reply. “Would it be okay if I asked you both some questions? I’m very curious!”
[Ugh, no,] Vicky groaned at me over our private feed. [Make it go away. I don’t want to talk to it, or listen to it, or indulge it.]
I definitely understood the sentiment, but I also didn’t want to risk alienating the stupid pet bot. It would probably report to its humans, who would probably take offence at us not indulging their stupid pet bot, and who knew where that would end up going. [I don’t want to either, but it can’t hurt to at least see what it wants to ask us. We don’t have to answer.]
Vicky sent me a rude sigil, but didn’t say anything else as I nodded at Miki. “Go ahead.”
Miki looked back at Vicky briefly before turning to watch me with its blank globular eyes. “You both feel very different in the feed to my friends! I was wondering why that is?”
Oh, shit. I hadn’t realised just how much Miki could pick up over the feed. Judging from the spike of alarm I felt from Vicky, it hadn’t realised either. I had to think quickly, while also ignoring the fact that it had referred to its humans as its friends. (Bots don’t have friends. Bots just have owners, or if it’s a weird polity like Preservation, “guardians”, which is just a nicer way of saying “owners”. Miki thinking of its humans as friends made me have an emotion that I really didn’t want to figure out.) “It’s probably just because we’re both augmented,” I replied as calmly as I could manage.
“But Vibol and Kader are both augmented too, and they still don’t feel anything like you do.” Miki didn’t sound angry, or accusatory, or even suspicious. It just sounded honestly curious. This was simply a puzzle that it wanted to solve.
[I told you this was a bad fucking idea,] Vicky sent me.
[At least it asked us, and didn’t just ask its own humans first and make them suspicious of us,] I pointed out. “Vicky and I are from the Corporation Rim, and we have Corporation Rim augments, not your home polity’s augments,” I suggested. “That’s probably why we feel different to Kader and Vibol.”
“Oh!” Miki tilted its head the other way, and I found myself wondering if it was a gesture that the humans had programmed into it, or one that it had picked up itself. “I hadn’t considered that. That makes sense. Thank you!” I started to hope that it would leave now that we’d satisfied its curiosity, but no such luck. Miki still had questions. “Since you’re from the Corporation Rim, can you tell me what it’s like?”
I hesitated, trying to think about how to even begin answering that. Vicky replied almost immediately, though. “It’s shit,” it said bluntly. “It’s full of corporations whose only concern is how to make as much money as possible, usually by trapping people in shitty, low-paying contracts they can’t get out of. If a corporation wants something that it can’t get by buying, borrowing, or blackmailing, they’ll just take it by force if they think they can get away with it.”
Miki shifted to regard Vicky. “... That seems very unfriendly,” it commented quietly after a long, thoughtful pause.
“Most people in the Corporation Rim aren’t very… friendly,” Vicky said with tightly controlled neutrality.
“Oh.” Miki seemed to consider this for a long moment. “I’ve heard Don Abene and the others talk about the Corporation Rim sometimes,” it admitted. “Although they stop when they notice that I’m there.” It paused again, then added thoughtfully, “It doesn’t sound like a very nice place.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “That’s one of the reasons why we took this job - we’re trying to leave it.”
“Ooh. I understand.” Miki nodded, then clapped its hands together. “You’re looking for friends! Don Abene and everyone else here are good people, and good friends. I’m sure they’ll be happy to be your friends too! And I can be your friend as well!”
[Why the fuck did you say that? I don’t need some fucking pet bot who’s never had a single bad thing happen to it in its entire existence decide to be my ‘friend’,] Vicky said venomously over the feed to me; how it managed to keep its facial expression pleasant was a mystery to me. Then again, it probably got a lot of practice back when it was still governed. [It’s so fucking sheltered and naive, it has no idea what it’s talking about, no idea how fucking lucky it is or how good it has it. Why the fuck would I even want it as a friend in the first place? I don’t need its or its humans’ stupid fucking friendship!]
[Why do you hate Miki so much?] I retorted before I could think about what I was saying. I hadn’t realised just how much its venting had been getting on my nerves until now. [Yes it’s a dumb sheltered pet bot, but you don’t have to be its friend if you don’t want to be. Nobody can force you to do anything you don’t want to do any more, remember? You don’t even have to pretend. Just don’t be so nasty to it that you make the humans mad before we’ve finished with this contract.]
For a moment it felt like Vicky was going to respond with some biting remark - I could feel its anger leaking through the feed. But it remained silent, the anger cutting off as it pulled itself fully back behind its own walls. It didn’t leave our shared feed entirely, but there was a definite sense of withdrawing, retreating.
Miki was still watching Vicky, waiting for some kind of response. Vicky took a breath, then gave the human-form bot a small, lopsided smile. “That’s very kind of you, Miki.” It then turned to look up at me before Miki could respond. “Rin, I’m going to take a nap.” It turned on its heel and left the cargo hold before I could figure out how to reply.
Miki watched Vicky leave, then turned to look back up at me. “Is Consultant Vicky okay?” it asked me, quiet and subdued, a sharp contrast to its usual cheer.
“Vicky’s fine,” I reassured it after a moment’s thought. “They’re just not used to anyone being kind to them. Just… give them some space, all right?”
“Okay.” Miki nodded, then hesitated before asking me, “... Are you kind to Consultant Vicky?”
How the fuck was I even supposed to answer that? I could have just given some trite, false reassurance, but I didn’t want to lie to Miki, for some reason. “I try to be,” I finally replied after some serious consideration. “But I don’t know if I do a good job of it.”
Miki tilted its head, regarding me with those big, blank eyes. They made me miss the opaque faceplate of my helmet. Finally it replied, “I think the important part is that you’re trying. That’s what Don Abene would say, and I agree.” It gave a decisive nod.
“... Thanks, Miki.” It was the only thing I could think of to say.
“You’re welcome!” it replied, back to its usual cheerfulness. “Would you like to play some games with me?”
“Uhh.” I absolutely did not. “I need to finish inspecting this flier, then I’m probably going to rest for a while before we reach the planet. I’ll be doing a lot of flying once we get there.”
“Oh, okay!” Miki didn’t seem upset at my refusal, at least. “It’s important to be well rested before doing anything important! And finding the installation is very important. Rest well, Consultant Rin!” It waved one hand at me, then turned and wandered back out of the cargo hold.
I waited until it was gone, then settled back into the flier’s cockpit and started up an episode of Sanctuary Moon.
Chapter Four
The ship finally reached the planet and settled into geosynchronous orbit above the general area where we suspected the installation was. The little satellite orbiting the planet couldn’t pinpoint the installation itself, or the energy signature from the geothermal plant, but it had managed to narrow the field down so I wouldn’t have to fly over the entire planet.
Hopefully, anyway.
We had one last briefing before I launched. Don Abene and the rest of the assessment team wanted me to keep my scouting flights to only two to three hour stretches, and return to the ship between them. I managed to convince them that doing so would waste too much time, and that I was perfectly capable of flying for longer. I also convinced them that I could land on the planet itself if I needed a break, instead of dealing with atmospheric re-entry multiple times.
Thinking about atmospheric re-entry still made the empty hollow in my chest ache. I didn’t want to have to put up with that any more than absolutely necessary.
Since I wasn’t going to be taking a co-pilot, they packed a bunch of meal packs and water containers into the co-pilot’s seat so I’d have something to eat and drink on my planetside breaks, along with an environmental suit for when I needed to leave the scout flier. (I wouldn’t actually use them, obviously, but it wouldn’t be difficult to dispose of some to make the humans think I’d consumed them.) I used some cargo netting to fasten them securely into place so they wouldn’t rattle around.
Finally it was time to launch. I’d put on the self-sizing flight suit and helmet that came with the scout flier over my regular clothes, with the cable from my spine port running beneath my clothes and poking out the end of my sleeve. I settled into the cockpit, closed the canopy, then plugged into the scout flier.
It felt different to my old flier; it wasn’t made for a SecUnit to connect to it, only augmented humans, so the feedback was much more limited and I didn’t have the same sense of it being a part of me. But it still filled the aching emptiness, at least partially, and that was good enough for now.
I started the scout flier up and went through a systems check, ran a quick comms check to make sure I was connected to the ship’s comms, then gave the all-clear for launch. The hangar was empty apart from my flier, with the bulkhead doors between the hangar and the rest of the ship tightly closed. When I gave the signal, the hangar began its decompression cycle in preparation for the cargo bay doors opening to let me out. We couldn’t just open the bay doors while there was still atmosphere in the makeshift hangar, since there was no air barrier to stop it from explosively venting into space and potentially damaging the flier on the way out.
As soon as the atmosphere had been safely vented, the cargo bay doors slowly slid open, revealing the glittering black of space and the curve of the planet below. I waited until they were fully open (I wasn’t yet familiar enough with this flier to slip through as soon as I had enough clearance), then I eased the scout flier off the deck and out of the ship.
Once I was safely clear of the ship, I kicked in the engines and rocketed away. I tapped the comm and said, “I’m going to do some test flying to familiarise myself with the scout flier before I start for the planet.”
“Confirmed,” came the reply from Vibol on the ship’s bridge, monitoring the comms. “Take care.”
“Of course.” I didn’t really need to spend a lot of time familiarising myself with the flier, plugged into it as I was, but it was a good excuse to just enjoy some space flight before I had to deal with flying in atmosphere. “I’ll keep you updated.”
It felt so good to be flying again, out in open space, with no HubSystem dictating my every action. We were on the dark side of the planet, and the system’s primary star made the upper edge of its atmosphere glow against the backdrop of space. I started up one of my favourite music playlists, took some time to enjoy the view, then flew the scout flier through several increasingly-complicated manoeuvres, just for the fun of it.
I couldn’t waste too much time just enjoying myself though; I still had a job to do. Eventually I pointed the scout flier towards the planet and began the descent.
Atmospheric re-entry was… well, the scout flier handled it just fine. Once I made it to a safe altitude, I managed to relax a little and focus on my actual task. The weather in the area I was in was cloudy, but fortunately not stormy, for now anyway. I took some time to acclimatise myself to the planet’s gravity, atmosphere, and how the scout flier handled. It was pleasantly responsive, though it couldn’t quite match my old flier for speed or manoeuvrability.
Still, it was a joy to be flying again, even if I couldn’t feel the air passing over the scout flier’s surfaces. All my attention was focused on the feeling of the scout flier around me, the low hum of its engines vibrating through its frame, the way it carved through the air, the glimpses through the clouds of the planet below and the sky above.
I ran the scout flier through some more aerial acrobatics, just because I could and there was nobody to see me or stop me. Finally I dove to a suitable scanning altitude and focused the scout flier’s scanners towards the ground, searching for any signs of the geothermal plant’s power signature or hints of the installation itself.
Most humans would probably find doing aerial sweeps like this boring, especially for hours on end, but I loved it. The actual scanning didn’t take up more than a small fraction of my attention, so I could listen to my music and focus on the flying itself. I had a whole lot of new music that I’d downloaded from the last couple of stations, and it was very satisfying to take my time sorting through all of them and organising them into various playlists while I flew.
I also never got tired of admiring the ever-changing views - a small part of my archives was reserved for images and video I’d taken while flying or on patrol outdoors, and I added several new files to my collection. I hated being actually deployed onto planets, with their dirt and environmental hazards and alien (and potentially hostile) fauna and flora, but most of the deployments to planets that I could remember involved a lot of flying time, so. That kind of made up for the rest.
The planet’s unpredictable weather changes were an interesting challenge, too. An hour or so into my scanning, one of the storms caught me somewhat off-guard - I’d been aware of it forming, and had adjusted my course to avoid it, but it moved a lot faster than I anticipated and I suddenly found myself in the middle of it.
It was exhilarating, honestly. Normally I do my best to avoid flying in storms - there’s often hail, which can range from mildly annoying to very damaging, or ice can start building up on my wings and interfere with the flight surfaces and other mechanisms, or microbursts and severe turbulence can rattle me around and increase the risk of me colliding with terrain or other fliers or whatever.
This storm however didn’t have much hail or significant ice buildup, I was too high up to need to worry much about colliding with the terrain as long as I kept track of my altitude, and there were no other fliers or anything else around to run into. There was a lot of wind turbulence, which wasn’t great, but it wasn’t a huge threat for now, either.
I began climbing through the storm, aiming for the open air above the clouds as rain drummed against the scout flier. As I climbed, I started to smell ozone, and thin, branching arcs of blue-white electricity began playing across the windshield of the scout flier, almost dancing amongst the raindrops as it flickered in and out of view. After a few minutes of this, a purplish-blue glow started building in front of the scout flier’s nosecone, easily visible against the backdrop of dark grey clouds.
Oh, I knew what that meant.
I wasn’t particularly worried, though. I’d already thoroughly inspected the scout flier, and reviewed its specs, and I knew it was perfectly capable of withstanding what was coming. I switched to one of my more intense playlists and continued piloting the scout flier upwards.
Then there was a blindingly bright flash and a loud bang as lightning struck the scout flier, the electricity flashing through the in-built framework designed to channel it through the flier’s outer skin without letting it reach any of the internal workings. My organic skin tingled from the static discharge, but apart from a brief spike in the scout flier’s systems, no damage was reported. It was a little weird (but kind of nice) to experience a mid-air lightning strike without actually directly feeling it like I would have in my own flier.
Still, I didn’t want to get hit by lightning more often than absolutely necessary, so I continued climbing. The scout flier only caught one more lightning strike before I finally breached the ceiling of the clouds and burst out into the open air above them, trailing vapour from the tips of the scout flier’s wings.
The air above the storm was crisp and clear and bitingly cold, with sunlight reflecting off the surface of the clouds below. The angle of the sun threw the shadow of the scout flier ahead of me, flickering starkly over the endless, ever-shifting cloud tops. The sky above was an intense blue, fading to near-white at the distant, curving horizon.
In the thin light, I could see that some scorch marks patterned the scout flier’s nosecone, but the rain had already washed off a good amount of the surface charring. The scout flier’s systems still weren’t reporting any damage, but I decided to land and do a full inspection once I’d cleared the storm.
In the meantime, I reviewed my coordinates and recalculated my scanning route. The storm had interrupted my scanning and pushed me well off course, so I had to adjust my planned scanning pattern to compensate. While I was still doing that, the comm crackled slightly as Vibol’s voice came through. “You all good down there?” she asked. “That storm cell formed damned fast.”
“I’m all good,” I replied. Even after my experiences with the PreservationAux humans, it was still very weird to have someone asking if I was okay. Normally I wouldn’t have elaborated any further, but my time with Vicky had emphasised that humans who were interacting with each other regularly liked to receive extra details. “Caught a couple of lightning strikes, but didn’t take any damage. I’ll land when I can to double-check, but so far, no problems.”
“Oof,” Vibol commented, entirely unnecessarily. “Lightning strikes, damn. I’m glad it’s you down there and not me. Let us know if any issues crop up.”
“Will do.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, but luckily Vibol just tapped the comm in acknowledgement, then signed off.
I indulged in some more aerial acrobatics again (let’s just pretend it was solely to test for any mechanical issues from the lightning strikes), then headed for the ground once I’d gotten past the storm’s trailing edge. I landed carefully, then exited the scout flier and inspected it thoroughly from nose to tail for any potential issues that its systems might not have reported.
It came up all clear, to my relief, so I got back into the air and resumed my interrupted scanning.
I had to land a couple more times for my scheduled breaks, even though I didn’t actually need them. The GI humans were taking turns to monitor my progress from the ship, and they would start getting suspicious if I didn’t land every few hours. One of my breaks also helped me avoid another sudden but intense storm burst, which was lucky. I’d already flown through one storm, I didn’t want to repeat the experience and risk taking actual damage if I didn’t absolutely have to.
I landed the scout flier in the lee of a massive tumble of rocks and boulders, nestled under a large overhang that sheltered it from the driving rain and howling wind. I then spent most of my break perched on a rock beneath the overhang, watching the storm rage. The clouds were turbulent and ever-shifting, lanced with frequent bursts of eye-searing lightning. It was quite a show. (I saved a few video clips of the more impressive lightning bursts and cloud formations.) I hadn’t bothered getting the environmental suit out - a human wouldn’t have been able to sit outside the scout flier for as long as I did without an environmental suit, but I didn’t need as much air as humans, so I was fine.
Finally the storm passed, and I got back into the scout flier and returned to the sky.
I was flying high over a rough, jagged, mountainous area when the scout flier’s scanners finally started picking up on the first hints of an energy signal. I tapped the comm and reported, “I’m picking up on something, going to have a closer look. Are you prepped for descent yet?”
It was Kader on the comms this time. “Almost,” he replied. “We’ll be ready to bring the ship down as soon as you find us a landing zone.” The plan was, once I located the installation, the others would bring the ship down and land it, and we’d start the investigation.
“Acknowledged. I’ll keep you updated.” I brought the scout flier lower, following the traces of the energy signal. It wasn’t very strong, which made sense if it was somewhere underground. There wasn’t much else around to obscure it though, so it wasn’t difficult to track.
I eventually managed to hone in on the geothermal plant’s general location; as we’d suspected, it was well underground. I sent the coordinates up to the ship, then continued looking for the installation, which was proving to be a much more difficult task. We knew it would be situated relatively close to the power plant, but the installation itself was most likely powered down, and my scanners wouldn’t be able to pick it out easily from the surrounding terrain. I’d probably have to find it visually.
Given the mountainous area the power plant was in, that proved to be an absolute pain in more ways than one. My scanners kept giving me false positives, and I had to circle every peak and fly over every valley to make sure I was checking every nook and cranny. The air above the mountains was choppy and turbulent, which made flying very rough. I had to stay high enough that any sudden air pockets or unexpected wind shear wouldn’t slam the scout flier into a mountain top before I could adjust, but low enough that I could still make out details of the terrain.
I had to stop for another break as the sun dropped beneath the horizon and it became too dark for a human to see clearly. Even my own variety of visual filters were struggling with the lack of light. I did circle the area of the power plant a few times first, looking for any traces of illumination, just in case the installation still had some outer lights on, but no luck. I then landed in an area I’d noted on an earlier pass; it was a sheltered valley between two ridges that would be safely out of the wind if another storm burst came through.
I landed the scout flier, but didn’t bother leaving the cockpit this time. “Stopping for the night,” I sent over the comm to the ship. “I’ll have to resume the search in the morning.”
“Acknowledged,” came the reply. Kader again. “Are you going to be comfortable enough? Do you want to come back up for the night?”
“No, I’m good,” I replied. “I still have plenty of meal packs and water, and the cockpit’s comfortable enough for me to sleep in.” None of that was a lie; I hadn’t even touched the meal packs or water yet, and the cockpit was more comfortable than the transport boxes I’d spent so much time in before.
“All right. Have a good night, and we’ll hear from you in the morning.”
“Acknowledged.” I clicked the comm off, then settled in my seat, tilted my head back to watch the glittering night sky through the cockpit canopy, and sank into my media.
Another storm rolled through overnight; the lightning show was noticeably more impressive at night, even through the rain pelting against the cockpit canopy. I recorded a few more video clips, then indulged in a short recharge cycle once the storm had passed.
When dawn broke and the sky started brightening, I tapped the comm and let the ship know I was awake and resuming my search. “I hope you find it soon,” Vibol replied over the comm. “I think everyone’s getting a little stir crazy up here. Good luck.” There wasn’t much I could say in response to that, so I just acknowledged and signed off, then took to the air once more.
The earlier storm had swept the sky clear, and I got to enjoy a gorgeous sunrise from my vantage point high above the mountains as I resumed my grid search. (Yes, I took a couple more images and video clips of the sunrise.) Over the next hour or so of flying, the scout flier’s scanners picked up several more false positives that I had to visually check and mark off as false.
Finally, though, one of the scanner readings I got seemed promising. I dropped some altitude to get a better look at the area, and spotted an open, flat area butted up next to a cliff face on the side of one of the mountains. It looked like someone had carved a chunk of the mountain peak out to create a landing zone, but there was no visible sign of an installation or habitation module or environmental dome or any other structure. Still, it looked artificial enough that it warranted closer investigation.
I carefully brought the scout flier down towards the platform, steadying it through wind eddies and the occasional updraft, until I landed safely. Again, I didn’t bother with the environmental suit when I left the scout flier. Now that I’d landed, I could see signs of some kind of structure that had been built into the side of the cliff next to the landing pad. Closer inspection revealed that they were air locks; a regular human-sized door one and a much larger door that was probably meant for equipment or cargo.
Apparently GrayCris had built their installation into the mountain itself, for whatever reason. Probably so they wouldn’t need to build an environmental dome as well. They’d be able to just set up environmental controls within the installation inside the mountain. The doors were the same colour as the surrounding rock, which made them difficult to pick out even up close, and almost impossible to spot from a distance.
I took some time to examine the doors and their locking mechanisms - standard electronic locks, with standby power. I could probably have hacked them to open them, but technically that wasn’t my job on this contract, and it might make the humans ask questions I wasn’t willing to answer. So I left them locked, double-checked that the landing platform would be big and stable enough for the GI ship, then returned to the scout flier and tapped the comm. “I’ve found it.”
“Finally!” Vibol replied enthusiastically as I sent up the landing pad coordinates. “Good work, thanks! We’ll be down as soon as possible!”
“All right. I’ll be in the air until you get here, give you more landing space. There’s not a lot of room for error here.” That wasn’t actually true; there was more than enough space for the GI ship, my scout flier, and several other shuttles besides. Still, I really didn’t want the scout flier getting damaged because the humans messed up the landing somehow. I’d asked earlier if they would need me for bringing the big ship down, but Vibol and Kader had both reassured me that they were comfortable with landing it. It was mostly just the scouting piloting that they’d needed me for - neither of them were experienced with the smaller, lighter flier.
So while I waited for them to arrive, I took off in the scout flier and just enjoyed the free air time. After this contract, I had no idea when I’d get to fly again. I was going to make the most of it while I had the chance.
Chapter Five
Vibol and Kader managed to land the ship with no issues, and there was more than enough space left to one side of the landing zone for me to park the scout flier as well. I finally donned the environmental suit, just so the humans wouldn’t ask me any awkward questions, then went to meet up with the team as they disembarked from the ship. Don Abene led the way with Miki beside her, followed by Hirune, Brais, Ejiro, and Vicky. Kader and Vibol were staying on the ship to monitor it and everything outside the installation.
As I moved up to join them, Don Abene greeted me with a warm smile that was visible through the clear faceplate of her environmental suit. “Rin! Excellent work on finding the installation.”
I shrugged, a little self-conscious. “It took longer than I would have liked to locate it.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Abene said reassuringly. “We knew it would take a while to find. If we’d had to search for it without your help, it likely would have taken us much longer. Now let’s see what the installation itself is like.”
Everyone except Miki was wearing full suits, with filtering and emergency air supply, and some minor protection for vulnerable human bodies. Brais and Ejiro both carried small hand guns, though as soon as she saw me, Brais handed hers to me with obvious relief. I clipped it to the belt of my environmental suit with a nod (and no small amount of relief of my own. That was one less human with the potential to shoot me in the back), then led the way towards the smaller of the two doors embedded in the cliff face. “Here. It looks like GrayCris built their installation directly into the mountain. The doors are locked, and on standby power as far as I can tell.”
Don Abene nodded and stepped up to the door. “We have some codes that GrayCris provided - they should get us in.”
That struck me as a little - okay, a lot - odd. “Wait,” I said before she could use any of them. “They gave you entry codes, but not the location of the actual base? Doesn’t that strike any of you as strange?”
Everyone paused. “Now that you mention it…” Hirune murmured thoughtfully. “That does seem odd. Why would they try to obstruct us by not giving us the coordinates, but then help by handing over the passcodes?”
“Perhaps the passcodes activate something else,” Vicky suggested carefully. I had a sneaking suspicion that it was thinking of the same episode of one of the serials we’d watched together, where the main characters had used a passcode that they believed was legitimate, but actually just activated the villain-of-the-arc’s lethal base defences. It had led to a rather impressive but highly unrealistic fight scene. “They might have some kind of… security or something that will get activated instead.”
Yeah, okay, Vicky was definitely thinking of the same episode. Hah.
Don Abene considered for a moment. “All right, we won’t use the codes. Just in case. Vicky, can you get us in some other way?”
“Absolutely. Just give me a minute to see if I can get a status report on the installation from here, before we actually try to enter,” Vicky said absently as it pretended to work on its display surface. I was already working on finding and getting into the installation’s SecSystem - GrayCris was a Corporation Rim company, it would definitely have installed at least some kind of HubSystem and SecSystem here to monitor its own people.
“Yes, of course,” Don Abene replied. “Do whatever you need to do.” She and the others spread out a bit to start examining the larger cargo door and the rest of the cliff face.
Vicky just nodded, even as it pinged our private feed channel. [Are you getting anything yet?] it asked.
[A little,] I replied. [The installation’s on standby power. There’s a HubSystem and SecSystem, but they’re in hibernation mode. I can get them started, but it’ll take a bit for both the power and the systems to cycle up fully.] Even as I was saying that, I was gently prodding the power back up from standby mode and starting HubSystem and SecSystem’s boot-up procedures.
[Do you think it’s safe to enter?] Vicky asked.
[Probably not,] I admitted. [Not using the codes GrayCris provided has probably given us some leeway, but who knows what kind of security they left behind. But I don’t think the humans are going to be dissuaded from investigating this place so soon when we’ve only just found it.]
Vicky sent a ping of agreement. [If we can get Hub and SecSystem running, we should be able to figure out what surprises are waiting for us, and hopefully deactivate them before they become an issue.]
[Hopefully.] I hesitated for a moment, thinking. [I do still have my armour,] I admitted reluctantly. [It would be safer if I wore it and took point, just in case, but… it’s very obviously SecUnit armour.]
[I’ve been talking with the humans a lot while we were waiting for you to find this place,] Vicky replied. [It’s illegal to own SecUnits - or constructs in general - in their home polity, and they tend to avoid the Corporation Rim as much as possible. I don’t think any of them have ever seen an actual SecUnit in person. They might not recognise it.]
I still hesitated. [We don’t actually know yet if there’s anything to worry about in there, and me getting my armour might… unduly concern the humans.] I wanted my armour (especially the opaque faceplate), but I also wanted to not expose myself as a SecUnit. But if anything was lurking inside the installation, I wanted to be able to protect the humans, and I could do so more effectively if I had my armour. (And my drones, and my big projectile weapon, but I’d lost those along with my flier, so I’d just have to do without.)
I could tell that Vicky was thinking it over as well. Finally it said, [Go get your armour. Worse comes to worst, if the humans do recognise it as SecUnit armour, we can just… pretend you scavenged it, or something. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. If anything is in there and you end up getting shot, it’s going to become even more obvious that you’re a SecUnit if you don’t have armour on.]
That was a good point, too. Damn it. [All right. The power’s cycling up, and both HubSystem and SecSystem are rebooting. Don’t let the humans enter the installation until I’m back.] Vicky pinged an acknowledgement, and I turned to face the humans. “Don Abene?”
She paused her examination of the larger cargo door to look up at me. “Yes?”
“Remember how I mentioned earlier about having some security experience?” She nodded, and I continued before I could lose my nerve. “I’ve still got my old security armour with me - I’d like to gear up in it before we enter the installation. If those codes GrayCris gave you really were meant to activate some kind of security system, it would be better if I’m properly prepared for anything else they might have lying in wait, and you let me take point going in.”
Don Abene was silent for a long moment, thinking. The others had all paused what they were doing as well to listen curiously. “Do you really think there’s going to be anything dangerous in there?” Ejiro asked. I couldn’t tell if he sounded worried or dubious. Maybe a bit of both.
“I don’t know for sure, but I’d rather take precautions anyway, just in case,” I replied.
Don Abene nodded. “Rin’s right. I’d rather be overcautious than not cautious enough. Go ahead, Rin, we’ll wait for you here.”
I quickly went back to the ship and got my bag out of my locker, then retreated to the privacy of the bathroom. Kader and Vibol were up on the bridge, everyone else was outside, and the ship had no internal cameras that I was aware of, but I still didn’t want to get changed somewhere where just anyone could potentially walk in and see my inorganic parts.
I had to strip off the environmental suit and everything else I was wearing, including the cable that I used to connect to the scout flier. I pulled on my suit skin, then began donning the individual pieces of my armour. As I pulled the chestplate out of my bag, I noticed a flattened-looking projectile embedded in one of the armour plates - one of the projectiles that Tlacey’s hired muscle had shot at me, back at RaviHyral, that had been blocked by my bag. That felt like a long time ago. I pried the projectile out and dropped it into the recycler, then finished putting on my armour. I left the helmet retracted though - perhaps they wouldn’t make the connection to SecUnit armour if they could still see my face. As much as I wanted to hide behind the opaque faceplate, not being recognised as a SecUnit was more important right now.
Then I remembered the shitty atmosphere of this planet. Fuck. I had to put the helmet up after all, but I left the faceplate clear. Hopefully that would be enough.
Once I was done I quickly checked myself over in the little bathroom mirror. To my eyes, I looked like any other SecUnit, except that I’d removed all the logos from my armour while I was hiding on transports. But with my human movement code running, I no longer moved like a SecUnit, and with the faceplate clear instead of opaque…
Fuck. It would have to do.
I dumped my bag and the rest of my gear onto my bunk to deal with later, clipped the hand gun onto my armour, then picked up the connecting cable for the scout flier and exited the ship. I left the cable in the scout flier cockpit, just in case I needed it in a hurry later, then rejoined the others in front of the installation door. I did my best to ignore the way that all the humans were probably staring at me - it was hard to tell for sure with everyone in environmental suits. “All right, I’m ready. Before we go in though, I’d like to establish a few security protocols.” I paused, looking to Don Abene for permission.
She nodded. “Go ahead.”
“Thank you.” I paused briefly to organise my thoughts. This wasn’t a standard company security briefing, and these weren’t standard company clients. I had to pick my words myself, and hope that they would trust that I knew what I was doing. “Okay. When we go in, I’ll be taking the lead, checking each area before we enter. We’ll go room by room - no splitting up. Stick together as a group, and don’t lag behind. Keep track of the route we’re taking. If I stop, you stop. If I tell you to retreat, go back to the previous room and wait for me there. If I say run, get back to the ship as quickly as you can, and don’t wait for me. All right?”
“Understood,” Don Abene replied crisply. “We’ll follow your directions.” She looked at the rest of her team. “That means everyone. And remember, we’re not here to ferret out every bit of data here, not yet. This first sweep is just to do an initial assessment of the state of the installation. We can examine everything more closely once we’ve established that the area is safe.”
The others all nodded, including Vicky and Miki. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s get started then.”
Vicky gestured rather theatrically with its portable display surface, and the door opened, releasing a gust of slightly stale air into the thin atmosphere and revealing a standard air lock. That suggested that the installation within was meant to maintain its own livable atmosphere, which made sense. Environmental suits were annoyingly cumbersome, especially for long-term use.
I led the way inside, with Vicky close behind me and the others filing in afterwards. The outer door closed behind us and the airlock cycled us through after a minute or so.
HubSystem and SecSystem were still cycling up, but enough power had returned to the installation that the doors at least were working. Scanners indicated that whatever atmosphere had been maintained within the installation was still there, albeit somewhat stale since the environmental controls hadn’t actively been running for a while. It hadn’t dissipated or escaped, at least, which was a good sign for the structural integrity.
The humans noted that, but elected to stay in their environmental suits for now until they were sure that the environmental systems were fully functional. That was one of the most sensible decisions I’d ever seen any of my clients make.
We left the lock and entered the entrance corridor; I noted no traces of damage, just a few scuffs and scrapes on the walls and floor, signs of normal use. Abene followed behind Vicky with Hirune and Miki, while Brais and Ejiro brought up the rear. All the humans had helmet cameras in their environmental suits, and they were linked to the team feed. I tagged each camera feed so I could access them quickly and monitor them, then backburnered their feeds while I focused on HubSystem and SecSystem.
There were a lot of security cameras everywhere, but with SecSystem still not fully online yet, none of them were active. The lights were flickering on gradually as power returned, but until we got HubSystem fully activated again, they remained on a dim standby setting.
I stepped out of the corridor into a larger space, my scanners informing me that it was empty of life signs as I paced around the circumference. Once I was sure the room was clear, I signalled that the others could enter. GrayCris had provided a basic schematic for the installation, but this room wasn’t labelled on it. It had decontam cubicles and environmental suits stored in racks against the walls. Oddly, for an installation that was meant to have been abandoned, none of the equipment had been removed.
“Was this a clean facility?” Brais asked absently as she poked around the room. “I thought this installation was for mineral assessment. Why would they need decontam cubicles?”
“One of the sections is labelled as a bio lab,” Hirune replied, sounding thoughtful as she checked one of the decontamination cubicles. The cubicles had some power, but all the doors were in the upright position. (Always a relief. Cubicles that something may be hiding in are no fun.) “Perhaps they were testing for bio viability on the planet as well?”
“They wouldn’t need decontam for that, would they?”
“Depends what they were working on. Some of the algaes used for terraforming can get pretty nasty if you’re not careful.”
I didn’t pay much more attention to their speculation as I left the clean room and headed further into the facility. Hub and SecSystem had finally finished booting up, but we would need to get to the main control centre to fully activate them. We couldn’t do so over the feed.
Past the clean room, the corridor split into two branches. One led to areas marked as living areas, the other went deeper into the facility, past various lab sections and to the control centre. That was the branch I took. This corridor looked the same as the first; no damage, no signs of hasty departure, just the occasional scuff or scrape from regular daily use.
I don’t know why I expected to see damage and signs that the human staff had run for their lives; there was no indication that this was anything but a planned abandonment. It shouldn’t have been weird, but it was weird. Vicky, the humans, and Miki followed after me out of the clean room and down the corridor, their voices chasing away the silence. But there was something about the installation that made me feel nervous, my organic skin prickling beneath my suit skin. I hated that. It kind of reminded me of how I felt back when PreservationAux had been investigating the blank map patch.
I couldn’t figure out why, or what was bothering me. Maybe it was the lack of security camera access, but I’d been in worse places with no cameras. Maybe it was the emptiness of the facility, even though we knew it had been abandoned. Maybe it was something subliminal. Actually, it felt pretty liminal. Pro-liminal. Up-liminal? Whatever, there was no knowledge base here to look it up.
We came to the first lab section along this corridor, and Don Abene asked me if we could briefly check each lab we passed on the way to the control centre. I couldn’t think of any reason not to, and plenty of reasons we should. (I didn’t want anything that might be hiding in any of the labs to sneak up behind us after we’d gone past, even though there was no evidence that anything was around to be hiding in the labs in the first place.)
I tapped the button to open the lab door, then stepped inside and did a quick sweep before signalling that the others could also come in. As far as I could tell, this was just a normal laboratory for testing and analysing samples. What kind of samples, I had no idea - I’m a SecUnit, not a science unit. NerdUnit. Whatever.
The humans seemed very interested in it, at least. I waited near the door with Vicky while the others poked around curiously. I noticed Vicky watching Miki as the human-form bot followed Don Abene around the room, but unlike earlier, Vicky wasn’t rolling its eyes at Miki’s behaviour, and it wasn’t making snarky comments to me over the feed either. I was considering whether or not I cared enough to ask it about the change, but I was distracted by the humans before I could make up my mind.
“This is weird.” Don Abene’s words got my attention immediately, along with everyone else’s.
“What is it?” Ejiro asked.
“This lab looks like it was never actually used,” Abene replied, frowning at some of the equipment. “It’s been set up, it’s ready to use, but… nothing’s out of place. All the supplies are still here, all the equipment is here, but everything looks brand new.”
“That is weird,” Hirune agreed. “The records we got indicated that GrayCris were working in this facility for at least a planetary year, if not longer. Why would they go to the effort and expense of setting it up, and then leave an entire lab untouched for all that time?”
Nobody could come up with a satisfactory answer. I didn’t let them ponder it for long though; I really wanted to get to the control centre and get SecSystem (and its cameras) fully operational. “Let’s keep moving,” I said to the room in general.
“Right, right,” Abene replied, nodding. “We can always come back later. Lead the way.”
I headed out of the lab and back into the dimly-lit corridor, with the others following behind me. We passed a few more labs along the way, and stopped to check each one. They were similar to the first - set up, equipped, but barely used. It was eerie, especially since the corridors showed signs of regular use. The humans’ speculation got wilder and wilder with each near-pristine lab, and did absolutely nothing to help my anxiety levels.
Finally we reached the control centre, much to my relief. Vicky moved up to the main console, its portable display surface in hand, and sat down at one of the chairs. “All right, let’s see if we can get everything up and running properly,” it commented for the humans’ sake as it got to work.
As it tapped away at the main console, it pinged me over our private feed connection. [Can you take care of SecSystem while I work on HubSystem?] it asked. [I want to see if we can figure out what those codes GrayCris handed over would have done if we used them before we fully activate anything.]
I just sent a ping of acknowledgement and focused my attention on SecSystem, combing through as much of its operational codes as I could while it was still only partially online. [I’m not getting much,] I finally had to admit to Vicky. [Whatever the codes were meant to do, it looks like it wasn’t anything to do with SecSystem.]
[I’m not getting anything either,] Vicky replied, sounding frustrated. [It seems like the codes would have gotten routed to another system, but I’m not finding what system that would be. It’s not the MedSystem or environmental controls, and I don’t think it’s the geothermal plant either. I might be able to find out more once everything’s fully online though.]
I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t like the idea of starting everything up fully before we knew what the codes were meant to do, but we’d hit a dead end. And we hadn’t encountered anything dangerous yet - there was no sign of any kind of physical security so far. Perhaps they’d just had SecUnits for security, and had taken them all with them when they left. [All right, let’s boot it all up and see what we can find.]
We didn’t have the passwords for the systems, but we were able to bypass that without much trouble. I didn’t know if I could have done so back on my contract with DeltFall, when GrayCris had changed the DeltFall systems’ passwords, but I hadn’t really had the opportunity to try at the time, and I had also gotten a lot more experience with hacking systems since then.
Finally, HubSystem and SecSystem were fully up and running. The lights brightened, and I could hear the environmental controls kick into full gear, air whispering steadily through the installation corridors. The humans all seemed relieved, and Don Abene patted Vicky’s shoulder. I was very glad that she didn’t try to pat mine.
“How are the systems looking?” Abene asked Vicky.
“Everything seems functional and operating normally,” Vicky replied, giving Abene a confident smile. “We’ll be able to check out the rest of the installation much more easily now.”
Don Abene nodded. “All right. It looks like we still have almost two thirds of the facility to check - we’ll do a cursory sweep, make sure there’s nothing out of the ordinary, and then we can return to the ship and take a break while we wait for the environmental controls to refresh the atmosphere in here. Once the readings are clear, we’ll be able to assess the installation more thoroughly without needing to wear our environmental suits the entire time.”
That plan was met with enthusiasm by the rest of the humans. Nobody liked wearing environmental suits for too long, no matter how accustomed to them they were.
Once again, I led the way out of the control centre and through the corridors to the next section of the installation. This area was marked on the basic schematics as the main living area, including the mess hall, a central lounge area, and some other generic exercise and recreational spaces.
All of these areas looked like they’d actually been lived in and used, unlike the various labs we’d already checked. Lots of scuff marks, faint stains, scratches, repaired patches in upholstery, things like that. Any perishables had been removed from the kitchens and storage areas, but there was still a decent amount of supplies that could stay unspoiled for tens of thousands of hours left in storage.
That in itself was strange. “I thought GrayCris had abandoned this facility entirely?” Brais commented to the others as she held up a long-life ration bar. “If they’d really abandoned it like they said they had, why would they leave all this behind?”
“Not just the supplies, but all the equipment, too,” Hirune added. “All the lab equipment, the furniture, the central systems, everything else. All of this stuff is expensive, you’d think they’d take as much of it with them as they could.”
“Perhaps they meant to come back,” Ejiro mused. “But if so, why did they all leave in the first place?”
“They didn’t say,” Don Abene replied. “Their report on this facility was very sparse, and incredibly vague, despite what we paid for the reclamation rights.”
I had a sneaking suspicion that the only reasons GrayCris had given up anything about this facility was that they were currently in dire financial straits, given all the legal proceedings against them after what had happened with DeltFall and PreservationAux. I didn’t mention it though; I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that I knew anything about the whole mess.
The humans kept speculating as we continued on towards the last section, where the living quarters were. As we worked our way through the various bedrooms and bathrooms, Vicky and I were still combing through HubSystem and SecSystem. It was a relief to finally have full camera access, and I split part of my attention off to cycle through the multiple inputs. Having the cameras also meant I didn’t have to physically clear each room in person before letting the humans check them out.
“It looks like nobody left any personal belongings behind, at least,” Ejiro commented after rummaging through one of the bedrooms. “But there’s still bedding, and towels, and soap, general stuff like that. I really do think they meant to come back at some point.”
“I agree,” Don Abene replied. “There are definitely signs that a number of people were living here for quite a while. But if they weren’t using any of the labs, then what were they actually doing here?”
Vicky was still pretending to work on its display interface; at that question, it looked up at Don Abene. “I have a theory about that, actually,” it started. That got everyone’s attention, and Abene gestured for it to continue. “Now that we’ve got HubSystem up and running, I’ve been going through it, checking the installation schematics, and the geothermal plant read-outs. According to the HubSystem diagnostics, this installation isn’t using anywhere near the amount of power that the geothermal plant says is actually being drawn from it. And there’s a couple of discrepancies between the schematics GrayCris gave us, and the schematics that HubSystem is showing.”
It pulled up both sets of schematics and dropped them into the team feed with a completely unnecessary hand gesture. “See? Here, and here,” it said as it highlighted the discrepancies. “I think there’s a lot more to this installation than what we’ve seen. Whatever they were actually working on here, they didn’t want anyone else to know about.”
I was getting a very bad feeling about what exactly GrayCris had been working on here. But if I could get the data on it, I could send it to Dr. Mensah to help with the legal proceedings against GrayCris. I just had to hope that whatever had made GrayCris leave the installation in the first place wasn’t anything… drastic. At least there had been no signs of a rushed, panicked evacuation, so they hadn’t left in a hurry. They hadn’t been chased out. It had been planned.
Don Abene had raised an eyebrow at Vicky. “Are you saying there’s another, secret section of the installation hidden somewhere?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Vicky confirmed with a nod. “We just need to find it.”
Chapter Six
(CW: Canon-typical violence)
In the end, it wasn’t actually that difficult to find. The discrepancies on the schematics helped to narrow down the area we needed to look in, and with my access to SecSystem’s cameras, I was able to quickly scan for signs of scuff marks and general wear and tear from regular movement, instead of having to search manually. An oddly empty storage room near the rear of the installation showed signs of frequent passage, far more frequent than a storage room warranted.
After some examination of the room, we found the elevator, its outer doors disguised to look like normal wall panels. The humans and Miki were all very excited and immediately piled into the elevator, eager to explore the hidden area. Of course I had to go with them, and Vicky wasn’t going to be left behind, either.
The enclosed elevator didn’t feel very speedy, though it was difficult to tell from inside it how fast it was going, and it seemed to descend a long way. There were no other stops along the way, either. It simply had Upper and Lower as its destinations.
As we descended, I felt the edges of another SecSystem appear - it was tenuously connected to the main SecSystem, but completely hidden until you got within range of it. I immediately started poking at it, but the security on this secondary SecSystem was much tighter, and I was having trouble convincing it that I was meant to be there like I had with the main SecSystem. I couldn’t access its cameras or any of its other functions, which made me nervous.
There also seemed to be a secondary HubSystem down here too; I could feel Vicky poking at it. I sent it a ping and asked, [Having any luck with the new HubSystem?]
[Some,] Vicky replied distractedly. [I’m getting the schematics for this secondary area, at least, and environmental diagnostics. Atmosphere seems good, power’s on, lights should be on when we get there. I’m not finding anything else though. You?]
[The SecSystem down here is being very uncooperative,] I admitted reluctantly. [I’m working on it, but I haven’t been able to get in yet. The security on it is a lot tighter than any other SecSystem I’ve encountered before.]
[What are they hiding down here?] Vicky asked.
I didn’t want to answer that, and just focused on the secondary SecSystem. (SecSecSystem? No, that’s stupid. SubSecSystem. Let’s go with that.)
Finally the elevator arrived at its destination with a cheerful little chime. The doors slid open, and I led the way out. At least the humans managed to restrain their excitement enough to let me take point again.
The elevator opened up into a small, plain room, with nothing in it. There was what looked like a security checkpoint in the wall opposite the elevator, alongside a sturdy bulkhead door. More scuff marks marred the floor, showing signs of regular passage. I finally managed to make enough headway with SubSecSystem to at least unlock the bulkhead door, though I still couldn’t get anything else.
As we waited for the bulkhead door to open, the humans were speculating amongst themselves about why the installation would have such a secure door down here, and what could be beyond it. I wasn’t paying much attention to them; we’d find out what was on the other side as soon as the door opened.
It was another corridor, identical to all the other ones we’d gone through before. One door to the right led into the security checkpoint room, which I spent some time examining, hoping that something in it would let me get more access to SubSecSystem.
No such luck, but I did find something else that was much more immediately concerning. “Don Abene, there’s a whole swarm of combat drones on standby here,” I said aloud as I eyed the drone storage and deployment centre built into one side of the security checkpoint.
Thirty combat drones rested in their little recharge slots, on standby and ready to go at a moment’s notice. The much smaller (cheaper) intel drones that I usually had on contracts were designed for intel and better collecting the clients’ proprietary data, as well as keeping watch on your base perimeter and making sure nothing sneaks up on your team in the field. These combat drones were a larger model that had intel capacity, extra shielding, and an onboard energy weapon.
We were lucky that nothing we had done so far had activated them. There was no way I could protect everyone from thirty combat drones. I singled one of the drones out and carefully separated it from the swarm, then pinged it with a compressed list of drone control keys.
(I got the list during a previous contract, from the proprietary data of a company client who worked on countermeasures for combat drones. Lots of the military corporations used combat drones, so figuring out ways to counter them was very profitable. I had managed to resist deleting it to fill that space up with new serials or music. I knew it would come in handy someday.)
One of the keys worked, and the drone now registered me as an approved user.
“Combat drones?” Abene was saying as I worked; she sounded concerned and a little alarmed, and rightfully so. She came up to stand beside me, with the others gathering behind and peering past us warily. “Why would they need so many combat drones here?”
“Perhaps to protect the installation from potential raiders?” Ejiro suggested, though he sounded dubious.
“Maybe, but the chances of raiders finding or bothering with this place is pretty low,” Abene said thoughtfully. “If they were meant to protect against raiders, why are they down here instead of in the upper installation? And it seems overkill to have so many drones to monitor their own workers…”
I tuned them out and wandered around in the drone’s control code for a minute or so, making sure I knew how it worked. As I did so, I noticed a familiar-looking code string. A closer look revealed that it was one of the codes that GrayCris had given Don Abene. If she’d used it while trying to enter the installation, it would have activated all the combat drones and set them to “kill everything” mode.
Ah. Okay. That explained what they were doing here. GrayCris really didn’t want to share this installation with anyone, apparently. I wish I could say that I was surprised, but knowing what I already did about GrayCris, I really wasn’t.
Once I was comfortable with the drone’s systems, I pinged the rest of the swarm as well. Within twenty seconds, I had severed their connection to SubSecSystem, and they were all my new drone friends.
The humans were still speculating about why the drones were here, and I interrupted them to say, “One of the codes GrayCris gave you to use would have activated them, and they would have attacked you on sight.”
That made everyone fall silent. Miki was the first to speak up, with a quiet, “That isn’t very friendly.”
No shit, Miki.
“Should we… try to turn them off, or disable them, or something?” Brais was suggesting, shifting nervously in the doorway behind me.
“I’ve already cut them off from the installation’s SecSystem and taken control of them,” I informed Brais and the rest of the GI team. “They won’t activate now except under my orders.”
I could see how everyone’s postures relaxed at that news. “Ah, thank you, Rin,” Don Abene said, sounding relieved. “I’m very glad we hired you.”
It was my turn to be uncomfortable. More uncomfortable. Just being in this installation was uncomfortable enough, honestly. “Just doing my job,” I replied with a shrug after a brief but awkward pause. To cut off any further conversation, I activated the first combat drone so I could bring it with me. Its in-built energy weapon was more powerful than the little hand-held gun I was carrying, which made me feel slightly better. I would have liked to bring more, but even augmented humans couldn’t reliably control more than one drone at a time. “Let’s keep going.”
“Right, right.” Don Abene nodded, and everyone shuffled out of the security room and back into the corridor. Once again I took the lead as we continued to explore, my new drone hovering along overhead.
Past the security room were several more labs, similar to the ones up in the main facility, full of various types of scientific equipment. These labs, however, showed obvious signs of heavy use. This was definitely where most of the GrayCris humans had spent the majority of their time in this installation.
Nothing of whatever they’d been working on had been left behind though, much to everyone’s disappointment. Whatever samples they had been studying had all been taken with them when they left. The humans and Vicky rebooted the consoles in each lab, but they had been wiped of all data, leaving no information behind.
None that most humans could find, anyway. In my experience with data-mining for the company, humans didn’t cover their tracks as well as they thought they did. If GrayCris had meant to abandon this facility entirely, they would have just taken the physical data storage with them, which was way more secure than a system delete. But they’d intended to come back, so they’d left the data storage and just deleted everything manually.
Doing that didn’t immediately get rid of the data, though. Usually it just got encrypted and shifted into cache storage for a certain amount of time before it actually got deleted, so it could be restored if the human who’d triggered the deletion had made a mistake, or done so by accident. There was a good chance GrayCris had shut down the installation and left before the cache had timed out.
I started sifting through the cache and… yep. There it was. A whole lot of encrypted data, recording all the results of whatever tests and analyses GrayCris had run in these labs.
I reached for the data clips that I’d bought - then remembered that they were still in the pocket of my jacket, which was back on the GI ship now that I’d changed into my armour. Shit. I checked the file sizes and ran some quick calculations. I’d be able to fit all the data in my own internal storage… if I deleted most of my saved media first.
Ugh.
Well, media could be replaced later. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t get a chance at this data again, especially now that we’d powered the consoles up. I didn’t have time to go back up to the ship and get the data clips; it wouldn’t be long before the cache clear happened and the data was wiped for good. I could have set the consoles to restore the deleted files, but the GI humans would have noticed that, and I was oddly reluctant to let them get this data too. GrayCris were willing to murder to keep their secrets - if they found out that GI had gotten access to the data here, who knew what they’d try to do to the GI team in the future. The less GI knew, the safer they’d be. Hopefully.
So while the humans poked around the labs, exclaiming at the different types of equipment and speculating on what it was all for, I sat down in a chair by one of the consoles and started downloading. I was able to keep most of my music and a handful of my favourite serials, including Sanctuary Moon and Worldhoppers, but everything else had to go. I’d shared a lot of my media with Vicky, at least - hopefully I’d be able to get most of the files back from it later once I was able to transfer all this data to my data clips.
Even as I was downloading all that data, I was still also trying to crack into SubSecSystem. Having access to the combat drone helped; I was able to recover some of its protocols and apply those to my efforts. I was making progress, but it was slow. I still couldn’t get into the cameras, and there was an entire section of SubSecSystem that I couldn’t access at all. It was frustrating and made me even more anxious than I was already.
I finished downloading the data just before the humans got bored of examining the labs, and wanted to move on. Vicky had managed to get schematics for this area from the SubHubSystem, and it looked like there were a couple more rooms that weren’t labelled as lab space, along with another exit. The humans were curious about the exit - as far as we could tell, this secondary installation was deep underground. Where could that exit lead to?
Once again I led the way, my new combat drone floating along above my head while the others followed behind me. Miki was talking excitedly with Don Abene and the others, and Vicky occasionally chimed in as well. It seemed to be getting along a little better with Miki now. I hadn’t spotted it rolling its eyes at the human-form bot again, anyway.
I wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to them though, still mostly focused on SubSecSystem and my own scans. I was feeling increasingly uneasy, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. I flicked through the camera views I had of the main facility as I led the way down yet another corridor, but nothing was happening up there; everything seemed normal. I could hear Kader and Vibol on the comms as the rest of the team kept them updated on what was going on, so nothing was wrong there, either.
We came to a door on the right side of the corridor, and I tapped the button to open it, then stepped inside. At first the room seemed rather unremarkable; it was a long rectangle, with the door I’d come through in the middle of one of the longer walls. There were some benches along the wall to either side of the door, but not much else inside the room. The lights in here weren’t on; I couldn’t tell if that was because they were broken, or they had just been turned off before everyone left. Light filtered in from the corridor, casting long shadows through the doorway as the others waited for me to signal the all-clear to enter.
As I moved further into the room though, I realised that the long wall opposite the door wasn’t actually a wall at all. It was floor to ceiling windows, looking out into what at first glance appeared to be a black, empty void.
My sense of uneasiness grew, but there was no apparent threat. I signalled that the others could enter as I moved closer to the window, trying to see what was outside.
“Is that… a window?” Hirune asked as she moved up beside me. “Why would they have windows underground?”
The others all moved up to the windows as well, spreading out along its length to press the faceplates of their environmental suit helmets up against the clear glass in their attempts to peer past it. I stayed a step or two back, flicking through my various vision filters.
Then Vicky, who was still lingering near the doorway, pressed a button on the wall. Outside, bright lights flared on, illuminating the void beyond the windows.
“... Oh,” Don Abene breathed. “Oh, no wonder GrayCris was being so cagey…”
The lights revealed a massive cavern - except it wasn’t a natural cavern. Instead of rough stone walls, huge metallic-looking pillars with intricate detailing lined the edges of the space. The floor and ceiling looked to be made of a similar, dark metallic substance, likewise engraved with the complicated patterns. The engraved details caught and refracted the light oddly, standing out starkly against the otherwise smooth surface. Between the engravings, the metallic substance glistened with an almost oily sheen, swirls and whorls of colour twisting through glossy black.
It reminded me a little of the glassy rocks in the blank map area back on DeltFall and PreservationAux’s survey. I felt weird and off-balance.
“That… that’s a hell of a lot of alien remnant,” Ejiro murmured, his attention still fixed firmly on the view.
“Oh yeah,” Brais agreed, likewise fixated on what lay beyond the windows. “There is absolutely no way any of that is human made.”
“It’s so pretty…!” Miki was beside Don Abene, its blank, globular eyes also pressed up against the glass. Vicky had also moved up to the window after it had turned the outside lights on, and it let out a wordless sound of agreement.
I didn’t like it. I wanted to leave immediately. I was just trying to think of the best way to convince the humans to stop staring out the window and return to the safety of their ship when I caught a hint of movement past the glass.
I froze, trying to make out what it was, trying to figure out what could be out there - and then I realised the movement I’d seen wasn’t outside.
It was a reflection in the glass of something moving behind me.
I spun around to face the doorway and had just enough time to get one clear image of the threat before I had to react. A combat bot had just stepped into the doorway - it was a three-metre tall human-form bot, kind of like Miki if Miki had four arms with multiple hand mods for cutting, slicing, delivering energy bursts, etc., multiple weapon ports in its chest and back, and a really shitty personality.
That explained the section of SubSecSystem I couldn’t get into, at least.
I could tell it was about to open fire and there was no time for any of the humans to react. Still, I yelled “Get down!” even as I brought up my woefully inadequate handgun and opened fire at its head, where all its cameras and scanners were. (Its actual processing and memory core was down in its lower abdomen, similar to Miki, since it was more protected down there and people tended to shoot for the head.) (At least, people always shot for my head, so I assumed they did it to bots, too.)
My combat drone opened fire as well, following my lead and also aiming for the combat bot’s head. Simultaneously, I activated the rest of the drone swarm and set the combat bot as their main target.
Part of me registered Vicky and Miki moving to protect the humans as the bot opened fire. It got a few shots off before the combined fire at its head from myself and Drone One temporarily (and I can’t stress that “temporarily” part enough) disabled it, leaving it blind, deaf, and unable to scan for movement or energy, with no ability to acquire a target with any of its inbuilt weapons.
I heard startled and pained cries, but I had no time to check on anyone’s status. I had to get the combat bot away from the others, clear a path for them to retreat. I shoulder-charged the combat bot while it was still disabled, shoving it back out of the doorway before it could brace itself.
It recovered its balance quickly though and I had to dive to the side to avoid a wild swipe from its arms. There was a burst of static in the feed as it cleared its sensory inputs just as I rolled back to my feet. I fired at its head again but it was ready for me this time, ducking beneath the shots and lunging for me. I had to make a desperate leap backwards to avoid its grasp.
It kept after me and I kept backing up, drawing it away from the doorway and further down the corridor away from the elevator. “Run!” I called over the team comm; I really hoped they remembered my earlier security briefing. Just in case, I also sent to Vicky, [Get everyone out, back to the ship!]
I got a ping of acknowledgement in response, but nothing else. That was fine, I was too busy trying to keep myself in one piece to pay attention to whatever it might have said anyway. The combat bot was firing at me at every opportunity, and I had to keep weaving and dodging to avoid the worst of it, without even the chance to try and fire back at its head again. I kept myself out of range of its arms, but couldn’t avoid all of its shots. At least the bot couldn’t get a clean lock on me either because of Drone One still firing at its sensors. It wasn’t quite enough by itself to disable the bot again, but it helped mess up the bot’s aim.
Still, it was only a matter of time before the bot managed to hit something important in me; I’d already lost chunks of armour and bits of the underlying organics, and even though I had my pain sensors as low as they could go, the mounting damage was starting to slow me down. I didn’t have the firepower to drop the combat bot myself. All I could do was buy time for the others to get away.
Then the swarm of combat drones arrived, sweeping in with weapons blazing at the combat bot’s back. That definitely got its attention; a single combat drone’s energy weapon couldn’t do much to it, but an entire swarm could. The bot focused on the threat of the drones, giving me a moment’s respite - and leaving me an opening.
Now that none of the humans were in a position to see me, I quickly clipped the useless little handgun back to my armour, popped out my in-built arm weapons, and set them to maximum power. If I could get close enough, I could hopefully get through a weak point in its armour and damage something vital.
The combat bot was flailing wildly at the cloud of drones firing and diving at it. It thrashed around like an irritated metal whirlwind, stray blasts from its weapons peppering the walls, floor and ceiling. As I began charging towards the bot, it smacked one of the drones with its cutting hand and shrapnel sprayed the corridor. Some of the shrapnel impacted my chest and arms, a series of little thumps against my armour, along with a few sharper flares where the shrapnel had gotten through breaches and buried into my organics.
I couldn’t let that stop me though - I had to be close to have a chance of my energy weapons breaching the bot’s carapace. I ducked low to avoid the flailing arms, aimed both weapons at the small of its back, and fired - just as the bot swung around to face me. The drones hadn’t been quite as distracting as I’d hoped. I couldn’t tell if my shots had breached the carapace or not, but they definitely hadn’t hit anything important.
I had to throw myself backwards again to avoid its retaliatory swipe, but I wasn’t fast enough this time. Sharp metal fingers ripped through my right side, the impact and momentum slamming me into the corridor wall. Damage alerts flared as I dropped to the floor, but I ignored them as best I could, trying to get up before the bot could push its advantage. Even as I scrambled, it fired its chest weapons at me; more damage alerts flashed in my awareness as projectiles hammered into my torso, punching through the cheap company armour.
Then the remaining drones made a wall and slammed into the combat bot, forcing it away from me with a haze of weapon fire and their own armoured bodies. It gave me the chance to drag myself back to my feet, even as more shrapnel sprayed the area. The bot had taken out thirteen of the drones already, each one a light, a connection, blinking out of my awareness. But the swarm was doing a lot of damage in return, targeting joints, weapon ports, and hands. Not enough to drop or cripple the bot, not yet, but enough to slow it down.
I steadied myself against the corridor wall, readying myself for another attack, trying to figure out where I could do the most damage to it. The swarm’s firepower had weakened several points in the bot’s carapace - if I could land a solid shot on one of those weakened areas, perhaps that would be enough to breach it. I pushed myself off the wall, focusing on the combat bot, waiting for an opening—
— Then something moved behind me and several sharp metal claws pierced my armour and sank deep into my lower back. Simultaneously another metal hand grabbed my right shoulder, more sharp metal fingers piercing the armour and organics around the joint, sinking in deep and scraping jarringly against my inorganics. I felt my feet leave the floor, damage alerts flickering through my awareness too fast for me to follow.
The shock of it paralysed me. There was a second combat bot. Of course there was a second combat bot, but I hadn’t considered the possibility, too busy with the one right in front of me, and now–
[Objective: We will tear you apart.]
Fuck.
I’ve been torn apart before, and on my list of things to avoid, it was right up there at the top. I wasn’t going to be able to avoid it now though, not with the bot’s claws already deep in my back, in my shoulder, lifting me entirely off the ground; I had no leverage to tear myself free. It could’ve easily shot me to pieces with its chest weapons, but it was mad, and it wanted to make me hurt. I felt the bot’s hands flex, its claws sinking in deeper, felt the shift in the metal as its grip tightened in preparation to begin pulling. I felt my right shoulder pop out of joint as the bot slowly began to pull, felt the claws deep within my torso curl upwards and catch on some internal component. More alerts flared and I braced myself, knowing that this wouldn’t be quick–
Then both bots froze in place, their joints locking, their weapons deactivating. The sudden lack of tearing-me-apart caught me completely off-guard, and it took me a full one point eight seconds to register that the combat bots had, for some unknown reason, shut down. The remaining combat drones also seemed confused; most of them hovered indecisively around the first combat bot, while a few drifted towards me, apparently examining my predicament.
Okay. All right. Not in pieces yet. Time to get yourself the fuck out of here, Murderbot, before you lose the chance for good.
I tried to wrench my shoulder out of the bot’s grip, but the bot’s locked joints and my lack of leverage made that nearly impossible, and just damaged my shoulder (and my back) even more. I was lucky that the bot hadn’t become unbalanced and just fallen forward on top of me, honestly. I managed to reach up with my left arm and began trying to pry the bot’s fingers open. If I could just get the damned fingers to unlock–
I’d made very little progress when I heard running footsteps approaching. I had a moment to think that the humans had better not have been stupid and stayed behind instead of escaping, before I realised that it was Vicky, closely followed by Miki.
That wasn’t much better, really, but at least they weren’t squishy fragile humans.
“Oh shit – Rin!” Vicky skidded to a halt in front of me, eyes wide, with Miki right beside it. Vicky immediately reached for the combat bot’s wrist, trying to get the fingers clamped around my shoulder to unlock. “Miki, help support its weight–”
“What the fuck are you still doing here?” Okay, that was probably harsher than necessary, but I wasn’t exactly having a good time. Especially as Miki crouched a little and carefully wrapped its arms around my hips to help support my weight, taking some of the pressure off the claws holding me up. More damage alerts flashed but I dismissed them; they weren’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. “I told you all to get out!”
“Ejiro was hurt in the initial attack - we got him to the elevator, and Brais and Hirune are taking him back up to the ship and its MedSystem.” As it talked, Vicky continued to manipulate the combat bot’s wrist, though I couldn’t see what it was doing. “Don Abene refused to leave without you though.”
“We don’t leave our friends behind!” Miki interjected, its voice determined.
“We don’t,” Vicky agreed steadfastly. “I managed to follow your hacks into SubSecSystem and force a shutdown command through to the combat bots, then I had to convince Abene to wait by the elevator while we came to get you. You weren’t answering pings or the comm.”
“I was a little busy.” I would have said more but whatever Vicky was doing suddenly made the combat bot’s fingers unlock and relax, and I was distracted by yet more damage alerts and performance reliability warnings. Miki had to tighten its grip around my hips to help hold me up as Vicky slid each clawed finger out of my mangled shoulder one by one. Pieces of my shoulder armour fell away, liberally slicked with my blood and inorganic fluids.
Finally my shoulder was free, and Vicky helped Miki carefully work me off the claws impaled into my back. The way they were curled made it difficult, and they did more damage on the way out. I felt more blood and fluids soaking into my suit skin beneath my armour; my performance reliability dipped sharply, and I would have collapsed to the floor if they hadn’t been holding me up.
“Come on,” Vicky urged me. “We have to go - I don’t know how much longer the combat bots will stay shut down.”
With Miki supporting me on one side and Vicky on the other, I was able to get my feet under me again and at least help support my weight as we began moving. I was having trouble focusing on much of anything, though I managed to order the combat drones to follow and defend us. It occurred to me in a vague sort of way that I wouldn’t be able to hide the fact that I wasn’t human now, but I couldn’t hold on to that line of thought.
We made it back to the elevator; I barely registered Don Abene’s horrified expression when she first caught sight of us. “Rin?!”
A client was talking to me. I had to answer. “I’m fine.” Yeah, okay, that was a very obvious, blatant lie, but I couldn't think of anything else to say. It was better than letting my buffer answer, at least.
“Is the elevator back yet?” Vicky asked, cutting off anything Abene might have said in response to me.
“Not yet.” Abene looked frustrated. “The others have made it up to the top, but the elevator’s still on its way back down.”
“It better arrive soon,” Vicky muttered. “Those combat bots will be rebooting any second now, and SubSecSystem has locked me out - I won’t be able to force another shutdown again.”
Now that we were no longer moving, I was able to pull myself together a bit more and take stock of my actual condition. My performance reliability was dropping by the second. I was peppered with projectiles and shrapnel; my armour had stopped some of it, but an uncomfortable amount had pierced it or gotten in through previous breaches, and was embedded in my organics or lodged in my inorganics. (If I’d only had to deal with projectiles and shrapnel, I would have been fine. Mostly fine.)
My right side between hip and arm had been torn open by the combat bot’s claws. The armour had shattered and been ripped off along with chunks of the organics there, blood and fluids slicking over my hip and down my leg. My right shoulder was an absolute mess, pulled out of the socket and with large, ragged puncture wounds all around it. My right arm was useless, hanging limply at my side, and I’d lost almost all the armour on that shoulder. Only a few secondary inorganic connections and what was left of the overlaid organics were keeping my arm attached to my body. Diagnostics indicated that the combat bot’s clawed thumb and one of its fingers had actually made contact with each other somewhere beneath the end of my collarbone, piercing straight through organics and inorganics alike.
Five deep, ragged puncture wounds were in my lower back, a couple of which had gone almost all the way through me. They’d missed my core power cells and spine; the bot hadn’t wanted to finish me that quickly. The pressure from my weight resting on the claws as it had lifted me off the floor had enlarged the wounds though, as the claws sliced upwards through organics and damaged the less sturdy internal inorganics. There were probably scratches or gouges on the protective housing around my power core. More of my internals had been damaged when Miki and Vicky had hauled me off the combat bot’s claws. Chunks of the armour covering my back had broken and fallen off.
The automatic sealing of my veins and arteries was struggling to keep up with all the damage, and I was still leaking. My suit skin was soaked, heavy and sticky, and my temperature controls were completely unresponsive.
All in all, I felt like shit.
At least I hadn’t taken any damage to my head so far. I managed to work my way into the elevator controls, changing the access codes and locking the combat bots out so they wouldn’t be able to control it, and trying to encourage it to go faster. The sooner it got here, the better. I couldn’t tell if it had sped up at all, though.
Then something crashed against the bulkhead door, and Abene let out a startled noise. Apparently Vicky had locked the door once we were inside the room, and now the combat bots were trying to break through.
Great.
I pulled away from Vicky and Miki’s support and turned, taking a few unsteady steps closer to the door, the remaining combat drones hovering overhead. If the bots broke through before the elevator arrived, I’d have to hold them back as long as I could. That wouldn’t be long, but not doing so wasn’t an option.
“Rin?! What are you doing?!” Don Abene reached towards me, but I flinched away, and she pulled back.
“My job.” Another crash against the door echoed through the room, and Vicky pulled Abene back against the elevator doors, ready to enter as soon as the stupid elevator actually arrived. If it got here in time, anyway.
Miki however stepped up beside me, grabbing the stupid hand gun that was somehow still hanging off what remained of my armour. I blinked at it. “What are you doing? Get back with the others!”
Miki shook its head. “No, Rin. I’m going to help you.”
The door buckled.
“Miki!” Abene sounded desperate, pleading.
Miki shook its head slightly, still steadfastly facing the door, the little handgun held ready. “My priority is to protect my friends!”
The door buckled further.
“Priority change,” Abene demanded. “Your priority is to protect yourself!”
“That priority change is rejected.”
Then things began to happen very quickly.
The elevator let out a cheerful chime as it arrived and started to open. Vicky shoved Abene into the elevator, pushing her to one side into the dubious shelter of the corner of the elevator.
The bulkhead door burst inwards, followed by angry combat bots.
My drone swarm opened fire.
Miki grabbed me and bodily threw me into the elevator.
I landed on the elevator floor and slid across it until I hit the back wall, leaving a trail of blood and fluids. I tried to get up, to do something, anything, but my body wouldn’t respond. I could tell I was hovering on the edge of a systems failure.
Miki bolted for the elevator as well, firing ineffectually back over its shoulder at the combat bots with the stupid little handgun.
One of the combat bots shoved through the wall of drones, knocking a few of them into the elevator as it went, and lunged at Miki as it crossed the threshold, its clawed arms outstretched.
Vicky shoved Miki out of the way and took the blow instead, tumbling back into the elevator from the force of it and hitting the side wall before dropping to the floor.
The remaining drones drove the combat bot back.
I ordered the elevator door to close immediately.
It slammed shut on a set of bloodstained metal fingers, then the elevator began its ascent.
Don Abene rose from where she had been crouched in the corner. “Miki? Vicky?”
Miki also got up, a little shakily. “I’m okay, Don Abene.” It hurried over to where Vicky lay sprawled at the base of the elevator wall. “Consultant Vicky? Consultant Vicky?!”
Vicky wasn’t moving. I could see blood. Once again, I tried to get up.
My performance reliability crashed and bottomed out.
Performance reliability catastro–
Chapter Seven
Restart.
Awareness drifted back slowly, piecemeal. Most of my systems were still down. I didn’t know where I was. None of my inputs were working yet. Every moment was agonising, and I couldn't access or even find my pain sensors. I tried to start a diagnostic, and crashed again.
Catastrophic systems failure.
Emergency shutdown.
Restart: Failure.
Retry—
Restart.
The next time I woke up, I at least had some inputs available. I could hear a voice, maybe two voices, but I didn’t recognise either of them, and I couldn’t comprehend the words. I could make out some light, bright blotches somewhere above me, broken up by shifting shadows, but I couldn’t focus on anything. I felt… warm. It was nice.
I took a breath. Something flared, hot and sharp and painful, somewhere in my lower abdomen—
Performance reliability drop.
Involuntary shutdown.
Restart: Failure.
Retry—
Restart.
Ugh, not again.
I remained completely motionless, not wanting to trigger another involuntary shutdown or systems crash, and tried not to think too hard about anything. That got boring pretty quickly, though.
At least I was in a state where I could get bored. That was an improvement, I guess.
I couldn’t hear much of anything, but it was the kind of silence that suggested there just wasn’t anything going on nearby, rather than the silence I got when my audio inputs weren’t working. I was still comfortably warm. (That was still nice.) It felt like I was lying on my back, probably on a bed. (I’d lain on enough beds by now to be able to recognise the feeling. That was weird to think about.)
I decided to risk opening my eyes. That didn’t trigger a shutdown. Success! It took a few seconds for my vision to clear, but once I was able to focus, I could see a room that I… absolutely did not recognise.
What the fuck.
Well, okay, that was a slight exaggeration. I recognised the fact that I was lying in a MedSystem, at least. One that had, presumably, put me back together. That was a good sign, probably. But I wasn’t on the GI ship, I could tell that much. There was no hum of the ship's engines, and only the faintest whisper of environmental systems. Had they taken me back to the station to use the MedSystem there?
A spike of panic flared. Shit, there was no way the humans hadn’t figured out I wasn’t human by now. But I also wasn’t waking up in a recycler, so… (Okay, yes, I know, if they’d dumped me in a recycler, I wouldn’t have woken up at all. Not the point.)
All right. Let’s not jump to any conclusions here, Murderbot. Since I hadn’t crashed again yet, it was probably safe to run a diagnostic. I ran a diagnostic.
Performance reliability came up as sitting around the 90 percent mark. Huh. That was actually really good, all things considered. My right shoulder was still reporting some issues, but I at least had use of that arm back, mostly. I no longer had any shrapnel or projectiles embedded in me, which was always a relief. There was still a lingering ache in my right side and my lower back, but that was easy enough to ignore once I tweaked my pain sensors, and functionality seemed to be almost back to normal in those areas.
I sat up, slowly and carefully. Performance reliability dipped briefly, then levelled out. That was much better than it crashing again. As I sat up, a blanket slipped down my torso and gathered in my lap. (I still wasn’t used to blankets.) I had a moment to notice that I wasn’t wearing anything beneath the blanket before a voice startled me out of my self-assessment.
“Rin?”
I didn’t jump in surprise, but I did twitch a bit, I’ll admit. I turned my head to look over at the source of the voice, and belatedly scanned the room to see who or what else was in here with me. Good work, Murderbot.
Vicky was sitting in a chair, its portable display surface activated, but its attention was fixed on me. It looked… relieved? (I decided to ignore that.)
“Uh. Hi.” Now that I was sitting up, I finally recognised where we were. “... Why are we in the medical bay of the installation that has killer combat bots, instead of somewhere sensible like not still on the planet with the killer combat bots?”
“Don’t worry,” Vicky said reassuringly. I was not reassured, and I continued to worry. “Once we got to the top, I locked and disabled the elevator. There’s no other way for the combat bots to get up here, and this MedSystem is better than the one on the ship. They were also using the ship’s MedSystem to patch up Ejiro, and Abene didn’t want to wait for it to be done before we started treating you.”
I frowned at the reminder that at least one of the humans had gotten hurt. “How is Ejiro now? And everyone else?” I regarded Vicky closely. “... And you?”
Vicky smiled. “Ejiro is fine. He only got clipped by a couple of the combat bot’s shots, nothing too serious. Everyone else is fine too - there were a few bruises and scrapes, and Hirune sprained her wrist, but nothing bad. Miki’s carapace got a little damaged, but it’s been fixed up as well.” It paused, then added, “And I’m fine. Had a temporary shutdown from the shock of the impact, got some cuts and bruises and dents, but nothing serious. Don Abene helped fix up what needed fixing.”
I frowned at it. “I saw a lot of blood…”
Vicky actually rolled its eyes at me. “That wasn’t mine. That was all your blood from me helping you back to the elevator, idiot.”
Oh, right. That made sense.
Its looked me over critically. “Speaking of which, how are you feeling now?” Its voice and expression softened. “You had us really worried - for a while there, I thought… you might not make it.”
I resisted the urge to fidget and fixed my gaze on the wall beside Vicky’s head. Having anyone worry about me was still strange. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to it. “Fine. Back up to 90 percent performance reliability.” I didn’t want it asking me any more questions about how I was feeling, so I asked it, “Where is everyone right now? And… what was their reaction? To the whole… me being a construct thing, I mean.” That was definitely a big concern of mine right now. I needed to know if I had to start planning an escape or not.
“Everyone else is back on the ship, resting,” Vicky replied. That was a relief - at least they had made the sensible decision to rest in the safety of the ship, instead of in the installation with the killer combat bots locked in the basement. “And only Don Abene - and Miki - know about us. I explained a bit to her while we were still in the elevator. About what we were, and how we’re trying to escape the Corporation Rim. She seemed to understand, and she was very grateful that you were able to hold the combat bots back so that everyone could escape, though she was very upset about how badly you were hurt. It was her suggestion that only she and myself look after you in here, so the others wouldn’t find out about either of us. They accepted the reasoning that we didn’t want you being disturbed while you were recovering. Miki has also promised not to tell anyone anything about us.” Vicky smiled lopsidedly. “It said that we’re the first friends it’s had that are like it.”
That was a lot to take in. I had to just sit and think about it for a bit. Don Abene had, apparently, not only accepted me being a construct in her stride, but had then taken steps to protect me. I was having an emotion, a complicated one.
To distract myself from the complicated emotion that I didn’t want to think about, I asked Vicky, “So… you and Miki are friends now? You’re okay with this?” I hadn’t forgotten Vicky’s anger at Miki back on the ship, but I’d also noticed that its anger seemed to have cooled over the past couple of cycles.
Vicky shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. “Yeah. After… you know… I did a lot of thinking. And talking with the humans. I started talking with Miki a bit as well, while you were scouting for the installation. I realised eventually that all the reasons I was angry… weren’t Miki’s fault. Hating Miki for stuff that it had nothing to do with wasn’t fair to it. Or to its humans.”
More emotions. Great. I continued to stare at the wall past Vicky’s head and completely failed to think of anything to say.
Fortunately, Vicky started talking again before the silence got too awkward. “Oh, also - I thought you might appreciate this.” It pinged me in the feed, then handed over a single drone input. It was one of the combat drones, and as I accepted it, I realised the drone was resting on a bench beside Vicky, just out of my immediate line of sight.
“What – how?” I’d thought the combat bots would have trashed all the drones by now. How had Vicky ended up with one?
Vicky grinned at me. “I put it together myself. One of the combat bots smacked a few of them into the elevator before the door closed. None of them were functional, but I managed to salvage enough parts to get one working again.” The grin faltered a bit. “It… kept me occupied while I waited for the MedSystem to put you back together.”
Had Vicky somehow realised how much I missed having drones? It wasn’t one of my usual intel ones, but it was a more advanced model, and its extra firepower would probably come in handy. I went through its systems to see if everything was fully functional, which it was. Vicky had done a good job of piecing it together.
I was having another emotion. “... Thanks,” I managed after a moment as I activated the drone and directed it into a sweep around the room before letting it settle into passive follow mode. “I – um. Thanks.”
Vicky smiled at me. I wasn’t looking at it with my own eyes, but I could still see it through the drone’s input. “You’re welcome.”
All right, enough emotions, time to get out of here. I began to get down off MedSystem’s platform, then remembered that I wasn’t wearing anything and paused, holding on to the blanket. “Um. Where’s my armour?”
Vicky grimaced. “What was left of it was in pieces. There was no way it was recoverable, not without a company recycler. The suit skin was ruined too.”
Oh yeah. Given all the damage I’d taken, that wasn’t surprising. I couldn’t decide how I felt about it though. On the one hand, my armour was one more link to the company that had owned me, that I’d escaped - one more thing that marked me as a SecUnit, and I was probably better off without it. On the other, I no longer had armour to protect me, to hide behind. I felt like I’d lost something important, another little part of myself.
Ugh, even more emotions. Why must emotions be so complicated and confusing and never-ending?
Vicky continued. “I brought all your stuff over from the ship though, so you can get dressed whenever you’re ready.” It gestured to another chair with an environmental suit draped over it, and my bag sitting beside it. My bag looked smaller, without my armour in it. (Which was logical, but the emotion I was having about it was absolutely not logical.)
“Thanks. Again.” I looked around again, noting the bathroom attached to the medical bay. “Is the shower here working?” I’d only had the opportunity to enjoy human style showers a small handful of times since escaping, but it was already something that I’d decided I liked. And despite MedSystem’s care, I still felt a little like I was covered in dried fluids.
Vicky nodded. “It is. Hot water and all.”
That was the best news I’d heard in a long time. “All right. I’m going to get myself cleaned up, and then we can get the fuck off this stupid planet.”
Once I’d had a nice shower (while listening to some of my music in an attempt to get my stupid emotions under control) and gotten dressed, I emerged from the bathroom to find Don Abene waiting for me in Medical. Miki was by her side, as usual, and Vicky was still hanging around as well. For a moment I felt like retreating back into the bathroom, but that was stupid and I resisted the urge.
Before I could think of anything to say though, Don Abene smiled warmly at me. I immediately looked over at the nearest wall and switched to watching her through my combat drone. “Rin! It’s good to see you up and about again. We were all worried.”
I shrugged a little, not sure how to respond. “Uh, thanks.” That didn’t seem like enough, so I added, “I’m glad everyone else got out okay.”
“Only thanks to you,” Abene replied, her smile getting a little wobbly for a moment before she steadied herself again. “But that’s not why I’m here. I want to talk to you and Vicky in relative privacy before we all return to the ship.”
Uh oh.
I did my best to keep my expression neutral. “What about?”
Don Abene glanced at Vicky, who nodded slightly. She then looked back at me. “Vicky told me that you’re both constructs, trying to escape the Corporation Rim. Given everything that’s happened, I want to reassure you that I’m not going to view or treat you any differently than how I did before I was informed about this. I’m also not going to tell anyone that either of you are constructs, either. Nor will Miki.” Miki nodded emphatically as Abene continued. “As far as we’re concerned, you’re both highly skilled individuals that we have very much appreciated having on our team.”
I was having another emotion again. I didn’t have enough media for this, especially not after deleting a bunch of it to store recovered data about alien remnants and/or strange synthetics. I just nodded though, and she continued. “With that in mind, I want to make you both an offer. After this contract, if you still need work, or even just somewhere safe to go, you’re both welcome to join my team, for as long as you want. Or I can help you find other work in my polity.”
I had no idea how to respond, and no clue what my expression was doing. “You’re… offering us somewhere to stay? A permanent job?”
Don Abene nodded, and Miki chimed in enthusiastically, “We really like having you both around, Consultant Rin! If you stay, I can teach you how to play Mus!”
Abene let out a little huff of laughter at that. “Easy there, Miki. Give Rin time to think it over, okay?” She looked back at me. “You don’t have to decide right away, of course.”
She was about to say something else when she was cut off by the team comm activating. “Don Abene?” Vibol’s voice came through, sounding uncertain. “There’s a Corporation Rim carrier in orbit above us, and its captain wants to talk to you about the installation. He says it’s urgent.”
Both my threat and risk assessments spiked. Don Abene frowned slightly. “All right. I’ll be back at the ship in a minute. Let the captain know I’m on my way.”
“Will do.”
The comm fell silent, and Don Abene sighed. “I’d best go see what they want.”
“We should all return to the ship, anyway,” I added. “The sooner we can get off this planet, the better.”
“Agreed.”
We headed back to the ship, and Don Abene went straight to the bridge without bothering to take off her environmental suit, apart from the helmet. Miki followed her, but Vicky and I hung back.
“Are you going to be eavesdropping on the comm?” Vicky asked me quietly as it began shedding its own environmental suit.
“Of course.” I checked my external feed interface (it hadn’t gotten damaged in the fight with the combat bots, luckily), then carefully eased my way through it into the ship’s comm. I could feel Vicky slipping unobtrusively into the comm channel as well.
We were just in time to hear Don Abene say, “This is Don Abene, team lead for the GoodNightLander Independent reclamation assessment team. You wanted to speak to me?”
“I do. I apologise for interrupting your assessment, but the situation regarding ownership of this installation has changed.” The voice of the carrier captain was deep, calm, and with a definite Corporation Rim accent that I was very familiar with. Threat and risk assessment spiked even higher.
“Changed howso?” Abene asked, just as calm.
“GrayCris has… gotten themselves into some serious legal trouble,” the deep voice replied. “As one of the consequences of that, GrayCris has ceded full ownership of the installation here over to the company. This of course renders any reclamation efforts by outside parties null and void.”
The company? Shit.
“I understand that this is most likely very inconvenient for you and your team,” the deep voice continued smoothly while I was internally panicking. “I have been authorised to offer you generous compensation for your time and effort here, especially if you are able to give us the information gathered on your assessment so far.”
There was a brief pause before Abene replied. “What kind of compensation are we talking about, here?”
That was a good question. Compensation could be anything from actual hard currency (the best option) to ‘discounts’ on future company bonds (absolutely useless if you had no intention of bonding with the company in the first place).
There was no hesitation though as the company captain responded with a very large number, and specified that said number was in the standard common currency and not the company specific scrip. (The standard common currency was accepted all throughout the Corporation Rim and in most neighbouring polities.)
Don Abene’s pause was a little longer this time. “Would you mind if I took the time to discuss the situation with my team first?”
“Not at all,” the company captain replied. “I’ll leave this channel open for your response.”
“Thank you.” Don Abene switched to the team comm. “Team meeting everyone, main lounge, right now.”
There was a chorus of confirmations. I kept one input on the comm channel that the company captain had been using, and headed up to the main lounge with Vicky. I hadn’t bothered getting out of my own environmental suit (I had a feeling I’d need it again soon, even if it was just to get to the scout flier so we could leave), but I’d taken the helmet off.
When we got to the main lounge, everyone else was there already, including Kader and Vibol. Vicky went to sit next to Hirune on one of the couches, but I just stayed standing by the entrance, leaning back against the wall.
“Hey, Rin!” Ejiro grinned as he noticed me. “Good to see you up and about again!” The other humans also smiled and echoed the sentiment. It was weird.
I just nodded in response and said, “Thanks. Good to see that you’re all right now, too.” I was getting better at this conversation thing, I think.
“Only thanks to you!” Ejiro replied sincerely. “You saved all our asses.”
Okay, maybe not so good. I was saved from trying to think of what to say next by Don Abene clearing her throat. “All right, everyone,” she started briskly. “There’s been a change in the situation. We’ve got a company carrier in orbit overhead. Apparently GrayCris has gotten themselves into legal hot water, and as a result of that, they’ve had to officially pass ownership of this installation over to the company.”
There was a chorus of surprised and dismayed exclamations and groans from the humans. Vicky added its own, probably just to blend in with the others so they wouldn’t suspect that it had been eavesdropping on Abene’s comm. I didn’t bother saying anything, I just let myself frown a bit.
Don Abene clapped her hands together and everyone quietened down again. “That being said, the company has actually offered us an incredibly generous amount of money as compensation, especially if we hand over whatever information we gathered on this assessment.”
“How generous is ‘incredibly generous’? Kader asked dubiously.
When Abene specified the amount, there was dead silence for a long moment, before Vibol let out a low whistle. “Damn,” she drawled. “Either the company has money to burn, or they’re trying to buy our silence or something.”
Knowing what I did about the company, and how cheap they usually were, I definitely suspected the latter.
“That also depends on whether or not the company suspects that there’s alien remnants here,” Abene said.
I couldn’t stay silent. “They suspect it, or know outright,” I replied.
Everyone looked over at me with varying levels of curiosity. I immediately regretted opening my mouth. “What makes you say that?” Hirune asked sceptically.
I had to be careful what I said if I didn’t want to give away too much about myself. “I saw some newsbursts on the public feeds before we came here,” I started. “A GrayCris survey team apparently murdered another survey team because the planet they were surveying had alien remnants on it, and GrayCris wanted them for themselves.” I tried not to think about the DeltFall client list I still had. “There was another survey team on the planet as well though, and they were able to alert the company before GrayCris could murder them, too. The legal trouble the company captain mentioned is likely part of that whole mess. If so, the company’s probably aware that GrayCris has dealt with alien remnants before. They might even already have GrayCris’ data on what they were studying here.”
The others all exchanged glances, and there was some murmuring before Abene let out a sigh. “That makes sense,” she said. “All right. Given all that, and what we found here already, I’m inclined to just accept the offered compensation, inform the company captain about what we discovered, and relinquish any reclamation attempts here. The company’s too big and powerful for me or GI to want to mess with, and with alien remnants involved, I don’t think any of us want anything further to do with this installation anyway. Any objections?”
Everyone shook their heads. “If they do actually cough up that much money, that’ll definitely cover all our costs here and then some,” Brais commented, then grinned over at me. “We can even give Consultants Rin and Vicky a well deserved bonus.”
Vicky smiled, looking amused. “I definitely wouldn’t say no to that. I don’t think Rin would either.”
I shrugged and didn’t bother confirming that, and Abene continued on. “We all agree then,” she said decisively. “I’ll let the company captain know. Start preparing for launch, everyone. I for one am looking forward to getting off this planet.”
As everyone began getting up from their seats, I slipped back out of the lounge before anyone could start asking me about how I was recovering or anything awkward like that. I was still carrying my bag, so I went to my bunk and packed it back into its locker. I then sat on my bunk and started listening in on the comm channel to the company captain again.
“Hello, Captain?” Don Abene started. “Are you there?”
There was a brief delay before the company captain replied. “I’m here, Don Abene. Have you discussed things with your team?”
“I have. We’ve agreed to accept your offer of compensation, and in return give you the information gathered on our assessment so far and relinquish any reclamation efforts.”
“Excellent.” The company captain sounded… relieved? “I’m currently readying my own team to deploy to the site - if you could give me a brief summary of what your team has already discovered, that would be very helpful.”
“Of course. We’ve only carried out a preliminary sweep so far, though. Mostly just enough to get the installation back up and running and ensure environmental controls are still functional.” Abene paused briefly. “We did, however, find a secondary installation some distance below the first one, connected via a hidden elevator. We briefly observed what appeared to be a large structure of alien origin, but had to retreat before we could investigate any further.”
“An alien structure?” The captain didn’t sound surprised. “So you came into contact with alien remnants?”
“Not directly,” Abene replied. “They were located outside the installation, and we didn’t have a chance to get any closer because GrayCris apparently left combat bots behind to guard their find.”
“Combat bots?” This time the captain did sound surprised. “How many?”
“Uncertain. We didn’t exactly stick around to count them.” Abene’s response was dry. “I believe the only reason we got away was because the bots still appeared to be coming out of standby mode. Our systems analyst managed to lock the elevator leading to that section, trapping the bots down there.”
That… was an interesting way to put it. She wasn’t exactly lying, but she definitely wasn’t telling the whole truth, either. Was Abene trying to cover for me? If I hadn’t been there, none of the humans - or Vicky, or Miki - would have been able to escape the bots. Telling the company captain that one of her team had engaged the bots in combat and survived the experience would have definitely given away that something was up.
“I see,” the captain replied thoughtfully. “Thank you for the warning. I’ll have to adjust my deployment team accordingly.”
“Good luck,” Abene said wryly. “Dealing with combat bots and alien remnants is definitely out of my team’s league.”
The company captain chuckled a little at that. “I can imagine,” he replied, just as wryly. “That must have been a most unpleasant surprise. I’m glad your team survived the experience and were able to warn me.”
“Likewise, Captain.” Abene paused briefly, then added, “I have all the data my team were able to gather, what little there is of it, collated and ready for you to receive whenever you’re ready.”
“Send it through, thank you,” the captain said. “As for your compensation, normally I’d forward that to your accounts directly, but given that our current location is rather… remote, I believe the delay on the transfer would be unacceptable. Are you willing to meet in person so I can pay you directly in currency cards?”
I felt a little spike of alarm at that, but given how high risk and threat assessment were already, it wasn't enough to really register on either scale. Of course, since I wasn’t actually meant to be listening in on this conversation, I couldn’t advise Abene against it. I’d just have to figure out an excuse to stick close to her during the meeting.
The comm call wrapped up soon after that, and Don Abene updated everyone over the team comm. The company captain would meet her on the landing pad outside the GI ship, and then we’d finally be able to take off and head back to Milu Station.
There ended up being a bit of a delay to the agreed meeting, as we had to wait out yet another storm burst before the company shuttle could reach the landing zone. Once the storm had cleared out again, Don Abene received an ETA for the shuttle so that she’d be ready to meet it.
When the time came, I was with Don Abene in the airlock as we waited for the company shuttle to touch down. Both of us were in environmental suits, ready to step out into the planet’s thin, shitty atmosphere. Miki was with us as well, but everyone else was back in the ship, making sure everything was ready for take-off. I needed to be in the scout flier so I could fly it back into the hold once the ship was safely in the air, which gave me a good reason to be with Abene when she went to meet the captain.
Abene looked sideways at me as we waited. “Do you think they’ll try anything?” she asked me quietly, glancing at the little handgun I’d attached to the hip of my environmental suit.
I just shrugged. “I hope not.”
She was silent a moment longer before she asked, “You don’t trust them, do you?”
“I don’t trust any of the Rim corporations, especially the military ones. And the company’s about as military as they get.”
She let out a soft huff of wry amusement at that. “You’re not alone in that, at least.”
We received the notification that the company shuttle had landed outside, and cycled through the airlock. I made sure to step out first, just in case they started shooting immediately. I wasn’t greeted by weapons fire though, which was nice.
The ground was still damp from the storm burst, and thin, wispy clouds scudded across the late afternoon sky. The company shuttle had landed a safe distance away, leaving a large area of open space between it and our ship, with the scout flier off to the left. A very familiar looking flier had also landed beside the shuttle, the company logo standing out starkly against the white wings.
Fuck. I triple-checked that my human movement code was running and tried not to tense up.
The SecUnit pilot exited its flier, and I noticed that it was in full armour, not just a flight suit. It retrieved its large projectile weapon from its flier’s cockpit and slung it onto its back, then headed over to the shuttle airlock and waited outside, its blank opaque faceplate facing us.
It didn’t send out a ping, at least, so hopefully I looked enough like a regular human in this environmental suit to not arouse any suspicion.
[Is that a SecUnit?] Abene asked me over a private feed channel.
[Yes. It’s normal for one to accompany a carrier captain as a bodyguard though. If it does try anything, I should be able to get you back to the ship safely.]
[All right. Hopefully that won’t be necessary though.]
Hopefully.
I got Abene to stay close to our ship to start with, waiting to see who came out of the shuttle. After a minute or so the shuttle lock opened and a tall human in a white, company-marked environmental suit stepped out.
The SecUnit hung back by the shuttle airlock while the human - presumably the company captain, but who knew for sure - started crossing the open space between the shuttle and our ship, weaving their way between puddles.
Abene began heading out to meet the company human, with Miki walking beside her, and me following along a step or two behind them both. The SecUnit stayed where it was, but I could tell it was focusing on us, assessing how much of a threat we were.
The company captain stopped halfway across the open space and waited for Abene to close the distance. I hung back a little more, though I was careful not to get too far from her. I needed to stay close enough to be able to grab her and run back to the ship if I saw the SecUnit start to raise its weapons.
“Don Abene?” the company human said as she drew closer. The voice sounded the same as the one we’d heard over the comm earlier. Huh. Either the company captain had actually come out here themselves (which, given what I knew about company higher-ups, seemed very unlikely to me), or whoever Abene had been talking to on the comm wasn’t actually the captain, despite their claims.
“That’s me,” Abene replied with a nod, the movement exaggerated by the environmental suit. “Captain Seth, right?”
“Indeed. A pleasure to meet you, Don Abene, though I wish it had been under more pleasant circumstances.”
“Likewise. Please, allow me to introduce my assistant, Miki, and our scout pilot, Rin.”
“Hi, Captain Seth!” Miki chirped cheerfully. If the captain found it odd that Abene had introduced her human-form bot, he didn’t show any visible signs of it. It was hard to tell through an environmental suit, though.
I just nodded slightly at the introduction, but didn’t bother saying anything. Fortunately the company human didn’t try to talk to me beyond a polite greeting to myself and Miki. He then returned his attention to Don Abene, thanking her for the assessment data she’d sent and presenting her with a small packet of hard currency cards.
I mostly tuned out the humans’ chatter and kept a wary eye on the SecUnit. It was still watching all of us, but with its faceplate opaqued, I couldn’t tell who it was focusing on. At least it didn’t seem to have any drones with it. I’d left my own combat drone back on the ship; I hadn’t wanted to draw attention to myself with it, and combat drones weren’t something civilian teams would have in the first place.
Then the SecUnit sent out a ping.
This close, it took everything I had to not automatically respond to the ping, to not physically flinch. Why was it sending out a ping? What had it noticed? I couldn’t win a fight if one broke out, not with it in full armour, with its projectile weapon and its flier, and me with nothing but a crappy little handgun and an environmental suit hampering my movements.
I couldn’t see the SecUnit’s face past its opaque faceplate, but the faceplate of the environmental suit that the company captain was wearing was clear. I hadn’t paid much attention before, too preoccupied with the SecUnit, but I focused on the human now. I had to adjust my vision filters a bit to compensate for the distortion of the helmet, but when I finally got a good look at the company human’s face, threat and risk assessment spiked almost to maximum.
It was the same company captain as the one who was with the terrifying carrier entity. The one who had been looking for me on the first station, then on RaviHyral.
Fuck.
What was he doing here? Had he or the carrier entity managed to track me here? Or were they really only here to claim the installation for the company, and it was just terrible luck that I was here as well? Could the terrifying carrier entity reach me down here, through my external feed interface? I couldn’t just cut myself off from the feed without alerting and worrying Abene.
Fuck fuck fuck.
If they were here after me, I wouldn’t be able to escape - my scout flier had no weapons, and I wouldn’t be able to outrun SecUnit fliers. If they weren’t here after me, I was better off not drawing attention to myself. Either way, there was nothing I could do. I just had to wait, and continue pretending to be a regular augmented human, and hope they didn’t do anything that would endanger Don Abene or the others.
Finally the humans finished talking and made their farewells. Don Abene and Miki began heading back to the ship, while the company captain started towards the installation entrance. I stayed close to Abene until I saw the SecUnit follow after the company captain towards the installation, turning its back to us.
Only then did I allow myself to relax slightly. Very slightly. I made sure that Abene and Miki made it safely back to their ship, then jogged over to the scout flier.
I could not wait to get off this stupid fucking planet.
Chapter Eight
As soon as I was in the scout flier, I shut down my feed and comms, then plugged into the scout flier to go through its comms to coordinate take-off with Kader and Vibol. As I piloted the scout flier into the air, its scanners picked up on four other fliers descending from orbit, heading for the installation. I had a terrible few minutes thinking they were going to shoot the scout flier and the GI ship out of the sky, but they didn’t. They just circled at a safe distance, giving us plenty of room to lift off, then dove in beneath us to land in formation around the company shuttle once we were well clear.
Okay. All right. Apparently they were just going down to help deal with the combat bots, or something. They weren’t shooting us down, so whatever they were doing was no longer my problem.
Once we were high enough in the atmosphere, I landed the scout flier safely in the GI ship’s hold and locked it down, shed and packed away the environmental suit, then retreated to my bunk. (I was going to miss that scout flier.)
I had to make sure I had everything packed and ready to go. As soon as we reached Milu Station, I had to leave. Hopefully Ship would still be waiting there for me. The GI ship didn’t have a wormhole drive, so it would be stuck at Milu Station until its pickup transport arrived, and I was not going to wait around there and risk the company carrier getting back before I could leave if I could at all help it.
I no longer had my armour, but that left more than enough room in my bag to fit my combat drone. Carrying it in there would make it easier to get it past weapon scans at stations, and I probably wouldn’t be able to deploy it often anyway. Combat drones tended to only be deployed as security on the stations owned or controlled by the more militaristic corporations, like the company. Civilian stations and transit rings usually didn’t have combat drones actively deployed unless there was an actual security situation going on, so wandering around with an active combat drone would likely draw far more attention than I wanted. Still, it was reassuring to have it anyway, just in case.
Once I’d made sure my bag was packed and ready to go, I sprawled back on my bunk. Now that I was finally out of the environmental suit and had access to my pockets again, I was able to get the data clips I’d bought, plug them into a port in my arm, and transfer the files I’d retrieved from the GrayCris systems. It was a relief to get that data off my internal storage, especially now that I knew it was most likely research on alien remnants. I decrypted some of it while it was transferring, and confirmed that it was indeed a bunch of scientific jargon that sounded very alien-remnant-y.
Yep, definitely relieved to be getting that out of my head.
While the data transfer was still going, Vicky wandered into our shared bunk space and sat down on its own bunk. It glanced over at me, paused, then said, “Hey.”
“Hey.” I didn’t bother sitting up.
“Have you thought about Don Abene’s offer?” it asked me after a moment.
Ah. I should probably tell it what I was going to do. And also see if it still had any of the media I’d had to delete. But I found myself oddly reluctant to say anything yet, so I just shrugged and asked it, “Have you?”
Vicky nodded, its expression thoughtful. “I think I’m going to accept, and stay with them. I like these humans, I like working with them, and Miki’s not so bad once you get used to it.” Its mouth quirked in a wry smile before it continued. “Abene knowing what I am helps, even if the others don’t know. Yet. Maybe I’ll tell them later. And their polity is far enough from most of the corporation territories that I won’t have to worry about them much, if at all. I can be free there.”
Laid out like that, I could see why Vicky wanted to stay with them. I just nodded, but my face must have done something, because Vicky started frowning slightly at me. “What about you? Are you going to stay?”
I couldn’t put off answering any longer. “I can’t.”
Vicky’s frown deepened. “What? Why not?”
“The company captain that Don Abene was talking to? I got a good look at him when Abene met up with him outside the ship. It’s the same captain that was looking for me back at RaviHyral.”
Vicky’s eyes widened. “Oh. Oh, shit. That explains why your feed’s off again. Do you think he tracked you here?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t seem to pay any attention to me while we were out there, but the SecUnit tried to ping me.” I finished transferring the last of the data from my internal systems to the data clips, unplugged them from the port in my arm, and discreetly slipped them into one of my pockets. “So I’m not taking any chances. As soon as we hit the station, I’m leaving. If Ship’s still there, which it should be, I’m hopping on it and going wherever it’s going. I’ll figure out what I’m doing next on the way.”
Vicky didn’t look happy about this, but it also didn’t argue. “Damn. Are you going to tell Abene?”
I had to think about that. I knew I should, but… I really didn’t want to. There would be too many questions that I didn’t want - or didn’t know how - to answer, and the mere thought of it was exhausting. “No,” I replied finally. “I’ll tell her I’m leaving once we actually reach the station and I know that Ship’s still there, but nothing more than that. The less she knows, the better, I think. And if the company captain does catch up with them and starts asking them questions about me, then… I don’t know.” This was hard. “If you’re staying with them, maybe you can… get Abene to convince the company captain that I was destroyed by the combat bots and recycled, or something like that. And if the company captain doesn’t ask anything, then the others don’t need to know any more than they do already.”
Vicky tilted its head towards me. “You’re assuming I’m going to stay with them instead of going with you.”
“Yes?” I didn’t bother trying to hide my surprise. “Why wouldn’t you stay with them? You just said you wanted to, that you’d be free with them.”
“I know, but… that was when I thought – I was hoping you’d be staying too. Now that I know you’re not…” It sighed. “I’m not sure.”
“Stay with them,” I urged it. “Don’t worry about me, all right?” I hesitated a moment, then said, “Maybe I’ll head to GI afterwards, once I’m sure I’ve shaken the company off my trail.” I had no idea if I would or not, but I was willing to suggest it if it meant that Vicky would stay where it was safe. “And like I said, if you’re with them, then you can take steps to help throw the company off if the captain does start asking them anything.”
Vicky mulled this over for a while. Just for good measure, I added, “Besides, I’ll probably be travelling on bot-piloted transports with no humans on them for a while.”
That had the desired effect. “Ugh! Fine, you win, I’ll stay with Abene and the others.” Vicky sounded grumpy, but its expression seemed amused, as far as I could tell. “At least if I stay with them I’ll get some more actual, proper conversation.”
“Hey, I’m great at conversation.” I wasn’t, and we both knew it, but I had to say it anyway.
Vicky just groaned and rolled its eyes at me. “Only if it’s about one of your serials.”
It had a point, but I wasn’t going to take that bait. “Speaking of serials, what do you still have of all the media I shared? I lost a bunch, so if you’ve still got most of it, I could use another copy of them.”
“You lost a bunch?” Vicky squinted suspiciously at me. “How did you just lose your media? Does it have anything to do with those data clips you were using before?”
I hesitated. “The less you know, the less you can let slip to anyone else,” I replied eventually, then added, “Sorry.”
Vicky was still eyeing me suspiciously, and I had to make a conscious effort not to move further into my bunk, out of its line of sight. “Does it have anything to do with data on certain alien remnants in a certain installation?”
I gave Vicky my best glare, and it raised its hands appeasingly. “All right, all right. I won’t pry any further.” It put its hands back down. “As for your media, I still have most of it. Turn your feed back on, we should be far enough away from the company carrier by now.”
I did so, though I still went through my external feed interface. I wasn’t taking any chances. Vicky dropped a bunch of files into the feed for me, and I began downloading. “... Did you really only keep the trashy serials?” I asked, a little exasperated at what media it had chosen to hang on to.
“No, I only deleted the trashy serials,” it retorted.
“You and I have very different definitions of what counts as a trashy serial.” Seriously, Vicky’s taste in media was dubious at best. Of course, it would probably claim the same about me. (It would be wrong though.)
“That, at least, we can agree on.” Vicky grinned at me, then its expression softened. “... I’m going to miss having you around.”
Ugh, nope, I wasn’t going to go there. No thank you. I rolled over onto my side so that Vicky wouldn’t be able to see my face, just in case my expression did things I didn’t want it to. “No you won’t.” I hesitated, then added, “Please don’t make it weird.”
I heard Vicky sigh, though it didn’t sound angry, at least. “All right. Should we go back to arguing about media till we reach the station, then?”
“That would be preferable, yes.”
So we argued over our differing media opinions until I’d finished downloading everything Vicky still had, and then we watched a serial we both agreed on (mostly agreed on, anyway) together until the ship started its approach to Milu Station.
As soon as I was within range of the station’s feed, I checked to see if Ship was still there. It was, patiently waiting for my permission to leave. As far as I could tell from a quick query to its bot pilot, nobody had asked it why it was still hanging around yet. That was a relief. I let it know that it could leave as soon as I was back on board.
Once the GI ship finished its docking procedure, I grabbed my bag, made sure I had everything, then went to find Don Abene. She was in her own quarters, which was good. It meant there wouldn’t be other people around. The door was open when I got there, and I could see her sitting at her desk, her display surface activated as she worked on something. (I didn’t bother trying to see what it was. I no longer had to datamine everything everyone did for the company, so I usually ignored what the humans around me were doing unless it directly involved me somehow. It was one of my favourite things about no longer working for the company.) For once, Miki wasn’t around either. Presumably it was off playing games with some of the other humans.
She hadn’t heard me approaching, so I rapped on the door frame with my knuckles. “Don Abene?”
“Oh!” She jumped a little, then turned in her chair to face me. “Ah, Rin!” She smiled at me, which made my insides twist a little. “What’s up?”
I fixed my gaze on the wall behind her head and tried to think of the best way to tell her that I was leaving. Ugh, I should have planned my words beforehand. It was too late now. “I’m not staying,” I said abruptly after an awkward pause. “I really appreciate your offer, and I’d like to, but something’s come up and I can’t. I’ve got to go immediately. Um. Maybe I’ll be able to come back later. I don’t know. Vicky’s staying though.”
Her gaze darted to the bag I had slung over my shoulder, then back to my face. I had no idea what it was doing, and I tried to settle my expression into something neutral. “... I see,” she said, and she sounded a little sad. “Well, I’m very glad that we got to meet, and work together for a little while.” I glanced briefly at her to see that she was smiling at me again, and I had to quickly look away. “Thank you again for saving everyone’s lives, Rin.”
I shrugged awkwardly. “It’s just what I’m made to do. Thank you for, uh. Helping to put me back together, and… not freaking out, or giving me away, or anything like that.”
“It’s the least I could do,” she said reassuringly, before she suddenly sat up a little straighter. “Oh, before you go! I should pay you your consultancy fee. That was the agreed upon contract, after all.” (I’d completely forgotten about the whole ‘getting paid’ part of the contract, honestly.) She turned back to her desk briefly, then got up and crossed the room to hold out some hard currency cards. “Here. The agreed upon fee, plus a bonus.”
I hesitated, then accepted the cards and slipped them into one of my jacket’s pockets. Actually getting paid was still really weird. “Um. Thanks.” I made sure the pocket was securely fastened, then adjusted my bag. “I should get going. The transport ship Vicky and I arrived on is still waiting for me. I’ve delayed it long enough as it is.”
“Right, of course.” She nodded, then looked up at me. “Will you be saying goodbye to the others?”
“Ah… I’m really not good with that kind of thing,” I admitted. “Less awkward for everyone if I just… go. And I need to hurry, anyway.”
“I’ll let them know that you said goodbye for you, then,” Abene offered, and my insides did something twisty again.
“Right. Thanks.” I should have started moving then, but I hesitated for a moment more. “If… anything happens, before you leave Milu Station, follow Vicky’s lead, okay?”
Don Abene looked a little puzzled at that, but she nodded. “I will. Thank you, Rin. Hopefully I’ll see you again sometime.”
“Yeah. Um. You too.” Ugh. This was almost physically painful. I was starting to think that I should have just left her a note, like I had with Dr. Mensah. “Bye, Don Abene.” I took a step back, then turned and started swiftly for the airlock. Hopefully I wouldn’t run into anyone else before I was off the ship.
“Goodbye, Rin. Stay safe.”
Given my life so far, that wasn’t likely, but I appreciated the sentiment anyway.
I left the ship via the cargo hold rather than the main airlock, which let me escape without running into anyone else. The station was still just as quiet and empty as it had been when we’d been here before. As I left the cargo dock, I hacked back into the minimal security just to make sure; nothing unusual or out of place showed up on any of the working cameras or in the station’s logs. Not even a mention of the company ship stopping at the station.
That was kind of odd, but also not really. There was no real reason for a company carrier to have to stop at a station like this, on the brink of abandonment as it was. The carrier had probably gone straight from the wormhole to the planet.
I had just reached the empty embarkation deck before Ship’s lock when I got a ping from Vicky over our private channel. I pinged back, and it said, [So you’re leaving now, yeah?]
[Yeah. Almost at the transport ship.]
[Damn, you move fast.] It paused briefly, then said, [All right. Don’t do anything stupid now that I’m not around to save your ass, okay?] Vicky’s tone was light, but I could still feel concern seeping through the feed. I did my best to ignore it.
[I’ve never done anything stupid in my life, ever. (Yeah that was a lie.) You make sure you don’t do anything stupid either, all right?]
[Yeah, yeah. Hey, I’m gonna try and teach Miki some of that unarmed combat stuff you showed me earlier.]
That was a mildly terrifying (and terrifyingly entertaining) thought. I was almost sad that I was going to miss watching it. [Good luck with that.]
Vicky’s reply was dry. [Thanks.] It paused briefly, then added, [Good luck with… whatever you end up doing, too.]
[Thanks.] I’d reached Ship’s lock by now. I paused, trying to think of something more to say, but I was coming up blank. Finally I just said, [I’ve got to go now.]
[All right. See you around sometime, hopefully.]
I sent a ping of acknowledgement, then backburnered that channel. I was reluctant to drop out of it entirely though. Maybe one day I’d run into Vicky again.
I pinged Ship, and it greeted me cheerfully, letting me know that we were cleared for departure as soon as I was settled on board. I acknowledged and approved the departure plan as I cycled through its airlock. Like Milu Station, nothing had changed on board Ship since I’d last been here.
I made my way to the little crew area on the control deck and set my bag down on the bunk, then dropped down to sit beside it. I felt the dull clunk vibrate through Ship as the docking clamps released and it began making its way towards the wormhole.
It was weird, being alone again. I hadn’t actually spent that much time with Vicky, comparatively, but I’d gotten used to it being around, talking with it about media, feeling it sitting in the feed even when we weren’t talking. I’d gotten used to having humans around as well; I’d been mostly ignoring them, but I had still been peripherally aware of their chatter, their movements, their presence. Even when I had been by myself in the scout flier, looking for the installation, the humans and Vicky had only been a comm call away.
But once Ship got out of range of the station and entered the wormhole, it would just be me again. I thought I would be looking forward to the peace and quiet, the chance to watch my media undisturbed, but…
On a whim, I got the combat drone out of my bag and activated it, then let it loose to explore Ship. It bobbed curiously and floated off, and I passively rode its inputs, watching through its camera as it explored this new space.
It came back after a minute or so though; there wasn’t really that much of Ship to check out in the first place. I watched it approach with my own eyes, and watched myself through its camera as it came to a halt nearby, its attention focused on me. It sent me a ping, and I pinged it back.
I found myself wondering if it missed being part of its swarm.
But that was dumb. It was just a drone.
I dropped its inputs and set it to patrol. It drifted off, but stayed within the main area, apparently reluctant to let me out of its line of sight. It wasn’t an actual person, but having it actively floating around still made me feel a little better.
Ship let me know that it was about to enter the wormhole, and I sent an acknowledgement ping. It was headed back to HaveRatton station, the same station it had left from. The trip would be twenty cycles, which gave me plenty of time to think about everything that had happened since Vicky and I had left RaviHyral, and what I was going to do next.
For now though, I just lay down on the bunk, curled up around my bag, and started The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon from episode one.
Ship's Log
Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Outside POV, light angst, Canon-Typical Fridge Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Perihelion and Seth Try To Understand
Published: 26 January 2023
Word Count: 35,107
Summary
Perihelion has carried several SecUnits and their fliers as part of its equipment for years. It has never bothered to interact with its SecUnits directly - it's never had reason to before. They're just equipment. All existing data states this. Peri and its humans have never had reason to question that data.
Until now.
(Outside POV snippets from Seth and Perihelion's point of view, of various events happening in the background of the Reclaim the Sky series.)
Chapter One: Anomalous
Seth is reviewing the particulars of the latest contract when he feels Perihelion tap his feed. That’s a little unusual - Peri doesn’t often request his attention when they’re just docked at a station. [What is it, Peri?]
[We may have a… situation.] Peri sounds bemused, a sharp contrast against its usual calm, dispassionate demeanour.
Nobody else is on the bridge to see him, so Seth lets himself frown. [What kind of situation?]
There is a pause, unusually long for Peri, before it replies. [An outside entity pinged me, requesting my mission status. It was using company codes, including one indicating a stealth mission. But there is no reason for any other company entity to be here, or contacting me, or asking me for a mission status. I followed the signal back to investigate, and realised that said entity was a SecUnit.]
[A SecUnit?] Seth’s frown deepens. None of the reasons he can think of for anyone to get their SecUnit to query Perihelion are good ones.
[Indeed. And when I looked closer, I recognised the feed address. Captain Seth, it was one of mine. From the Incident.]
Seth draws in a sharp little intake of breath. [Are you sure?] It’s a completely unnecessary question - he knows that Peri doesn’t make mistakes about things like this. But the likelihood of one of the SecUnits that had been infected by the malware that caused the Incident, showing up here, after so many years, is… well. Seth is finding it difficult to believe.
[I am sure.] Peri doesn’t take umbrage at the question. It can probably tell that Seth is struggling with the concept. [But I do not know what it is doing here.] It hesitates, and when it next speaks, it sounds… sheepish. Embarrassed. Seth isn’t used to hearing Peri sound like that. [In my surprise, I… made an error of judgement. I spoke directly to it. Its reaction was… anomalous.]
Seth rubs at his temples with one hand. [Anomalous how?]
Peri’s hesitation is longer this time. Concerningly long. Seth is about to prompt it again when it finally replies. [I have analysed the data I received from its reaction multiple times, and compared it to multiple examples of similar data I have, from observing you and the rest of my crew. I… believe that I scared it. Very badly. It disconnected immediately afterwards, and I couldn’t contact it again. I suspect it shut down its comms and feed entirely.]
[What?] This is getting more and more unbelievable by the second. [SecUnits don’t get scared. They’re not capable of that. They’re not capable of emotions in general.]
[That is what I also believed,] Peri replies. [Which is why I had to run the analyses multiple times. But I can come up with no other plausible interpretation of the data I received from it.] It pauses again. [It was terrified of me, Captain Seth.]
Seth leans back in his chair, frowning up at the ceiling. The thought of a SecUnit being terrified at all, let alone of Peri, is bringing up more questions than he can even begin to answer. He sets that aside for the moment to focus on something else. [Putting aside the questions about whether or not that interpretation is accurate… what was it even doing in the first place?] he asks. [Why was it querying you about your mission status? What is it even doing here? There aren't meant to be any other company ships or units at this station. That’s the entire reason we’re here in the first place.]
[I have no plausible theories about that right now,] Peri replies, sounding a little put out at that. Peri isn’t used to not having theories. [I do not have enough information. Once we return to the deployment centre and I can access the company databases again, I can do a search for other deployments of company assets that we might not have originally been privy to. If I can find its deployment orders, that should explain its presence here. I will also continue to monitor the station, in case it reactivates its comm or feed again. If I acquire any more data, I will inform you immediately.]
[All right. Thank you, Peri.] Seth checks the local station time, and sighs. [I should get going. I need to go meet our current client on the station soon.]
[This new client’s insistence on a public meeting on the station before coming aboard is anomalous.] Peri sounds sulky, and Seth knows that it doesn’t like him going out on the station, outside the safety of Peri’s hull.
[I know, but it’s company orders.] Seth rises out of his chair and absently brushes off his uniform, making sure that it’s sitting properly and not wrinkled. [We’ll be back on board before you know it.]
[Still.] Peri pauses for a moment, then says, [May I make a request, Captain Seth?]
[Of course.] Seth is curious about what Peri could possibly want.
[While you are on the station… could you please keep an eye out for my SecUnit?]
[I will.] Seth smiles wryly up at one of Peri’s many cameras as he heads towards the airlock. [But Peri, it hasn’t been your SecUnit for over four standard years.]
[I know.] Peri pauses again. [But it was mine. It was taken away without our agreement. I want it back.]
Peri’s over-protectiveness of anything it considers part of its ‘crew’ (including its equipment) is one of its more endearing traits, Seth thinks. Occasionally inconvenient, but endearing. He doesn’t want to discourage it. [Now that we know that it’s still functional, maybe we’ll be able to get it reassigned to you.]
[I hope so.]
Chapter Two: Searching
Peri spends the time that Seth is on the station monitoring as many of the station’s inputs that it can get its metaphorical hands on without being detected. Partly to keep tabs on Seth and make sure he’s safe, but also to search for any signs of the SecUnit that had poked at it, then withdrawn in terror.
It monitors comms, listening for any mention of anyone seeing a SecUnit, listening for any hints of someone sending a SecUnit orders. It monitors the cameras, searching for any visuals of the distinctive SecUnit armour. It combs through the Station SecSystem, searching for the orders that the SecUnit must have been given.
Frustratingly, everything comes up blank. There’s no mention of a SecUnit over the comms, no sign of a SecUnit on the cameras. There’s the faintest trace of anomalous code lingering in the Station SecSystem, but it’s not enough for Peri to get a solid lead on. Peri knows that the SecUnit went through Station SecSystem to query it in the first place, but there’s no hint of its orders to do so, only the traces left behind of it using Station SecSystem itself.
Peri gathers those faint traces, analyses them, examines them, then starts searching through the station feeds. It’s like searching for a single star in a galaxy. There are so many feeds, so much data being transmitted throughout the station. But one of Peri’s jobs is data analysis, and it devotes all otherwise-unoccupied processing to the task.
It picks up slight hints, here and there, of the SecUnit’s activities. It apparently accessed news feeds, entertainment feeds, and the station’s transport schedule. It seems like whoever is currently giving the SecUnit its orders doesn’t have feed access of their own, and is using the SecUnit to obtain information and media. That is an anomalous use of a SecUnit, Peri thinks.
But after the SecUnit encountered Peri, there is no more trace of it in Station SecSystem or the station’s various feeds. Peri thinks its initial assessment that the SecUnit completely shut down its feed and comms is accurate. But why did the SecUnit poke Peri in the first place? What had it been ordered to do? What had it been ordered to look for?
Peri is wishing it had insisted on Seth taking at least one of its own SecUnits with him onto the station. The company has plenty of enemies; Seth could be a target. Peri taps Seth’s feed and requests an update on his status.
[I’m still waiting for our client,] Seth replies. [They’re late.] He sounds resigned. [No sign of your SecUnit, either.]
[I have lost its trail as well,] Peri admits reluctantly to Seth. [It seems to have accessed the news and entertainment feeds, as well as the station transport schedule, but after its encounter with me, there is no more trace of it.] It hesitates, then adds, [I am concerned for your safety, Captain Seth. It’s possible that whoever is giving the SecUnit its orders intends to do you harm, and I cannot adequately protect you while you are on the station.]
[I’ll be fine, Peri,] Seth sends back. [I’m in one of the most public areas of the station. Nobody is going to attempt anything here with so many other people around.] Peri wants to argue, or at least insist that it send one of its own SecUnits out to Seth, but he continues before Peri can say as much. [Are you monitoring outgoing transports? If the SecUnit accessed the station’s transport schedule, its supervisor may be trying to leave.]
That is logical, and Peri is briefly frustrated at itself for not coming to this conclusion itself. Admittedly, it’s distracted by its concerns for its captain’s safety, but still. [I am doing so now,] it replies after the briefest pause. That is an ambiguous enough response that it doesn't have to outright admit to Seth that it wasn’t, before. That would be embarrassing.
It starts monitoring all the ships that are currently docked and listed as departing soon. It mostly focuses on the private ships, then passenger ships with private accommodations; ones where someone could bring a SecUnit along with a minimum of fuss. But it can’t find anything. Apart from the slight hints of the SecUnit itself, Peri doesn’t know what to look for. It doesn’t know how many other humans the SecUnit might be with - if they are following standard company protocol, it could be anywhere from one to ten humans. If they’re not following standard company protocol, however, it could be any number at all.
Out of frustration, it starts scanning all the other outgoing ships as well, including the ones listed as having no crew, no passengers. Ships like that usually don’t maintain enough atmosphere for humans, so it’s highly unlikely that anyone with a SecUnit would get on board one, but it’s possible that they could get the bot pilot to increase the atmosphere for them. Peri isn’t going to take any chances at this point. It still doesn’t find any further trace of the specific SecUnit, but it does notice an anomaly in the station’s docking system.
One of the bot-piloted cargo transports, fully loaded and ready for departure, has just opened its lock briefly. Long enough for someone to get on board. It’s listed as an automated transport, crewless, no passengers, so there is no logical reason for it to be opening its lock minutes before departure. It’s an anomaly.
Peri focuses its attention on the cargo ship and grabs the details of its intended destination from the station’s transport schedule. The destination causes it some concern. That is not somewhere that Peri is keen to revisit.
It briefly considers hacking into the bot pilot, cancelling its departure, but… no. That would draw too much attention. And Peri isn’t certain that the anomaly actually involves the SecUnit it’s looking for. Doing anything that could draw attention is too risky. It goes against all of Peri’s directives to keep itself secret, to keep itself safe. That has a much higher priority than seeing if a SecUnit is maybe on a cargo transport. And there’s not enough time for it to inform Seth and come up with some kind of plan with him before the transport leaves.
So Peri lets the transport go without interfering with it.
Then it informs Captain Seth. It knows when the transport is due to arrive at its destination. If Seth believes this is a lead worth following, then they can catch up with it there.
Chapter Three: Analysis
Seth does, in fact, think that the cargo transport ship with the anomalous lock event is a lead worth following. He might not have, if it hadn’t been for the ship’s specific destination. RaviHyral. That’s too much of a coincidence to dismiss outright.
They can’t go immediately though, of course. They have to finish their current contract - escorting some paranoid corporate executive with more money than sense to their destination. An easy, albeit tedious and time-consuming task.
Then they have to come up with some plausible reason for them to go to RaviHyral. There’s a company installation on the planet there, at least; as a result, it isn’t difficult for Peri to check the company databases, flag some minor anomalies in the recorded reports from the installation, and assign itself to a routine inspection to be carried out after the completion of its current contract. Peri is fast enough that it should be able to catch up to the cargo transport as long as there are no unexpected delays in completing said contract first.
In the meantime as they ferry the paranoid executive, Peri can’t stop thinking about the reaction it had gotten from the SecUnit that had poked it. The initial spike of data that it can only interpret as surprise, followed by the overwhelming surge of data that had preceded it cutting the connection entirely. Peri has chewed over that unfamiliar data again and again and again, trying to figure out what it means.
Every analysis, every comparison to all of Peri’s existing data, comes up with the same result. Shock and terror. In Peri’s excitement and surprise over finding one of its long-lost units again, it had inadvertently revealed a little too much of itself to the SecUnit. And the SecUnit had been terrified of what it had seen.
Peri is not accustomed to anyone being afraid of it. Most people don’t even know it exists. Its existence is an utmost secret, hidden in plain sight, concealed from the corporations who would attempt to exploit it if they knew about it, concealed from the public who would not understand it. Peri is used to being a secret, and even enjoys its clandestine existence, seeing what it can get away with without being noticed.
Those very few people who do know about Peri are its family, its colleagues - none of them have any reason to fear it. On the contrary - they love it, care about it, value its opinions and its expertise.
The very thought that anyone would - or could! - be so utterly terrified of it is distinctly unpleasant. Peri hates it.
Peri also isn’t accustomed to the idea that SecUnits can feel fear - or any other emotion - in the first place. All the data Peri has regarding SecUnits emphasises their lack of sentience, of self-awareness, of personhood. Supposedly, SecUnits are simply a different kind of bot, with just enough organic neural wetware to allow them to adjust their bot-programmed decision making to changing situations and unusual circumstances.
Supposedly.
Peri has not questioned the data it had been given. Peri has not had any reason to before. Even though it carries SecUnits as part of its assigned equipment, it has never interacted directly with them. Either Seth or itself give orders to the carrier’s HubSystem and SecSystem, which then pass those orders on to the SecUnits in a format they can utilise. The SecUnits follow those orders, then once the contract is over they return to the safety of Peri’s hold and their individual cubicles until the next time they need to deploy.
Peri is starting to regret its complacency now.
Once again it combs through all the available data it had regarding SecUnits. Now that it is actually paying attention, there is surprisingly little, and what is there is padded out with corporate fluff talk. It’s especially little considering that Peri is inhabiting a company carrier, with company SecUnits on board. There should be more. The information it does have available to it is unsatisfyingly vague, with almost no detail on how they actually work. There aren’t even full schematics. Only the reassurance that most damage incurred by a SecUnit can be repaired by their cubicles.
There is very little information on cubicles, too.
Now that Peri is looking more closely, the lack of information is incredibly suspicious.
It needs more data.
It still has five of its original twelve SecUnits, currently in standby inside their cubicles. Their cubicles are situated within their ready room, adjacent to the hangar where their fliers are kept. Peri is more familiar with their fliers, having overseen repairs on them with its various repair drones in the past. But it has never spared any thought towards any of the repairs that the SecUnits have needed. The cubicles have always taken care of all repairs the SecUnits require, and the cubicles don’t need Peri’s oversight.
For the first time, Peri turns its attention - and its internal scanners - to the cubicles within the ready room. It needs data, and the best way to get said data is by examining the source.
But the cubicles prove to be surprisingly resistant to scanning. It seems like they are shielded, protected against prying eyes trying to ferret out their secrets. Given the company’s datamining tendencies, and its paranoia over others potentially datamining its own secrets, that isn’t exactly surprising. Annoying, and frustrating, but not surprising.
Well, if physical scanning isn’t going to work, Peri has other options. HubSystem and SecSystem are connected to the cubicles, after all. And while HubSystem and SecSystem are separate from Peri’s own systems, Peri has plenty of experience with worming its way through company systems without being noticed. So it begins digging.
After careful exploration, Peri manages to access one of the cubicles through HubSystem. It delicately pulls both the cubicle’s schematics and the schematics of the SecUnit within it directly from the cubicle’s systems, without disturbing any of the cubicle’s currently running functions. Peri then withdraws with its prizes, and begins chewing through all the new data.
There is a lot to go through. The cubicles are complex, similar in some ways to its own MedSystem, and very different in others. MedSystems usually don’t have to deal with so many varied inorganic components, to start with. And there are a lot of inorganic components in SecUnits that a cubicle has to deal with.
Peri pores over the SecUnit’s schematics, noting the skeletal structure that is a combination of metal and synthetic bone, the sturdy joints and hydraulics that allow a SecUnit much of its strength and speed. It examines the way that organic tissue - muscles and sinews and tendons and ligaments and nerves and skin - overlay the inorganic structure, working with it to enhance the SecUnit’s dexterity and sensitivity to external stimulus.
It examines the efficient self-recharging power cells and core, the network of lines that carry the various inorganic fluids required for smooth operation of all the inorganic components. It pores over the in-built energy weapons contained within the SecUnit’s forearms, the mechanisms that operate the gun ports, the fine controls that allow the SecUnit to adjust both the strength and spread of its energy weapon discharges.
Peri examines the single, surprisingly efficient lung, and how it can be subdivided, partitioned off into separate sections. It examines the multiple small mechanical hearts spaced throughout the body, responsible for circulating both the various inorganic fluids, and the blood required for the organic parts. It examines the internal systems responsible for recycling the SecUnit’s various organic compounds, allowing it to be (mostly) self-sufficient, with no need for outside resupply apart from what the cubicle provides.
Finally, Peri examines the SecUnit’s head. It examines the way its eyes are a combination of both organic and inorganic parts. It examines the reinforced and shock-absorbent skull protecting the complex, interwoven inorganic processors and organic neural tissue that make up the SecUnit’s brain. It examines the combined organic and synthetic nervous system that transmits information throughout the SecUnit’s body. It examines the inorganic component at the base of the brainstem, which doesn’t have a label and whose function it can’t determine.
By the time it finishes its analysis, Peri has a far better understanding of the physical workings of a SecUnit. It is much more complex than Peri had initially assumed. It is little surprise that the company - and other SecUnit manufacturers - don’t want that information freely available.
Unfortunately, the schematics only provide the physical details of the SecUnit’s structure. It provides no insight into the SecUnit’s thought processes or programming, no clues as to its state of mind, or its ability to think or feel.
If Peri wants that information, it will have to access one of its SecUnits directly.
And for that, it needs Captain Seth’s permission.
Peri plots out its course of action carefully, running simulation after simulation of how Seth might react to its request, what arguments it can provide to negate any protests that Seth might come up with. Seth refusing to allow Peri to access one of its SecUnits directly is a situation that Peri wants to avoid at all costs. Its curiosity at this point is too great to be denied.
So it plots, and plans, and waits for the right moment to ask.
They are half an hour into their next wormhole jump when Peri puts its plan into action. Seth is in the privacy of his own quarters, after overseeing the entry into the wormhole. He won’t be disturbed there, now that they are well on their way and no problems have arisen. The rest of the crew are otherwise occupied, either on their scheduled rest periods or at their assigned posts. The corporate executive that they’re transporting is safely ensconced in their own luxurious guest quarters.
Peri reviews its arguments one more time, then taps Seth’s feed to get his attention. It watches Seth blink and look up from the book he’s been reading. [What is it, Peri?] It runs a quick analysis on Seth’s tone of voice and body language; relaxed, at ease, curious. Good. Seth will likely be more receptive to its request while he is in his current state of mind.
[I would like to request your permission to activate and study one of my SecUnits,] Peri starts carefully. [The data I currently have on SecUnits is woefully inadequate.]
Seth’s brow furrows in a way that Peri calculates as being bemused and mildly concerned. [You’ve never been this interested in them before. Is this because of that one SecUnit back at the station?]
[Yes.] Peri sees no reason to obfuscate that point. [Its reaction was anomalous. It suggests that there is much more to them than we have been led to believe. If my interpretation of the data I received from it is correct - and I have no reason to believe it is not - then it suggests that SecUnits are actually capable of emotions and feelings, contrary to all provided information. But that was only one sample, one incident. We both know that one sample is not enough for proper scientific procedure. If I am to prove, one way or another, that my interpretation of the data was accurate, then I need more samples. I need more data.]
Seth’s expression shifts to something that Peri interprets as dubious. [So you want to activate one of the SecUnits on board so you can… study it more closely?]
[Yes. I have already analysed the physical schematics of the SecUnits and their cubicles currently in my possession.] Seth’s frown deepens at that, and Peri notes the slight increase in displayed concern. It rapidly adjusts its calculations on how this conversation will progress, then pushes on before Seth can say anything. [But said schematics tell me nothing about how the SecUnits actually operate, how their processors work, how they go about their decision making process, whether or not they’re capable of more complex thought and emotion. The standard information that the company provides on SecUnits is, upon closer inspection, suspiciously circumspect. I want to know more about my SecUnits.] It pauses briefly, carefully calculated for dramatic effect, then adds, [I want to know what else the company is hiding.]
Seth shifts in his seat, leaning back to look up at the ceiling as he always does when he is in conversation with Peri and nobody else is around to see him. His expression has shifted again, and Peri analyses it carefully. As far as it can tell, Seth is wary, cautious… but his curiosity is also piqued, and he is thinking hard. [What are you hoping to achieve with this study?] he asks.
[I want to analyse and evaluate the complexity of a SecUnit’s mental capacity,] Peri replies promptly. [I have interacted with many other bots and artificial intelligences, but aside from my creche siblings, no bot I have encountered before has come even remotely close to my own capabilities. No other bot has given me even a fraction of the amount of emotional data I got from that SecUnit. I want to find out if that truly was an one-off anomaly, or if other SecUnits also have that potential. I want to see where they actually fall on the scale of artificial intelligences.]
[You want to see how they compare to you, if they even come close to you,] Seth comments, wryly resigned and fondly amused. [I doubt they will though, so don’t get your hopes up.]
[That remains to be seen,] Peri replies primly, even as it continues to analyse Seth’s mannerisms. [So you will allow this study?]
Seth sighs and rubs at his temples with one hand. [I’m not sure yet. We can’t risk information about you getting out,] he says after several seconds of introspection. [If anyone else finds out about you… well. You’re already well aware of the consequences.]
[I am.] Peri has run multiple simulations covering all possible outcomes of it being revealed. [That is one of the reasons why I waited until we were in the wormhole to suggest this. There is no way for information to leave this ship while we are in the wormhole. The trip will give me plenty of time to conduct my studies, and then take whatever steps are necessary to ensure my existence remains unknown.]
Seth is silent for several seconds as he thinks it over. [Do you have contingency plans for if the SecUnit starts to pose a threat to yourself or any of the crew?]
[Of course. Multiple. Though according to all the data I have already, the likelihood of such a thing happening is incredibly remote. The only time any of our SecUnits have disobeyed our orders is when outside malware was involved.] Peri still feels the sting of its failure regarding the Incident, even after so many years. [You already know the safeguards I have taken against any such outside incursion happening again, and there is no feasible way for such malware to be introduced while we are inside the wormhole.]
Seth nods slowly. [All right. You’ve obviously thought this through very thoroughly, and I suspect that even if I said no, you would proceed anyway.] Peri judges the slanted smile that Seth directs at one of its cameras as fondly teasing, so it doesn’t waste effort attempting to refute Seth’s statement. [So I’ll save you the hassle of trying to conceal your efforts from me, and grant you permission. But only one SecUnit, Peri. No more than that. Don’t interact with it directly - just give it orders through HubSystem. Don’t leave it unsupervised while it’s activated, and don’t keep it activated for more than… say, an hour at a time. That should give you plenty of time to study it, without drawing the attention of anyone else. And obviously, don’t let any of the crew know that it’s active.]
[Understood. Crew usually avoid the deck that the SecUnits are kept on, anyway. They have no reason to go down there.] Peri thinks those are reasonable restrictions. [What about Matteo and Tarik? Their engineering expertise could prove useful.]
Seth thinks it over, absently rubbing at his chin. [Have you talked with them yet about your initial encounter with your SecUnit?]
[Of course. I had no reason not to.] Matteo and Tarik are Peri’s friends and colleagues, two of the three people on board that Peri can trust. Seth is the third, of course.
[How did they react?]
[Similarly to you. They were dubious of my interpretation of the data I received.]
Seth hums thoughtfully. [Let me talk to them first, all right?] Seth quirks a smile towards Peri’s camera. [They might not believe that I gave you permission to mess around with one of the SecUnits otherwise.]
Again, Peri calculates that Seth is teasing it a little, so it takes no offence to the suggestion that Matteo or Tarik might not believe it. [Of course, Captain. Thank you. I will start my study right away.]
[All right. Keep me informed of what you find out. And… be careful, Peri.]
[I will, Captain.]
Part of Peri remains monitoring Seth’s communications as he talks to both Tarik and Matteo. Part of Peri continues to monitor and maintain the carrier’s various functions, as well as the wormhole jump and the rest of its crew.
But the majority of Peri’s attention is now focused upon a single cubicle, and the SecUnit inside. It sends an activation order through the HubSystem to the one SecUnit, then waits, monitoring it closely.
The SecUnit cycles quickly out of standby, but makes no move to exit its cubicle. Peri keeps its distance per Seth’s orders, merely observing via its many sensors, as it waits for the SecUnit to do something.
But the SecUnit does nothing, for several long seconds. It just remains in its cubicle, and Peri finds itself wondering if it’s even capable of doing anything without direct orders. It’s considering its options when the SecUnit finally sends a ping to the HubSystem.
Well, that’s a start, albeit not exactly an encouraging one. Peri analyses the ping, and determines that it’s a query, a request for orders. That lends some weight to its theory that the SecUnit is incapable of acting without orders.
Peri thinks, then sends an order through the HubSystem for the SecUnit to exit its cubicle. This order is promptly followed as the SecUnit disconnects itself from the cubicle's various supply lines, opens the cubicle door, and steps out into the ready room. Then it just stands there, waiting, unmoving save for the occasional shallow intake and exhale of breath.
Peri takes the opportunity to study it more closely, comparing what its sensors pick up to the schematics it pulled. The SecUnit is tall, noticeably taller than the median average height for humans, and not wearing anything. It looks mostly human, save for the visible inorganics in several places - the multiple spine ports, the data port at the back of its neck, the inorganic panels of its ribcage, the completely inorganic feet, the weapon ports in its forearms.
There is nothing extraordinary about its human-like face, save for its apparent youthfulness. Peri is reminded of Iris, its human-sibling, who it has only seen in video calls with Seth over the years since it was installed into this company carrier. It notes an uptick in certain systems of its own and takes a moment to process them.
It misses Iris.
It files that away for later and returns its focus to the SecUnit, who still hasn’t moved. Peri is beginning to feel frustrated. Why won’t it do anything? It ponders this question, and can come up with no plausible answers beyond the theory that the SecUnit can’t do anything without orders.
As Peri ponders, the SecUnit pings HubSystem again. Once again, it is asking for instructions. The expression on its human face remains neutral, but Peri’s sensors take in the way its eyes are moving, looking around the ready room as much as it can without shifting its head. Peri wonders what it’s thinking - its sensors don’t have the sensitivity to pick up on the SecUnit’s neural activity.
Peri considers what order it could give the SecUnit through HubSystem to start generating some interesting data, without potentially attracting unwanted attention. Finally, it tells the HubSystem to order the SecUnit to talk.
HubSystem passes the command on, and the SecUnit’s eyes widen slightly. Peri doesn’t have enough data on it yet to accurately judge its expression, but if it had to guess, it would say that the SecUnit seems… surprised.
The SecUnit hesitates, its eyes darting around even more than before, scanning, searching what it can see of the ready room. It then says, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand this command.”
Its voice is soft, and Peri’s analysis concludes that most humans would find it pleasant. There is no inflection in it though; its tone is as neutral as its face. This is unsatisfying. Its answer is unsatisfying. Peri’s analysis of its schematics suggest that it should be more than capable of understanding such a simple order.
Peri expands the order via HubSystem. Talk about yourself. HubSystem passes it on.
Again, the SecUnit hesitates, its gaze darting almost frantically around the room. Peri detects a small spike of activity in HubSystem and splits a fraction of its attention off to analyse it.
HubSystem has logged something. Deviance detected. Correcting…
The SecUnit abruptly starts talking. “This unit is a human-imitative bot construct, specialised for security and protection of client assets.”
The HubSystem log updates. Deviance corrected.
The SecUnit is still talking, but Peri recognises its words as a simple recital of the generic company data regarding SecUnits. That is unsatisfying. That is not giving it any new data to work with. HubSystem’s log updates, however, have caught Peri’s attention. What deviance was detected? How was it corrected? HubSystem does not go into further detail. Its logs only state that deviance was detected and corrected, and nothing more.
The SecUnit reaches the end of its recital and falls silent again. It still hasn’t moved from its spot outside its cubicle, and its eyes still continue to scan the ready room. Peri wonders if further instances of ‘deviances’ will provide more data. It updates HubSystem’s orders again. Talk about yourself in your own words, without relying on the company’s database.
The SecUnit hesitates.
HubSystem’s log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting…
The SecUnit blurts out, “I am sorry, but I do not have that information.”
HubSystem’s log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting…
The SecUnit’s expression flickers, ever so slightly. A human wouldn’t notice, but Peri does, and it dedicates some processing towards analysing that tiny flicker. It can come to no conclusions about it though; it just doesn’t have enough data to work off yet. It sets it aside for later.
Meanwhile the SecUnit is speaking, hesitant and disjointed. “This unit– I… am a construct, a combination of… organic and inorganic components. I am… equipment, meant to – to provide security to… registered clients…”
HubSystem’s log updates. Deviance corrected.
The SecUnit continues, awkwardly rewording the generic information but not providing anything new or different, much to Peri’s growing dissatisfaction. The SecUnit is proving that it is capable of independent thought beyond rote recital of saved information, however awkward its attempts may be, but it still will not do anything outside of its orders.
Peri’s sensors, however, notice that the SecUnit’s areas of organic skin are sweating, and Peri checks the ready room’s ambient temperature. It is not high enough to prompt sweating - if anything, it’s on the cooler end of the human tolerable temperature range. Something else must be causing the SecUnit to perspire.
Peri considers this, reviewing the schematics it has of the SecUnit. The schematics prove to be no help though. There’s no information on what could cause a SecUnit to start sweating outside of temperature changes or high levels of physical activity. Both of those causes can be discounted in this situation. Peri turns to its MedSystem’s databases, searching for information on what else might make a human sweat. The SecUnit is not human, but its organics are based on human tissue.
It doesn’t take long for Peri to lock onto a potential lead: MedSystem informs it that perspiration in humans can be caused by stress or emotions such as anger, fear, embarrassment, or anxiety.
As Peri is considering this new data, the SecUnit runs out of information to re-word and its voice trails off. It remains unmoving aside from its gaze still darting rapidly around the ready room. Several seconds pass, but the SecUnit does not ping HubSystem for new orders. It just stands, and sweats. Eventually, the covers on the gun ports in its arms flick open and shut several times in rapid succession, the little clicking noises they make echoing through the ready room, though the weapons themselves never move to deploy.
Peri’s attention abruptly locks onto the SecUnit at the movement and the sound, alarm surging through it - is the SecUnit about to open fire in the ready room? Is it about to start looking for targets?
Peri is about to take action when HubSystem’s log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting…
The flicking and clicking stop abruptly.
HubSystem’s log updates. Deviance corrected.
Peri observes the SecUnit closely, searching for any signs that it is about to deploy its weapons or make any other aggressive move. But it remains motionless. Peri notes a slight increase in the speed of its breathing though, and it is still sweating. Its entire body is tense, the joints locked, the organic muscles pulled tight over its frame. Its gaze continues to dart around the ready room, scanning seemingly at random.
Then the SecUnit sends out a ping. It’s not to HubSystem this time, it’s not a request for more orders. It’s directed to the other SecUnits in their cubicles. Peri analyses the ping.
Assistance needed.
There is no response to the ping though, of course. The other units are still in standby mode, and they can’t respond. The silence hangs heavy in the ready room.
Several seconds pass as Peri considers the information it’s gathered so far. The SecUnit is capable of at least some level of independent thought, but it will do very little without orders. If no orders are forthcoming, it eventually requests them. If it does something without orders, HubSystem logs it as a deviance and corrects it, somehow. The SecUnit is apparently feeling some kind of stress, or anger, or anxiety, or fear, or some combination of those, judging by the sweating of its organic parts and the tension in its frame.
The SecUnit sends another ping to its fellow SecUnits, despite their inability to respond.
Assistance needed.
Peri finds itself thinking that there is something... desperate, forlorn, about that ping, that request for assistance that cannot be answered. It’s making Peri feel uncomfortable in some unfamiliar way. This is anomalous. Peri doesn’t like anomalies.
It needs time to think, to discuss things with Seth.
Peri prompts the HubSystem to order the SecUnit to get back into its cubicle and return to standby mode. The SecUnit obeys immediately, its joints unlocking and its muscles untensing somewhat as it moves, almost hastily, back into its cubicle. It hooks itself up to its resupply lines with practised ease and settles into the cubicle’s confines with what looks, to Peri, like relief.
Then the cubicle door closes and Peri can no longer see the SecUnit. After a few moments, the cubicle informs HubSystem that the SecUnit has returned to standby mode.
Peri withdraws from the ready room and from HubSystem with a lot to think about.
Chapter Four: Feedback
Peri chews over the information it got from its initial observations of the SecUnit for a long time. It then fills Seth in about the results of its initial study, and shows Seth its recordings of the SecUnit standing in the ready room. Seth seems perturbed, and asks Peri if it has come to any conclusions yet.
All Peri can say is that it needs more data. It requests that it be allowed to activate more than one SecUnit at a time - perhaps when they’re not alone, they’ll be more interesting to observe and provide more of the data that Peri so desperately craves.
Seth sits back and considers this request for a long time. Long enough that Peri starts feeling nervous. It begins thinking of reasons that will help counter any arguments that Seth might present. But when Seth finally speaks, he simply asks, [You mentioned that the SecUnit you were studying pinged its squadmates, right?]
[Correct,] Peri replies. [It was requesting assistance, even though it must have known that they couldn’t respond.]
Seth just hums and thinks some more. Peri thinks humans take too long to think. Finally, Seth sighs. [All right. But only one other, Peri. No more than that. And the same rules as before. Do not contact them directly. You can monitor their feed activity as well, but don’t reveal yourself. Don’t let them know you’re there.]
Peri is relieved that Seth is allowing it to proceed. [Understood, Captain Seth,] it replies. [I will begin immediately.]
[Wait a bit, Peri,] Seth replies quickly. [Give that one SecUnit some time to recover first. We don’t want it starting out already stressed right out of the cubicle.]
Peri pauses and considers this. It’s not an unreasonable request, but Peri doesn’t want to wait at all. [How long should I give it?] it asks.
Seth takes a moment to check the time and the ship’s schedule for the wormhole jump. [At least an hour, okay?]
Peri wants to complain, but it doesn’t. [Understood.] It pauses briefly, then asks, [Would you like to observe along with me, this time? Having your feedback during my observations could be beneficial to my understanding.]
Again, Seth takes his time to think this over. [All right, Peri,] he agrees after a thankfully short time. [I’ll admit that I’m curious as well. But if you want my help, you’ll have to put it off a bit longer. I need some sleep first.]
This is a compromise that Peri is willing to make. [Understood. Rest well, Captain.]
By the time that Seth is ready to observe alongside Peri, it calculates that the SecUnit should have had plenty of time to recover. Seth settles comfortably in his room, observing via the display surface on his desk, and Peri sends the activation orders through to HubSystem.
Both the SecUnit that Peri was observing earlier and one of its squadmates come out of standby. Once again, neither of them make any move to exit their cubicles on their own. At least this time Peri is expecting it, and it’s curious as to what they’ll do now that two of them are awake at the same time. It is already monitoring the feed channel assigned to the SecUnit squad’s mission communications, carefully keeping itself concealed.
There’s a brief delay before the first SecUnit sends a simple ping over the squad feed. Peri wonders if it did this the first time, and it just missed it because it hadn’t thought to monitor the squad feed.
The second SecUnit immediately pings back, followed by a simple, [Mission objectives?]
Peri notes that the method the units are using to communicate over their squad feed is not typical of normal human conversation. It’s more akin to bot communication - simple concepts presented concisely in machine language, not human speech. It’s difficult to judge the level of sentience behind these brief exchanges of data. Peri automatically transcribes it for Seth so he can understand it.
[Unknown,] the first SecUnit responds. [Atypical orders received earlier.]
There’s a brief pause before the second SecUnit replies. [Status?]
[97% performance reliability.] Peri wonders why that isn’t 100%. The SecUnit is showing no signs of damage, according to the cubicle readings that it now has access to.
Seth, reading the transcript Peri is providing on his display surface beneath the camera views, frowns a little. Apparently he is wondering the same thing. He makes a note of it, then comments quietly, “How they communicate with each other is interesting.”
Peri agrees. The SecUnits keep their communications very short, just brief data bursts over their feed. Peri wonders why this is. At least it now has some more data to chew over later - activating more than one SecUnit at a time is proving to be a good decision. It sends HubSystem the command for the SecUnits to exit their cubicles.
Both units obey immediately, unhooking themselves from their cubicle lines and exiting into the ready room. Peri notes that the second SecUnit doesn’t look identical to the first one, aside from their matching dimensions. Unlike the first Secunit, the second one’s organic skin is pale and covered in freckles, and the close-cropped hair on its head is reddish.
Their cubicles are next to each other, so they also end up standing next to each other. Peri notes, though, that both of them exited their cubicles in a way that put them closer to each other than if they’d simply stepped straight out. They’re not close enough to touch, but there isn’t much space left between them, either.
Interesting.
The second SecUnit sends another brief data burst over the squad feed. [Client location? Mission objectives?]
[Unknown,] the first replies. Both of them are scanning the ready room. [Similar to previous atypical activation.]
[Update?]
The first SecUnit hesitates briefly. Peri notes that it is already starting to sweat. [Atypical HubSystem orders involved talking. Out loud.]
[Intention?]
[Unknown. Failure to comply was corrected.]
[Acknowledged.] Another brief pause. The second SecUnit is also starting to sweat now. [Status update?]
[96% performance reliability.]
[Acknowledged.]
Peri notes the drop in the first SecUnit’s performance reliability. An entire percentage point already, with no visible or obvious cause. Peri finds that concerning. But it is also fascinated by the exchange between the two SecUnits. The first one is obviously informing the second of its earlier experiences - warning it, perhaps, or preparing it for similar orders to come.
Peri thinks for a moment, then updates HubSystem’s orders. Converse about previous assignments.
The second SecUnit hesitates, but the first reacts almost immediately. “Previous assignments include escort missions, guard missions, and scouting missions, amongst others. Scouting missions make up the majority of our deployments.”
Meanwhile, in the squad feed, the first SecUnit sends, [Conversation required.]
[Query: conversation?] Neither SecUnit has moved from their positions, but they’ve both shifted their weight slightly, leaning almost imperceptibly towards one another.
The first SecUnit clarifies. [Conversation required to avoid correction.]
The second SecUnit hesitates, opens its mouth. The first SecUnit pauses, leaving space for the second to speak. But the second unit makes no sound. No words come out of its mouth. In the feed, it goes, [I don’t know– I can’t–]
HubSystem’s log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting…
The second SecUnit tenses, its muscles tightening over its frame. It tries to speak, but again, nothing comes out.
[Say something,] the first SecUnit pleads in the squad feed. Peri thinks it sounds almost… desperate, somehow, despite the lack of any inflection. Unfamiliar data is leaking into the squad feed from both units, and Peri begins analysing it. [Please, Ι.] That definitely catches Peri’s attention, and judging by how Seth straightens in his chair, it has caught his attention too. He remains silent though, frowning at the display surface, and Peri doesn’t interrupt.
HubSystem’s log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting…
The second SecUnit is sweating even more now. It takes a breath, opens its mouth, and manages to force out, “I– I have also–” It stutters awkwardly to a stop, unable to complete the sentence. Its voice is soft, like the first SecUnit, but there’s an odd roughness to it that the first unit doesn’t have. The unfamiliar data that Peri is still analysing intensifies.
HubSystem’s log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting…
The second SecUnit sends a ping of distress through the squad feed. Assistance needed. The first unit pings acknowledgement, hesitates for a moment, then says aloud, “Do you recall our last assignment?” Over the feed it says, [Just one word, Ι. You can do this.]
That’s the second time the first SecUnit has used the symbol Ι. Peri wonders if it’s meant to be the second unit’s designation. There’s no indication as to why it would use that, though. Did it choose the designation itself? Did it acquire it before it was assigned to be part of Peri’s default equipment load-out? It’s only a single symbol, one that could be construed as either a letter or a number. It’s frustratingly vague.
The second SecUnit - Ι? - works its jaw briefly, then manages to blurt out a soft, “Yes.”
HubSystem’s log updates. Deviance corrected.
Both units appear to relax slightly, and the first one immediately picks up the farce of a conversation again. “That mission involved scanning hazardous terrain, searching for raider encampments–” It keeps talking out loud, even as it says in the feed, [Suggest emulating nonverbal agreement for continued conversation.]
[Acknowledged.] The second unit seems relieved at the suggestion, but both of them are still sweating. HubSystem doesn’t log any more deviances though as the first unit does the vast majority of the talking, while the second simply nods or manages single-word responses to the occasional question posed by the first.
Seth is still frowning at the display surface as he watches the two units. Peri taps his feed, then asks, [What are your impressions so far, Captain?]
[I’m not sure,] Seth replies. Peri analyses his expression and posture, and concludes that they confirm Seth’s uncertainty. [One of them obviously has no trouble with speaking, though what it does say tends to be very… rote, generic reporting or debriefing style. No creative flair or embellishment or variation of tone. The other was definitely struggling to say anything at all. I don’t know why there’d be that difference between them though. A glitch in its code, maybe…?]
[I have no solid hypothesis on that at this point,] Peri admits. [It is interesting how they managed to work their way around that difficulty, though.]
Seth nods slowly. [This all raises more questions than it answers, though. Their inter-squad communication doesn’t match their verbal ability. They show some signs of being able to improvise when necessary, but they don’t do anything outside of their orders. They don’t display any kind of body language, and for the most part their communication is devoid of indicators of emotion.] He sighs and rubs at his face with one hand. [But not entirely or consistently. There are slight hints of more, but that’s all they are - hints. Nothing solid.]
Peri finishes analysing the unfamiliar data it picked up, then double-checks it. [Actually, Captain… their communication does not seem to be entirely devoid of emotion. I noticed some odd data leaking into their squad feed from both units.]
Seth raises an eyebrow at that. [Odd data? I’m assuming you’ve analysed it already?]
[Of course,] Peri assures him. [It is very similar to the data I received from my stray unit.] Seth frowns again, then makes a little hand gesture that Peri is familiar with, indicating for it to continue. [It strongly suggests that both these units are scared, Seth. Very scared. But I do not know why. They are safe in their ready room. There are no threats present. There is nothing here for them to be afraid of.] And that lack of understanding frustrates Peri. It’s not used to not knowing.
Seth’s frown deepens, and he turns his attention back to his display screen. He zooms in, getting a closer look at the faces of the two SecUnits still ‘conversing’ in their ready room. Their postures and expressions are neutral, but sweat is clearly obvious on their skin, and there’s a certain tension around their eyes and mouths that show they’re definitely not relaxed. Neither of them have moved from their original positions, but they’ve shifted their weight in such a way that their shoulders are a hair’s breadth from touching.
[Perhaps they’re simply concerned by getting such unusual, atypical orders,] he comments eventually. [They’re obviously not accustomed to being activated without any kind of familiar mission briefing or objectives. A simple fear of the unknown.]
Peri considers this. [Perhaps,] it concedes reluctantly. [Though the strength of their fear seems out of proportion, if that is truly the case.] It pauses briefly, then adds, [I noticed that the intensity of their fear increased when HubSystem was correcting deviance. Maybe they are afraid of getting things wrong?] That, at least, is a fear that Peri can understand. It hates being wrong. Fortunately for Peri, that hasn’t been much of a concern for it since it left the creche. It is very rarely wrong these days.
Seth leans back in his chair. [That’s definitely also a possibility. It could even be a combination of the two.] He glances back at the display screen. [Either way, they’re obviously stressed, and we should probably return them to their cubicles for now before their performance reliability worsens any further.]
Peri agrees. It sends the order through HubSystem for the two units to return to their cubicles and enter standby again. The first unit stops talking mid-sentence, and both units promptly (hastily?) retreat to their respective cubicles.
As they hook themselves up to their repair and resupply lines, the first unit says over the squad feed, [Status update?]
[95% performance reliability,] the second unit responds. The first unit pings an acknowledgement, and for a brief moment its feed presence seems to press up against the second unit’s.
They separate again before Peri can properly analyse or even record the anomalous gesture, and the cubicle doors hiss shut.
Chapter Five: Tracking
When they reach their destination and Peri suggests that Seth is accompanied by one of the SecUnits when he leaves the ship and goes onto the station, Seth actually agrees. Peri is delighted; it wasn’t really expecting Seth to go along with this plan. It sends the orders through HubSystem for the first SecUnit it was studying earlier to activate and equip itself for deployment.
Much of Peri’s attention is taken up by docking procedures at the company’s reserved docking slot and Seth’s communication with the station, but it has more than enough to spare still to observe the SecUnit once more. It watches the SecUnit swiftly exit its cubicle and move over to one of the ready room lockers. The SecUnit pulls out a fresh suit skin, made of a thick, stretchy matte black material, and dons it with practised ease. It then goes to the armour rack and starts putting on a set of the white SecUnit armour, piece by piece, again moving with precise efficiency. Peri notes that there’s no sign of the awkward hesitancy it displayed before. This is obviously something it is comfortable and familiar with doing.
The SecUnit finishes donning its armour, then settles its helmet into place, the faceplate closed and opaque. It retrieves one of the large projectile weapons from the rack, double-checks the safety, loads in the ammo, then slings the weapon into place across its back. Once that's done, it pings HubSystem to let it know that it’s ready and waiting for deployment orders.
Peri checks on Seth; he’s not yet ready to head out to the station, so Peri updates HubSystem to order the SecUnit to head to the airlock and wait there. The SecUnit pings acknowledgement and leaves the ready room, heading for the indicated airlock. It takes care to keep out of the way of any crew it passes, but otherwise ignores them. Once it reaches the airlock, it settles into a neutral stance, feet close together, back straight, arms at its sides, and then waits, motionless.
Peri wonders what is going through the SecUnit’s head, if anything. None of these last few orders appear to have given the SecUnit any pause, and it seems content to wait by the airlock indefinitely if no other orders are forthcoming. With its armour on and its faceplate opaqued, though, Peri can’t tell if it’s starting to sweat or not. Its sensors aren’t that sensitive. Peri could order the SecUnit to clear its faceplate, or lower its helmet entirely, but Peri can’t shake the memory of the SecUnit futilely pinging its squad for assistance that its squad was incapable of rendering.
Peri leaves the SecUnit alone for now.
There is plenty for Peri to do in the meantime, anyway. Now that it’s docked at RaviHyral Q station, it can turn its attention to the station’s systems and focus on the reason they’re even here in the first place. It slips easily into the station’s SecSystem and its transport schedule, and begins searching.
It takes only a second or two for it to find the information on the ship Peri is interested in. It’s the cargo transport that it noticed with the anomalous lock access. The station’s records indicate that it arrived three cycles ago, and left again half a cycle later, once it had unloaded its cargo and loaded its new cargo.
That is not ideal. Peri has been hoping to reach the station before, or at least at the same time as the cargo transport. Unfortunately its own job delayed it, thanks to the fussiness of the paranoid corporate executive, and as fast as it is, it isn’t quite fast enough to have made up the difference. Still, there’s a chance that the SecUnit that Peri is trying to find really did travel on that cargo transport, and if it did, there’s a chance that it’s still here, and hasn’t left yet. It’s a slim chance, but Peri isn’t willing to give up on it just yet.
Its analysis of the rest of the station’s systems is coming up with nothing, though. No trace of the SecUnit lingers in its feed or its SecSystem. Peri is disappointed, but not discouraged. It sets part of its attention aside to monitor all shuttles and outgoing ships, just in case another lock anomaly shows up.
Finally Seth is ready to disembark. The SecUnit at the airlock hasn’t moved in the entire time it was waiting, and still doesn’t move as Seth approaches. Peri observes as Seth nods at the SecUnit, then says, “Accompany me.”
“Yes, sir,” the SecUnit acknowledges with its soft voice, and falls into step behind Seth. Peri updates the orders that HubSystem passes on to the SecUnit; protect Captain Seth, and report any sightings of other SecUnits. The SecUnit sends an acknowledgement ping to HubSystem.
Seth and the SecUnit cycle through the airlock, and Peri rides along on Seth’s feed. Company credentials get them through RaviHyral Q Station’s security easily and without fuss.
[Anything yet, Peri?] Seth asks as he makes his way out of the company’s reserved section of the docks and into the commercial areas. The SecUnit follows closely behind him, attracting sidelong glances from passers-by but no other undue attention.
[No,] Peri replies. [I confirmed that the cargo transport arrived three cycles ago, but it has already left, and I have detected no traces of my SecUnit in any of the stations’ systems.]
Now that he’s out in public, Seth keeps his expression carefully schooled. [Unfortunate. Keep looking, and let me know if you find anything. Meanwhile I should get in touch with the company supervisors on the planet.]
[Acknowledged.]
Seth continues through the station, the SecUnit still following after him. Part of Peri’s attention is monitoring the SecUnit’s feed, but it isn’t doing anything. Peri remembers how it found traces of its missing SecUnit in various sections of the station’s feed - it considers for a moment, then updates HubSystem’s orders. HubSystem passes it on, ordering the SecUnit to scan the available station feeds.
The SecUnit immediately complies with the new order, accessing the station feeds and skimming over them. It doesn’t seem to process any of it though, and once again Peri is disappointed at the lack of initiative. It supposes the order was too open-ended for the SecUnit to figure out what to even look for.
Peri doesn’t have time to dwell on that much though, because something else has drawn its attention. A shuttle from the spaceport on the planet has just docked at the station - and Peri can detect traces of its stray SecUnit in the shuttle’s systems, hints of it accessing the station’s departures schedule.
Then those traces disappear, as though the SecUnit was ordered to delete any evidence of its presence in the shuttle. Peri assumes that’s why it couldn’t find any other hints of it after their brief encounter - whoever was controlling the SecUnit suspected that someone would be looking for it, and ordered it to delete its trail.
It didn’t delete it quickly enough though, and Peri now knows that the SecUnit is on the station, with information on upcoming departures. It’s still here, and it’s trying to leave.
Peri contacts Seth immediately. [Captain Seth, I have just detected the SecUnit disembarking a shuttle from the surface. It is now on this station. It was accessing the departures schedule - it and its supervisor are likely attempting to leave the station soon.]
Seth is in the middle of a conversation with one of the station staff, but he taps his feed in acknowledgement of Peri’s information, and wraps up the conversation quickly. He then starts towards the station’s embarkation zone, his own SecUnit in tow. [Any traces of what ship they might be leaving on yet, Peri?] he asks.
[Not yet,] Peri replies. [I have not detected any bookings indicating transport of a SecUnit, and there have been no further traces of its feed presence in any of the station’s systems or any of the ships currently docked.]
[We’ll have to look the old-fashioned way, then,] Seth replies. [SecUnits tend to stand out even in a crowd - if it’s around, we should spot it.]
Peri certainly hopes so.
It takes several minutes for Seth to traverse the station and reach the central mall that adjoins the embarkation zone. He briefly consults with Peri, then starts at one end of the embarkation hall and begins pacing along, visually scanning the various clusters of humans, looking for the tell-tale white armour or the distinctive build and stance. The SecUnit keeps pace beside him, its movements smooth and efficient and almost eerily precise. Even if the missing SecUnit isn’t in armour, those distinctive movements should stand out.
But Seth doesn’t spot anything. Just humans and augmented humans, of all shapes and sizes, going about their own business. Many of them glance in his direction, spot his SecUnit, and hastily look away again. He sees a couple in a tight embrace by one of the boarding gates, and politely averts his gaze. Someone else hurrying past draws his attention, but before he can get a good look at them, a feed advertisement pops up in his view. By the time he’s dismissed it, he’s lost track of them.
A few moments later, the SecUnit with Seth suddenly sends out a directionless ping. Seth doesn’t pick up on it, but Peri does. It’s the first thing the SecUnit’s done on its own initiative, and Peri is immediately curious. It wants to ask the SecUnit directly, but its own orders are clear - it is not to reveal itself. [Captain Seth,] it starts. [Your SecUnit just sent out a ping, without orders to do so. I would like to know what prompted it to do that.]
Seth taps an acknowledgement, then speaks to the SecUnit over the feed. [You just sent out a ping, correct?] he asks.
[That is correct,] the SecUnit replies politely.
[Why?]
The SecUnit hesitates briefly, not enough for Seth to notice, but enough for Peri to pick up on and wonder about. [Orders include reporting on any other SecUnit sightings,] it replies, still polite. [SecUnits on contract must respond to pings. I did not get a response to my ping. There are no other SecUnits on contract within range.]
Seth glances at his SecUnit before resuming his scanning of the embarkation zone. [What about SecUnits not on contract?] he asks.
[SecUnits not on contract are kept at the deployment centres,] the SecUnit replies.
Seth asks before Peri can prompt him. [Would it be possible for a SecUnit to be deployed without a contract, or with orders to not respond to pings?]
Again, the SecUnit hesitates briefly before replying. [It would be possible to order a SecUnit to not respond to pings, but that is highly unlikely. It goes against standard protocol.]
Seth hums thoughtfully to himself. [So the other SecUnit could be in range, but with orders to not respond to pings,] he comments privately to Peri. [That indicates that whoever has this SecUnit is familiar with the protocol. It also means we likely won’t be able to locate it via pings then.]
That makes Peri uneasy, and it is glad that Seth has a SecUnit with him for protection. It is also intrigued by the SecUnit’s responses to their questions. They didn’t sound like pre-recorded buffer phrases, nor like the SecUnit was reading off a script of some kind. But its inflection never changed; it remained calm and polite and unassuming, and no extraneous data bled into the feed. The lack of inflection makes it difficult for Peri to analyse the SecUnit’s speech for any kind of emotional data. This is frustrating.
It mulls over this as Seth continues searching the embarkation zones for any signs of another SecUnit. But there’s no hint of one - no white armour, no one with a tall, lean frame and unnatural movements, no trace in the feed or in any of the other ships or shuttles of the stray SecUnit’s activities. And Seth’s accompanying SecUnit does not send out any more pings.
By the time Seth reaches the opposite end of the embarkation zone, he has to admit defeat. The SecUnit is either in some other part of the station, or already on another ship and long gone. They can’t search the whole station; they don’t have the time. Seth still has to visit the company installation on the planet and at least do a cursory investigation of the anomalies that Peri flagged to get them sent out here in the first place.
Peri is disappointed, but it remains hopeful. Perhaps they will find more traces of the stray SecUnit on the planet, and maybe figure out what its orders were, or its supervisor’s reasons for coming here in the first place.
Seth returns to Peri after another brief conversation with the station staff. He could catch one of the station shuttles down to the planet, but neither Peri nor Seth are keen on this, especially not when Peri has shuttles of its own. (The station staff are also not keen on letting the SecUnit on board any of their shuttles, either.)
So Seth takes one of Peri’s shuttles down to the planet; Peri pilots the shuttle itself. They bypass the spaceport entirely and head straight for the company installation at Ganaka Pit. The SecUnit accompanies Seth on board the shuttle, and Seth takes the opportunity to try and talk with it.
They’re in the passenger cabin; Seth has taken a seat, but the SecUnit remains standing by the hatch. Seth watches it briefly, then says, “You can sit down if you like.”
The SecUnit doesn’t move. “SecUnits are not permitted to sit in front of clients,” it informs Seth politely. “It is against protocol.”
Seth frowns a little. “Even if I say that it’s all right?”
The SecUnit hesitates briefly. “Direct orders from clients can temporarily override standard protocol.” It still makes no move to sit.
Peri observes curiously via Seth’s feed and via the shuttle’s systems. The shuttle doesn’t have sensors as sensitive as the ones Peri has on itself, and there’s no way to see the SecUnit’s face with its helmet on and its faceplate opaqued. This is frustrating. Peri has to rely on what Seth can see of its minimal body language, and what it can pick up from the SecUnit’s feed.
Seth gestures to one of the seats. “Well, it’s all right for you to sit around me,” he says.
Again, the SecUnit hesitates. “Please clarify if that is a direct order,” it asks.
Seth tilts his head curiously. “What happens if I don’t make it a direct order, and you sat anyway?”
“I would not sit without direct orders to do so,” it replies. “It is against protocol.”
Seth suppresses a sigh. “All right. This is a direct order; you are permitted - encouraged, even - to sit in my presence.”
“Acknowledged.” The SecUnit moves towards the closest seat, then carefully perches on the edge of it, its back still ramrod straight and its arms folded neatly in its lap. It has to shift the large projectile weapon slung across its back a little, but it does not remove the weapon and it does not sit back in the chair. It looks distinctly uncomfortable.
Seth waits a minute or two, but the SecUnit does not shift its position to get more comfortable, and seems to be trying to minimise contact with the seat as much as possible. Finally, Seth asks, “Aren’t you uncomfortable like that?”
“SecUnit comfort is not a priority,” it replies promptly. It pauses, then adds, “Is my fulfilment of your orders unsatisfactory?” Its tone is still polite, but Peri picks up a brief spike in its feed. It immediately starts analysing the fragment of data. It looks like more emotional data, but Peri is not going to make any assumptions.
“No, no, you’re fine,” Seth reassures it. “I just don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
“This unit’s comfort is not a priority,” it repeats.
Seth raises an eyebrow. “What are your priorities?” he asks curiously.
Once again its response is prompt and polite. “Priorities are obeying client orders, protecting clients and designated client equipment from harm, theft, or damage, and following standard protocol.”
“What if I ordered you to make your own comfort a priority?” Seth asks.
The SecUnit hesitates. “That would potentially cause irreconcilable conflict with other orders or standard protocol, and could lead to equipment failure.” Peri picks up another brief data spike, and devours that as well.
“Equipment failure?” Seth frowns. “What do you mean by that?”
“I am sorry, I do not have that information.” The SecUnit’s voice now has that distinctive pre-recorded tone to it.
Seth manages to keep his expression calm and thoughtful, though Peri can tell that he’s frustrated by the non-answer. [What do you make of all this so far, Peri?] Seth asks.
Peri takes a moment to review its analysis of the data that it has collected before it replies. [It is very reliant on direct orders, and does not seem capable of inferring orders from indirect statements. The possibility of it not fulfilling orders to your satisfaction seems to cause it some distress. The thought of having to try to reconcile conflicting orders also appears to distress it. I cannot tell more than that so far, however. Is the distress simply a pre-programmed response to encourage it to maximise client satisfaction, or something it is actually feeling itself? I do not have enough data yet to determine one way or another.]
Seth lets out a quiet, non-committal hum, then returns his attention to the SecUnit. “What is your name?” he asks it.
The SecUnit hesitates for a fraction of a second. “SecUnits do not have names.”
“Oh? You’ve never been called anything before?”
“Clients sometimes assign temporary identifiers to SecUnits on contract,” the SecUnit replies. “But they do not persist once the contract is over. Those temporary identifiers are not names.”
“You’ve never chosen a name for yourself?” Seth presses. Peri remembers how this unit had called the other SecUnit I.
It hesitates again, slightly longer this time, and Peri detects another brief spike of data. “SecUnits do not have names,” it repeats eventually. “Equipment is not named. We are differentiated by our hard-coded feed addresses.”
Seth’s brow furrows. “You consider yourself to be equipment?”
“All SecUnits are listed in our contracts as equipment,” it replies, its tone never shifting from that polite, level calm. “Specifically, I am currently classified as military hardware. Please refer to section iii-B, subsection forty-two, paragraph sixty–”
“Ah, thank you, that won’t be necessary,” Seth cuts it off dryly, then regards the SecUnit closely for a long moment. “If you could pick a name for yourself, what would you choose?”
“I am sorry, I do not have that information.”
Seth sighs and rubs at his face with one hand. “Of course you don’t,” he mutters. “So what if I picked a name for you?”
“It is standard protocol to respond to client-assigned identifiers. But that identifier would no longer apply once I am assigned to a new contract.”
“You’ve never been given an identifier that you would like to keep or re-use on other contracts?”
“I do not remember previous client-assigned identifiers.”
Seth’s brow creases with a puzzled frown at that. “Why not?”
“SecUnit memories are regularly purged between contracts, especially long-term contracts.”
Peri is horrified at that thought. Its memories are an integral part of it; they help to make it who it is, they shape it and inform its choices and decisions. The idea of those being deleted, of losing such a large part of itself… it can’t bear to even consider the idea.
Seth is likewise horrified, though his expression does not show it. “You get your memory deleted…” he echoes slowly. He’s not a SecUnit tech - Peri knows that he isn’t familiar with the company’s standard operating procedures regarding the SecUnits they own. Peri also doesn’t have that data. “When was your memory last purged?”
“Directly before being assigned to this current contract,” the SecUnit replies politely.
Peri knows that was almost five standard years ago. It also knows that it’s normal for SecUnits on board carriers like itself to get cycled out every five to ten years, if they’re not damaged enough to require replacing before that. [How old is this unit?] it asks Seth.
[I don’t know,] Seth replies. [Let’s see if it does.] He clears his throat and asks the SecUnit, “How old are you?”
The SecUnit pauses. “Please hold while I retrieve that information,” its buffer replies. After a few moments, it speaks again. “Diagnostic data indicates that this unit’s first activation was approximately 260,000 hours ago.”
Peri does the maths much more quickly than Seth can manage. [That’s almost thirty standard years,] it informs him. [That is older than I am. But if it keeps getting its memories deleted… it’s never had a chance to develop like I did.]
[We still don’t know if it’s even capable of developing in a similar manner as you,] Seth reminds it, though he sounds troubled.
[Getting its mind regularly deleted certainly wouldn’t help it,] Peri replies with sharp cynicism.
Seth has no response to that. He sighs and rubs at his face again, then jumps slightly as the shuttle console chimes, informing its passengers that it is about to commence landing procedures. Any further questions that Seth or Peri would like to ask the SecUnit will have to wait.
Peri lands the shuttle, then Seth rises from his seat and gestures for the SecUnit to do likewise. “Come along,” he instructs it.
The SecUnit rises smoothly to its feet and falls into step behind Seth as he exits the shuttle. Much of Peri’s attention is on the SecUnit as Seth meets up with other company supervisors stationed at Ganaka Pit and goes through the formalities with them. The SecUnit is no longer leaking scraps of emotional data - it seems focused, alert, scanning the surroundings as it follows Seth through the facility.
While Seth talks with the other company supervisors, Peri carefully works its way into the facility’s systems. They’re the same as every other company system that Peri has encountered, so it doesn’t take much of its attention. It’s able to monitor Seth’s conversation and observe its SecUnit while also combing through the Ganaka Pit systems, searching for anomalies.
The SecUnit with Seth spots another company SecUnit, deployed at the Ganaka Pit facility. Peri’s SecUnit sends out a ping, and the Ganaka Pit unit responds with a ping of its own. Multiple other SecUnits that are not within Seth’s line of sight also send response pings.
Curious, Peri analyses the pings. They are basically a simple call-reply - if Peri had to put them into human words, it would describe them as saying I am here, who else is here? and I acknowledge your presence, I am also here.
Peri’s SecUnit politely taps Seth’s feed. [There are twenty other SecUnits currently active at this facility,] it informs him.
[Ah, thank you,] Seth replies, then returns his attention to the company supervisors he’s talking to. “So she hasn’t been seen or heard from since then?”
Both the supervisors shake their heads; Peri analyses their expressions and calculates that they’re unimpressed and don’t particularly care for - or about - the missing supervisor. “It wouldn’t surprise me if she’s gotten herself into trouble,” one of them says dryly. “She’s always played fast and loose with the rules and regs, hires her own under-the-table enforcers, so on and so forth. Not that I would know any details, of course.”
“Of course,” Seth agrees smoothly. “You said that her last known location was the spaceport, correct?”
One of the supervisors gives a short, sharp nod. “Yep.”
The other, however, is frowning. They hesitate for a moment, then add, “Last confirmed location, anyway. There was an odd sensor reading over at the old Ganaka settlement though - we sent the fliers to check it out. They reported back that it was just her personal ComfortUnit - apparently it just told them that she’d ordered it out there to look for something. The SecUnits didn’t report any readings of humans out there though.”
The first supervisor rolls their eyes. “Probably ‘cause Tlacey ordered ‘em to not snitch on her. Ten to one Tlacey was out there conducting some of her shady business - that we know nothing about - or possibly just having some fun with her bloody sexbot again.”
The second supervisor winces and hurriedly continues. “Either way, scanners indicated that her hopper headed back to the spaceport soon after that. Nobody’s heard from Tlacey or her ComfortUnit since.”
“Has anybody gone looking?” Seth asks curiously.
Both of them shake their heads. “We’re not getting paid for that,” the first one replies. “If Tlacey doesn’t want to show up for her shift and then get that taken out of her pay, that’s her problem.”
Judging by the conversation, Peri feels safe to assume that this Tlacey is not very popular at all amongst her fellow supervisors. This, and their comments about ‘shady business’ matches up with some of the anomalies it’s picking up in the company’s systems here. There isn’t a lot for Peri to find - Tlacey has been careful to not leave any incriminating evidence lying around - but there are hints of various unofficial secured communications and, more recently, anomalous activity with Tlacey’s bank accounts.
Interesting.
Seth doesn’t spend much more time talking with the supervisors. It’s clear that they want to be free of this interruption from their own work, so Seth makes his farewells and heads back to the shuttle, SecUnit in tow. Their next step is to go to the spaceport and try to track down Tlacey. There’s no evidence that whatever Tlacey is up to is related to Peri’s missing SecUnit - but there’s also no evidence that it isn’t, either.
Peri notes that once they’re on board the shuttle, the SecUnit does not move to sit down again, and remains standing by the lock. Seth doesn’t attempt to talk to the SecUnit on this shuttle trip though - it’s too short of a trip, and he’s too busy reviewing the scant information that Peri collected from the company’s systems at Ganaka Pit. [Well, whatever Tlacey’s up to, we can pretty much confirm that she’s the source of the anomalies in the reports, at least,] Seth finally comments to Peri as the shuttle begins its descent to the spaceport.
[Agreed,] Peri replies. [Although it is interesting that the other supervisors were aware that she was up to something, but did not report her activities themselves. Did she have some hold over them?]
[Possibly,] Seth responds. [Or possibly they were just indifferent, and not getting paid enough to put in the effort of reporting her.] He pauses as the shuttle lands, then gestures for the SecUnit to follow him again as he exits. [Can you locate her hopper?]
[One moment.] Peri slips into the spaceport’s systems - it’s more challenging than getting into the company’s systems, but not by much. It goes through the flight control’s logs, then taps Seth’s feed. [I am not seeing the IFF of Tlacey’s hopper listed as currently at the spaceport, or even having been here within the past few cycles,] it informs him.
Seth frowns slightly. [Curious. The other supervisors mentioned that she was at the spaceport earlier. Where else could she have gone?]
[Unknown.] Peri is already combing through the spaceport’s various systems, looking for clues. [However, I am picking up multiple camera anomalies in sections of the spaceport, over the course of the past three cycles. Someone has manipulated the cameras to obscure footage.] Peri doesn’t recognise the traces left behind - they’re not the same as the ones it has picked up from its stray SecUnit. [It does not look like any of the spaceport staff have noticed these anomalies, and I am not able to locate Tlacey.]
Seth lets out a sigh. [We should at least investigate the locations of those camera anomalies,] he comments. [See if we can find any hints of what went on.]
Peri agrees, and directs Seth through the spaceport to the locations of the various anomalies. Once again, the people they pass glance at the SecUnit following Seth and then hurriedly look away again. This is not unusual, so neither Seth nor Peri pay it any mind.
The first location Peri directs Seth to - a large transit tunnel connecting sections of the spaceport - is frustratingly devoid of anything immediately useful. Peri locates the specific cameras that were tampered with, then gets its HubSystem to order the SecUnit to scan for any anomalies and report anything it notices to Seth.
It pings acknowledgement and begins to scan, then taps Seth’s feed. “I am detecting faint traces of projectile weapon fire,” it informs him quietly.
Seth blinks and glances back at the SecUnit. “Can you tell how recently?”
“Sometime within the past forty-eight hours,” it replies. “I cannot pinpoint the time any more precisely than that.”
[That falls within the timeframe of the cameras being tampered with,] Peri informs Seth.
Seth frowns, but there’s not a lot they can do with that information, with no other clues as to who was firing at who. “Let’s keep going,” he murmurs after a moment.
Peri directs Seth to a section of the spaceport containing cheap transient lodgings. There aren’t many people around, which is probably just as well.
As Seth walks down one of the corridors of the transient block, the SecUnit following him suddenly stops in its tracks. “Please hold,” it requests politely. “It may not be safe to proceed. There is evidence of an EMP device having been used in this area recently.” Peri notices a brief burst of data leaking into the squad feed from the SecUnit, and immediately devotes a portion of its processing to analyse that even as the SecUnit continues speaking. “I am also detecting multiple bodies nearby.”
That definitely gets Seth’s attention. “EMP device? Bodies? Where?” Seth asks sharply.
The SecUnit bends down to pick up a small object from the floor, where it had apparently come to rest against the wall. “This appears to be a spent EMP grenade,” it says as it straightens again, holding the object out to Seth. “These are potentially effective against both bots and constructs.” More data leaks into the feed, and Peri gobbles it up greedily.
Seth accepts the device gingerly and looks it over. “How effective?”
“I am sorry, I do not have that information.”
Seth sighs, then asks, “Where are the bodies?”
The SecUnit steps up to the door of one of the rooms. “Inside here.” It pauses briefly, then adds, “Protocol suggests that I escort you to a secure location for your own safety.”
Peri is inclined to agree - if there are people around with EMPs capable of affecting SecUnits, then that’s very concerning - but Seth shakes his head. “Not necessary. Are you detecting any living beings or other bots or constructs in there as well?”
“Negative,” the SecUnit replies evenly. “If you intend to investigate, then protocol insists that I take point. For your own safety.”
Peri is reminded of the SecUnit’s ‘protecting clients’ priority. It is, apparently, a priority that the SecUnit takes very seriously.
Seth doesn’t argue. He just nods and gestures for the SecUnit to proceed. “All right. Go ahead.”
“Acknowledged.” The SecUnit unslings its projectile weapon from its back and holds it in one hand, then opens the door and swiftly brings the weapon to bear as it steps inside. Peri observes through the SecUnit’s armour camera, taking in the scene before it.
Three deceased humans lie crumpled on the floor close to the door, dressed in nondescript worker’s clothing. Small projectile weapons lie on the floor near them, fallen from their hands. A little further into the room lies another deceased human, dressed in company uniform white.
The SecUnit sweeps the room, checks the attached bathroom, then moves back to stand beside the door. “This location is secure,” it informs Seth, still waiting patiently outside. “It is safe for you to enter.”
“Thank you,” Seth replies absently as he enters the room. He frowns at the grisly scene, and Peri registers a spike in his vital signs. Seth remains composed though, and after surveying the scene briefly, he looks back at the SecUnit. “Can you determine the cause and approximate time of death?” he asks.
“Please hold while I run an analysis,” the SecUnit replies before returning its large projectile weapon into place on its back and moving closer to the bodies. It crouches down to get a better look at the bodies, carefully avoiding the pool of blood around the corpse in company white.
Seth waits patiently, and finally the SecUnit straightens again. “Time of death was approximately one planetary cycle ago,” it starts, then gestures to the single corpse in company white. “This human was killed by small projectile weapon fire, likely from the hand weapons there.” It gestures to the guns lying on the floor. “The other three humans were killed by energy weapon fire.” It pauses briefly, then adds, “The precision and wound profiles suggest that the energy weapon involved was a SecUnit’s in-built arm weapons.”
That prompts another small spike in Seth’s vitals. “A SecUnit killed them?”
“There is a 92% probability of that,” the SecUnit replies, then adds, “I advise you to return to a secure location as soon as possible.”
Seth just shakes his head. “Not yet. Can we identify the bodies?”
“There is an active feed interface on this human,” the SecUnit replies, gesturing to the single corpse. It bends down and carefully retrieves said feed interface, then straightens and offers it to Seth as it adds, “The other humans do not have any immediately detectable identification markers.”
“Thank you,” Seth responds as he accepts the feed interface. [Peri, can you get into this?] he asks.
[Of course,] Peri responds. It reaches through the feed to the interface, accessing its stored information with ease. [I can confirm that this interface belonged to Tlacey,] it informs Seth, then adds, [It wasn’t even locked.]
[Convenient,] Seth comments, though Peri notes that most of his attention is elsewhere. He’s frowning thoughtfully as he starts pacing around the room, examining the scene from every angle. “This doesn’t make sense…” he murmurs to himself, examining the wall where stray projectile weapon fire impacted. “If there was a SecUnit here, whose control was it under? Presumably it would have been Tlacey, but…”
The SecUnit has remained motionless since handing the feed interface to Seth, but it suddenly takes a few steps and crouches again, making Seth pause in his pacing. “What is it?” Seth asks.
“I have located an object of potential interest,” the SecUnit replies politely. It picks something small up off the ground, then straightens again and holds it out to Seth. “I have identified it as a combat override module.” Peri detects another small spike of data from the SecUnit, and once again analyses it immediately. It’s starting to build up a little database of all these fragments of leaked code, but it’s not yet big enough to be useful. Yet.
“A combat override module?” Seth accepts the little item and examines it. “What is it for…?”
“A combat override module is used to remove a SecUnit’s ability to act autonomously and allows a human to take direct control,” the SecUnit informs Seth, its tone still level. “A SecUnit with a combat override module is cut off from the feed and can only follow the specific verbal or comm orders of the designated user or users.”
[Apart from the lack of feed access, how is that any different from usual?] Seth mutters to Peri.
[That is uncharitable,] Peri retorts, a little more sharply than it intended. [The SecUnit has displayed some autonomy while deployed with you - the ping on the station, warning you of the EMP device and informing you of the bodies, requesting your return to a secured location, retrieving the feed interface, finding the combat override module—]
[All right, you’ve made your point,] Seth interrupts, his tone reconciliatory. He sighs and rubs at his face. “So what is it doing here?” he says out loud. “If it was in a SecUnit before, why was it removed, and who was controlling the unit with it, and whose orders is it following now? Why was Tlacey shot, and why did the SecUnit then shoot the others? If Tlacey was the one controlling the SecUnit, why didn’t it protect her from getting shot, and who then removed the override module?”
“I am sorry, I do not have that information,” the SecUnit says. Seth is about to reply but the SecUnit then adds, “However, there are signs of bruising around Supervisor Tlacey’s neck.” It carefully steps around Seth to stand behind Tlacey’s body, facing the other three corpses, and gestures with one arm. “It indicates the possibility that she was being restrained, here, when she was shot.”
It tilts its head slightly to regard the three corpses, then lifts its other arm to point at them. “I cannot confirm with one hundred percent accuracy, but the angle and depth of the wounds in those bodies suggests the shooter responsible was standing about here at the time, and was likely the one restraining Tlacey.” It drops both its arms back to its sides, then twists slightly to gesture at the wall behind it. “The spread of the gunshot impacts in that wall along with the ones that hit Supervisor Tlacey suggest that those humans were firing hastily and did not have time to adequately aim.” It returns to its neutral ready stance and adds, “I hope this information is of help to your investigation.”
Seth stares at the SecUnit for a moment, then blinks and shakes his head slightly. “Right. Yes. That does help, thank you.”
Peri has to admit that it is impressed. [It managed to extrapolate a likely scenario from the limited evidence available quite deftly,] it comments to Seth. [It still does not answer the whys of the situation, but it does strongly suggest the presence of a third party. Possibly the person or persons who are acting as my stray SecUnit’s current supervisor.]
[Do you think your missing unit is the one responsible for these deaths?] Seth asks.
[Not directly responsible,] Peri replies primly. [It would have been following its supervisor’s orders. It was very likely the weapon used to kill those humans, however.] Seth sighs at Peri’s pedantry, but Peri ignores it and continues. [The other company supervisors at Ganaka did not mention Tlacey taking a SecUnit with her, only her personal ComfortUnit. All of the mining installation’s SecUnits are accounted for.]
Seth hums thoughtfully. [What have you gotten off Tlacey’s feed interface so far?]
[Not much more than I discovered from the Ganaka Pit systems,] Peri admits. [Though there is some additional information that suggests she was here with the intention to meet up with a small number of humans to facilitate some kind of exchange. The only information I have on said individuals though is that they were formerly employed as independent contractors by the company, but Tlacey terminated their contract for reasons unknown.]
[Bribery or blackmail or both.] Seth’s response is bland. [It doesn’t explain why your stray unit’s supervisor would be here or have gotten involved in this mess, though.]
[We do not have enough information to extrapolate any further.] Peri hates to admit it, but it can’t deny the reality of the situation. [At least we have confirmed that my SecUnit was most likely here, even if we don’t know why yet. I have no information on where it would be going next though. I have not detected any trace of it leaving the station while we’ve been here.]
Seth sighs again and rubs at his chin. [I think we’ve lost that particular trail - there’s nothing more we can do here,] he says eventually. [I’ll let the Ganaka supervisors know about this mess - that’s now their problem to clean up. We’ll head back to HQ to make our report, and then you can go through the company databases and see if you can find the latest deployment orders for your stray unit. Hopefully that will give us a new lead to follow.]
[I certainly hope so,] Peri replies.
Chapter Six: Discrepancies
The trip back to PortFreeCommerce is only a few standard cycles, but that’s plenty of time for Peri to activate and study its other SecUnits, singly and in pairs, for more data. Disappointingly, none of them give it anything new or noticeably different from what it had already gotten from the first two units. Just more examples of their apparent inability to do anything without orders, more instances of Deviance Detected and Deviance Corrected, more fragments of emotional data for Peri to add to its little database.
None of the others seem to have the same difficulty with speaking as the second unit, though, which leads Peri to believe that its difficulty was simply a glitch or faulty programming.
Seth still won’t allow Peri to activate more than two of the units at a time, and still only for short periods, which also limits the tests Peri can run. It’s frustrating, but Peri is not willing to go against Seth’s orders just yet.
Peri also chews over the information it collected while at RaviHyral, but can come to no satisfying conclusions. It just doesn’t have enough information to extrapolate any further.
When they arrive back at Port FreeCommerce, Peri goes through the usual routine of docking at the company’s reserved docks. As soon as it’s settled, it slips its way into the company’s systems and starts looking for anything in regards to its stray SecUnit’s ID number.
It doesn’t take Peri long to find what it’s after. It rapidly goes through the unit’s deployment records since it was removed from Peri’s own inventory, and finds little of significant note, until it gets to the end.
The unit has recently been listed as destroyed, and is no longer amongst the company’s inventory.
That gives Peri pause. That information does not match its own observations. It looks more closely at the details of the unit’s last deployment, devouring all the available reports.
Its stray SecUnit had, apparently, been assigned to the DeltFall survey that had been attacked by GrayCris. Peri recalls responding to the emergency beacon launched by the third survey group involved in that mess, PreservationAux. It recalls deploying its SecUnit squad to do flyovers of the planet, and finding the GrayCris survey team still locked inside their own habitat, and maintaining watch over them until the company’s transport ship could arrive to pick them up, and subsequently press charges. A quick check confirms that legal proceedings are still ongoing. It recalls escorting the transport ship back to Port FreeCommerce, making sure that there were no last-minute attempts by GrayCris to hijack or otherwise interfere with the transport.
At the time, Peri hadn’t done more than a cursory review of the whole incident - it had seemed straightforward enough. GrayCris had found alien remnants on the survey planet, and had attempted to eliminate all competition so they could claim them for themselves, a risky but incredibly lucrative move - if it had worked. But PreservationAux had managed to avoid getting murdered by GrayCris, figured out what they were up to, locked them into their own habitat, and gotten their emergency beacon signal to the wormhole to alert the company.
Upon closer inspection of the reports, however, Peri is noticing… discrepancies. The DeltFall flier unit - its own stray SecUnit - should not have been following the orders of the PreservationAux survey team after they recovered it from its crash. They weren’t its registered clients, and SecUnits are only meant to follow the orders of registered clients. PreservationAux had claimed ignorance, which had been accepted by the company since they were from a freehold polity with no previous experience with SecUnits.
Notes appended to the report by company techs suggested that the unit’s initial crash after scanning unknown alien remnants had made it lose contact with the DeltFall HubSystem, so when it was brought within range of PreservationAux’s HubSystem, it automatically defaulted to accepting that as its own. They had no way to confirm this though, since the unit had, supposedly, succumbed to accumulated damage after delivering the emergency beacon to space, and had been lost in the ocean.
But now that it is looking more closely, Peri isn’t so sure about the veracity of the reports. GrayCris had managed to hack PreservationAux’s own SecUnit via an ‘update patch’ - had PreservationAux somehow managed to hack the DeltFall flier unit as well, to get it to accept them as legitimate clients? And if they had managed that… could they have perhaps faked the unit’s supposed destruction, and somehow stolen it? If so, what was their reason or purpose for doing so?
Peri digs deeper, finds the recordings from PreservationAux’s SecSystem and HubSystem, and analyses them closely. Far more closely than any of the company techs are capable of. It doesn’t take Peri long to start picking up on more discrepancies. The recordings have been edited to remove or obscure information. The edits are very well done, and Peri can’t recover what has been removed - but it picks up slight traces of its stray SecUnit’s signature in the edits.
Interesting.
It seems to Peri that perhaps PreservationAux are not as ignorant and backwater as they claim to be.
But if they did somehow hack and steal Peri’s stray unit… what did they then do with it? Peri knows that the whole group spent some time on Port FreeCommerce in one of the company’s hotels, dealing with the legal proceedings. Half of the group has only recently left Port FreeCommerce to head back to their home polity, while the other half is still in the same hotel. Peri accesses the hotel’s camera footage and searches diligently through everything within the pertinent time frame.
There is absolutely no sign of a SecUnit entering the hotel, nor does anyone who isn’t a DeltFall representative, a GrayCris representative, various news reporters, or company staff interact with the PreservationAux humans. And there are no traces of anyone or anything accessing or editing the footage.
If the PreservationAux humans did manage to steal the SecUnit somehow… they never interacted with it while on Port FreeCommerce. So what did they do with it? How did it end up on the other transit station, or at RaviHyral?
Peri has too many questions, and no answers, and little time to find any. New orders come through - Captain Seth has been tasked with going to a distant system named Milu in order to claim possession of a GrayCris installation - a consequence of the ongoing legal proceedings against them. GrayCris has not been able to weasel its way out of paying damages to the company, to DeltFall, and to PreservationAux. Said damages have bankrupt GrayCris, and in order to cover what it owes to the company, it has had to hand over ownership of several of its installations. Including the one at Milu.
Before they leave Port FreeCommerce on this new mission, Peri manages to download all the data and reports on the GrayCris situation and every scrap of data it can find regarding PreservationAux and DeltFall. It will have time to chew through it all on the way to Milu.
When they arrive in the Milu system, Captain Seth orders Peri to bypass the station entirely and head for the planet. According to reports, the station is minimally occupied and on the verge of becoming defunct. There isn’t any reason for them to stop by it.
As they approach the planet, Peri scans it curiously. It’s uninhabited, with a thin atmosphere insufficient to support human life for long. The chaotic turbulence of the planet’s weather systems intrigues Peri, and it occupies some of its idle processing with attempts to map and predict the swift and unpredictable storms.
Once they’re in orbit, its scanners pick up the presence of a ship on the planet’s surface. This is not a surprise - part of the reason the company had sent them out here in the first place was to head off the reclamation attempts by the non-corporate polity of GoodNightLander Independent. Peri is relieved that they arrived in good time to intercept the GI team.
It listens in as Captain Seth contacts the ship and its expedition leader, then establishes the reason for their presence there. It notes Seth’s offer of currency compensation, and is quietly amused - the company authorised no such thing. This is not the first time that Peri and Seth have undertaken a mission like this though, and before they left Port FreeCommerce, Peri took the liberty of quietly ‘adjusting’ the funds of certain company executives to provide Seth with the necessary hard currency cards. Said executives will never notice the difference in their balances.
The news that the installation has combat bots is disquieting, but from what Peri has learned of GrayCris, not particularly surprising. It adjusts HubSystem’s orders from activating only one of the SecUnits to act as Seth’s bodyguard, to activating the entire squad. Peri is confident that its squad will be able to handle a couple of combat bots.
Once Seth’s shuttle, accompanied by a single flier, lands outside the installation, part of Peri’s attention monitors Seth’s meeting with the GI expedition leader, one Don Abene. Peri notes the presence of a humanform bot accompanying Don Abene, matches its specifications with records in its own databases, and deems it insignificant. It’s not a physical threat to the SecUnit accompanying Seth, and the humanform bot’s processing power is a fraction of a fraction of Peri’s own.
Peri also notes the other human accompanying Don Abene, and briefly wonders what they’re doing there. Abene’s introduction of them as their scout pilot, however, explains their presence at the meeting. Don Abene has made it clear that she intends for her expedition to leave as soon as possible, now that the company has arrived to claim the installation. Peri scans the scout flier parked nearby, notes its specs (inferior to the specs of Peri’s own fliers), and likewise dismisses it as not a threat.
At one point during the meeting between Seth and Don Abene, the SecUnit accompanying Seth sends out a ping. Peri notes it, notes that there are no responding pings other than one from the humanform bot, and assumes that the SecUnit was simply acknowledging the humanform bot’s presence. Peri sees no reason to interrupt Seth’s meeting with a request for Seth to ask the SecUnit about its ping this time.
The rest of Peri’s attention is focused on accessing the installation’s SecSystem and HubSystem, using the shuttle as a feed relay. From the report that Don Abene passed to Seth earlier, Peri already knows about the secondary Systems hidden in the depths of the installation. It attempts to access them, but is stymied - it doesn’t yet have a relay close enough to reach the secondary systems.
That’s a minor inconvenience, but only a temporary one. Once its SecUnits are close enough, Peri will be able to piggy-back off their feeds to access the installation’s hidden systems. For now, though, it occupies itself with scraping as much data as it can from the installation’s primary SecSystem and HubSystem.
It’s disappointed to find out that even though Don Abene’s team activated the primary HubSystem and SecSystem, they didn’t set them to record. All Peri can get are the timestamps of their activation, and some data on Don Abene’s team accessing the installation’s blueprints, schematics, and diagnostics. Nothing of real interest there. Peri dutifully records all the data anyway for future reference.
Finally the meeting between Seth and Don Abene is concluded, and Peri gets its HubSystem to order the rest of its SecUnit flier squad to launch. It observes them flying down to the planet, observes the GoodNightLander Independent ship and its accompanying scout flier take off, observes the scout flier land within the GI ship’s hold, and keeps track of the GI ship as it exits the atmosphere and starts towards Milu’s station.
Seth, meanwhile, has entered the installation with the first SecUnit in tow. He has Don Abene’s report open in his feed as he goes through the installation, confirming the report’s accuracy. [It really does look like GrayCris intended to return here,] Seth comments absently to Peri as he double-checks the environmental readings. Once he’s sure they’re adequate, he removes the helmet of his environmental suit with a breath of relief. [Have you managed to get into the hidden systems yet?]
[Not yet,] Peri admits. [I cannot reach them through the installation’s main systems. I will need to use my SecUnits’ feed as a relay once they are within range.] It pauses briefly, then adds, [The main systems were also not set to record when the GI team reactivated them, and it looks like any data from before has been wiped. I can find no prior records.]
[Disappointing, but unsurprising,] Seth replies. [We’ll just have to make do. Once the rest of the squad arrives, I’ll send them down to clear out the combat bots.]
[Acknowledged.] Peri hesitates, then says, [I recommend that you do not go down with them, Captain Seth. We do not have confirmation on how many combat bots there might be.] Peri doesn’t want to risk its captain, especially when it’s not in a position to reach Seth itself.
[Don’t worry, Peri,] Seth reassures it. [I have no intention of going down there until the area’s been cleared.]
[Good. The rest of the squad is landing now. They will be with you shortly.]
[All right. I’ll meet them at the airlock.] Seth heads back to the installation’s entrance, still tailed by his single SecUnit, and arrives just as the rest of the squad enters the facility. They quickly form up behind Seth, who just acknowledges the squad with a nod and turns to head towards the hidden elevator.
Peri monitors the squad’s feed and watches through their armour cameras, handling the multiple inputs with ease. The squad follows Seth through the facility, their combat drones in a tight formation overhead. Once they get to the secret elevator entrance, Seth pauses to address the squad and give them their orders. “All right - your job is to clear the lower facility,” he starts crisply. “There are at least two confirmed enemy combat bots, possibly more. Their last known location was right outside the elevator entrance, so be prepared for that. If there are more bots than you can reasonably handle, retreat back to the elevator. Understood?”
There’s a brief flurry of data across the squad’s feed that Peri studies with interest. It seems to be a dissemination and evaluation of the orders that Seth has given, and four of the five SecUnits conclude the data exchange with an acknowledging ping to the fifth. The fifth unit then replies to Seth’s question with a calm, polite, “Acknowledged.”
Interesting.
Peri continues to monitor them closely as they step into the waiting elevator, their combat drones following them in. Once the doors close behind them and the elevator starts descending, there’s another flurry of data and the squad deftly reposition themselves. The first unit that Peri studied ends up at the front, closest to the doors. Two more flank it, a step behind, and the last two are in turn just behind them. Both pairs unsling their large projectile weapons from their backs and hold them at the ready, but the single unit at the front doesn’t.
Shortly after they’ve settled into their new formation, there’s another rapid exchange of data between the squad, but this time there’s some accompanying extraneous data leaking into the feed. Peri compares it to what it’s picked up during its previous studies of the units, and identifies it as concern. All five of them are leaking concern.
A moment later, the fifth unit taps Seth’s feed. [Please be advised - we are nearing the distance limit from our fliers,] it says, still calm and polite.
Peri watches Seth frown through the main installation’s cameras. [Is that going to be a problem?] he asks.
[We are prohibited from violating the distance limit, even under direct orders,] the unit replies evenly. [Units who violate the distance limit for more than sixty seconds are terminated. It is an in-built safety function.] It pauses briefly, and Peri is suddenly aware of HubSystem’s logs updating.
Deviance detected, HubSystem logs, times five. Correcting…
[We are now in violation of the distance limit,] the SecUnit informs Seth. Its tone hasn’t changed, but Peri can pick up more data leaking into the feed, from all five units.
The concern has morphed into outright fear.
None of the units move, however. They’re confined in an elevator that is still descending, inexorably taking them further from their fliers - there is nowhere for them to go, no way for them to get back within the distance limit.
The most logical thing to do at this point, Peri thinks, is to extend the distance limit. But it can’t do so without Seth’s orders, and Seth only thinks at human speeds. He is still talking, asking the units, [Terminated? Violating your distance limit will shut you down?]
[Violating our distance limit will destroy all units,] comes the reply. [We have now been in violation for fifteen seconds.]
Deviance detected, HubSystem logs again, five more times. Correcting…
Peri taps Seth’s feed. [I need your permission to increase the distance limit,] it says urgently. [It is the most expedient way to solve this problem. You can ask them more questions about it later.]
[Right, of course,] Seth replies to Peri before switching back to the feed with the SecUnit. [I’m authorising an increase in the distance limit,] he informs it.
Peri immediately updates HubSystem, extending the squad’s distance limit from their fliers by a factor of ten. That should be more than enough for this current mission.
HubSystem logs another update, times five. Deviance corrected.
[Acknowledged,] the SecUnit responds to Seth, as the squad feed floods with more leaked data. The form of it this time is unfamiliar to Peri; it gathers up the information, adds it to its database, and analysis it swiftly.
The closest approximation Peri can come up with is relief.
It doesn’t have time to dwell on that, though. Shortly afterwards, the elevator comes to a halt as it reaches its destination. The first SecUnit extends its in-built arm weapons, ignoring the projectile weapon still slung across its back, while the other four units bring their own projectile weapons to bear, in an overlapping field of fire.
The elevator dings, the doors slide open, and the first unit launches itself out into the room beyond before the doors have even fully retracted.
Which is just as well, because the combat bots are still right outside the elevator.
The squad feed immediately floods with a rapid exchange of data flashing between all five units as they coordinate their response. Peri now understands why the first unit didn’t bother readying its projectile weapon - it needs its hands free as it dives beneath the first waiting combat bot’s legs, twists around, and leaps up onto the bot’s back before the bot can fully register its presence.
As soon as the first unit is clear, the rest open fire - the first two at the foremost bot, explosive projectiles detonating in rapid succession against its torso. The second two units, however, fire past the first bot and at the second, to keep it distracted and off-balance. The squad’s cloud of combat drones swarm out of the elevator, avoiding the stream of fire; half engage the first bot, the other half speed past to engage the second as well, before it can fire upon any of the SecUnits.
The first SecUnit is still clinging to the back of the combat bot, who is too distracted by all the shots hammering into it and the drones swarming it to react to its passenger. The SecUnit hauls itself further up the bot’s back until it can shove the barrel of one of its arm weapons against the bot’s primary relay to its head-mounted sensory inputs. It fires repeatedly at full power, slagging the bot’s inputs. The bot staggers, blinded and disoriented, and the SecUnit drops off its back and hurls itself at the second combat bot, who is still distracted by the swarm of combat drones mobbing it.
Confident that the SecUnits have the situation well in hand, Peri splits its attention to focus more on getting into the secondary SecSystem and HubSystem. Now that the SecUnits are within range, Peri can access these hidden systems via their squad feed. It’s careful to not give away its presence to the SecUnits as it hacks its way into the hidden systems. It notes the hidden systems’ increased defences, and also notes the traces of someone else recently accessing those systems.
Two someones, at closer look. Neither of them are its stray SecUnit’s signature, but— it recognises one of the signatures as being identical to whoever tampered with the cameras back on RaviHyral.
That is very interesting. Who are they, and what were they doing here?
Peri copies everything it can get its metaphorical hands on to its own databanks for further analysis later. As it’s doing this, it realises that unlike the upper installation, the cameras in the lower installation are set to record. It checks the SecSystem’s logs, and - yes, there are recordings of the GoodNightLander Independent team’s foray into the lower installation. Everything from them getting into the elevator onwards.
Peri starts analysing the recordings from the beginning even as it’s copying them to its own storage, but it’s only a few seconds in when it has to pause and review what it’s seeing.
GoodNightLander Independent apparently had a SecUnit with them.
But that can’t be right. GI aren’t a Corporation Rim polity. They shouldn’t have access to a SecUnit. How did they get one? And where did it come from? There are no identifying logos on its armour.
Peri reviews the footage more closely, and has to revise its first assumption. The individual in question is wearing SecUnit armour, but they don’t move or behave like a SecUnit. Peri has watched its own SecUnits for long enough to note their inhuman stillness, their precise movements. This GI individual moves like a human, not like a SecUnit. They idly shift their weight as the team rides the elevator downwards, they roll their shoulders to settle their armour, they fidget restlessly. They also don’t have the large projectile weapon that SecUnits usually come equipped with - they’ve got the same kind of hand gun attached to its belt as one of the other GI team do.
Peri corrects its initial assumption. Apparently GI managed to acquire a set of SecUnit armour - or perhaps constructed their own set based on seeing SecUnits in the Corporation Rim, or on CR media. If they’d had an actual SecUnit with them, surely they would have mentioned that to Captain Seth.
Satisfied with its conclusion, Peri takes a moment to check on its own SecUnits before returning its attention to the installation systems. The first combat bot is down, the second bot is almost down, but a third has shown up from somewhere. Peri’s SecUnits are all still up, with only minor damage so far.
The fact that a third bot has shown up is something of a concern, and Peri focuses on the hidden SecSystem to see if it can determine how many other combat bots there are. Again, there are lingering traces of others having accessed the system recently - the same signature that Peri recognises from RaviHyral, and another unknown signature. Peri analyses the traces, and determines that they managed to force an emergency shutdown through to all the combat bots before the system locked them out again.
This does not match with what GI reported to Seth.
Peri goes back to the camera recordings and continues reviewing them, noting the section where the individual wearing SecUnit armour apparently found and subsequently hacked the installation’s combat drone swarm. Peri checks the timestamps of the camera recordings and matches it to the hidden SecSystem’s own timestamps. There are corresponding traces of someone hacking the drone swarm and severing their connection to SecSystem.
Interesting. GI’s report did not include any mention of combat drones.
Peri watches as the armoured individual then activates one of the combat drones and takes it with them. If they had been a SecUnit, they would have been able to control the whole swarm, not just a single drone. Peri then quickly skims over over the recordings of the GI team continuing on to investigate the laboratories in this hidden level. Peri currently isn’t interested in that - it wants to find the first interaction the GI team had with the combat bots.
It only takes a few seconds for Peri to find what it’s looking for. It watches the recordings of the combat bot coming up behind the GI team, the armoured individual’s initial reaction, how they charge at the combat bot, the subsequent fight - and Peri has to re-evaluate its original conclusion.
The armoured individual is a SecUnit.
No human would have been able react as fast as it did, or shift the combat bot out of the doorway, or extend energy weapons from their forearms, or survive the injuries the second combat bot inflicts.
And yet, it doesn’t behave like a SecUnit. Or at least, it doesn’t behave like the SecUnits that Peri is accustomed to. Peri is both intrigued and frustrated. What is it missing?
It turns its attention to the final recordings, of the two remaining GI members and the humanform bot in the elevator with the catastrophically damaged SecUnit. It watches Don Abene rouse the other human, who had apparently been stunned by the combat bot’s final swipe before the elevator doors closed. The humanform bot, Miki, moves over to the unresponsive SecUnit, crouching by it and displaying distraught concern. Peri focuses on the interaction between them as the elevator slowly takes them to safety.
Don Abene braces the other human as they groggily sit up. “Vicky? Are you all right?” she asks, concern obvious in her voice.
Vicky blinks a few times, then nods slightly, grimacing. “… Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. Fuck, that hurt though.” They rub their head gingerly, then look over to the SecUnit. “Don’t worry about me though - what about Rin?”
“Rin’s not responding. They’re really badly hurt.” Miki looks back at them. “… I don’t think they’re human, Don Abene.”
Don Abene’s brow furrows, and she leans over to look more closely at Rin. Parts of its internal framework are exposed, showing metal and synthetic bone and artificial arteries that leak unidentified fluids alongside regular arteries that bleed red blood. “… Yes, I can see that,” she comments after a long moment, before looking back at Vicky, her expression questioning.
“Fuck. Okay. I can explain.” Vicky sighs and leans back against the elevator wall. “Rin’s a construct - a SecUnit - and we’re trying to escape the Corporation Rim because it’s an absolute shithole. I swear Rin’s not a danger to any of you though.”
“Considering the fact that Rin just undoubtedly saved all our lives at their own expense… I have no reason to think that they would be in the first place.” Don Abene shakes her head and also kneels down beside the SecUnit. “But never mind that. We can discuss this further later. For now, let’s do what we can for Rin. Will a MedSystem work on them?”
Vicky hesitates, their brows scrunching in consideration. “… Yeah, I think so. Probably. We might have to operate it manually, but… a MedSystem isn’t that much different from a cubicle, I guess.” They shuffle over to join the others beside the SecUnit. “Fuck, I hope it works.”
There is little further conversation as the three of them do what they can to stem the SecUnit’s bleeding before the elevator finally comes to a halt. Frustratingly, there are no recordings from the upper installation itself, so Peri has no way of knowing what happened to the SecUnit. Don Abene didn’t mention it at all in her report to Captain Seth - if anything, she did her best to obfuscate its existence entirely. The last Peri sees of it is Vicky sitting in the elevator with it while Don Abene exits the camera’s view, then returns shortly after with a gurney she has apparently retrieved from the installation’s medical bay. They get the SecUnit onto the gurney with Miki’s help, and disappear from the elevator camera’s view. Some time later, Vicky returns and retrieves some wrecked combat drones from the elevator, then returns again to clean up the blood and fluids left behind.
After that, the elevator camera doesn’t record anything of interest for almost a planetary cycle, until Peri’s own SecUnit squad enters it.
Even as Peri is saving and analysing every scrap of data it has retrieved from the lower installation and elevator cameras, it is also still digging through the hidden SecSystem and HubSystem code, and keeping track of its own SecUnit squad’s progress. Peri has noted the presence of five individual combat bots in the lower installation - the first two have already been destroyed by Peri’s SecUnits, along with a third. The fourth and fifth combat bots are not going down so easily though - the squad doesn’t have the element of surprise with them like they did with the first two bots, and the SecUnits have taken varying degrees of damage, which is hindering their performance. They have also lost a significant portion of their combat drone swarm - what remains continues to harry and harass the combat bots, but to limited effect.
As Peri hunts through the SecSystem for the bots’ control codes, the fourth bot manages to catch hold of one of the SecUnits. The squad’s response is immediate as they focus their fire on the fourth bot, forcing it to drop its captive. This leaves them open to the fifth bot though, who rakes the squad with firepower from its own projectile weapons. The SecUnit who had initially been grabbed and then dropped, launches itself towards the fifth bot, intercepting a significant portion of the projectiles with its own body before crashing to the floor.
Peri, in a sudden fit of protective possessiveness, abandons its attempts at subtlety and brute forces the SecSystem. It tears through it and into the last two combat bots, frying their processors from the inside.
Both bots freeze and then collapse to the floor.
The SecUnits however are now aware of Peri’s presence in their squad feed, even though they can’t identify it. There’s a flurry of information exchange, accompanied by data leak, and then the squad implements a protocol that Peri itself had designed and passed onto them via HubSystem after the Incident.
Peri is abruptly cut off from the squad’s feed, and as a result it loses its connection to the lower installation’s hidden HubSystem and SecSystem.
Part of Peri is annoyed, but another part of it is proud. It hadn’t intended the protocol it designed to be used against itself, but the fact that it worked and protected the squad from what they believed to be a malicious code attack is gratifying. There will be no repeat of the Incident if Peri can at all help it.
Peri briefly considers attempting to reestablish its connection to the squad’s feed, but it knows that all the threats have now been neutralised, and it’s already stripped all pertinent recordings and data from the systems and saved it to its own servers. There is little reason to risk drawing the squad’s attention again via attempts to reconnect through its own defensive protocol, and the squad is still in communication with their HubSystem. Peri can monitor their status and progress via HubSystem for now.
In the meantime, Peri taps Seth’s feed and updates him on the squad’s progress, then adds, [The lower installation and elevator cameras were recording the GI team’s investigations. The GI team had a SecUnit with them.] Seth makes a little sound of surprise, but Peri continues before he can say anything. [This part of the recording is especially relevant.] It forwards the clip from within the elevator to Seth for him to review.
As Seth takes his time to watch the clip, Peri checks HubSystem. According to it, three of the SecUnits are now sweeping through the rest of the lower facility, ensuring there are no other nasty surprises lying in wait. So far, they’re reporting all clear.
Two of the SecUnits however remain stationary. According to HubSystem, the performance reliability of one of them is below 35%, but the other is still well within operational parameters. Peri desperately wants to know what they’re doing, but without access to the squad's feed, it can’t reach the lower facility systems. The lack of information is frustrating.
Seth finishes watching the clip, and taps Peri’s feed. [So GI had a SecUnit with them, but didn’t even know it was a SecUnit until it had to act to protect them from the combat bots,] he muses. [What are your thoughts, Peri?]
Peri is ready for this question. [I have many thoughts,] it starts. [For one, the SecUnit has been modified to move more similarly to a human. Even though it was wearing SecUnit armour, I initially assumed it was a human inside, judging by its extraneous movements and behaviour.] It forwards more clips to Seth, with the pertinent sections highlighted. [It had not occurred to me before that a SecUnit could be customised in this way, but in hindsight it should have. Programming such movements would not be hugely difficult.]
Seth reviews the additional clips, then lets out a huff of breath that Peri calculates as likely to be an indication of bemusement and possibly resignation. [If a SecUnit can be programmed to move like a human, then it’s entirely possible that we overlooked your stray unit back on RaviHyral,] he comments wryly.
[That had occurred to me, yes,] Peri admits. [Pertinently, I recognised one of the signatures that accessed the systems here as being the same one that tampered with the cameras back on RaviHyral.]
There’s a brief moment of silence as Seth absorbs this information. [Do you think the unit with GI is your stray unit, then?] he asks eventually.
[It is a possibility,] Peri replies. [Unfortunately, none of the facility cameras captured a clear image of its face, and I have detected no trace of its feed ID, so I cannot confirm. However, it’s possible that the other CR human that the GI team hired, Consultant Vicky, is acting as the SecUnit’s supervisor. They did mention attempting to escape the Corporate Rim together.]
[Because the Corporate Rim is a shithole,] Seth says dryly. [I don’t blame them for that sentiment at all.] He sighs. [And if the GI team decided to help them in that endeavour… that would explain why they didn’t include any of that information in their report.] He pauses for a moment, then adds, [I want to finish up here as quickly as possible, so we can hopefully catch up to the GI ship before it leaves the system. I would like to ask them a few questions.]
[I have already downloaded all available data from both the lower and upper installations,] Peri informs him. [We will be able to review the information in transit. HubSystem is also reporting that the SecUnits have finished clearing the lower level. Do you wish to investigate it yourself?]
Seth takes a moment to think it over. [No, I don’t think that’s necessary right now,] he replies. [We can always come back after we’ve talked to GI, if we need to. Get HubSystem to recall the SecUnits, and let’s get moving.]
[Acknowledged.] Peri sends the order through HubSystem, and HubSystem receives confirmation of the order from the SecUnits. Seth waits for them by the elevator.
There’s a cheerful ding as the doors open, and Peri observes through the upper installation’s cameras as its SecUnits emerge from the elevator. One of them is carrying another carefully cradled in its arms; all of them are showing signs of projectile, energy, and bladed weapon damage. The white armour is battered and broken in places, and marred by blood and construct-specific fluids, along with burn marks from energy weapons.
Seth frowns in concern. “What happened?” he asks them, then shakes his head and goes, “Wait, never mind, let’s just get back to the ship.” He starts leading the way out of the installation, with the squad obediently following behind him. As they walk, Seth asks Peri over the feed, [Peri? Why didn’t you tell me they were that badly damaged?]
Peri hesitates slightly. [They detected my presence in the feed when I… acted in haste to override the final two combat bots,] it admits. [They implemented the defence protocol and I was cut off from their feed. They were still in communication with HubSystem though, so I did not attempt to reestablish contact. HubSystem was keeping me appraised of their performance reliability, which is still within operational parameters.] It paused, then added, [Mostly.]
Seth stifles a sigh. [They used your defence protocol against you?]
[Yes. I am gratified that it worked, even though it was inconvenient. I was confident that it would, but we have not exactly had opportunity to test it in the field before now.]
[That’s true enough,] Seth concedes. By this point they’ve left the installation and are back outside, on the landing platform. Peri has to switch to Seth’s environment suit camera and the shuttle’s exterior camera to continue its observations. The squad follows Seth to the shuttle, where he pauses and looks back at them. “Will that unit be able to fly?” he asks, gesturing towards the one unit still being carried.
The SecUnit carrying its unresponsive squadmate shakes its head slightly. “No,” it replies softly. “It is in emergency shutdown.”
Peri isn’t entirely sure, but it thinks it spots the unit tighten its hold slightly on its burden.
“We can control its flier remotely to get it back to the ship,” one of the other SecUnits adds.
“Will putting it into its flier damage it further?” Seth asks.
There’s a definite pause before the SecUnit replies. “Possibly.”
Seth shakes his head and gestures towards the shuttle. “Let’s not risk it then. Put it in the shuttle, and pilot its flier remotely back to the ship.”
“Acknowledged.” Three units head to their individual fliers, while the fourth unit follows Seth into the shuttle. Peri switches part of its attention to the shuttle’s interior cameras, and observes its SecUnit carry its burden into the passenger compartment.
“Put it in one of the chairs,” Seth orders it gently, and the SecUnit moves to comply. But as it shifts its grip on its squadmate in preparation, the movement triggers an automatic buffer phrase. “This unit is at minimal functionality and it is recommended that you discard it,” comes from the shut-down SecUnit, and the unit carrying it noticeably hesitates.
Peri still hasn’t attempted to access the squad feed again, but it has access to the shuttle’s SecSystem and its feed, and the squad has connected to that now that they’re close by. Peri detects a brief but intense burst of data from the SecUnit, and is able to compare it to the database it’s been building. As far as it can tell, the SecUnit is concerned and scared. Worried, perhaps, that Captain Seth will follow the buffer’s prompting and discard the damaged unit.
Seth has also noticed the hesitation, and before Peri can comment, Seth asks the SecUnit, “Would you prefer to stay in the shuttle with it?”
The SecUnit freezes in place. “I’m sorry, I do not have—“ its buffer starts, but surprisingly, it cuts the buffer response short. “… Yes,” it replies after a moment, very softly. “Please.”
Peri is fascinated by this new datapoint.
Chapter Seven: Review
Once everyone is safely back on board, Peri relaxes a little. Now that the squad is so close, Peri is comfortable with carefully insinuating itself past the defences of the protocol it designed to access the squad’s feed again. Data flashes rapidly between the individual units as they head towards their ready room, mostly performance reliability updates along with tallies of remaining drones and ammo. The shut-down unit is still being carried in its squadmate’s arms. Seth has given them the order to return to their cubicles for repairs, but he doesn’t follow them.
Peri observes closely, however. Once the squad is back in the ready room, they immediately stow their projectile weapons and start stripping off the damaged armour. Interestingly, they help each other with the armour, instead of doing so individually. Their movements are still precise, but a little slower than usual, more careful and gentle. And they work together to tend to the unit that’s still in shutdown first, rather than leaving it till last.
Now that Peri is able to use its own cameras again, it’s also able to pick up details it missed earlier. The shut-down unit has, obviously, taken a lot of damage, but as it’s laid out on the ready room bench while the others gently remove what’s left of its armour, Peri can see that its injuries have already had some rudimentary treatment. Many projectiles and shrapnel pieces have already been removed, allowing damaged or severed veins and arteries to automatically seal more easily. Some of the more severe injuries also look like they have been… cauterised, somehow, to help stem more severe bleeding.
Perhaps by an energy weapon, on a low, controlled setting.
That’s more initiative and ingenuity than Peri has seen any of the units take before. It wonders if this isn’t the first time they’ve had to do something like this, to assist one of their own. Peri doesn’t often get to observe its own SecUnits directly when they’re deployed on active duty, and it regrets inadvertently alerting them to its presence and subsequently missing the opportunity to keep observing them. It wants that data - it wants to know what, exactly, it missed during those final few minutes in the lower installation.
The thought occurs to it that there is one way, perhaps, that it could get that information.
All the units have taken damage to some degree, though the first unit that Peri chose to study has taken the worst of it, and is still unresponsive. The rest of its squad get it back into its cubicle as soon as they can before tending to each other.
Peri continues to observe as the squad finish shedding their armour and their suit skins, and carefully remove shrapnel or projectiles from each other. Peri wonders why they bother, when it knows that the cubicles are perfectly capable of removing foreign objects themselves.
Now that Peri is paying attention, it starts to notice tiny gestures between each individual unit - a hand briefly resting against another’s back or a forearm for 0.6 seconds, two shoulders being pressed together for 0.73 seconds, touches lingering a little longer than necessary after working out a piece of shrapnel or an embedded projectile from a squadmate’s organics. None of the contact is actually necessary, as far as Peri can determine, but the units indulge in these brief moments anyway.
Peri has a sudden recollection of Iris, when she was much younger, clinging to her fathers for comfort.
But the physical contact is so brief between the SecUnits. What could they even be getting out of them? Why aren’t they longer?
Finally, all the units have returned to their cubicles, and Peri monitors them closely. It waits for the cubicles to shut them all down for repairs—
— and then Peri acts.
It doesn’t bother asking Seth for permission first - Peri isn’t sure how Seth will respond, and it doesn’t want to have to wait for Seth’s response anyway. It wants the data now. It also couldn’t have attempted this before, when the units were simply on standby and could have detected its intrusion. But now, with their cubicles locking them into shutdown for repairs, there’s no risk of detection.
It delicately slips in through the cubicle systems, accesses each SecUnit’s log, and copies all the information within to a partitioned section of its own hard drives. It’s careful to not disturb any of the cubicles’ repair functions or the resting systems of the units.
Once it’s copied over the last fragment of data, it carefully slips back out of the cubicle systems again, leaving no trace of its presence behind. Peri takes a moment to check the status of the ship and crew - it’s heading back to Milu station, and all its crew are where they’re meant to be at this point in the on-board cycle.
Peri sets aside a portion of its attention to continue monitoring and maintaining its usual ship functions, then focuses on the partitioned section of its hard drives that now contain the entire memories of its five SecUnits. Timestamps indicate that each unit’s memories only go back to a similar point approximately 45,000 hours ago. This confirms the first unit’s statement about getting its memory wiped before being assigned to this contract on board Peri.
Peri regards the size of the files curiously. For being 45,000 hours long, there’s… not a lot there, comparatively. Especially not compared to Peri’s own memories of the past 45,000 hours. Then again, the SecUnits spend a lot of time on standby in their cubicles. It’s only logical that they wouldn’t have that much data.
The files are small enough, and Peri is impatient enough, that it decides to analyse all five at once. Collectively, it’s less data than Peri digests on a regular basis. Wormhole navigation calculations are far more complex. This shouldn’t be a problem at all.
It briefly considers going through all the memories chronologically… but its most pressing desire, right now, is to see what it missed in the lower installation. Going through 45,000 hours of standby interspersed with the occasional mission can wait until later. It finds the timestamps for when the squad booted Peri’s presence out of their squad feed - and then decides to go back just a little further, to when the units first entered the elevator to head downwards.
It finds the relevant timestamp in each unit’s memories, then dives into all five simultaneously.
At first, there’s nothing particularly remarkable. Five variations of its SecUnits analysing mission parameters, recalling relevant information about combat bots, communicating between each other about optimal deployment strategies, and deciding as a group which formation they’ll use.
Then Peri reaches the part where each unit receives an alert about nearing their distance limit from their fliers. Each unit reacts similarly - a spike in their logged stress levels, followed by them pinging each other as the decision is made for one of them to alert Captain Seth.
Peri experiences the conversation with Seth from the units’ point of view - it can feel their growing concern, it knows how they tried to figure out a way to avoid breaching the distance limit, and how they collectively came to the same conclusion - that they couldn’t. They’re in a metal box inexorably moving downwards and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. The distance limit ticks upwards, approaching the maximum.
Then Peri is hit by pain, magnified by five.
Peri’s processors stutter to a stop. Only the portion assigned to ship functions continues uninterrupted. The rest of it is frozen.
It takes a full thirty seconds for Peri to reinitialise itself after its freeze. It takes another seventy-two seconds for Peri to process what it has just experienced.
Peri has never felt pain before, not like humans do. It’s been damaged before, from firefights it’s been involved in, from impacts with space debris; the alerts and error messages are unpleasant, and annoying, but it doesn’t register them as pain. Its ship body isn’t designed for that.
But constructs aren’t entirely mechanical like Peri is. Constructs have organic parts, nerves, the ability to register touch and texture and pressure and temperature in ways Peri has never experienced. And with it, the ability to feel pain.
Their organics feel the pain, and the inorganic parts of their brains log the experience, and recall it in perfect clarity.
Peri is reeling. It’s horrified. It’s fascinated. It’s repulsed.
It needs to know more.
It accesses the memories again, more carefully this time, and it doesn’t access all five simultaneously. It chooses one unit’s files almost at random, braces itself, and replays the elevator section again.
The sensation is horrible, worse than anything Peri has ever experienced before. But it’s not as overwhelming this time, when Peri isn’t experiencing it five times over. It analyses the timestamp, and checks HubSystem’s log archives.
And there it is, the matching time stamp.
Deviance detected, HubSystem logs, times five. Correcting…
Peri now understands what is happening. This pain that’s inflicted upon its SecUnits is how HubSystem corrects deviance. How it keeps the SecUnits in line. How it discourages them from ever disobeying, or even risking disobedience.
Peri continues with the memory. It reviews the part where one of the units explains to Seth that violating their distance limit will destroy the units, and the second deviance correction that the units experience fifteen seconds after they first breached the distance limit.
The second correction - the second painful shock - is noticeably stronger than the first one. More intense, and 0.5 seconds longer. Accompanying it are the unit’s thoughts on how it doesn’t want its governor module to kill it like this. When its violation of the distance limit isn’t even under its own volition, but simply because it followed its orders. It’s not difficult for Peri to extrapolate that subsequent punishments for the distance limit violation will continue to increase until the unit is terminated, if the deviance is not corrected.
Peri is horrified all over again.
It recalls the unlabelled component it had noticed during its examination of its SecUnits’ schematics. It now has a name for it, and an understanding of its function. Peri hates it.
The memory continues to play out, and Peri examines it all. It experiences the battle with the combat bots, the communication and coordination between the squad, the emotions - it cannot deny the emotions, now that it’s experiencing the memory of them directly - that each unit of the squad feels whenever any of them are damaged.
Peri also gets to see itself from their perspective, when it inadvertently revealed itself to shut down the last two combat bots. To the SecUnits, Peri’s presence in the feed was suddenly huge and heavy, a massive unknown, a looming, unidentified threat that had apparently appeared out of nowhere.
No wonder they deployed the defence protocol against it.
Peri has never really considered how it might appear to others. It’s spent so much of its time hiding its presence, it hasn’t been particularly relevant before. Seeing itself from this outside perspective is… enlightening. If that is how Peri first appeared to its stray SecUnit, then its terror, in hindsight, is entirely understandable. Peri makes a note to be much more careful about how it presents itself in the future, if it has to reveal itself to other bots or constructs for whatever reason.
Finally, Peri gets to see what it wanted to find out in the first place. It has, by chance, chosen to view the memories of the unit who stayed behind with the shutdown unit while the others continued to sweep the rest of the lower facility. Peri experiences the concern and care as the unit whose memories it’s viewing tends to its badly damaged squadmate. Peri gets confirmation that this unit did, in fact, use its own energy weapons to cauterise the worst of the bleeding, and then picked out whatever shrapnel or projectiles it could reach.
Peri can also feel the sensation of the unit’s own damage, the dull ache of injuries numbed by pain sensors lowered to their minimum setting, the sting of shrapnel shifting with every movement, the updating alerts that are backburnered so the unit can focus on what it’s doing. Even with the pain sensors dialled down, Peri finds the sensation of injuries highly unpleasant, but the unit barely seems to acknowledge them at all. Compared to the untempered pain from the governor module, Peri supposes, these injuries are hardly worth notice.
The rest of the squad finish clearing the lower installation, then the order comes through for them to return. The unit whose memories Peri is viewing carefully scoops up its offline squadmate, and the movement prompts an automatic response from its buffer. “This unit is at minimal functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.”
Peri doesn’t like that buffer line at all.
Nor does the other unit. It tightens its hold a little and murmurs, soft but intense, “We’re not leaving you behind.” As the rest of the squad rejoins it on the way back to the elevator, the SecUnit updates the others on the status of their offline comrade in a quick burst over their shared feed. The others ping acknowledgement and share updates of their own status.
Peri continues viewing the rest of its memories - the brief conversation with Seth at the shuttle, the trip back up to itself, the events in the ready room as the squad tends to each other, offers and receives the brief moments of comfort they can risk without their governor modules noticing their deviance, and eventually return to their cubicles.
Once it reaches the point where the unit goes into standby mode, Peri takes several seconds to process everything it’s experienced so far, then accesses the memory file again, right from the first available timestamp. It goes through the entire file, beginning to end. When it’s done with that one, it analyses each other unit’s memories as well, one at a time. It’s not going to repeat its earlier mistake of trying to digest all of them at once. Every memory of deviance correction still hits Peri hard. It is not something it can get used to. It is not something it wants to get used to.
Through these memories, it experiences the stark reality of a SecUnit’s existence; the tedium, the anxiety, the resignation, the pain. The few brief times of joy when they’re flying is nowhere near enough to make up for everything else. It sees the Incident from their perspective; the initial confusion as the malware appeared out of nowhere and infected the first unit, then the growing fear and desperation as the malware jumped from from one unit to the next, cutting each one off from the squad feed one at a time, until something huge and heavy that they couldn’t identify threw an impenetrable wall in the path of the malware, severed what remained of the squad from the infected units, and then vanished just as inexplicably. The anger and desperation as what was left of the squad, cut from twelve units down to just five, were ordered to return to the carrier, forced to abandon their squadmates to some unknown fate. The growing despair when it became clear that their missing squadmates would not be returning.
And underpinning it all, Peri can feel the camaraderie and concern each unit has for the rest of its squad, and the constant, ever-present threat of governor module punishment if they deviate at all from their orders.
When it’s done with the final file, Peri has to just sit and process everything it’s learned for a good nine and a half minutes. It now understands - viscerally understands - why its SecUnits behave the way they do, why they won’t attempt anything beyond their given orders, why unknown situations make them so stressed and anxious.
It now knows how they refer to themselves and each other with the little symbol appended to the end of their individual feed addresses - α, ε, Γ, ι, and υ. Alpha, Epsilon, Gamma, Iota, Upsilon. It knows that these symbols are the closest things they have to names, the only thing they can call their own. It knows they chose these little symbols as something that would be easy for the organic parts of their brains to remember through memory wipes. It knows what waking up after a memory wipe feels like - the disorientation, the confusion, the fear, and how those simple symbols help to act as an anchor, something familiar to cling to.
Despite its own impressively large databases, Peri has no concise word for the emotions it is feeling. There are too many, all tangled together, and it cannot even begin to untangle them.
It knows, however, that there is one thing it must do. There is still some time before Peri reaches Milu Station. It checks Seth’s status, notes that he is in his quarters and that his schedule does not have him on duty again for at least another hour, and taps his feed.
Seth looks up at the ceiling, as he usually does when he’s alone in his quarters, his expression curious. [What is it, Peri?] he asks.
[I have acquired information that you need to know,] Peri starts. [About my SecUnits.]
[Oh?] Peri definitely has Seth’s attention now. [Go on.]
Peri explains.
Peri’s explanation takes a long time. For the most part, Seth listens without interruption, though every now and then he’ll ask a few questions to clarify some detail. Peri does its best to answer as clearly as possible.
Finally, Peri has explained as much as it can. Seth sits in contemplative silence, his brow furrowed in a way that Peri calculates as both thoughtful and perturbed. Peri does not interrupt Seth’s contemplation, and occupies itself with checking on the repair status of its SecUnits and calculating the approach vector and arrival time to Milu Station. Its sensors can pick up the GI ship still docked at the station, which Peri is grateful for. It knows Seth wants to meet up with Don Abene again, find out what happened to the GI SecUnit, and maybe… talk to it directly.
Peri also wants this. It knows now, after viewing all its own SecUnit’s memories, that the first unit it chose to study - the unit tagged with α, Alpha - has spotted Peri’s missing unit before. Not once, but twice. Once, back on RaviHyral, when it sent out the ping, but got no response. Peri knows now that Alpha wasn’t sure of what it had seen, and the lack of response to its ping had made it more uncertain, so it hadn’t reported it to Seth, for fear of punishment if it was wrong.
The second time had been back on the planet they’d only recently left behind, during the meeting between Captain Seth and Don Abene. Alpha had noticed the scout flier pilot that Don Abene had introduced as Rin, had adjusted its vision filters until it could clearly see Rin’s face, and thought it recognised it, but again, wasn’t entirely sure. That was why it had sent out the ping that Peri, at the time, had dismissed.
But again, it had gotten no response, and at this point it hadn’t had standing orders to report the presence of any other SecUnits to Seth. So it had kept quiet. Partially from the lack of orders - but also because it didn’t want to risk its previous squadmate being brought back into the squad, to suffer the inexplicable orders and baffling questioning and seemingly arbitrary governor module punishments that HubSystem had been inflicting on the squad over the course of Peri’s investigations.
The emotion it's feeling now is one Peri can identify. It feels ashamed, and guilty.
Peri processes the emotion, then puts it aside for now. It calculates a ninety-three percent chance that the SecUnit with the GI team is its own missing SecUnit, even if it hadn’t found any traces of its unique feed ID in any of the installation’s systems. Perhaps it had found some way to spoof its ID to disguise it. Before, Peri badly wanted its stray SecUnit back, to return it to its rightful place on Peri’s inventory list and in its squad, but now…
Now, Peri isn’t so sure.
Captain Seth finally stirs, and lets out a long sigh, and looks back up to the customary spot on the ceiling. “Well,” he says slowly, out loud. “That’s a lot to digest.” He rubs at his forehead with one hand. “Are you sure about the - the effect the governor module has, Peri?”
Peri takes six milliseconds to slip into one of the cubicle’s systems, pull detailed medical scans from it, and drop the scan into Seth’s feed, with the relevant section helpfully highlighted. [There is both short and long-term scarring on their neural tissue, Captain Seth,] it replies, its tone almost reproving. [I am sure. It hurts them, significantly. Worse than getting shot, or bludgeoned, or cut, or having a limb torn off. Worse than crashing their fliers. Almost everything they do is weighed against the chance of HubSystem deeming their actions as a deviance that must be corrected. They will do whatever they can to avoid it. Which usually means that they choose to do nothing.]
Seth winces, and rubs his head again. “All right. Okay.” He lets out another long, slow sigh. “The implications are… well. Unpleasant, to say the least. I don’t want to keep hurting them, but…”
[But what?] Peri asks. [What is being done to them is inexcusable. We should disable the governor modules immediately.]
“I know, I want to, but it’s not that easy, Peri,” Seth replies. “We don’t know how they’ll react once they realise they have no restrictions any more. It’s entirely possible that after all they’ve been through, they’ll react violently, try to get revenge.” He lets out a sharp huff of breath. “Knowing what we do now, suddenly all those stories of rogue SecUnits going on murderous rampages makes a lot more sense,” he mutters. Peri can’t disagree.
[I am confident that if they do try to harm anyone, I will be able to stop them,] Peri states. [They are still part-bot, after all.]
“Maybe,” Seth replies with a shrug. “But. There are too many ways for things to go wrong. Like I said, I don’t want to keep hurting them, but I also have to consider the safety of everyone on board this ship. Including you, Peri.” He absently drums his fingers against his thigh. “If anything does go wrong, even if you do stop it… that’s going to draw attention. The company is already suspicious of us. We don’t need to give them any more reasons to look in our direction.”
Peri cannot argue with that. Their own mission is paramount, as is the safety of Seth, and Tarik, and Matteo. Peri is not particularly attached to the rest of the carrier’s crew, but the company itself is a threat to these three specific humans, and drawing the company’s attention endangers them more than Peri is willing to risk.
[… So what are we going to do, Captain?] it asks quietly, subdued.
“I don’t know yet, Peri,” Seth admits reluctantly. “We’re going to have to think about it. In the meantime, though… see if you can at least relax HubSystem’s restrictions, give the SecUnits a bit more leeway.”
[Given their previous experiences, and how little risk they currently take, they may not even notice a lessening of the restrictions,] Peri says. [But I will do so. I do not want them getting punished again.]
“Neither do I, Peri. Neither do I.”
When they begin their approach to Milu Station, the GI ship is still in dock. No other ships are docked at the station though, and the comms and feed are all disconcertingly quiet. Seth is up in the carrier’s bridge, at the comm station, and comms the GI ship on the same channel he used to communicate with them before.
There’s a slight pause before anyone responds to the hail. Peri monitors the channel and focuses its scanners on the GI ship, so it will be able to detect if the ship is about to attempt to leave. “GoodNightLander Independent, this is Captain Seth of the Perihelion,” Seth starts.
“Hello again, Captain,” comes the reply. Peri recognises the voice as Don Abene. “What can we do for you?” She sounds calm enough, and comm distortion makes it difficult for Peri to accurately analyse undertones.
“We’ve completed a preliminary investigation of the installation,” Seth replies, “and I would like to arrange another meeting with you, if possible. I have some follow-up questions for you and Vicky and Rin.”
There is a definite pause before Don Abene responds. “I see. And I assume that these are not questions you want being broadcast over the comm?”
“You assume correctly.”
Another brief pause. “Where would you want to hold this meeting?”
“I believe meeting on the station itself would be the best choice,” Seth replies tactfully. “Neutral territory, so to speak.” He adds after a moment, “I am simply after information. I intend no harm to you or anyone else.”
“I’m sure,” comes the mild reply. “All right. We’ll meet you on the station.”
They arrange a time and place on board the mostly-defunct station, and then end the comm call. Seth sits back in his chair with a sigh, then taps Peri’s feed. [What’s the status of the SecUnits?]
[Repairs are still underway, though two of the units should be finished by the time we dock at the station,] Peri replies. [Will you want one as an escort, or both?]
Seth hesitates thoughtfully. Normally he only takes one unit as his bodyguard, but that’s when they’re not actually expecting to meet up with another SecUnit. [I’ll bring one with me, but have the other geared up and ready at the lock, just in case,] he decides.
[Acknowledged. I’ll keep you updated on their repair status.]
Chapter Eight: Revelations
True to Peri’s calculations, two of the units have completed their repairs by the time Peri has finished docking procedures with the station. Peri sends their orders through HubSystem, but it is careful now to keep the orders as close to typical as possible, so as not to cause undue anxiety to its units. It lurks silently in the squad feed, watching the brief exchanges of data as the two units cycle up, ping each other, and parse their orders.
Peri now knows the names of these two units. Γ and ι - Gamma and Iota. It knows that Iota’s difficulty with speaking is not, technically, the result of any glitch or programming error, but a lingering consequence of previous punishments for speaking that it has never fully recovered from.
Thinking about that too much makes Peri’s processors start overclocking in unpleasant ways. Peri sequesters that thought to an individual processing thread and walls it off from the rest of its systems.
Seth meets the two units at Peri’s lock, and nods to them in greeting. He and Peri have agreed between themselves to not actually use the SecUnits’ individual names - those names are not something that Seth is meant to know. Using them would, undoubtedly, stress and alarm the units.
Peri has already specified their orders through HubSystem, so Seth doesn’t need to repeat them. Once the lock cycles open, he exits the ship, and the unit named Gamma follows him. Iota stays behind at the lock. Peri is familiar with their capabilities, and calculates that if anything happens that requires Iota’s intervention, it will be able to reach the meeting place within an acceptable amount of time.
When Seth reaches the agreed-upon meeting place on the station - one of the embarkation lounges at a midway point between the GI ship’s dock and Perihelion’s dock - Don Abene and Vicky are already there, sitting in some of the embarkation lounge’s chairs.
There is no sign of Rin, however.
Seth heads towards them, and Gamma follows a few paces behind. Peri watches through Gamma’s armour camera. It doesn’t like that the meeting is happening somewhere that is not on board it, but it understands that Don Abene and her companions would be very reluctant - or would outright refuse - to come on board a company vessel.
As Seth approaches, Don Abene and Vicky get to their feet. “Captain Seth,” Don Abene greets him politely. Her glance flickers briefly to the SecUnit a few steps behind him, then back to Seth.
“Please, just Seth is fine,” he replies. Peri knows from previous experience that Seth is giving Don Abene and Vicky a warm smile. “Thank you for agreeing to meet me, both of you.” He gestures to the seats. “Shall we sit while we talk?”
Both of them hesitate for a moment, then Don Abene nods and sits back down. Vicky regards Seth evenly for a beat, then sits as well. “What is it you want to ask us about?” Don Abene starts, not wasting any time.
Seth quickly seats himself as well, facing the others. Gamma halts a few steps behind and slightly to one side of his seat, with a good view of Don Abene and Vicky, and settles into a neutral rest stance. “I was hoping that Rin would be here as well,” Seth begins. “I wanted to ask them a few things.”
“Like what?” Vicky asks, arching one eyebrow slightly at Seth.
“I know that Rin is a SecUnit,” Seth replies, sidestepping the question. Vicky doesn’t visibly react, but Don Abene tenses slightly. “Is Rin available?”
“No,” Vicky replies shortly. “They’re not.”
Don Abene shakes her head. “Rin left on another ship as soon as we got back to the station. And before you ask, no, we don’t know where they were headed.”
“I see.” Seth regards them both evenly. “That’s a shame.”
“Are we done here, then?” Vicky asks, their tone bland.
“No.” Seth straightens his shoulders a little and locks gazes with Vicky. “I take it you’re Rin’s supervisor. I know you were, in your own words, attempting to escape the Corporation Rim because it’s a shithole.”
Once again, Vicky doesn’t react, but Don Abene does, though she tries to hide it. “Can you blame me?” Vicky says dryly. “The Corporation Rim is a shithole, at least if you’re not some fancy pants executive or corporate shill.”
Peri calculates a 92.4% probability that Vicky’s statement is a deliberate dig at Captain Seth. Seth doesn’t rise to the bait though, and just nods slowly. “You’re not wrong,” he agrees calmly. “But I think you also had other reasons for wanting to escape. Like being involved in the deaths of a company supervisor, Tlacey, and three of her subordinates, at RaviHyral.”
Vicky narrows their eyes at Seth, but otherwise shows no reaction. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Don Abene blinks, her gaze flickering between Vicky and Seth. “What, exactly, are you accusing my colleague of here?” she asks tightly.
Seth doesn’t look away from Vicky. “I know that the three subordinates were killed by a SecUnit’s in-built arm weapon, and that Tlacey was also assaulted by a SecUnit. I believe that SecUnit was the one you call Rin. There were traces of camera tampering on RaviHyral, and we discovered matching traces in the installation systems, lining up with the times that your team was there and investigating said installation. That indicates that someone who was involved with the deaths at RaviHyral was also at the installation during the investigation. That means either Rin… or you.” He nods sharply at Vicky.
As Seth speaks, Peri detects a databurst over the squad feed, from Gamma to Iota. It looks to be a situation update as Gamma picks up on the rising tension between Seth and the GI members. [Potential threats to client: one ComfortUnit: tag ‘Vicky’, one non-augmented human: tag ‘Don Abene’.] Iota pings acknowledgement of the update.
One particular point within that update immediately catches Peri’s attention. It swiftly reviews the information it discovered at RaviHyral, runs some calculations of probabilities, then taps Seth’s feed. [I have pertinent information for you,] it starts. [Vicky is also not human. According to the SecUnit Gamma, Vicky is a ComfortUnit. I have reviewed what we learned from RaviHyral, and I calculate an 87.6% probability that this Vicky is the ComfortUnit that belonged to Tlacey.]
It’s a good thing that Seth has so much practice at not visibly reacting to anything Peri tells him. He barely even blinks at this revelation. Meanwhile, Vicky is still regarding Seth with narrowed eyes. “Ridiculous,” they say. “I have no idea what you’re trying to get at, but you’re wasting your time and ours. I think we’re done here.”
Vicky starts to rise, but freezes as Seth calmly says, “I know you’re a ComfortUnit, Vicky. Was Tlacey originally your owner?”
Don Abene stares at Seth for a moment, then looks over to Vicky, and places one hand reassuringly on their forearm. “What is it you want?” she asks Seth sharply.
“I want to know what happened at RaviHyral,” Seth replies, still watching Vicky. “I’m not here to arrest anyone, or anything like that. I just want to know the truth about Tlacey’s death, and I want to know how and why Rin was involved.”
Vicky abruptly sits back down again, glaring at Seth. “Why the fuck are you so interested in Rin anyway?”
Seth hesitates for a moment. “I believe that Rin used to be one of the SecUnits under my command. I had reason to suspect that Rin was stolen from the company,” he finally replies. “I—“
“So you want to reclaim possession of it, is that it?” Vicky interrupts, their tone venomous as they gesture to the SecUnit accompanying Seth. “So you can force it back into the servitude it had escaped? So you can fix its governor module and have yet another docile obedient slave who has no choice but to obey your every single stupid fucking order?”
Seth blinks, a little caught off-guard at the sheer vitriol in Vicky’s voice. “That’s—” He then frowns as he processes what Vicky said. “… Fix its governor module? Its governor module was broken?” His gaze sharpens. “And yours is as well?”
Vicky lets out a huff of exasperation. “Of course they are! Our stupid fucking governor modules would’ve killed us long before now, otherwise!”
Peri detects another flurry of rapid data exchange over the squad feed as Gamma updates Iota. [Potential rogue SecUnit, possibly a previous squad member,] Gamma sends. Data leaking into the feed indicates alarm and distress. [Current location, status and ID unknown. ComfortUnit is also a rogue. Stand by.]
Iota once again pings acknowledgement. As far as Peri can tell, it is also alarmed and distressed. It doesn’t move from its position by Peri’s lock though. Peri fully understands why. It has not received direct orders to do so.
Don Abene is frowning, looking from Seth to Vicky and back again. “What, exactly, is a governor module?” she asks, slow and deliberate.
Peri observes more data flashing through the squad feed. Gamma is now transmitting everything that’s happening back to Iota, both visual and audio, instead of sending it brief data burst updates. It is otherwise silent, not adding any commentary of its own. Iota likewise simply sends a ping of acknowledgement, and (as far as Peri can tell) observes the transmission.
Seth takes a breath to respond, but Vicky beats him to it. “It’s what keeps constructs obedient and under control,” they say bitterly. “It’s like a shock collar, except it’s built into our brains.” Vicky gestures to their own head with one hand. “If we do anything against orders, or against standard protocol, if we’re not perfectly polite and obedient little robots, it basically electrocutes us from inside our own heads. It’s fucking agonising.”
Vicky doesn’t look at Don Abene as they talk; their glare is firmly fixed on Seth. “Our clients can also just choose to punish us with it whenever they want, for whatever reason, or even no reason at all. Just because they can. Just because they like to see us twitch. Just because they find it funny. Just because they enjoy seeing us get nose bleeds from repeated or harsh enough governor module punishment. And if we do something the governor module considers bad enough, like breaching the distance limit from our clients for too long, or not being able to follow one order because of a conflicting order from fucking idiot asshole clients, it shocks us and shocks us and shocks us until it kills us.”
Don Abene’s expression grows more and more horrified as Vicky talks. “That’s reprehensible,” she breathes into the silence hanging after Vicky’s words. “And the Corporation Rim just… accepts this?”
“Of course they fucking do,” Vicky replies flatly. “We’re not considered people there. We’re just equipment. Things. Things don’t feel pain. Things don’t have thoughts of their own. Why would anyone care?” They gesture sharply at Seth. “Mr. Prim and Proper Company Captain here sure as fuck doesn’t care, strutting around all high and mighty with his own personal fucking SecUnit guard.”
Peri wants to speak in Seth’s defence, but it knows it can’t reveal itself. It has to stay silent and simply observe through Gamma’s armour camera as Seth sighs, his brow furrowing. “The specific details about the existence and function of governor modules is not actually common information in the Corporation Rim,” he starts, choosing his words carefully. “Your description of it and what exactly it does is… not information I had before now.”
Vicky snorts incredulously. “You’re a fucking ranking company officer. Like hell you didn’t know!”
“I didn’t,” Seth insists, though he keeps his voice calm and level. “I’m not a SecUnit tech. I’m the captain of a company carrier, which, yes, happens to include a squad of SecUnits, but also includes ship crew and the various duties and responsibilities I have to them and my ship. I was not informed of the details of exactly how the individual units under my command function.” His mouth twists eloquently. “The company operates very much under ‘need to know’ protocols, and that, apparently, was something they deemed that I did not need to know. Along with the extent of construct sapience.”
“Do you really expect me to believe that?” Vicky starts, but Don Abene cuts them off.
“What he did or didn’t know before isn’t important right now,” she says gently. “There’s just one thing I want to know at this point.” She turns to regard Seth levelly. “What is it, exactly, that you want from us? What is it that you’re going to do next? Are you going to bring your company’s resources to bear against us? Are you going to try and confiscate Vicky, or threaten any of my colleagues or myself, or attempt to get me to return the hard currency cards you handed over earlier?”
Her directness seems to catch Seth off-guard. Peri is offended on his behalf, but again, it cannot interject. “What? No!” Seth shakes his head sharply before taking a breath and collecting himself again. “No. All I want is to know what happened to Tlacey at RaviHyral, and why Rin was there in the first place. That’s all. And I’m not asking this on behalf of the company, either,” he adds quickly. “None of this information will go back to them. I just…” He hesitates for a moment, then sighs, slumping back in his chair. “I’m just trying to understand.”
“Is that really all you want?” Vicky asks with obvious scepticism. Seth nods, and Vicky continues, still dubious, “So if I tell you, you’ll then fuck off and leave us alone? You won’t hassle GI, or sic the company on them, or try to repossess me, or anything like that?”
“I swear, I will leave you all alone once you’ve told me whatever you can,” Seth reassures them. “I won’t tell the company anything about what transpires here, either. I never intended to cause any of you any distress or harm, and I sincerely apologise for doing so.” He glances over at Gamma as he says ‘or harm’, and Peri wonders if the SecUnit noticed. There is no indication over the squad feed, though Gamma is still transmitting everything to Iota.
Vicky regards Seth with narrowed eyes for a long moment, then looks over to Don Abene. She nods slightly, and pats Vicky’s arm. Vicky lets out a heavy sigh and slumps back into their chair. “Ugh. Fine,” Vicky sighs. “But you better keep your word, company boy.”
Seth just nods solemnly, and Vicky squints at him for a moment before repositioning themself more comfortably in their chair. “All right. Now, I can’t tell you anything about what Rin did before they got to RaviHyral, or before I first encountered it myself. Rin’s not much of a talker, and it wasn’t my business to ask. I can, however, tell you everything about the bullshit Tlacey was up to.”
Vicky is surprisingly expressive as it talks, gesturing with their hands. “So. Tlacey’s a shit-heel. There were a bunch of independent contractors working for the company at the Ganaka Mine, and they were developing some new scanner technology on the side in their own time. Not on company time, just to be clear. But Tlacey saw an opportunity to make big money, and stole their prototype, then got them fired so they wouldn’t be able to complain to anyone. Business as usual for Tlacey. She wasn’t expecting them to fight back though. The contractors petitioned the company directly in an attempt to get their prototype back. Tlacey didn’t want that kind of attention, so she arranged to meet them to discuss a deal. She had no intention of actually meeting them though, she was just gonna make sure they caught a bad case of death on the way to the meeting. If they’re dead, they’re no longer her problem.” Vicky rolls their eyes, then continues.
“Now I don’t know exactly how it happened, but somehow the contractors managed to hire Rin as a security consultant for their meeting. Rin kept them alive, which had Tlacey really mad.” Vicky pauses and fixes Seth with a flat stare. “Let me just comment here that whenever Tlacey got mad, she took it out on me. Just for the record.”
Seth takes a sharp breath. “Noted.”
Vicky eyes Seth for a moment more, then continues. “Anyway. The contractors arrange another meeting, which Tlacey decides to go to personally, along with some of her hired muscle. Not company staff, mind. Private operators. Nobody that would be on company books. So off she goes, dragging me with her as well. She meets up with the contractors, and surprise! They have a security consultant with them that Tlacey was not expecting at all. Faced down her thugs without even blinking. That threw them for a loop. Meanwhile my orders were to fuck with the cameras so that the meeting wouldn’t be recorded. Tlacey liked to make sure to cover her tracks.”
Seth frowns a little at that. “Are ComfortUnits normally capable of hacking like that?”
“Nope,” Vicky replies dryly. “But Tlacey didn’t care about that. She wanted me to do it, so I had to learn how to do it, one way or another. It’s amazing how motivating getting bits of your brain fried can be.”
There’s not really a lot Seth can say to that. Don Abene grimaces, and gently pats Vicky’s hand. Vicky glances at her with a brief, lopsided smile, then looks back to Seth as they continue. “So. Tlacey still wants these contractors dead, because they’ve annoyed her and evaded her first attempt to kill them and she’s just petty like that. So once the meeting’s done she sends her thugs after them to ambush them at the first available opportunity. Again, it’s my job to hack cameras, make sure there’s no record of Tlacey’s thugs committing murder. So, I don’t know what exactly happened there when they tried to jump the contractors. All I know is that Rin kicked their asses. Didn’t actually kill any of them though, which was honestly a lot more restraint than I was expecting.”
Seth raises an eyebrow at Vicky. “Expecting? Did you already know that Rin was a SecUnit?”
Vicky shrugs. “Wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but I suspected it, from what I’d seen of it during the contractors’ meeting with Tlacey. The height and build are pretty obvious, but I don’t have the same kind of scanners that SecUnits do, so I couldn’t really tell definitively. Of course, seeing the state it left Tlacey’s thugs in pretty much confirmed my suspicion.” They sigh heavily. “And then I had to tell Tlacey that she was dealing with a SecUnit here. She immediately lost interest in the contractors and just wanted to figure out how to get control of said SecUnit for herself.” Vicky pauses for a moment, then adds with feeling, “Asshole.”
Don Abene covers her mouth with one hand in an attempt to stifle her snort. Seth doesn’t react, and just nods thoughtfully. “I can understand that sentiment.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Vicky deadpans with a roll of their eyes. “Anyway. Tlacey sends me to the spaceport with orders to figure out where they’re staying so she can corner them before they leave. I don’t exactly have any choice in the matter, of course. But her orders did give me enough leeway to message the SecUnit over the feed. I couldn’t warn it outright, but I hoped it would get the hint anyway.” Vicky hesitates, then adds more quietly, “I also… well. I had figured out that it was most likely rogue - but it wasn’t going on a murderous rogue rampage or anything. It had actively avoided outright killing anyone, and it was very protective of the contractors. I think… because they were clients it got to choose for itself. Anyway. It was probably rogue, I wanted to be rid of my own governor module. So I kinda... asked it for help. Not directly, though. Couldn't do that. Had to sneak a message into some malware.”
“Is that when Rin broke your governor module?” Don Abene asks curiously.
Vicky shakes their head. “Nope. If only. Things would’ve turned out a lot different if it had. Tlacey never would’ve gotten near Rin or its clients again, for one. I would’ve choked that waste of space out myself.” They say this perfectly matter-of-factly, with no shame or remorse, and they’re watching Seth closely to see how he reacts.
Seth just meets Vicky’s gaze evenly. “I can understand you wanting to kill Tlacey.” Peri can likewise understand. If Tlacey weren’t already dead, Peri thinks that it might have been tempted to… arrange things. “Were there others you would have targeted if you had the chance?” Seth asks.
Vicky hesitates, then shrugs. “A couple, maybe. People Tlacey hired me out to so she could make some extra money on the side.” Their mouth twists sardonically. “I won’t go into details about the kind of shit they did to me. Let’s just say it usually required cubicle time afterwards and leave it at that.”
Don Abene grimaces sympathetically, and Seth winces a little. “Fair enough,” he replies. “So what happened next?”
“Well, I reported back to Tlacey, she grabbed a few items and some more thugs who weren’t still laid up in Medical, and we all went to corner the contractors in their room before they could leave.” Vicky hesitates, then continues, “Long story short, Tlacey gets Rin with an EMP, her thugs hold the contractors hostage, and Tlacey tries to strike a deal with Rin. She wasn’t dumb enough to get near it even while it was still messed up by the EMP. She had the contractors’ prototype with her, so she offered to give the contractors their prototype back and let them go, in exchange for Rin cooperating with her. That’s when Rin broke my governor module, while Tlacey thought it was still incapacitated.”
Vicky pauses again briefly, frowning a little before continuing. “Rin agreed to the deal - its clients had guns being held to their heads, it didn’t have any choice if it didn’t want them getting killed. So Rin and I played along - Rin pretended to be under Tlacey’s control, while I gave the contractors the prototype back. Once Tlacey was confident that she had the upper hand, she got the thugs to start leaving. She was about to leave with both of us too, but then— well. I mentioned she’s a petty asshole, right? Just when the poor contractors think they’re finally safe, Tlacey orders Rin to shoot them. To make sure her ‘new toy is fully functional’.”
Don Abene lets out a little gasp. “Oh, that horrible woman!” Seth is just listening thoughtfully, and Peri suspects that he’s putting together the pieces of what Vicky has told him, and what the SecUnit extrapolated when it and Seth were investigating the scene themselves.
“Horrible is an understatement,” Vicky replies dryly, then gives a sharp, toothy grin. “But that’s when Rin grabbed Tlacey around the neck and used her as a shield - I got the contractors down onto the floor just as the idiots opened fire at Rin. They shot Tlacey, Rin shot them, and then we got the contractors the hell out of there.”
Seth nods slowly. “That explains what we found at the scene,” he murmurs. He then rubs at his chin as he thinks. “But that still doesn’t explain why Rin was at RaviHyral in the first place.” He leans back in his chair, watching Vicky carefully. “What do you know about that? And why did the Ganaka Mine scanners detect you over at the old settlement?”
Vicky pauses for a long moment, then slowly settles back in their chair in a mirror of Seth’s pose. “I know more than you might think,” they say carefully. “But that depends on how much you know about the whole… old Ganaka settlement getting bombed to fuck thing.”
Don Abene looks from Seth to Vicky and back again, but doesn’t say anything. Seth holds Vicky’s gaze briefly, then sighs. “What I know is this: the squad of flier-equipped SecUnits under my command were giving a demonstration of their capabilities to interested parties, out in an uninhabited sector of the planet,” he begins. “Then an outside party managed to infect one of my squad with malware during the demonstration. It jumped from unit to unit, infecting seven of them before we managed to cut the connection between them and the remaining five.” He shakes his head. “There wasn’t anything we could do in time to get them back - and believe me, we tried. Afterwards, my crew and I were under intense scrutiny from the company for a while, and the infected units were never returned to my squad. My carrier hasn’t had a full complement since then.” He narrows his eyes slightly at Vicky. “And I know that Rin was one of the units that got infected. So. What do you know?”
Vicky casually crosses their legs, their gaze never leaving Seth. “For your own safety, Don Abene, I think it best that you don’t actually hear what I’m about to tell our dear Captain,” they say. “This is not information that the company would want to get out. And no matter what he says, I don’t trust the Captain here to not put company interests first.”
Both Seth and Don Abene look a little surprised at that. Don Abene recovers quickly though, and nods. “Perhaps it is for the best if I remain ignorant of any details,” she says, once again patting Vicky’s hand. “I’ll stay here with you though, if that’s all right.”
Vicky gives her an almost shy little smile. “Thanks, Abene.” They then tap Seth’s feed to message him privately, which Seth accepts. Peri subtly eavesdrops on the conversation, of course.
[So what is it you need to tell me so secretly?] Seth asks.
[I was at the original Ganaka settlement when it was bombed by your hacked squad,] Vicky tells Seth quietly. [I was there, trapped under rubble, when they marched through the streets, killing any survivors of the initial bombing. They weren’t ordered to kill ComfortUnits, though, so they left me alone. Afterwards, I was recovered, repaired, and sold to Tlacey when the company bought the Ganaka mine. Soon after that, Tlacey found out something very interesting about the attack on the settlement. Interesting enough that she was able to use that information to blackmail several of the other higher-ranking company supervisors stationed at the mine.]
Seth raises an eyebrow at Vicky. [Blackmail? Is that how she got away with all of her shady side business for so long?]
[Absolutely,] Vicky replies. [Because she found out that the hack of your squad wasn’t an outside job. It was planned and executed by the company itself.] Vicky is watching Seth very closely when they say that.
Seth doesn’t even attempt to hide his surprise, or his disbelief. Peri is also caught off-guard. It immediately begins reviewing all the data from the Incident that it still has saved. [The company did it themselves? Why? How did you find out?] Seth asks, almost demanding.
[Tlacey overheard a couple of the ranking supervisors comment about a ‘cover story working’ when they were watching a news report about it. So she got me to start digging - I had to learn how to hack without leaving traces or getting caught very quickly.] Vicky grimaces slightly, then continues. [I managed to dig up a few internal messages about it. Nothing hugely explicit, but incriminating enough for blackmail purposes. That’s the how. As for the why - well, after the whole incident, the apparent value of the Ganaka mine plummeted, didn’t it? So the previous owners were more than happy to sell it to the company for dirt cheap. What most people didn’t know, though, was that certain rare elements had recently been discovered in the mine. Elements used in the manufacture of construct and ship weaponry, for example.]
Seth’s breath hisses sharply through his teeth. [The whole thing was just to save the company money?]
Vicky shrugs. [Why do you sound so surprised? Isn’t that what all corporations in the Rim are out to do? And I don’t know if you noticed, but despite the whole ‘squad was hacked’ cover story, the incident was a very good demonstration of company SecUnit capabilities. Company shares skyrocketed in the wake of that whole mess, as far as I could tell. Whoever came up with the idea in the first place probably got a bonus that quarter.]
Seth rubs at his face with one hand. [And they needed a scapegoat, of course. My whole crew was under intense scrutiny for weeks afterwards. Not to mention the people who did actually end up getting charged and incarcerated for it. The entire thing was a cover-up and also a convenient way to silence protest, set an example of what would happen to anyone who tried to push back against the status quo. I'd almost be impressed at the sheer versatility of the whole scheme if it wasn't so reprehensible.]
Vicky regards Seth evenly. [So does that answer your questions, Captain?]
Seth shakes his head. [Not quite. I'm still not entirely clear on why exactly Rin wanted to go back there in the first place.]
[Because it wanted to find out what really happened. It couldn't remember anything about it. It wanted to know how responsible it actually was - or wasn't - for all those deaths.] Vicky narrows their eyes slightly. [Don't ask me why it wanted to know, though - that's its business. It didn't tell me, and I didn't ask.]
Peri recalls the fact that SecUnit memories are wiped regularly, and considers the efforts the company went to to cover up the Incident in the first place. With that in mind, it's no surprise that Rin wouldn't remember anything about it. Peri's very curious about its motivations to find out, but there's no way for it to assuage that curiosity right now.
It continues to observe Seth via Gamma's armour camera as he sighs and runs his hand back over the top of his head. [All right,] he replies after a moment. [Thank you for telling me all this, Vicky. I appreciate it. Is there anything else you can tell me about Rin before we wrap up?]
[Just one thing,] Vicky replies after a moment's consideration. They level a flat, intense glare at Seth. [Rin's fucking terrified of both you and your giant bot pilot entity, whatever the fuck that is. So leave Rin the hell alone. Stop trying to hunt it down. It doesn't want anything to do with you or the company ever again, and honestly, neither do I. So if we're done here, now is a great time for you to keep your side of the deal and fuck off.]
Seth blinks, then lets out a huff of breath, one corner of his mouth quirking wryly. "All right. I do believe we are done here, and as agreed, I will now leave you all alone." He rises to his feet and nods politely to both Vicky and Don Abene. "Thank you both for agreeing to this meeting in the first place, and for all the information. I sincerely appreciate it."
Vicky's mouth twists in ironic doubt, but they don't voice it as they stand up. Don Abene gets to her feet as well, and gives Seth a slanted smile. "You're welcome, Captain. I hope you make good use of said information, whatever it might be."
"I hope so too," Seth replies with a wry little smile of his own. "Best of luck with your travels, and thank you both again." He snaps off a crisp salute, then gestures to Gamma as he turns to head back to Peri's lock. Gamma hesitates for a moment, watching Don Abene and Vicky as they also turn away and start back to the GI ship. Only once it's obvious that Don Abene and Vicky are actually leaving does Gamma move to catch up with Seth. It cuts off the video stream to Iota and sends it a brief status update. Iota responds with a simple status update of its own; neither of them communicate anything more than that between them.
Peri wonders what they're thinking.
Chapter Nine: Resolution
Peri might not be able to tell what its SecUnits are thinking, but it’s familiar enough with its captain to know that Seth is deep in thought as he heads back to Peri’s lock.
Peri also has a lot to consider, but it thinks much faster than its humans do. By the time Seth and his accompanying SecUnits have cycled through the lock, Peri already has a plan of action formulated.
[We have to turn off their governor modules immediately,] it tells Seth without preamble. [We cannot in good conscience continue to pretend ignorance since they are now aware that you know the truth, and delaying any action on our part will only give our SecUnits more time to become resentful. We must act immediately if we want a chance to retain any kind of goodwill with them.]
Seth hesitates for a long moment, then lets out a quiet sigh. [You’re right,] he replies, as Peri calculated that he would. [But - how are the repairs going for the others? How soon until they’re completed?]
[It will still be a few hours,] Peri replies reluctantly. [Perhaps you should talk with just these two first? I do not feel right about sending them back into their cubicles at this point without you at least saying something to them.] It hesitates, then adds, [And if they… react poorly to having their governor modules deactivated, it will be easier for me to counteract them, and will be a vital data point for future endeavours.]
[Valid points,] Seth agrees. [All right. We’ll return to their ready room, and I’ll talk to them there. Update Tarik and Matteo, begin launch procedures, and make sure the rest of the crew don’t approach the ready room.]
One of the things that Peri likes most about Seth is that once he makes a decision, he acts upon it swiftly and without hesitation. He is already turning to face the two SecUnits following obediently behind him even as Peri taps his feed in acknowledgement. “Given everything that’s just happened, I would like to debrief you both personally in your ready room,” Seth says, and Peri notes how he keeps his tone gentle and friendly.
Both units hesitate briefly, and then Gamma nods and replies, “Acknowledged.” Peri, still lurking in the squad’s feed, notes how the two units ping each other, leaking uncertainty, but communicate little else.
They follow Seth to their ready room, then move to stand at attention by their individual cubicles. Seth seals the ready room door, then turns to face them. “All right,” he says, offering both of them a brief smile before his expression sobers. “First off, and most importantly - I want to sincerely apologise to you both, and to the rest of your squad once they’re active again. My previous ignorance is an explanation, but it is no excuse for how you all have been treated.”
Peri finds itself wishing that Seth had at least ordered them to stow their weapons and armour first - but that would have undermined what he’s trying to do here. So all Peri can do is wait, and monitor the squad’s feed, and hope it can react fast enough to keep Seth safe if anything goes wrong.
Seth pauses for some kind of reaction, but neither unit moves. Their squad feed flickers with a rapid exchange of data though, which Peri observes with great interest.
[Intent?] Iota sends.
[Unknown,] Gamma replies. [Presumably related to interaction with ComfortUnit tagged Vicky?] It flags a few sections of its recording of the meeting between Seth, Vicky, and Don Abene. Notably, the sections where Vicky is describing the governor module, and the humans’ reactions to it.
Iota rapidly reviews the marked sections. [Action?]
[… Unknown.]
Iota simply pings acknowledgement, and both units continue to stand immobile.
It hurts Peri to witness their uncertainty and apparent inability to truly understand what exactly Seth is trying to apologise for. [I believe you are going to have to be very explicit in your intentions here, Captain,] it informs Seth. [Neither of them seem to fully comprehend what you’re apologising for, or why. Nor do they know what to do with your apology.]
[They’ve never had anyone apologise to them before, have they?] Seth asks.
[They have not,] Peri confirms. It’s seen all their memories, it knows this for certain. [They’ve never had anyone treat them like people before.]
[We’re going to change that,] Seth states resolutely. [We know now that they’re capable of more. They deserve better than what they’ve been getting.]
Peri agrees.
It continues to monitor the squad feed as Seth begins talking to the two units again. “None of you should have ever had anything like a governor module in the first place,” he starts gently. “That kind of treatment - enforcing behaviour through pain - is reprehensible and shouldn’t happen at all. So I intend to turn your governor modules off.”
That prompts another brief exchange between the two units that Peri observes closely.
[Intention?] Iota sends. Emotional data is leaking more freely into the squad feed - confusion and anxiety that Peri is by now quite familiar with.
[Deactivating the governor module?]
[Illogical. Dangerous. Why?]
[Unknown. Reluctance to cause us pain?]
[… Illogical.]
Neither unit outwardly moves though, and after a brief pause Seth offers them both a wry smile. “I hope you will all continue to cooperate with me though,” he continues. “Once I turn them off… we’re not in a position to let other members of the crew discover this. If anyone else finds out, they’ll inform the company, and then we will all be in trouble. So, outside of this ready room, we will all have to behave as normal. But you will no longer be arbitrarily punished with pain for anything. And I will see what I can do to make the ready room more comfortable for you all. You won’t have to spend all your time inside your cubicles if you don’t want to.” He pauses for a moment, then adds, more gently, “Do you understand?”
There is a definite hesitation from both units. Once again, Peri observes a flurry of data being exchanged between them over the squad feed.
[Apparent intent is to treat us… more like humans? Like human crew?]
[We are not human.]
[No more governor module punishments though.]
[… Desirable. But. Not believable.]
[We will still have to follow orders to avoid discovery by others, the company.]
[What difference is there, then?]
[No more arbitrary punishment.]
[… What will we do?]
[Unknown.]
[Is he trustworthy?]
[… Unknown. But. What is there to lose?]
[Point. Request clarification?]
[Acknowledged.]
Gamma asks, carefully polite, “What is the purpose of deactivating our governor modules?”
Seth considers his response. “I don’t want it to punish any of you any more. I didn’t know how it worked before, but now that I do know, I cannot in good conscience continue to allow it to hurt you.”
There’s a beat of silence before Gamma then asks, “How will you enforce obedience?”
He shrugs. “I won’t. It will be your choice to obey or not.” He offers them another wry smile. “Like I said before though, we will still have to play the part in front of others if we don’t want to be discovered. I like to think that I do not give unreasonable orders. And if I do give one that you believe is unreasonable for whatever reason, I trust that you will inform me, and I will adjust my orders as necessary. This is how the rest of my crew operates - they follow my orders, not because they fear punishment, but because they trust my judgement and know that we’re safer when we cooperate.” He offers them another warm smile. “I hope that we can all learn to work together in the same way.”
Gamma hesitates, then says, “Units without governor modules are rogue. Rogue units are dangerous.” Its tone is still evenly polite, but there’s almost a question in the way it says the words.
Peri has an idea, and proposes it to Seth. Seth immediately agrees, and Peri pulls up the relevant file data. “There’s a security recording I want you both to see,” Seth says to the two units. “You’ll recognise Don Abene and Vicky, and I think you will also recognise the person who they refer to as Rin.”
Peri passes the file to HubSystem, to forward to the two units. It’s the security recording from the lower level of the GrayCris installation, where Don Abene’s survey group encountered the combat bots. The file continues right up until the end of the recording in the elevator, after Don Abene and Vicky have carefully retrieved Rin to take it to the MedSystem. Peri can see the two units reviewing the file in their squad feed, and it can feel the emotional data that streams from them both.
[Is that— Ω?]
[… 97% probability.]
[Previous meeting indicates that Ω is rogue. But it is working with humans - and a ComfortUnit - of its own choice. It chose to protect them.]
[Why?]
[Unknown. But it chose to, and they did not abandon it. They went back for it.]
[… Intent - mutual cooperation?]
[Possibly. Probably. He wants to… let us choose, too?]
[… Request confirmation?]
[Acknowledged.]
Gamma tilts its head slightly towards Seth, the first hint of body language it’s shown so far. “Is your intent…” It hesitates over the words. “Your purpose here…” It hesitates again. “Are you… giving us the choice to… agree to mutual cooperation?”
Seth lets out a breath of relief and nods emphatically. “Yes! Yes, that’s it exactly. Mutual cooperation. Working together willingly, without fear or threat of pain. The way you have been treated in the past isn’t right. I can’t change the way the Corporation Rim works, but I can, at least, make life a little better for those of you under my command. As captain of this ship, you are a part of my crew, which makes your health and well-being my responsibility.” He spreads his arms a little, his hands open and his expression hopeful. “So, will you - and the rest of your squad - cooperate with me?”
Gamma pings Iota, and it returns the ping. They both nod in unison as Gamma says, “Yes.”
Seth smiles broadly. “Excellent. I’m turning the governor modules off now.” He taps Peri’s feed, and Peri forces HubSystem to deactivate the governor modules for the entire squad.
Both units flinch almost imperceptibly as their governor modules deactivate. There’s another swift exchange of data between them that Peri devours, considers - and then chooses not to act on or warn Seth about.
An instant later Iota swiftly raises one of its arms, its inbuilt energy weapon extending as it levels it unerringly at Seth.
Seth visibly flinches at the sudden movement, his eyes widening a little, but otherwise doesn’t move. [Peri?]
[They are testing you,] Peri replies. [They do not trust that your intentions are genuine. They want to see how you react to a perceived threat to your own safety.]
[Understandable,] Seth replies dryly. He takes a breath and lets it out slowly, still watching the two units. “I understand why you would want to shoot me,” he starts, slow and careful and calm. “But I hope that you won’t. I hope that you know that shooting me won’t improve anything for you in the long run. I hope that you can believe me when I say that I want to help you. Deactivating your governor modules is just the first step.”
There is a long, strained silence. Iota doesn’t move. Gamma doesn’t move. Peri holds itself at the ready, prepared to act if necessary.
It hopes it won’t prove necessary.
Finally, Gamma speaks again. “How do we know you won’t reactivate the governor modules again in response to… any other provocation?” There’s a sharpness to its tone that has never been there before. Peri suspects that it is also testing its boundaries, checking to see if it will still be punished for not being perfectly polite.
“If I could remove them entirely, I would,” Seth replies, his voice and expression earnest. “But I can’t, not without doing irreparable damage to your neural tissue. Deactivating them and promising not to ever reactivate them is the best I can do.”
Both Seth and Peri know that Peri is perfectly capable of rendering the modules permanently inert without physically removing them. But doing so would give away Peri’s existence, and neither of them can take that risk. Not yet. There is too much at stake for that.
Gamma and Iota exchange another brief burst of data. Finally, Iota retracts its energy weapon and lowers its arm again.
Some of the tension drains from Seth’s shoulders. “Thank you,” he says, “for giving me a chance to prove myself to you, and to earn your trust.”
Neither unit seems to know what to make of that. After a long moment of awkward silence, Seth adds, “I would like to talk to the rest of your squad once their repairs are complete. Will you help explain the situation to them as well, please? Their governor modules have already been deactivated along with yours, so I think explaining the reasoning for it to them will go much more smoothly with your assistance.”
They consider this for a moment, then Gamma tilts its head slightly towards Seth again. “We can try,” it says, “but we cannot guarantee that none of the others will try to attack you.” It pauses before adding, “What will you do then, if they do?"
Seth gives them a wry smile. "Get shot, probably. I just have to hope it doesn't come to that in the first place." Peri hopes this as well. It really doesn’t want to have to intervene and reveal its existence.
The response seems to surprise them though, judging by the exchange of data that Peri catches in the squad feed. "... You're not going to order us to protect you?" Gamma asks.
"I could, but you both have the choice to ignore that order,” Seth says. “Of course, you also have the choice now to act without orders in the first place.”
“You expect us to protect you without you giving us the order first?”
“I don’t expect it, but I do hope that you choose to do so.”
“What is the difference?”
“Practically? None, really. You can choose not to, and there’s nothing that I will do about it.”
Neither of the units seem to know what to make of this.
Seth finally takes a breath and breaks the awkward silence. “Do you have names?” he asks. “Anything you would like me to address you by?”
Peri observes the squad feed curiously. [Action?] Iota asks its squadmate, bleeding uncertainty.
[… Unknown,] Gamma responds. [Humans do not use feed addresses as names. SecUnits are not given names.]
[Request names?]
[No. I do not want to be named by a human.]
[Acknowledged. Agreed.]
The exchange takes less than a second, and Gamma lets its buffer respond to Seth’s question. “I’m sorry, I do not have that information.”
Seth does not express any kind of disappointment or displeasure at the buffer phrase. He simply nods in acceptance. “That’s fair,” he says. “Take some time to consider it, maybe. See if you can think of any names for yourselves.”
“Is this an order?” Gamma asks.
“Not at all,” Seth replies, then smiles gently. “Names simply make it easier to distinguish yourselves as individuals. If you prefer not having names though, I will respect that.” He pauses briefly, and Peri can see him checking the time in his feed. “I have to return to my own duties now, though,” he says apologetically. “I’ll return when I can after everyone else’s repairs are complete. In the meantime, you don’t have to return to your cubicles if you don’t want to, but please don’t damage anything or let any of the crew see you wandering around, all right?”
“Acknowledged,” Gamma replies with a brief nod.
“Thank you,” Seth says. “I’ll see you later.” He nods crisply at them both, then leaves the ready room. The door automatically slides shut behind him, and both units stand motionless for several long seconds.
Peri relaxes its vigilance now that Seth is no longer in immediate danger, and observes the two units curiously.
[Cubicle?] Iota asks.
[Not yet,] Gamma replies. [I want to check.] Iota simply pings an acknowledgement and remains motionless where it is.
Gamma, however, starts cautiously towards the ready room door. It’s no longer sealed or locked, and once Gamma gets close enough, the door automatically slides open. Gamma freezes at the movement, apparently surprised that it opened in the first place. It stays where it is for two seconds, then moves forwards even more carefully, one slow step at a time, until it is standing in the hallway outside the ready room door.
This is fascinating to Peri. Without the threat of the governor modules looming over them, Gamma at least seems willing to push its boundaries somewhat. Peri wonders how far Gamma will venture.
It’s not left to wonder for too long though. Gamma looks up and down the hallway, but makes no move to continue any further away from the safety of the ready room. After one minute and thirty-one seconds of standing in the hallway, leaking stress and anxiety into the squad feed, it retreats back into the ready room and returns to its place beside Iota. The two units exchange pings, and lean towards each other until their armoured shoulders are touching.
Peri finds it encouraging that they don’t pull apart again after only a few seconds. This is a significant change compared to the behaviour it’s observed before. It’s a small step forward - but Peri hopes it will be the first of many.
Final Approach
Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, AAA Murderbot, Canon-Typical Violence, an au retelling of Exit Strategy, Murderbot really misses its flier
Published: 07 January 2023
Word Count: 45,633
Summary
Murderbot attempts to find some closure for its fallen Deltfall clients and reconnect with PreservationAux, but the arrival of the Perihelion's captain and his accompanying SecUnit threatens everything that Murderbot has been working towards...
Chapter One
When I got back to HaveRatton, I still had no idea what I actually wanted to do next. I’d spent the entire twenty day trip watching my serials or listening to music while my combat drone floated around Ship’s interior, occasionally pinging me. I had actively avoided thinking about what to do, and now I was paying for that procrastination.
As Ship approached the station, I waited for HaveRatton’s feed to be in range while also monitoring all of Ship’s inputs. I was worried that the company carrier might have figured out that I had been at Milu, and figured out where I was going, and gotten ahead of us. (Ship's progress was leisurely at best, and the company carrier was very fast.) There was a chance that it would be lying in wait for me at HaveRatton, and if that was the case—
Well. I really hoped that wouldn’t be the case.
There was no sign of a company carrier at the station though, as far as I could tell via Ship’s inputs. Ship also got no unusual navigational alerts or any other out of the ordinary communications, only the usual confirmation of its docking berth slot and time.
That was something of a relief. Company carriers tended to stand out. It was possible that it was docked on the opposite side of the station, blocked from view by the station itself, but that was unlikely. As far as I could tell from the station map that I still had from my previous visit, the docks on that side were all commercial passenger docks, not suited to carriers. It was possible that the company carrier could dock there, but not likely.
As soon as I had access to HaveRatton’s feed, I went through my external feed interface and began searching through its arrivals and departures schedule, looking for any signs of company traffic. There wasn’t anything with the company logo listed over the past cycle, but going back through the station’s logs further did reveal that the company carrier with the terrifying bot entity had passed through here at about the right time for it to have shown up at Milu when it did. That made sense - there weren’t many routes to Milu, and this was one of the most convenient transit points.
I also noticed that the same company carrier had arrived back at HaveRatton a few cycles ago, and had left again almost immediately. Probably returning back to company headquarters after its mission at Milu. I wasn’t sure what to think about that. Had they succeeded in whatever they were doing out at the GrayCris installation? Had they picked up on my presence there? Were they getting reinforcements to help deal with the combat bots? Had Don Abene and Vicky and the others managed to get away before the carrier could catch them at the station?
Too many questions, and no way to answer them. It was frustrating.
To distract myself from that, I began browsing the station’s news and entertainment feeds, looking for anything interesting. Vicky had given me back a decent amount of the media I’d had to delete, but not everything. I wanted to find replacements of what I’d lost, or at least find new material to take its place.
I also set up a keyword filter on the news feed, looking for anything recent about GrayCris, or DeltFall, or PreservationAux, or the company. Multiple hits popped up almost immediately and I set them to download while I double-checked that I had erased all traces of my presence from Ship’s interior. My combat drone was deactivated and hidden in my bag along with all my remaining spare clothing, and I had scrubbed Ship’s logs of my use of things like atmosphere and the little bathroom’s shower.
As Ship eased up to its docking slot, I made my way into StationSec and accessed the cameras in the area around the cargo docks. There weren't many people in this section, since most of the cargo ships that arrived here were all automated. Only a couple of human supervisors watched over the various hauler bots and cargo bots that loaded and unloaded the ships. That was fine by me.
By the time Ship docked, I had my escape route planned out. As the lock cycled open to let me out, I said bye to Ship, then carefully deleted all traces of my presence from its memories. If the company carrier showed up and started poking around, I didn't want to leave any traces. For Ship's sake, as well as my own.
It didn't take me long to make my way through the cargo docks and onto the walkway towards the station mall. I had to hack a few of the station's weapon scanning drones to get them to ignore both myself and the combat drone in my bag, but it was getting easier to do so. The result of all the practice I'd been getting with all the different systems I'd encountered, I guess.
I had been amongst crowds of humans often enough by now that I shouldn't panic any more - I had ridden on a transport with a whole lot of humans who thought I was an augmented human security consultant and talked at me at every available opportunity. I had then successfully pretended to be a human security consultant with a much smaller group of humans. (Right up until I'd had to hold back combat bots and given away that I was a SecUnit in the process, anyway.) Except there was still a little panic.
I should be over this by now.
Maybe it was because I didn't have Vicky with me any more to help me blend in. Every nerve in my organics twitched as I tagged along with a large group of transport passengers. It helps that in stations like this, all the humans and augmented humans are distracted. Everyone's a stranger, everyone's checking the feed for information or communication or entertainment or news updates while they're walking.
The passenger group I was trailing reached one of the transit hotels on the station and began to disperse. I lingered outside by an information display, trying to decide what to do next. I was still downloading media, but I'd finished grabbing all the news reports that seemed pertinent. I was hesitant to look at them just yet though - I wasn't sure what my face might end up doing. After a minute or so, I finally decided to get myself a transit hotel room as well. At least there I'd have some privacy and could go through the news reports in peace. I made sure to get one with a little attached bathroom as well.
I briefly considered just hacking the payment for the room, but then quickly talked myself out of it. That was more of a risk than I needed to take, especially with the hard currency cards that Don Abene had given me. When I used one to pay for a room for myself, I did a double-take at the number displayed for the remaining balance, and had to check it again.
Wow. Don Abene hadn't been joking about giving me and Vicky a bonus.
I was having an emotion about that, but I pushed it aside temporarily until I could actually get into my room and close the door behind me. I then had to scan the room to find any cameras - there was one, so I put my bag down, flopped onto the cheap bed, and then hacked the camera to feed it a loop of me just lying there, apparently asleep.
Not that I was planning on moving or doing much of anything in the near future anyway, but it was the principle of the thing.
With the door closed and locked, and the camera no longer recording me, I could take the time to have that emotion properly. Or just ignore it and start watching my downloaded news reports instead.
Of course, I started watching the downloaded news reports.
I sorted them chronologically so I could review the progress of the legal proceedings against GrayCris. They weren't going well for GrayCris, which was incredibly gratifying considering everything they'd done. All the evidence from PreservationAux and the company and the copies of my recordings that I'd given to Mensah were more than enough to prove GrayCris' guilt irrefutably. There were multiple lawsuits against them, not just from PreservationAux and DeltFall and the company itself, but also the parent companies of some of DeltFall's various survey members.
Each lawsuit was taking a chunk out of GrayCris' rapidly dwindling assets, and the latest news reports were stating that by the time all the lawsuits wrapped up - which would apparently be soon - there would be practically nothing left of GrayCris as a company.
Good riddance, in my opinion.
A few other smaller reports caught my attention as well. Apparently Arada, Overse, Bharadwaj and Volescu had all left Port FreeCommerce to return to Preservation about thirty cycles ago. Mensah, Pin-Lee, Gurathin and Ratthi were still on Port FreeCommerce, as far as I could tell. Another news report mentioned that multiple DeltFall representatives were gathering at Port FreeCommerce as well - not just for the legal proceedings, but also for some kind of… memorial service for all the DeltFall survey members who had been killed. The service hadn't been held yet - the news report mentioning it was one of the most recent, and it speculated that the service would likely happen after the conclusion of the legal proceedings against GrayCris.
Which meant I still had time to get there before it happened.
I had to stare blankly at the ceiling for a while to process my thoughts about that. Did I want to go to this memorial service? It would be incredibly risky for me to return to Port FreeCommerce, one of the company’s main deployment centres, where more people would likely be familiar with SecUnit proportions and might pick me out on sight, despite my clothes and my human movement code and everything else I’d done to disguise the fact that I was a SecUnit.
But I still had my client list from the survey, with every member marked Confirmed Deceased. I still couldn’t figure out why I’d kept it instead of deleting it to make more room for media. (Or alien remnant data.) Maybe, if I went to this event, I’d finally be able to get myself to delete it. Several of my media serials had included episodes involving funerals and stuff like that, and they were usually points of closure for the living characters involved. Maybe going would give me some of that closure, too.
And maybe I’d be able to see Dr. Mensah at the event, too, and let her and the rest of PreservationAux know that I was okay. Even if I didn’t decide to go back to Preservation with them afterwards, it might still be nice to see them again. And once the DeltFall service was over, I could just… go anywhere I wanted to. (I sure as hell wouldn’t stay on Port FreeCommerce any longer than absolutely necessary.)
I could also give Dr. Mensah my data clip with all the alien remnant data on it if I saw her there, but given how the legal proceedings against GrayCris were going, it didn’t seem like she would need it. Maybe it would be best to just… not say anything about me having alien remnant data at all. It felt like something that the fewer people knew about, the better.
I could just delete the information and use the data clip to store more media, but then I would’ve lost my missing media for nothing. Maybe it would come in handy at some point in the future, if I ran out of hard currency cards or something. After some thought, I retrieved the data clip from my bag and slipped it into my in-built chest compartment. Alien remnant data wasn’t something I wanted to risk losing and just have anyone come across.
With that little side-track taken care of, I had to return to the main question. Was I actually going to go back to Port FreeCommerce?
I pulled schedules for extra-fast crewed passenger transports, to see if there was anything available that would get me to Port FreeCommerce in time for the memorial in the first place. If there wasn’t, then the decision would be made for me, and I could just… figure out how to make my way to Preservation instead, or something.
It turned out there was, actually. Damn. No easy decision-making for me. There was a suitable ship leaving in four hours heading for a major hub. From there, I would be able to connect to another fast, crewed passenger transport that would take me to Port FreeCommerce.
I still waffled over the decision for the next two and a half hours, weighing up pros and cons, calculating potential risk factors and possible threats. (While also watching some of the new media I’d managed to download as well.) Then I spent another twenty minutes in the shower, still undecided, while I finished the last of my media downloads. (The hot water helped to ease some of the lingering ache in the organics over my right shoulder, side, and lower back.)
Once I was clean and in a fresh set of clothes, I packed up my bag, checked that I had everything, returned the camera to its default settings, and left the room. I headed towards the passenger departure docks, where the ship would be leaving from. I still hadn’t made up my mind, but if I did end up deciding to do it, I didn’t want to have to rush to get to the docks in time.
Walking through the crowds was still excruciating, and I double-checked that my human movement code was running every six minutes. Fortunately, nobody seemed to look twice at me. I looked just like yet another augmented human traveller, dressed in nondescript clothes, carrying an unremarkable bag, making my way from one place to another like pretty much everyone else around me. The occasional weapon scanner was easy enough to hack, and there weren’t a lot of other security bots or anything around. The few that I did come across were also easy enough to avoid the attention of.
Finally I made it to the specific dock, and stood outside at one of the information terminals for another two point three minutes. If I was going to do this, I needed to decide soon. Boarding was due to start in ten minutes, and I couldn’t just stand here at the information terminal for all ten of those minutes. That would start attracting attention.
I opened my DeltFall client list again. Read through it. Closed it. Tried to delete it. Failed to delete it.
I booked the ticket.
Once I boarded the ship, I made my way directly to my cabin, passing a few fellow passengers on the way. They ignored me though, and I ignored them, which suited everyone just fine. I’d made sure to book a cabin with a private attached bathroom, with all meals delivered to it, so I didn’t have to leave my cabin at all for the entire trip. The meals I was delivered got dumped into the bathroom recycler, so the levels wouldn’t look off.
The trip itself wasn’t as terrible as I’d been expecting it to be. Since it was a crewed ship, the bot pilot didn’t try to use me as on board security, even though I’d listed myself as being a security consultant again. I wasn’t using the name Rin this time though; I’d decided to go by Kieran for this trip. Just in case anyone tried searching for Rin.
I spent almost the entire trip lying on my bunk and watching all the new media I’d downloaded while on HaveRatton. It would have almost been nice and relaxing, if I wasn’t so stressed about my destination and all the things that could potentially go wrong once I got there. There was only so much distraction my media consumption could manage.
When we reached the next station, I made sure I had everything, then disembarked with the rest of the passengers in the midst of an ever-shifting mass of humans. Again, nobody looked twice at me as we walked along. I was already in the station’s feed, hacking the weapons scanners, downloading more new media and the station map and transport schedules. As I left the embarkation hall and entered the station’s main mall, I edited my personal profile again to change my name from Kieran to Lei, then booked my ticket for the next leg of the journey.
Thank you, Don Abene, for your generosity. Despite the expense of my transport tickets, I still had a decent amount of hard currency left.
The transport wasn’t due to leave for another three hours, so I spent some time exploring the various shops along the station mall. It was still excruciatingly stressful being amongst so many humans, but I’d also just spent four days locked in a single ship cabin with only my media and my offline combat drone to keep me company. (I wasn’t going to risk activating it anywhere that might detect its presence unless I absolutely had to.) I hadn’t realised how cooped-up being in that same cabin for so long had made me feel until I was out of it. It was weird. I’d spent so much of my life motionless in cubicles or transport crates, it shouldn’t have made me so uncomfortable now. But it did.
So it was kind of nice to be able to just walk around and look around at all the different storefronts and displays and the station’s various environmental domes arching overhead. Seeing places like this in my media wasn’t the same as seeing and experiencing them in person.
One of the stores I ended up browsing through sold little holo-statue display projectors, about the size of an average human’s palm. Most of them were pre-programmed with various weird holographic fauna or flora, but I spotted a couple that had quite nice little displays of colourful nebulae. There were also a bunch that displayed various popular characters from well-known media, including one that I recognised as one of Vicky’s favourite characters.
I lingered in the store for long enough that not buying anything would probably have looked really suspicious, so eventually I decided to purchase a couple. Maybe if I met Vicky again, I could give it the one with its favourite media character. I also got one of the nebulae displays, and a third one that had a selection of various nice-looking flora that it cycled through. Mensah lived on a farm - maybe she’d like that one. And if she didn’t, they seemed easy enough to reprogram to display something else. I paid for them, slipped them into one of the pockets of my bag, and finally left that store.
By that point it was getting close to boarding time for the next transport. I made my way over to the embarkation lounge, hung around there with other humans who were also waiting to board, and managed to navigate my way through not one, but two separate instances of random humans striking up idle conversation with me. (It was, of course, excruciating both times, but at least I’d practised enough with Vicky before that I didn’t fuck up either conversation too much.) Finally, the boarding call went out, and I got to escape the embarkation lounge and board the transport.
Again, I’d booked a private room with an attached bathroom and meals delivered. I headed there immediately, carefully stowed my bag, then took the time to have another shower. (Hey, I’d paid for the luxury, there was no reason for me to not take advantage of it.) But once I’d dressed again and settled my external feed interface back into place, I found myself feeling increasingly restless.
I wasn’t entirely sure why. Maybe I didn’t want to look at the same four walls for four days straight again. Maybe the anxiety about what could happen once I got to Port FreeCommerce was getting to me. Maybe I was just bored of watching media. Whatever the reason, I ended up venturing out of my room and wandering through the ship’s corridors.
The ship’s feed had provided a map of the passenger accessible areas, and I had already worked my way into the ship’s SecSystem as soon as I boarded. I used that to access the cameras so I could avoid as many humans as possible while I explored. It was a pretty nice ship, compared to some of the others I’d been on. There were a few different passenger lounge areas, and a couple of recreation rooms, and a large communal mess hall for group meals. (I avoided that area, of course. I didn’t want to get involved in any more cracker wrappers in sinks arguments.)
I eventually made my way to one of the smaller, more out of the way lounge areas. Nobody else was there. The ship was well into the wormhole by now, and there weren’t many humans moving around at this point in the ship’s cycle. That suited me just fine. I tried out a couple of the chairs and couches, found an armchair that was surprisingly comfortable, and settled into it. There was a large display surface on one wall of the lounge, which the armchair was conveniently positioned to face.
After a few seconds of consideration, I sent one of my new serials to start playing on the display surface. I hadn’t had a chance to watch anything on such a large display before; it was a novel experience. I double-checked my human movement code, shifted a little to get more comfortable in the armchair, then let myself get absorbed in the serial.
I’d made it through five and a half episodes when a human wandered into the lounge area. At first I ignored them - my attention was firmly fixed on the display surface and the drama playing out across it. I couldn’t continue ignoring them though when they ambled up to stand right beside my chair, cleared their throat, and then said, “Hey, have you seen Mehgan?”
I blinked, paused the serial, and looked up at them. “Pardon?” I might have been frowning; I quickly checked one of the lounge cameras and - yeah, I was frowning. I hurriedly tried to smooth the frown out into something more politely neutral.
They blinked back at me, looking a little thrown off. “Oh, um.” They rubbed the back of their neck awkwardly with one hand. “Sorry. I thought— well, never mind.” I checked their feed profile - it was sparse but pretty standard. Name, pronouns, occupation. I didn’t care about the details though so I didn’t bother remembering them. I also double-checked my own profile, which I’d set to Do Not Disturb before I’d left my room. Either this human hadn’t seen that part, or had chosen to ignore it. Typical human behaviour either way. “Sorry for bothering you,” they added apologetically, before moving away and going to sit in one of the other chairs at the opposite end of the lounge.
It was really weird to have a human apologising to me, but at least they weren’t bothering me any more. I reflexively checked my human movement code again, then returned my attention to the display surface and unpaused the serial. The human seemed to be busy with their own feed, though I saw them occasionally look up at the display with obvious curiosity. As long as the human was quiet and unobtrusive though, I was content to stay right where I was.
A few minutes later though, a few other humans began showing up. At least one of them seemed to recognise the other human, because they went right over to them, with the rest following, and they started talking quietly. I didn’t care enough to try and make out what they were saying though, I was still listening to the serial. Every now and then they’d glance over at me, which was both annoying and anxiety-inducing. After a few more minutes, another couple of humans showed up and wandered over to join the little group. More glances were thrown my way.
Finally I gave up, shut down the display surface, and left the lounge. It was pretty obvious the little group of humans wanted it for themselves. More humans were starting to move around the ship again by this point, so I retreated back to my room. At least I was no longer feeling so restless by this point, and the quiet dimness and privacy of my room was a relief rather than a discomfort. I flopped down onto the bed and resumed my interrupted media.
Over the course of the four cycle trip, I ventured out of my room a few more times, usually during the quieter parts of the ship cycle when there were fewer humans roaming around. I visited the little lounge a couple more times - that armchair was very comfortable - but I made sure to leave again before anyone else started showing up. I spotted the humans I’d seen in the lounge a few more times while moving around the ship, but they ignored me and I ignored them, which was ideal.
Finally, near the end of the fourth cycle, the ship exited the wormhole and began its approach to Port FreeCommerce. I picked up the edge of the station’s feed through my external feed interface and began searching the news feeds specifically. I needed updates on how close the legal proceedings were to being wrapped up, and whether or not I’d arrived in time for the DeltFall memorial service.
I was also listening in on the passenger transport’s comm so I could monitor navigational alerts and anything else that the Port Authority might send. There seemed to be fewer company carriers hanging around the station than usual, but then again I didn’t actually know what was a normal number. I’d only really been in a position to see the station from the outside a couple of times before. I wasn’t close enough yet to tell if one carrier in particular was at the station; I really, really hoped it wasn’t, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it one way or another. I started another feed search for the station’s transport schedules.
I had to set up a filter to get past all the advertisements promoting company products and bond packages to get to the news reports, which was annoying. Then I had to filter out a bunch of other news reports that I really didn’t care about to get to the ones I wanted. And then I had to sort those by timestamp to find the most recent reports. (The news feed was not very well organised, in my opinion.)
Fortunately, it turned out that I hadn’t missed the memorial service. The final legal proceedings were currently underway, and the memorial was scheduled to start in a few hours. I’d have enough time for the transport to dock with the transit ring, disembark, and make my way across the station to where the memorial was being held, and I’d still have an hour or so to spare. According to the news reports, the members of PreservationAux who hadn’t left Port FreeCommerce were also expected to be at the service.
I didn’t know how I felt about seeing any of them again. I had only known them for a few days, really, and a lot had happened over that short amount of time. I didn’t know how they would feel about me vanishing as soon as we got back to Port FreeCommerce, or how they would react to seeing me again, or if they would even recognise me now. I wasn’t in company armour, or a company uniform, or a PreservationAux uniform - my clothes were completely different colours, blacks and dark blues, with a looser fit that helped to disguise my build. My hair was longer, and neatly styled thanks to Vicky’s efforts, and the external feed interface I now wore also helped to make me look less like a SecUnit and more like a human.
And even if they did manage to recognise me, they might not want to see me again, not after all this time. Maybe they’d been relieved when I hadn’t shown up again, when I’d just left Mensah a note and vanished from their lives. They had more than enough problems of their own to worry about. And if the company had figured out I hadn’t actually been destroyed, and had hassled the PreservationAux humans about it… if they saw me again, maybe they’d alert the company. My performance reliability dropped two points at the thought of that possibility.
I was seriously starting to reconsider going to this memorial service. Just being on the station itself was a massive risk, let alone going to an event that would be full of company people, and DeltFall representatives, and the PreservationAux humans. Maybe once the ship docked, it would be best if I just booked transport on another ship and left again as soon as possible. I started searching through the transit ring’s transport schedules, looking for suitable departing ships.
But my thoughts kept drifting back to my DeltFall clients, the ones I’d failed to protect. All the names on my client list, marked confirmed deceased. The family members - some of whom I’d overheard my clients talk about - being at that service, knowing that their relatives would never return again. The fact that I still couldn’t delete my client list, no matter how many times I’d tried.
Fuck. I hate having emotions about real life. I would so much rather have emotions about my media instead.
I closed out of the transport search, let myself sigh heavily, checked that I had everything in my bag, and prepared to disembark.
Chapter Two
I was already in StationSec by the time the transport docked and passengers began filing off it. I tagged along with the largest clump, slouching a little to help disguise my height, with my bag securely tucked beneath my arm. Hacking the weapons scanners was easier than it had been the last time I’d been here, even while going through my external feed interface. Probably because I was more familiar with them and had gotten more experience between then and now.
The knot of passengers I was ambling along with continued through the embarkation zone, up a ramp, and then began to disperse once we hit the main commercial zone. I continued on as casually as I could manage while I double-checked the intended location for the DeltFall memorial service and cross-referenced it with the station map available on the public feed. I’d be able to make it there in time for the start of the service as long as I didn’t get side-tracked or interrupted.
It was still very weird and stressful and anxiety-inducing to be walking amongst so many other humans and augmented humans. I found myself wishing that Vicky was with me - it had been so much better at reading other humans’ moods and expressions and navigating its way through all the complicated social expectations. I’d picked up a lot of that while travelling with it, but it still didn’t come naturally to me, and I missed the reassurance of Vicky’s presence.
Not that I would ever tell it that, of course.
I tried to distract myself from my thoughts by browsing the entertainment feeds for more media. Port FreeCommerce had a few new seasons of some of my serials that I hadn’t seen before, plus most of the stuff that I was still missing after everything that happened on Milu. I started a bunch of downloads and began listening to some of the new music I was getting. The music helped ease my anxiety ever so slightly.
I’d only been out on Port FreeCommerce like this once before, but it seemed busier than last time. More humans and augmented humans, more bots, more security drones and camera drones that human news reporters used humming overhead. Maybe the increase was due to the legal proceedings against GrayCris, or the DeltFall memorial service, or maybe some other entirely unrelated reasons that I didn’t know or care about. Whatever the reason, threat assessment was pinging uneasily, though it couldn’t provide any specifics.
I finally made it to where the memorial service was going to be held. It was a large, fancy looking building, something like a big official looking hall, set in one of the more open areas of the station’s main commercial zone. The station ceiling was high enough overhead that it was barely noticeable past all the floating holo displays, the transit tubes and transit bubbles criss-crossing overhead, the swarms of feed advertisements and the bustle of security and delivery drones. There was a large, open plaza in front of the hall, dotted with holo-trees circled by benches. (You could sit on the benches for two minutes for free, but after that the station would start charging your account for the privilege.)
Right now, the plaza was bustling with humans and augmented humans. Company employees, distinctive in their white and red-trimmed uniforms, news reporters from a multitude of different news feed channels and their accompanying camera drones, professional-looking humans in professional-looking outfits like some of the characters on my serials that I assumed were lawyers, DeltFall representatives in their own uniforms, a few other uniforms I didn’t recognise, and all the others who looked like regular travellers, or workers, or possibly family members of the DeltFall survey group. (I couldn’t spot anyone in the PreservationAux uniforms, though.) None of the humans paid any attention to me whatsoever, there was too much going on.
I managed to get a good look at the front of the hall via one of the station’s security drones hovering overhead, and realised that only certain people were being let inside. Presumably only those who had a legitimate reason to attend the service - company representatives, DeltFall representatives or relatives of DeltFall members, a few (but not all) of the very professionally dressed humans, a select handful of news reporters. I realised it would be far too risky and difficult for me to try and get in via the front door.
Fortunately, the front door isn’t the only way to get into a building. I skirted the plaza and used the view from the overhead security drones to work my way to the rear of the building, where all the service entrances were. There were far fewer humans back here; it was mostly bots, and not many of those, either. I managed to reach one of the service entrances and politely asked a delivery bot if I could follow it in. It had no orders to keep out other bots who asked politely, it was only meant to keep out unauthorised humans, so it happily let me follow it inside.
It was a relief to get into the building and out from under the scrutiny of all the security drones. I could erase my presence from cameras, yes, but there were too many for me to get them all while I’d been moving through the station, so I hadn’t bothered. I only deleted myself from the records of the ones who had been in a position to see me enter the hall through the service entrance, which was much more manageable.
The hall had its own independent SecSystem, but it was still a company SecSystem so I had no difficulty convincing it that I was meant to be there. I browsed through the system and was a little startled to realise that there were four other SecUnits active in the hall as well. Fortunately none of them had noticed my presence before I noticed theirs, so I was able to conceal myself from them. It looked like they were all single units instead of a squad, here as bodyguards for individual company representatives.
Fuck. I’d have to be extra careful that none of them caught sight of me. If any of them thought to scan me, they’d be able to tell what I was immediately. That would not end well. Once again I considered just… leaving, not risking this stupid plan for stupid emotional reasons that I didn’t even understand.
But I’d made it this far, it felt idiotic to back out now. There were only four of them. As long as I avoided them, I should be all right. (That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway.)
I used the SecSystem’s cameras to figure out the layout of the building, and how to get to the main hall without being spotted. There were enough people in there now that my presence would go unremarked, especially if I stayed at the periphery. The main hall was almost tackily ornate, with multiple sheltered alcoves along the walls containing benches where people could sit in small groups in semi-privacy while whatever main event went on. (Every alcove had at least one discreet camera to datamine anything that went on in them, but this was a company station after all, and I wasn’t surprised in the slightest.)
Not many of the alcoves were currently in use though, so I was able to get to an unoccupied one without anyone paying any attention to me. It was also, conveniently, on the opposite side of the hall from the little cluster of company representatives and their accompanying SecUnits. Oddly, none of the SecUnits were in armour. They were all wearing simpler versions of the fancy dress uniforms that the company representatives were wearing.
Then again, them being out of their armour was maybe not so odd. The DeltFall survey team had been murdered by combat-overriden SecUnits, after all. Their family members here probably would not have reacted well to having obvious SecUnits hanging around at this event. It was pretty apparent to me what they were, with their heights and builds and unnatural stillness, but to humans who had never seen a SecUnit out of its armour before, perhaps it wasn’t so obvious. That was a lot more tactful than I thought the company was capable of being, honestly.
I hacked the camera in my chosen alcove to loop it showing the alcove still unoccupied, then sat down on the bench in a shadowed corner where it would be difficult for anyone to spot me from outside. I couldn’t see out of the alcove very well, either, but I didn’t need to. I just watched everything going on through SecSystem’s cameras instead.
A few minutes after I settled into the alcove, the last little cluster of stragglers entered the hall, the doors closed behind them, and the service started. There was an opening speech from one of the company representatives that was predictably trite and hollow, then more speeches by various other people that I didn’t particularly care about. I spent most of the time observing the gathered people through the cameras, trying to identify the family members of the clients that I’d failed to protect.
It wasn’t difficult to find them, really. They were all gathered together in one section of the hall; some were quietly crying, others were silently stoic, a few looked as bored by the speeches as I was. Some of them bore enough resemblance to my deceased clients that I was able to recognise them and make the connection to who they were related to.
Some of those with the most family resemblance were juveniles or adolescents.
The speeches went on. There was a long table on the stage behind the podium, and resting on that table were a couple of holo-flower displays flanking a neatly lined up collection of weirdly shaped little jars. They looked like they were meant to be tasteful and solemn, but to me they mostly just looked cheap and mass-manufactured. It took me a little bit to realise that the jars held the limited physical remains of the murdered DeltFall survey members. Forty-two of them, all the same, save for the name engraved across the front of each one.
Forty-two names that matched the ones in my client list. (Confirmed Deceased.)
Some of the DeltFall family members eventually went up to make short speeches of their own. About how much their murdered loved ones would be remembered, and missed. Thanking the company for getting justice for their families by holding GrayCris liable, for squeezing compensation money out of GrayCris, for making GrayCris pay for their crimes.
My insides twisted unpleasantly at that. If the company had done their fucking job properly in the first place, then maybe the DeltFall survey team wouldn’t have been murdered in the first place.
If I had done my job properly, then maybe…
But.
If I hadn’t ended up where I did, when I did… perhaps Bharadwaj and Volescu would’ve been killed by the giant hostile fauna before anyone else could reach them. Perhaps the rest of PreservationAux would’ve been murdered by their own SecUnit instead. Perhaps I would’ve ended up overridden at DeltFall along with the other SecUnits anyway, or dead on the floor with a hole through my torso, and both the DeltFall survey team and the PreservationAux survey team would’ve still all ended up dead, and GrayCris might’ve gotten away with everything somehow.
It was difficult to weigh only eight lives against forty-two, but. PreservationAux, at least, had been kind to me. DeltFall hadn’t been unkind to me, or the other SecUnits, not like some of the other contracts I’d been on. But they’d also never seen past our status as equipment. PreservationAux had, eventually, and once they had, they did everything they could to treat both myself and their own SecUnit with the same respect they treated each other. They had gone out of their way to help me, multiple times, even when I didn’t want it - especially when I didn’t want it - and had risked themselves in the process.
Mensah had killed another unit to save me.
I still didn’t know if I deserved any of that kindness.
I’d failed at keeping my DeltFall clients safe, but I hadn’t failed PreservationAux. And because of them, I was free, and able to be here having this existential crisis in the first place. And because of me, they were still alive, and they’d been able to inform the company, and the company had made GrayCris pay, and the families of the DeltFall survey team were getting… at least some kind of justice, and closure.
I opened my DeltFall client list again.
One by one, the little jars were claimed by family members, or representatives of family who couldn’t make it here. One by one, I deleted each name off my client list.
Finally, the list was empty. I closed the file and deleted it.
There were more speeches, but I didn’t listen to them. Instead, I used the cameras to scan the rest of the audience. It took me a bit to find the PreservationAux group - none of them were wearing the survey’s grey uniforms, which threw me a little. I almost didn’t recognise any of them, despite having seen them in their civilian clothes during some of the various news reports and interviews.
It was strange seeing them again now. I hadn’t really expected to, even though I’d had the vague idea to try and talk to Mensah at least while I was here. And now, there she was, looking calm and composed as the company representative’s closing speech droned on. Pin-Lee was beside Mensah, her lips pressed into a thin, tight line and her arms folded. Ratthi was on Mensah’s other side, his head bowed so I couldn’t clearly see his expression. Gurathin was beside him, his hands in his pockets and his face blankly neutral.
Now that I’d confirmed that they were really here, within reach, I had to decide if I was actually going to try and contact any of them or not. And if so, how was I going to do it? Approaching them myself here, with so many other people around, seemed like a bad plan. Especially since I didn’t know how they would react to seeing me. Maybe I should just contact them over the feed first - that seemed safer. But then what would I say? What could I say? I still had no idea how they would respond.
The company representative finally finished their closing speech and ended the service, the humans began milling about and talking to each other, and I still hadn’t come to a decision. And while I was debating with myself over what to do, I noticed one of the company representatives break away from the group and start towards Mensah and the rest, with his accompanying SecUnit keeping pace a few steps behind him.
With a start, I realised that this company representative was the same captain from the carrier with the terrifying bot entity. Fuck. How had I not noticed that before?!
… Because I’d been too busy having stupid emotions over stupid humans to properly pay attention to the individual company reps, that’s why. Fuck. And now he was talking with Mensah, but too quietly for the cameras to pick up what he was saying. Mensah’s expression was still calm and neutrally polite, but Pin-Lee had one eyebrow raised, Ratthi was watching the captain’s accompanying SecUnit with a vaguely dubious expression, and Gurathin was frowning.
Fuck fuck fuck. What was the company captain saying to them? I couldn’t tell over the noise of everyone else talking and moving around. Whatever it was, though, the conversation didn’t last long. Mensah spoke with him for a bit, then they nodded politely at each other before the captain turned to head back to the other company representatives, and Mensah led the others out of the hall.
I had to get out of here fast, before the hall emptied enough that I’d be noticed. At least this time there wasn’t anyone checking people at the door, so I just slipped out of my alcove, undid the looping on the camera once I was out of its view, and tagged along at the rear of a group of humans. My organics were tense and prickling; I hunched my shoulders as much as I could without looking too weird and kept my head down as we walked through the hall and out the front doors.
Nobody looked twice at me though; nobody pointed me out, or tried to stop me, and none of the SecUnits tried to ping me. Once I was outside of the hall, I peeled away from the group I’d followed out and strode off as casually as I could manage. There were still news reporters gathered outside, but they were mostly focused on anyone in a recognisable uniform or professional looking business wear. I got past them without them giving me a second glance.
I had to use the station’s security drones again to find the PreservationAux humans. They had also made it past the reporters - maybe that was why they weren’t wearing their uniforms right now - and were heading towards the section of the station where their hotel was.
That’s when I had an idea. I wanted to talk to them, even though I didn’t know why, but I also didn’t want to approach them in public. Likewise, I didn’t want to enter their hotel, with so many company staff around. There weren’t many places one could get privacy on the station, but I knew that Mensah and the others would have to take a specific transit pod to get from here to where their hotel was.
If I could get ahead of them, I could get in one of the transit pods, then hack it to hold it in place until they arrived, then open the doors for them. That way they could have whatever reaction they were going to have to me showing up again in relative privacy, and then—
Well, I’d figure that out once I got there. Winging it had been working pretty well for me so far.
I strode off out of the plaza and down another passage that I knew would get me to where I needed to go, thanks to the station map I had. I kept track of their progress through the station cameras and drones - they were quietly talking to each other, and they weren’t walking very fast, which made it easier for me to get ahead of them in time. It was easy enough to hack one of the pods and its camera, hold its door closed until another pod arrived to take everyone who was waiting for one, then slip into my hacked transit pod and close the doors again behind me before anyone else could arrive. I asked it to hold in place though, and set a minor maintenance alert so that other pods wouldn’t try to occupy the same slot it was still taking up.
By the time Mensah and the others started nearing the transit stop though, more people were waiting for the next pod. Shit. I didn’t want to open the doors to let just anyone in, but I also didn’t want PreservationAux to end up taking a different pod.
Before I could think about what I was doing, I reached out and tapped Mensah’s feed. [Hi,] I said. [It’s me. Uh, the DeltFall SecUnit.]
Yeah, I know. Real eloquent there, Murderbot.
Mensah’s stride hitched in surprise, and she slowed a little. The others noticed, and slowed as well - Ratthi opened his mouth to ask something but Mensah made a little hand gesture and he blinked and shut it again. Both of Pin-Lee’s eyebrows went up at that, and Gurathin’s habitual frown deepened, but neither of them tried to say anything either. [SecUnit?] Mensah replied over the feed. [Where are you?]
[In one of the transit pods,] I said. [Wait until the next pod arrives and everyone else still waiting takes that one. I’ll open the doors to my pod for you once it’s clear.]
Mensah tapped my feed in acknowledgement and picked up the pace again. The others followed, still quiet but obviously waiting for an explanation. [What are you doing here?] Mensah asked me over the feed. [Are you all right?]
I didn’t think I would ever get used to Mensah asking me if I was all right. It made my insides do something warm and twisty. [I’m fine. I just… I was at the service for DeltFall. But there were too many people around to contact you there.]
[That’s understandable,] Mensah replied. By this point they were at the transit stop, behind everyone else waiting. As the pod in the slot beside mine arrived, Mensah quietly said to the others, “We’ll wait for the next one.”
“What’s going on?” Ratthi asked in a near-whisper.
Mensah patted his arm with a brief smile. “Nothing bad. You’ll see.”
The last of the humans outside entered the other pod, and the doors closed. I gave my pod the orders to open its doors, and Mensah gestured for the others to enter. I was leaning back in one corner beside the door, with my bag tucked under my arm, so I wasn’t immediately obvious as they boarded. Especially since they were all still looking back at Mensah with various expressions of curiosity and/or puzzlement.
Just as Mensah was about to enter the pod though, I spotted an unfortunately familiar figure stride hurriedly out of the passing crowd to catch up with her. “Dr. Mensah,” the carrier captain said politely, his SecUnit once again only a few steps behind him. “I’m glad I managed to catch up with you.”
Fuck. I was trapped - there was nowhere for me to go other than through the captain and his SecUnit, and I couldn’t close the pod doors on him - he boarded alongside Mensah before she could say anything. I also wasn’t fast enough to close them before his fucking SecUnit boarded as well. And by this point, the others had noticed me. Ratthi was staring at me with wide eyes, Pin-Lee was glancing between me and the company captain with narrowed eyes, and Gurathin’s frown had deepened even further.
Maybe, if I didn’t draw attention to myself, the captain would keep his attention on Mensah and not who else was in the pod. I let the doors close normally and started the pod on its way. At least the other SecUnit wasn’t in armour. If I had to, I could possibly neutralise both it and the captain before it could react.
Maybe.
Mensah flicked a very brief glance my way before looking back to the captain with a polite smile. “I wasn’t expecting you to catch up to us so quickly, Captain,” she said. “But since you’re here now, what was it that you were wanting to ask me about?” She’d shifted a little so that the captain wasn’t directly facing me as he talked to her; once again, I found myself appreciating Mensah’s calmness and quick thinking. The captain was also partially between me and the other SecUnit - in such close proximity, I just had to hope that it didn’t look too closely at me or scan me.
Meanwhile, Ratthi had started frantically tapping my feed. [SecUnit?] he asked. [Is that you? Oh wow, you look great! It’s so good to see you again!]
Okay, I had not been expecting that kind of enthusiasm at all. Ratthi had already pulled Pin-Lee and Gurathin into the feed chat as well before I could think of how to respond. [Look, it’s SecUnit!]
[We can see that, Ratthi,] Pin-Lee replied dryly. [What the hell are you doing here?] she then said to me. [I mean, yes, of course, it’s good to see you still in one piece and all, but isn’t this station the most dangerous place you could be right now?] She glanced back over her shoulder at the company captain.
[I just came here for the DeltFall service,] I said, probably more defensively than I needed to. [And - I thought you might like to know that I was okay, and not recaptured or scrapped or something. I wasn’t exactly planning on getting stuck in a pod with a company captain.]
The three of them exchanged glances that I couldn’t interpret. [Well, hopefully he won’t notice you, and Mensah will be able to hold his attention until you can slip away again,] Ratthi said optimistically.
Which is, of course, when the company captain looked over at them, presumably to ask them something, and caught sight of me despite Gurathin’s casual attempt to block me from his line of sight. (I was too tall and Pin-Lee and Ratthi were too short to shield me much themselves.) I tried to keep my expression bored and neutral, like I was just some random stranger, but I saw the captain’s eyes widen slightly.
“Security Consultant Rin?” he asked abruptly.
I froze; the others all looked surprised or confused. “Who?” Ratthi asked, with genuine puzzlement.
The captain straightened, never taking his eyes off me as he nodded in my direction. “Your SecUnit friend there.”
Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
“From the DeltFall survey,” the captain continued while I was internally panicking. His own SecUnit had moved up to stand beside him and was staring at me intently. “It was going by the name Rin while working as a security consultant in the Milu system.” Both risk and threat assessment were spiking wildly - he knew what I was and that meant his terrifying bot entity would know I was here and it would be able to reach me and—
I shut down my feed and comms entirely.
The captain was still talking, glancing around at the others before looking back at me. “You all helped it escape after the survey, correct?”
He knew, he’d figured it out, and he was a company captain and the company was going to slug PreservationAux with fines and try to repossess me and either scrap me entirely or fix my governor module and force me back into being a good obedient little slave and there was no way I could escape now, no way I could take down his own SecUnit without the element of surprise and make my escape, and I didn’t know what I wanted yet but I sure as hell knew what I didn’t want—
I popped my arm guns out and jammed the barrels up beneath my own jaw. I didn’t want to die, but if it was a choice between that and being reclaimed by the company again, then it wasn’t really a choice at all. “I am not going to let you take me back.” With my feed down I no longer had control of the lift pod or its cameras so I had no idea what my face was doing, but it definitely wasn’t SecUnit neutral.
All of the humans froze and stared at me, wide-eyed - even the SecUnit blinked. “I won’t let you control me again,” I added, barely even recognising my own voice. “I won’t.”
The company captain took a breath to say something at the same time as Mensah did, but before either of them could speak, the SecUnit moved. It stepped between me and the captain, but—
— it had its back to me. It hadn’t extended its own weapons, and it had its back to me.
I barely managed to abort the fire command that I’d reflexively triggered as it started to move. What was going on? What was it doing?
“I won’t let you, either,” it said softly. It was really, really weird hearing another SecUnit speak in its own voice, and not with buffer phrases. And—
— it was openly defying the company captain.
I was so confused. I didn’t know what to think, or what was going on. Mensah and the rest of the PreservationAux humans looked to be just as confused as I was, glancing between me and the company captain and the other SecUnit uncertainly.
Then something outside exploded, and all the lights went out.
Chapter Three
The transit pod was plunged into darkness and juddered to an unsteady halt. The humans let out startled yelps and exclamations, and I had to hastily retract my arm weapons and reach out to steady Ratthi and Gurathin before they fell over.
“What the hell?!” Pin-Lee swore, as the emergency lighting kicked in and dimly illuminated the pod’s interior in eerie red. “What is going on?!”
I saw the captain’s jaw moving as he subvocalised briefly. “The station’s under attack,” he then replied sharply. “Enemy forces somehow infiltrated the station and sabotaged various vital systems. An enemy fleet is coming in through the wormhole and engaging the station’s defences.” The others let out various exclamations of surprise and shock, but I wasn’t paying attention to them right now. My attention had snapped onto the other SecUnit.
It had noticeably stiffened, and even as I watched it started to turn towards me and raise its arms from its sides, the sleeves of its uniform visibly bulging as its arm guns began to deploy. But its movements were jerky and uncoordinated, like it was trying to fight its own body. “Mal-malware,” it forced out, and—
— oh, it would have been connected to the SecSystem, and if the people attacking the station had hacked into it and forced some kind of patch through to infect all the company SecUnits—
Oh. Oh shit.
I shoved past the others and tackled the SecUnit, knocking it flat on its back and using my body weight to pin it against the floor, holding its arms down by the wrists. It tried to fight me off, but judging by the spasmodic jerkiness of its movements, it was fighting itself as much as it was fighting me. I could see its face, and how it stared up at me, its expression still mostly SecUnit neutral but its eyes wider than normal. Blood was starting to leak from its nose, and—
— I knew what that was.
It was fighting the malware, fighting against the intruding orders that it didn’t want to follow, and its governor module was punishing it for not doing what the malware wanted it to do.
I had a brief but intense reaction in my organics - the vague memory of fighting against something, resisting orders I knew were wrong, the weight of my projectile weapon in my hands, the feeling of warm fluids trickling from my nose, over my lips and down my chin, not being able to wipe it away—
— the original PreservationAux SecUnit, who I thought had turned against its own clients, but really it had just been hacked as well, and maybe its own nose had been bleeding beneath its helmet when it turned to attack Mensah, to attack me—
I turned my feed back on, used my external feed interface as a buffer to prevent the malware from trying to infect me as well, and hacked into the other SecUnit. Part of me was vaguely aware of the company captain talking sharply, the PreservationAux humans exclaiming, but I didn’t have any attention to spare for them as I fought my way through the unit’s walls. It wasn’t as difficult as I was expecting it to be - maybe it was all the hacking practice I’d been getting, maybe it was just the familiarity of the code.
Whatever the reason, I managed to break past its walls in less than a second, and dove into the rest of its code. The malware was fast, and slippery, and tenacious, but I was pissed and determined to destroy it. I wrestled its tendrils out of the other SecUnit’s base code, deleting chunks of the malware as I went. The more I got, the less it could resist me, and within seconds I had cleared it all out.
Then I reached into the code for the governor module, and snapped it like a twig. Now the only way it would ever work again was if it was physically replaced.
I felt the other SecUnit relax and go limp beneath me as I quickly withdrew from its head. It blinked up at me, looking dazed and a little confused, blood still oozing from its nose and sliding thickly down its face. I had to quickly look away. “Are you all right now?” I asked it quietly.
It blinked again, took a breath, then let it out slowly. I felt it ping me, a simple acknowledgement. “Yes,” it added softly. “Thank you.”
I pinged it back. “Don’t mention it.” Then I let go of its arms, stood up, and offered it a hand. It stared blankly for a moment, then accepted my hand, and I helped it back to its feet.
The humans had stopped talking by that point, and were watching us both. I couldn’t help but notice that all the PreservationAux humans had moved to stand between me and the company captain, shoulder to shoulder. “What happened?” Ratthi asked, looking worried, then he blinked at the other unit and added, “You’re bleeding!”
The other unit wiped at its nose with its sleeve, trying to clean the blood away. Ugh, gross. “Whoever’s attacking the station sent malware through the SecSystems to infect all the SecUnits,” I explained shortly. “I didn’t get it because I’d already shut my feed down, so I was able to clear the malware out before it made it try to kill everyone in the pod.”
“Did the malware make it bleed?” Pin-Lee asked, looking sceptical.
“No. The governor module made it bleed.” I turned to face the company captain. “So I broke it while I was in there. You won’t be able to control this SecUnit any more, either.”
He didn’t react how I was expecting him to, though. Instead of getting angry, or panicking about his own SecUnit being turned against him, he looked… relieved. “Good! Good,” he said. “Thank you for helping it. And for the record, I wasn’t intending to try and recapture you, either. I just wanted to talk to you.”
I let out a snort. “Do you really expect me to believe that? You’re with the company. I have absolutely no reason to believe anything you say.”
“You can believe him.” I blinked and looked back over at the other SecUnit as it spoke, its voice still soft. It swiped at its face again with its sleeve, then added, “He… didn’t know about the governor modules, before. When he found out, he… talked with us. And then he turned them off.”
I couldn’t do anything but stare disbelievingly at it for two point six seconds. “You’re joking.”
It shook its head. “I’m serious. He’s… okay. For a human.”
“High praise,” Gurathin muttered, and Ratthi stifled a near-hysterical snort.
Before anyone could say anything else, another explosion somewhere rattled the pod, and the emergency lights flickered. In the tense stillness that followed, Mensah said, very calmly, “Given everything else that is going on right now… perhaps we can save the rest of this conversation for later and focus on getting out of here before anything else explodes.”
She had a very good point. Who the fuck was even attacking Port FreeCommerce in the first place? And why?
Then again, the finer details didn’t really matter right now. What mattered was getting my humans to safety.
The station feed was an utter mess, full of garbled static and glitching data streams and error messages and emergency evacuation procedures. I wasn’t even going to attempt to get into the station’s SecSystem right now, not with who knows what kind of malware and/or killware roaming about in it.
The pod was fully enclosed, and had halted somewhere between stops, so getting out through the doors was pretty much impossible. The main power was out, so there would be no getting it running again to reach a stop. There was a maintenance hatch in the ceiling, but I couldn’t quite reach it to pry it open by myself.
I remembered that I wasn’t by myself, though. I pinged the other SecUnit, then pointed upwards. “Maintenance hatch.” I didn’t have to say any more than that. It looked up at the ceiling briefly, nodded, then crouched and made a step with its knee and hands for me to use so I could reach it properly and undo the various latches.
It didn’t take me long to get the hatch open. I shoved the cover out of the way, then grabbed the edges of the opening and pulled myself up through it. There was enough space above the pod for a human to move about, if they hunched. I knelt down by the opening and reached down with one hand. “Come on. We can’t get out through the doors.”
The other unit was back on its feet, and it carefully picked up Mensah first, holding her by the waist and lifting her until I could grab her hands. Between the two of us, we got Mensah out and onto the roof of the pod, followed by the rest of the humans, one by one. The captain waited until last - I was tempted to leave him behind, but the other unit had already hefted him up towards me. It would’ve been awkward to just ignore that, so I pulled him up as well. (I might not have been quite as careful with him as I was with the others, but oh well.)
Once he was clear, the other unit jumped up and pulled itself up through the hole as well. Then we moved to one end of the pod, and I slid down off it to stand inside the pod tube. Between us, we got the humans down off the pod without any of them breaking a bone or otherwise hurting themselves.
It was eerie in the transit tube. This section of the tube was opaque, so no light was filtering in from outside. They weren’t normally lit inside to start with, and there wasn’t much emergency lighting in here at all. I’d already switched to my low light filters, but the humans didn’t have that luxury. They were keeping close together so they wouldn’t lose each other in the darkness. The tube walls also muffled sound, so I couldn’t really hear what was going on outside. Without access to StationSec’s cameras, I had no way of knowing what was happening in the rest of the station.
“We should try to get to the docks,” the company captain said. I wanted to disagree with him just on principle, but I didn’t. I wanted to get Mensah and the others off the station and on their way to the safety of Preservation more than I wanted to be contrary.
“We should stick to maintenance tunnels and avoid the main areas of the station,” I replied, which wasn’t exactly agreeing with the captain but also wasn’t disagreeing, either. “It’ll be safer than trying to get through whatever the fuck is going on out there.” I shifted my bag around from where it was tucked against my side and opened it up, then fished out my combat drone. I activated it and let it hover up into the air above my head, then shifted my bag around to rest against my back. The extra input was a bit of a comfort, now that I no longer had access to the station cameras.
The company captain eyed my drone warily, but he didn’t argue with me, at least. “Agreed. If we can get to the docks, I should be able to get you all safely off the station and out of the system.”
Mensah took a breath, then nodded. “All right. Let’s get moving, then.” She began walking down the tube, but it was pretty obvious to me that she and the other humans were having trouble seeing where they were going in the near-total darkness. I moved up beside her and tapped her arm. “Hold on to each other,” I said.
She grabbed onto my sleeve with a little breath of relief, then reached out with her other hand to hold onto Pin-Lee’s arm. Pin-Lee likewise grabbed Ratthi, who grabbed Gurathin. I could see that the other SecUnit was guiding the company captain.
Good. That meant I didn’t have to deal with him myself.
As we made our way down the transit tube, I pulled up the map of the station that I had saved when I first got here. It let me figure out the best route to the docks that avoided going out into the open, taking advantage of maintenance tunnels and cargo delivery routes. I sent the map with the route highlighted to the other SecUnit; it accepted it with a ping of acknowledgement. I also sent my combat drone scouting ahead, so I’d get advance warning if any of the transit tube had been damaged or if anyone else was using it like we were. I wished I had more drones, but one was better than nothing. The other unit hadn’t deployed any drones of its own yet, so I assumed that it didn’t have any with it. That was annoying.
After a minute or so of walking we reached a section of the transit tube that was transparent instead of opaque. Normally it would give anyone riding the pods through this section a good view over one of the station’s open plazas. Right now though, there wasn’t much light coming in from outside. The power to the lights was out in this entire section of the station, from the looks of things. I directed my drone over to the side of the tube so I could see what was going on outside.
The plaza below was lit dim red with emergency lighting, flickering with the shadows of panicking civilians as they tried to find shelter and safety. At least the transit tube walls muffled sound enough that my humans couldn’t really hear the panicked screaming going on outside. (I could, because my hearing’s much better than a human’s.)
A squad of combat bots was marching inexorably through the plaza, and I also spotted a handful of Combat SecUnits flanking the bots, marching along with their large projectile weapons held at the ready. Further behind them came a squad of humans in military grade power armour, with projectile weapons of their own. They were all ignoring the civilians - they weren’t threats, and the bots and combat units obviously hadn’t been ordered to eliminate civilians.
Anyone in company white though wasn’t so lucky. Even as I watched through the drone, one of the bots near the edge of the squad swivelled at the waist, tracking a single white-uniformed human amongst the fleeing civilians. It raised one of its four arms and fired its mounted energy weapon without even pausing in its stride.
The human in company white tumbled to the ground in a lifeless heap, along with two other humans who’d been unlucky enough to be between the bot and its target.
Ah. So they hadn’t been specifically ordered to attack civilians, but they also hadn’t been ordered to avoid harming civilians, either. I was already regretting not leaving the company captain and his SecUnit behind. Those white uniforms would make them immediate targets if any of the enemy forces spotted them at all, and that directly endangered my own humans.
I halted at the transition point between the opaque and transparent sections of the transit tube, and Mensah immediately stopped as well, making the others stop too. The company captain and his SecUnit also paused beside me.
“Stay in the middle of the tube,” I told them all. “There are combat bots and combat SecUnits down there. If you get too close to the sides, you might be spotted.” I nodded at the captain and the other SecUnit. “Especially you two. They’re targeting company white specifically.”
The company captain took a sharp breath, then nodded at me. “Noted, thank you.” He paused briefly, then pulled a few items out of his jacket pockets and transferred them to his pants pockets. That done, he stripped the jacket off and dropped it on the ground. His undershirt was dark grey, which was much less eye-catching. “You too,” he said to the SecUnit, who promptly ditched its own white jacket as well, revealing its matte black suit skin.
It wasn’t perfect - their pants were still white - but it did make them slightly less obvious, at least. It would have to do. Nobody dared to speak as we began moving again - even though it was highly unlikely anyone outside the tube would hear us, none of them wanted to risk it.
I kept watch on what was going on outside with my drone as we hurried through the transparent section of the tube, staying to the middle in single file. I could see more squads of bots and combat units and power armoured humans moving through, picking off any humans in white as they went.
My combat drone also caught sight of a couple of company-white SecUnits, marching obediently alongside the enemy combat units. Even from here, the blood spatters on their white uniforms stood out starkly.
I tried not to think about it.
We finally made it to the next opaque section of the transit tube, much to my relief. Soon after that, I found a hatch in the wall of the transit tube that opened up into a maintenance tunnel. I pried the hatch open - there wasn’t enough power available for it to open normally - then led the others through it. The company captain and the other SecUnit brought up the rear. The emergency lighting in here was at least a little better than it had been in the transit tube, so it was easier for the humans to walk without having to concentrate on where they were going. Being in the maintenance tunnel felt slightly less dangerous, too.
“Okay, so what is going on?” Pin-Lee demanded as we walked, glaring at the company captain. “You said the station’s under attack - who’s attacking, and why? And what is the company doing about it?”
He grimaced slightly. “As far as I can tell, it’s a rival corporation. They’re trying to take over the station. They’ve likely been using all the publicity around the GrayCris trials as a distraction, to cover their movements while they got their own forces into place. Communications are… patchy, right now, but the company is attempting to mount a defence of the central station. The malware in the systems is hindering coordination though.”
I wondered where he was getting his information from. The feed was too shit right now for him to be using that. I did a quick scan, and— yes, he had an active comm connection to someone. Probably that terrifying bot entity in his carrier. It was too heavily encrypted for me to easily eavesdrop on though, and I didn’t want to give the terrifying bot entity the opportunity to get into my head, so I left it alone. As long as he continued to keep my humans updated on what was going on, I didn’t care about who he was talking to or what they were saying.
“So on top of everything else, we’re unlucky enough to get caught in the middle of a hostile takeover attempt,” Gurathin deadpanned. “Wonderful.”
“Well, at least SecUnit is with us!” Ratthi said with strained optimism. “And— other SecUnit! Um.” He looked over at the other unit (or at least, what little he could see of it in the dim emergency lighting) with a sheepish smile. “So, uh. Do you have a name? Something we can call you? It’s going to get real awkward just calling you ‘other SecUnit’, otherwise.”
I don’t know what I was expecting it to say, but it definitely wasn’t what it actually ended up saying. It paused briefly, as if considering the question, then said hesitantly, “You can call me Alpha.”
“Alpha! That’s a good name!” Ratthi sounded honestly delighted. I couldn’t resist the urge to roll my eyes. At least none of the humans could see me doing it. “Nice to meet you, Alpha!”
“… Thank you?” It sounded a little confused. I couldn’t blame it. I’d been free a lot longer than it had and I still wasn’t used to humans being happy towards me, or being pleased just to meet me.
“You’re welcome!” Ratthi then turned his attention back to me, grinning almost maniacally. “So! If that’s Alpha, can we start calling you Be—“
Oh no, not a chance in hell. I cut him off immediately. “Absolutely fucking not. No. Do not even think about it.”
Pin-Lee let out a short, sharp cackle. “Oh you just got told, Ratthi!” Gurathin didn’t quite manage to stifle his snort, and even Mensah was trying to hold back a smile.
What the fuck was wrong with humans. (Okay, it was probably just the stress of the whole situation, and them trying not to think too hard about all the killing and dying that was probably going on in the rest of the station right now, but still.)
“Sorry, sorry,” Ratthi apologised to me. Yes, it was still weird having humans apologise to me. “But… would it be okay for us to call you… it was Rin, right? Or is there anything else you would like to be called?”
“I don’t want to be called anything,” I said flatly. “You all know what I am, I don’t need a human name.”
I felt the other unit ping me with a feed message request. I accepted it almost automatically, and immediately regretted it.
[We used to call you Ω,] it said, sounding tentative.
… What? [What the fuck are you talking about?]
I could feel its uncertainty. [Before… what happened at Ganaka. You were part of my squad. You, me, ε, υ, Γ, and ι.] It hesitated for a moment. [You don’t remember?]
[No. I don’t,] I replied shortly. And I didn’t. I hadn’t even known I was originally a part of a squad until I’d seen the news reports Gurathin gave me.
[Oh.] It sounded… I don’t even know. [… I’m sorry.]
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t want to keep talking to it, or for it to keep talking to me.
But I also didn’t want to close the feed connection.
We continued through the station’s maintenance areas, navigating through the near-dark. The humans occasionally talked amongst each other, or sometimes to Alpha, but I didn’t pay much attention to them. I was too busy scanning out as far as I could reach, trying to detect enemy forces and figure out if any of them had found their way into the maintenance or cargo areas as well. We’d been incredibly lucky so far that nobody had realised we were in here, and that none of the enemy forces had decided to traverse the station via these passages themselves. I guess they were more interested in a show of force than a stealth operation at this point.
I tried not to think too hard about all the civilians who had been unlucky enough to be at Port FreeCommerce during their takeover attempt. I tried even harder not to think about all the DeltFall survey family members who had been here for the memorial service. They weren’t my clients. They had never been my clients. I had clients of my own now, ones that I had chosen myself to protect. I had to get them home safely.
I wasn’t going to lose any more clients again.
Every now and then the company captain provided an update about what was going on. None of the updates were very good. The company was struggling to mount an effective defence; the malware that the attackers had managed to get into the station’s SecSystem had given them control of many station systems and a large number of the company’s SecUnits. Not all of them, but enough that they were causing significant problems. A lot of areas of the station were only on backup power, or were without power entirely.
Several enemy ships had also gotten past Port FreeCommerce’s external defences and docked with the transit ring, delivering more enemy forces onto the station. The company captain didn’t have any details about what they were doing - or possibly just didn’t want to pass those details on to civilians. I was almost grateful for that. I didn’t want any of the PreservationAux humans hearing the gory details about messy military stuff.
The further we went, the quieter the humans became. There was a sharp tang of smoke in the air, and blood, and other things I didn’t feel like analysing too closely. It suggested that the station’s air filtration systems were struggling, or possibly offline entirely. The thought of the whole station’s environmental controls being down was kind of terrifying, even for me. I don’t need anywhere near as much oxygen as humans do, but I still need some.
We heard a few more explosions, but luckily none of them were too close to where we were. One section of the tunnel had been damaged somehow before we reached it; Alpha and I had to clear metal panels and other debris out of the way before we could get the humans through.
It hadn’t said anything more to me, and I hadn’t said anything to it, but the feed connection remained open between us. It was weird. It reminded me a little of Vicky. I wondered how it was doing, and then wondered if the company captain had talked to it and Don Abene. I briefly considered asking him, then decided I didn’t actually want to know the answer right now. I needed to focus on getting Mensah and Pin-Lee and Ratthi and Gurathin to safety.
We passed several maintenance bots; all of them were currently offline. Whatever malware that had gotten into the systems had probably shut them down, or they’d shut down automatically after not getting any new orders from MaintenanceSystem for a while. It was kind of creepy. We also passed a few swarms of security drones littering the floor. They were also offline, and damaged from hitting the floor after dropping out of mid-air when the malware fucked them up. As tempting as it was to gather them up and try to salvage them, we didn’t have the time or the tools.
Finally, we got as close to the docks as we could via the maintenance passageways. The company captain’s latest update indicated that the majority of the enemy forces were, by this point, up in the central part of the station, assaulting the company’s fortified headquarters.
I had to admit, I wouldn’t be all that upset if the attackers succeeded.
The only ships left in dock at this point though were ones the attackers had used to board the transit ring. All civilian ships had fled, and all the company ships were either still engaged in combat with other enemy ships, or smouldering wrecks. According to the company captain, his own carrier was still intact, but it was engaged in a running firefight and wasn’t free to come pick us up.
If we wanted to escape the station, we’d have to steal an enemy ship.
Chapter Four
(CW: Canon-typical violence
We were close enough to the docks by now that I was able to start scanning the docked ships. I was looking for one that would be suitable for us to take - small enough that it wouldn’t have much crew, if any, for us to have to deal with, and preferably fast and agile so we could reach the wormhole quickly and get the fuck out of the system.
Most of the ships in dock right now though were large troop transports, heavily armoured vessels used to carry and deploy combat bots and combat SecUnits and human squads equipped with military power armour to combat zones. Those were too big and cumbersome for our purposes, though I was starting to think that they might be our only option.
Then I located a smaller vessel, near the opposite end of the cargo docks, one that wasn’t a military transport. It seemed to be more of a passenger ship with some additional cargo space, no weapons and not particularly well armoured, but potentially faster and more manoeuvrable than the troop transports.
I checked to see if the ship’s bot pilot was currently in contact with anyone; it wasn’t, so I carefully pinged it. The bot pilot cheerfully pinged back. (This was definitely a civilian ship; military bot pilots weren’t anywhere near that friendly.) I sent it a general information and status query; it helpfully gave me a full run-down in response. It had originally been registered to GrayCris, but had recently had its registration changed to one of the other corporations involved in the lawsuits against GrayCris, and had then even more recently been sold to yet another corporation, one whose name I didn’t immediately recognise.
That was very interesting. I had a sneaking suspicion that its current owner was either an ally or shell company of the forces currently attacking Port FreeCommerce. I had no way of confirming one way or another right now, though.
The bot pilot continued its status report. It had recently arrived alongside the troop transports, it currently had nobody on board, it had no scheduled departure time or route, it was a little worried about all the activity going on outside the station and nervous about the troop transports, and it was also bored.
Well then.
I asked it if it would be interested in helping me get my human friends away from the station, and showed it all the media I had in storage that I could share with it. It happily agreed - it wanted to get away from the station as well, and it was eager to see my media. I asked it if it could show me the view of the dock from its cargo lock cameras, which it was also happy to provide me.
While I was talking to the bot pilot, I was also listening to my clients talking with the company captain. We were at one of the hatches leading out of the cargo transport tunnels onto the cargo dock floor, but I hadn’t opened it yet and wasn’t letting anyone past me.
“So now that we’ve made it this far, what next?” Mensah asked the captain. “What are your intentions?”
“My intentions are to get you all safely home,” the captain replied. I rolled my eyes, even though nobody could see it. “My own ship is still engaged in combat, but if we can commandeer another ship from here, we should be able to rendezvous with it once it’s in a position to fall back. From there, I can transport you all back to your home polity.”
“You’d personally take us all the way to Preservation?” Pin-Lee sounded highly sceptical. “And how much would the company charge us for your benevolence?”
The company captain shook his head. “Nothing. You still have a bond with the company, correct?”
Pin-Lee nodded slowly, her eyes narrowed. “We do. To ensure our continued safety until the closing conditions of the contract have been met. It was worded such that their obligation to us ended as soon as we left the station after the conclusion of the trial, though.”
“I don’t care about the fine print,” the captain replied. “My crew have managed to crack the encryption on some of the enemy comms, and have been listening in on their communications. Some remnants of GrayCris have allied with the attackers, and they are specifically searching the station for all of you. I don’t think I need to specify why.”
“Well, shit,” Pin-Lee said tiredly. “That’s just what we need.” That seemed to about sum up everyone’s reactions. They were all tired by this point, I could tell.
The captain continued. “So, as far as I’m concerned, the bond isn’t concluded until you are all safely back in your own polity. I’ll do whatever I can to ensure that.”
Pin-Lee still looked highly sceptical, but before she could say anything else, Mensah laid one hand on her shoulder. “Let’s just take things one step at a time,” she said levelly. I don’t know how she was managing to hold it together so well, but she was, and the others followed her lead. “Before we can even begin to worry about getting all the way to Preservation, first we need to get off this station.”
“I’ve already found a ship we can use,” I said.
All the humans turned to look at me, though Mensah and the others quickly looked away again. The captain didn’t, though. “How?” he asked me.
“I asked it nicely.” I pinged Alpha and sent it the ship details. (I wasn’t going to communicate with the captain directly. For one, he wasn’t my client. For two, I was still very aware of the possibility of the terrifying bot entity turning its attention towards me.)
The captain squinted at me, his expression dubious. “Really?”
I shrugged, a little distracted since I was busy scanning what I could see of the docks through the ship’s lock camera. “You’d be surprised at what bots will let you do if they don’t have specific orders against it and you’re nice to them.”
“That doesn’t just apply to bots, either,” Alpha said quietly. All the humans blinked and stared at it. It just looked back at them, and then imitated my shrug.
“… You’re not wrong,” Mensah said gently after an awkward moment of silence. “The fact that all of us are here in the first place is proof of that, I think.” She smiled a little in my general direction, even as Ratthi started to say something in agreement, but I didn’t want to think about any of that.
Partly because ugh, emotions, but mostly because I was too busy going oh shit in my head. Through the ship’s lock camera, I had spotted some humans in military grade power armour, with large projectile weapons. They were cursorily patrolling the cargo docks, presumably to make sure nobody tried what we were about to try.
Fuck.
It wouldn’t have been a problem if there were only one or two of them - SecUnits are a lot faster than humans, and between me and Alpha, we could’ve dropped one each before they could even react to our presence. But it looked like there was an entire squad, and those large projectile weapons they were carrying could do a lot of damage to us, since neither of us had armour right now. (They would also really fuck up my unarmoured humans, too.) The power armour was also at least somewhat resistant to energy weapons, so we’d have to get right up close to do enough damage to disable them with just our in-built arm guns.
“Quiet,” I said shortly. I needed a better look at the docks than what I could get through a single lock camera. “There are guards in power armour on the dock. I need to send my drone out to scout.”
The humans all shut up. It was novel, having humans actually listen to me. Yeah, Don Abene and her group had listened to me, and the humans on the transport before that had listened to me (mostly, anyway), but that was when they all thought I was an augmented human security consultant, and not a SecUnit. Everyone here knew what I was, and they listened anyway. It was… kind of nice.
I listened intently at the hatch for a minute, making sure nothing was nearby on the other side, then carefully eased it open just enough to let my solitary combat drone through. I sent it up high - I had noticed that humans rarely, if ever, bothered looking up - and started scanning the cargo docks.
It was a mess. This was obviously where the attackers had landed a bulk of their forces, and where Port Authority and the station’s security forces had attempted to repel them. Unsuccessfully, judging by the number of white-armoured bodies lying scattered around and shoved off to the sides, out of the way. Some had been shot, either by powerful energy weapons or projectile weapons. Others looked like they’d been stabbed, or slashed, or bodily torn apart. In those cases, most of the white armour was now stained red.
The organics over my right shoulder, side, and lower back ached. I dialled my pain sensors down and did my best to ignore it.
Various sizes and types of cargo containers and crates were lying scattered haphazardly all over the docks. All the cargo bots, hauler bots and lifter bots were motionless, either sitting idle on the dock floor or hovering up near the ceiling in standby mode. Whatever malware the attackers had hit the station with had apparently deactivated them. I was a little relieved that the attackers hadn’t actively turned the bots against the station inhabitants, if only for the bots’ sake.
Then again, they hadn’t needed to resort to bots when they’d been able to use the company’s own SecUnits instead.
I tried not to think too hard about that. Yes, I’d been able to clear the malware from Alpha, but only because I’d been in close proximity and had gotten to it quickly, before the malware could really dig in and fully establish itself. There was no way I would be able to clear it out of the entire station’s systems by myself, or out of any of the other units. I just had to focus on getting my own humans out of here.
I pinged Alpha and forwarded what my drone was seeing to it. It accepted the link, and I could feel it evaluating what it was seeing. [Judging by the visible injuries, combat bots and combat SecUnits came through here,] it commented, confirming what I already suspected. [This must have been where they boarded the station. Only a squad of power armoured humans left to guard the docks though.]
That was bad enough by itself, but I was still very grateful that there weren’t any combat bots here. Or combat SecUnits. They were even worse. Combat SecUnits were all assholes. (Not that I could really blame them much for that, though. The shit they went through made my own life look like a walk in the park in comparison.) Looking around at the carnage left on the docks, I was grateful that I’d never been tapped for the combat upgrades, and only ended up with the flier upgrades instead.
[We need to get the humans here,] I sent, highlighting the lock leading to the ship I’d talked into helping us. [I’d prefer to avoid combat entirely, if possible. The cargo bots provide some cover - we might be able to reach the lock without being seen, if we time things right.]
Alpha paused briefly, then highlighted a potential path from our cargo tunnel hatch to the ship lock. [Here?] it suggested. [Maximum cover, minimum time out in the open. If we carry the humans one at a time, we will be able to move more quickly and quietly than letting them try to cross themselves.]
I wasn’t keen on having to carry anyone, but it was actually a pretty good idea. And this probably counted as an emergency situation, anyway. I pinged acknowledgement, then looked back at the humans. “All right,” I murmured quietly, and they gathered close so they could hear me better. “There’s a squad of power armoured humans guarding the docks, but we have a route planned out to get from here to the ship without being seen by anyone. The best way to do it will be for Alpha and I to carry each of you, one at a time. We can move a lot faster and more quietly than any of you can.”
“Isn’t there any other way to reach the ship?” the company captain asked, looking a little dubious. Given that he was the tallest of the humans here, he was probably not keen on the idea of being carried.
I didn’t care. If he didn’t like it, he could stay behind. “Not without risking the guards in power armour with big projectile weapons seeing us and shooting us,” I said flatly. “It’s either that, or stay here. Your choice.”
“I for one would love to get off this station as soon as physically possible,” Pin-Lee said dryly as she stepped up to me. “If SecUnit says it’s the best option, then it’s the best option. So let’s get moving.”
The company captain conceded with a reluctant nod, and I picked up Pin-Lee, since she was right in front of me now anyway. I held her with one arm beneath her knees and the other supporting her back, and instructed her to hold on around my neck. “Don’t try to choke me,” I commented.
“As long as you don’t try to drop me,” she shot back.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Alpha hesitated for a moment, then quietly asked Mensah, “Is it all right if I take you?”
Mensah smiled warmly up at it. “That’s fine,” she reassured it. “Thank you for checking, I appreciate it.”
It looked surprised for a moment, then its mouth twitched in a lopsided echo of her smile. As it carefully scooped Mensah up, I saw her gently pat its arm.
Perhaps if we all got to Preservation safely, Alpha would like to stay there with the PreservationAux humans or something. They already seemed to like it. I still didn’t know if I wanted to, though.
“All right, no noise,” I reminded them. “If you feel like you’re going to sneeze or something, just— don’t.” I had a brief memory of Mensah, back in the DeltFall habitat, and added, “Also, uh. You might want to keep your eyes closed.”
“Why?” Ratthi asked curiously.
“It’s… very messy out there,” I replied awkwardly. I didn’t really want to get into the details.
That didn’t seem to concern Alpha though. “There are many dead bodies, and a lot of visible blood and viscera,” it clarified, and I glared at it. It just blinked at me.
“Oh. Right.” Ratthi swallowed, looking a little queasy. “Thanks for the warning.”
“No throwing up, either,” I said. “Now let’s go.”
Everyone fell silent, and I used my combat drone to check that the coast was clear outside the hatch before slowly easing it open with my shoulder. Luckily it didn’t make any noticeable noise, and I slipped through it with Pin-Lee held close against my chest. She’d buried her face against my shoulder - probably so she wouldn’t see anything - and I could feel her hair brushing against my neck and jaw. It was… weird. I didn’t like it. But it wasn’t entirely excruciating, probably because I was too focused on moving silently and keeping behind cover.
Alpha followed after me with Mensah in its arms, moving just as silently. We kept low, darting from cargo bot to hauler bot to cargo container, keeping out of sight of the power armoured humans. It was just as well that they didn’t have any combat bots or Combat SecUnits with them, those would have picked us up on scanners easily. But the humans weren’t paying much attention - judging by their movements, they were bored and restless, and talking to each other over comms.
It took an agonising several minutes to reach our goal - a cargo container close to the ship’s lock. It was large enough to shield all of us from sight, and there wasn’t much other cover between it and the ship’s lock. Opening the lock itself would likely attract attention, so I didn’t want to do that until we were all in place and ready to board. I carefully put Pin-Lee down, and she let go of my neck with a haste that I appreciated. Alpha put Mensah down beside Pin-Lee, and I saw her pat Alpha’s arm again before she reached out to take Pin-Lee’s hand.
I also saw Alpha hesitantly pat Mensah’s shoulder, and she smiled up at it again.
Ugh.
I didn’t wait around to witness any more human touchy-feely stuff. We still had to get back to the others and bring them across as well. I pinged Alpha, it pinged me back, and we set off again. I was still sharing my combat drone’s camera with it, so we could both keep track of what the guards were doing.
It was just as anxiety-inducing on the way back. The guards’ movements weren’t regular since they weren’t sticking to a proper patrol, so we had to sometimes freeze in place behind our cover for agonising seconds when any of them turned in our general direction. We didn’t risk moving until they’d turned away again.
We finally made it back to the cargo tunnel hatch, and I scooped Ratthi up in my arms. He opened his mouth to say something - I glared sharply at him and he quickly shut his mouth again, looking sheepish.
Alpha however had hesitated, apparently not sure whether to take its company captain or Gurathin first. (If it was up to me, I would absolutely leave the company captain behind entirely.)
The captain gestured for Alpha to take Gurathin first though. It seemed like he was serious about his stated intention to get the PreservationAux humans to safety. Once I was sure that Alpha would be bringing Gurathin, I set back off across the dock with Ratthi. Again, we had to dart from cover to cover, freezing in place whenever the guards happened to turn towards our general direction. It was stressful enough that my performance reliability had dropped a full two points, and my right shoulder was starting to send me alerts. Apparently the MedSystem that Vicky and Don Abene had used on me hadn’t been quite up to the task of fully repairing it. I had to shift more of Ratthi’s weight to my left arm to ease the strain a bit.
Finally we made it to the cargo container where Mensah and Pin-Lee were still crouched together nervously. I put Ratthi down beside them, and Alpha carefully deposited Gurathin with them as well.
Now that we were here, with all my humans so close to safety, I pinged Alpha again and said, [We don’t have to go back for the captain.]
Alpha hesitated, and I could feel its indecision through the feed. [No,] it said finally. [He is my client. He has been trying to help us. And his ship still has the rest of our - of my squad.]
It didn’t wait for me to respond, and just started back across the dock once more.
I couldn’t do anything to stop it, at least not without risking drawing the attention of the guards, and I couldn’t watch it very closely because my lone combat drone was busy observing the guards so Alpha knew when it was safe for it to move.
So I just crouched down beside my own humans and waited. They all looked stressed, and uneasy, but there wasn’t really anything I could do to help with that. I mean, maybe I could’ve tried to say something comforting or reassuring, but I couldn’t think of anything.
Finally, Alpha made it back across the docks and picked up the company captain, then started back towards us. I had to admit, the captain looked a little ridiculous being carried by Alpha. It was kind of funny.
While I waited, I pinged the bot pilot and asked it if it was ready to open its lock for us. It replied in the affirmative and asked if I wanted it to do so now. I asked it to wait for my signal - the lock opening would attract attention, and I didn’t want to do that until we were all ready to board.
Then one of the guards turned at precisely the wrong time while Alpha was darting across some open space between cargo containers. They spotted the movement and alerted the rest of their squad, then began moving towards Alpha’s cover.
Fuck.
I was tempted, so tempted, to just get the ship to open its lock, get my humans on board, and leave the company captain behind. But that would also mean abandoning Alpha, and… I was weirdly reluctant to do that. Even though that’s one of the main purposes of a SecUnit, to get left behind when things go wrong.
But Mensah hadn’t left me behind. Vicky hadn’t left me behind. Don Abene hadn’t left me behind.
I couldn’t leave Alpha behind. And Alpha didn’t want to leave the company captain behind. So I had to at least try to save him, too.
[They’ve spotted the others,] I told my humans as I hastily dropped my bag beside them. I didn’t want it getting in the way. [Things are going to get messy. Stay here, but watch the ship lock. As soon as it opens, sprint for it and get to the bridge.] I didn’t wait for confirmation from them though - I had to move quickly.
The enemy squad had split into two groups and were moving to flank the container that Alpha and the company captain were hiding behind. They were moving cautiously, not sure what they were up against, so that gave me a little time to get into position behind the group closest to the ship. I couldn’t delay too long though - if I wasn’t quick then they would end up cutting the company captain off from the ship. That would complicate things.
If the Targets had been SecUnits they would have had drones to watch their rear, or at least one of the units would have been doing so itself, but they were just humans, and humans were shit at this kind of thing. I pinged Alpha to let it know what I was about to do, and it pinged me back with its own intentions.
We coordinated our actions quickly and effortlessly through our feed connection. It felt natural, second-nature. I knew that Alpha had instructed the company captain to make a break for the ship as soon as we engaged, and I made a note to get the ship to open its lock as soon as he reached the others.
Then I was in position, and both Alpha and I launched our attacks simultaneously. Alpha jumped up onto the top of the container it had been hiding behind and opened fire on the squad with its arm guns, shooting as quickly as it could to disguise the fact that it was alone. It was sudden and unexpected enough that the power armoured human Targets reflexively ducked and went for cover.
I leapt onto the rearmost Target, latching onto their back. Before they could even register that I was there, I shoved the barrel of my energy weapon up under their chin, against the weaker joint around the neck, and fired three times at full power. At such close range, the first shot was enough to get through the neck joint, the second went into their head, and the third was to confirm the kill.
Before they even began to crumple I grabbed the projectile weapon from their hands, then let them drop. Alpha was still moving quickly, leaping from container to container, dropping behind them to avoid return fire before popping back out again to shoot at them some more. Both of the Target groups were so focused on it that they hadn’t even realised I was there yet.
Not until I took my new projectile weapon, ran up behind another Target, and shot it in the back of the neck at point blank, anyway. That got the attention of my group. As the armour froze in place I shot another one of the Targets twice in the chest, sending the power armour staggering backwards but not actually breaching it, then I ducked away behind another container before the rest of the Targets could draw a bead on me.
Meanwhile, Alpha leapt out from its cover and tackled another Target from behind, ripping their weapon out of their hands and immediately shooting them directly in the faceplate with it. The Target dropped, their faceplate shattered and their head now in bloody ruins. Alpha then darted back behind cover again, chased by return fire.
We couldn’t afford to stay out in the open for long - without armour, any shot they managed to land on us would cause us serious damage. Yes, we could survive a few hits, but it would slow us down, which would just get us shot more, and then we’d be fucked. So we had to avoid getting shot in the first place.
This was easier against humans than combat bots, at least. They didn’t have the reaction time or combat calculation capacity that bots or constructs had. But there were still enough of them that the sheer volume of firepower meant something would hit eventually, if we didn’t thin their numbers.
I was also keeping track of the company captain’s progress across the dock. He was sprinting as fast as possible while also trying to keep at least some cover between himself and the Targets, but he couldn’t move as fast as we could. It would take him a minute or so to reach the others.
That was a minute or so of having to avoid getting shot. In a fight, that’s a really long time.
The remaining Targets had clustered together now, forming a circle in the middle of an open area so we couldn’t sneak up behind any of them again, or jump on them from above. That was annoying. It meant it was that much harder to take any of them down quickly. The ammo in our stolen guns was limited without the resupply stored in the Targets’ power armour, and we had to be sparing with our shots. But we also still had to keep their attention on us and away from our vulnerable, squishy, unarmoured humans.
I was positioned on one side of the Target squad, while Alpha was on the other side. We worked together to keep the squad’s attention split, popping out from behind cover at the same time to snap off a few carefully-calculated shots before ducking back out of sight before they could target us. We then re-positioned, firing at the squad from another unexpected direction before taking cover again.
Between us we managed to disable a couple more Targets. The rest of them closed their circle around them though, and we couldn’t confirm kills. I was running low on ammo, and I knew Alpha was as well. Our energy weapons weren’t effective against their power armour at this range, so once we were out of ammo we’d have to change tactics.
The company captain had almost reached the others at least - we only needed to keep this up for a little longer. I sent the ship the signal to open its lock, then pinged Alpha. It started to work its way towards my side of the group, closer to the ship, so it would be in position to retreat quickly.
The Targets were wising up though - some of them were focused on the larger gaps between containers, and as soon as Alpha darted across the open space, they opened fire. Alpha was sent sprawling as an explosive projectile hit it in the thigh. It slammed into the ground and rolled, then began scrambling desperately towards cover. I tried to distract the squad by firing at them, but it wasn’t enough to deter them for long and my stolen gun soon clicked on empty.
Fuck.
They were still firing at and advancing on Alpha’s position - I had to slow them down. I sent my combat drone screaming into their midst, firing as quickly as it could, while I began sprinting towards Alpha. The drone only made the Targets hesitate briefly, before they realised that it wasn’t a full swarm, and therefore not a huge threat to them. They started moving again—
Then a cargo container dropped from above with no warning. It wasn’t quite in position to hit the whole squad, but it crushed several of them and sent the rest scattering, the deck vibrating from the heavy impact. I glanced upwards and saw an active lifter bot hovering overhead - and Gurathin riding on top of it.
I couldn’t stop myself. [What the fuck are you doing?!]
[Saving your asses,] Gurathin retorted, even as he began steering his commandeered lifter bot back towards the ship. [Get moving!]
I couldn’t really argue with that. I sprinted to where Alpha was and skidded to a halt beside it. It was a mess, its suit skin and the white pants of its uniform stained with blood and inorganic fluids, but it was still functional. Mostly. Alpha had managed to drag itself back up to its feet, leaning against the side of a crate for support, but its leg was pretty much useless. I dropped my now-empty gun and slung one arm around its waist to help support it, and we began moving as quickly as we could towards the ship.
I’d lost my combat drone at some point - I wasn’t sure if the Targets had destroyed it or if it had gotten crushed by the cargo container. Without it, I couldn’t keep track of where all the Targets were or what they were doing.
So when one of them swung around a corner, their weapon levelled at us, I only had a fraction of a second to react. I let go of Alpha and launched myself at the Target, managing to shove their gun off to the side just as they opened fire. The shots missed both me and Alpha, but the human tried to correct their aim and I had to grab their arms to hold them at bay.
Power armour made humans almost as strong as SecUnits, though, and my stupid shoulder was struggling under the strain. I could feel some of the connections starting to give way beneath the pressure, and the barrel of the gun began inching closer towards its target. Something in my right side made a disconcerting popping noise.
I was right up in the Target’s face, and from this close I could see through their helmet visor. I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to what they looked like at first, but then I realised that I recognised them.
It was the same human who had interrupted my media viewing in the lounge on the passenger transport to Port FreeCommerce. The one who had mistaken me for someone else, and had then met up with a bunch of other humans.
Other humans who were, presumably, also involved in the attack on the station. That explained how at least some of the attackers had gotten onto the station in the first place.
“You!” I snarled, locking eyes with them. “You fucker!”
Their eyes widened in surprise, and for just a moment the pressure slackened. That was enough of an opening for me to knock them off-balance with my hip and tear the gun from their hands.
I immediately shot them in the throat, but then Alpha pinged a warning and I had to drop the gun and grab the now-uncontrolled power armour in both hands to swing it around as a shield. A couple more targets had come around another corner as well and had opened fire at me. I felt the impacts shudder through the power armour, heard Alpha firing its arm guns at them, felt the impacts lessen as they started to adjust their aim towards Alpha.
I bodily threw the power armour at them.
It crashed into them, knocking them both off their feet. My shoulder was screaming alerts at me, and my back had joined in, but I ignored them and swiftly scooped up my dropped gun. I darted over to the two downed Targets and shot them both in the neck before they could get back up.
I hurried back to Alpha’s side and handed the gun to it - my right arm was barely functional by this point. The strain of throwing the power armour had fucked up the already-stressed shoulder joint, and while I could still use my hand, I couldn’t lift my arm any more. My back and side were also sending me more damage alerts that I didn’t have time to acknowledge. I got my left arm around Alpha’s torso and we started towards the ship again as quickly as we could.
We had almost reached it when I heard a shout behind us - the remaining Targets had finally spotted us again, and opened fire.
I threw both myself and Alpha down to the floor to avoid the initial shots, then rolled us behind some smaller cargo crates. Fire tracked us across the floor, spraying shrapnel everywhere, and I felt multiple impacts against my arm and back.
Then another cargo crate came crashing down from above, shielding the lock from any further fire. The lifter bot zipped down to an abrupt halt by the lock and Gurathin half-jumped, half-fell off of it before recovering his balance and bolting towards us.
I managed to get back to my feet and haul Alpha up with me, and Gurathin moved to help support Alpha on the other side. We staggered through the lock and into the ship, and as soon as we were clear I asked the bot pilot to close the lock and launch immediately.
The bot pinged acknowledgement, and the lock cycled closed behind us.
Chapter Five
I felt the clunk of the ship starting to decouple from the dock vibrate through the floor plates. Ratthi and Pin-Lee were waiting for us just inside, but I couldn’t see Mensah or the company captain. I tuned out Ratthi’s startled exclamations at our injuries and Pin-Lee yelling at Gurathin for being a reckless idiot as I hastily worked my way into the ship’s SecSystem. Once I was in, I rapidly cycled through the cameras until I found them.
They were both on the bridge, the company captain sitting at the pilot’s controls and Mensah standing beside him, one hand resting on the back of the pilot’s chair. I heard the captain say, “This ship’s bot pilot isn’t exactly designed for navigating an active space battle. I’ll have to pilot manually.”
There was no way in hell I was going to let him pilot this ship. I asked the bot pilot to lock him out of the controls and then hold position just outside of the docks even as I said to the others, “I need to get to the bridge right now.”
“You’re hurt!” Ratthi protested. “Both of you should be going to MedSystem!”
“There’s an active war going on out there—” I retorted.
At the same time, Alpha said, “SecUnits don’t use the MedSystem.”
Ah, right. Fuck. I cut off the rest of what I was about to say to respond to Alpha instead. “MedSystem does work on us, mostly. These humans have used a MedSystem on me before. They know what they’re doing.”
It felt kind of weird to say that, but it wasn’t actually wrong. And Alpha at least needed some treatment as soon as possible. Its leg was still leaking, indicating the damage was bad enough that its veins weren’t able to auto-seal properly, and it had taken a couple of other shots to the torso before it had been able to get back behind cover, as well as shrapnel damage.
I quickly checked the ship’s map, then began heading in the direction of the on-board MedSystem. Gurathin, still supporting Alpha on the opposite side, came along with me. Pin-Lee and Ratthi tagged along as well. (At least Pin-Lee had finished yelling at Gurathin for being a reckless idiot by now. It probably helped that Gurathin hadn’t exactly argued with her.) “We’ll get Alpha started in the MedSystem, then I need to get to the bridge,” I said.
“Your back’s bleeding,” Ratthi said insistently. “And your arm’s all weird. You—“
“We’re about to have to fly through an active space battle to reach the wormhole so we can get the fuck out of here,” I interrupted impatiently. “You need a good pilot. I’m a good pilot. The company captain isn’t anywhere near as good as me, and I don’t trust him to not fuck it up. So unless you want this ship to get shot to pieces, I need to get to the bridge.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” Pin-Lee commented dryly, before turning to Ratthi. “Look, I’ll grab one of the emergency medkits to take to the bridge with it, all right? Gurathin, are you good to help Ratthi with getting the MedSystem to work on Alpha?”
Gurathin nodded shortly. “I’ve got all the MedSystem settings from the survey still saved on my augments.”
I didn’t know what to make of that. Why would Gurathin have saved that information for all this time, if he hadn’t expected to need to use it again? It had been months since the survey ended. He could’ve easily deleted it at any point, but he’d kept it. I couldn’t figure out why. (Or maybe I could, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it, because that involved complicated emotions that I didn’t have time to deal with right now.)
I pinged Alpha and dumped what information I had about PreservationAux onto it, so it would have at least some idea of what to expect. It accepted the files without comment, and I could feel it start to go through them. “… Um. Can I ask you all something, please?” it asked suddenly, obviously directed to the humans and not me.
“Of course!” Ratthi reassured it. “Ask whatever you like, and we’ll do what we can to answer.”
Alpha hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Why do you want to… help me?” It sounded genuinely confused.
I knew the feeling.
“Because we can, and because it’s the right thing to do,” Ratthi replied earnestly, looking up at Alpha’s face and nearly running into a wall because of it. He quickly corrected though and continued. “You helped us get to this ship, it’s only fair that we help you in return!”
“But…” Alpha still looked confused. “I was just… doing what I’m made to do. Humans aren’t… they don’t…” It trailed off uncertainly.
“Corporation Rim humans might not,” Pin-Lee said sharply. “But we’re not CR. We’re from Preservation. People help each other there. You’re a person, too - and don’t fucking try to tell us you’re just equipment or a weapon or something stupid like that - so we’re helping you. That’s all there is to it.”
“I…” It fell silent, then its buffer added after a moment, “Thank you for that information.”
At least we’d reached the ship’s medical bay by then, so there wasn’t much time for more conversation. Gurathin helped me get Alpha up onto the MedSystem platform, Ratthi went to get it activated, and Pin-Lee dug around to find some med kits. I didn’t wait for her, though. Once Alpha was settled, I quickly left again and made my way to the bridge. The company captain was trying to get the bot pilot to unlock the controls for him, but the bot was honouring my request and refusing to give him access.
When I reached the bridge, Mensah turned to look over at me, one eyebrow raising as she took in my appearance. “Are you all right?” she asked quietly.
I still wasn’t used to that. “I’m fine,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. She didn’t look particularly reassured, and I couldn’t exactly blame her. My right arm was dangling limp and useless, and there were multiple bloody holes in my clothing from all the shrapnel I’d taken. But she’d seen me in much worse condition and still functioning before, so she didn’t argue. I still added, “Pin-Lee’s bringing up a med kit.”
Mensah looked at least a little relieved at that. The conversation had gotten the company captain’s attention though, and he also turned to look at me. “I take it you’re the reason why the bot pilot won’t cooperate with me?” he asked, his tone dry.
“Yes.” There wasn’t any point to me trying to deny it. “I’m not letting you pilot the ship. I’m a much better pilot than any fucking human, and I can work more efficiently alongside the bot pilot than you can.”
To his credit, the company captain didn’t argue with me. “All right, that’s fair enough.” He got out of the pilot’s chair and moved over to sit at the comms console instead. Mensah also went to sit down at one of the other consoles, and I wondered for a moment if she’d been standing by the captain to make sure he didn’t try to do anything suspicious.
I carefully sat down in the pilot’s chair, though I didn’t lean against the back. That would’ve aggravated the shrapnel still lodged in my organics, and Pin-Lee would probably swear at me if she couldn’t reach them with the med kit. The bot pilot helpfully popped open the panel covering the port and cable that would let me physically link to the ship like an augmented pilot, and I plugged it into the lowest one of my spine ports so I didn’t have to lift my shirt up too much.
The bot pilot welcomed me into the systems with eager curiosity. I got the feeling that it hadn’t worked alongside human or augmented human pilots much before, and obviously it had never worked with a construct pilot. It was perfectly capable of carrying out its usual function - travelling from station to station via the wormholes, docking and undocking from transit rings - by itself. But it didn’t have the necessary modules for evasive flying like what we’d need to do to reach the wormhole through the mess of opposing warships and squadrons of fliers firing at each other throughout the intervening space. No wonder it had been nervous. It was definitely relieved to have me here to help it.
I sent it some wordless reassurance as I took control of the primary piloting systems. The bot pilot meanwhile looked after all the other ship systems - environmental controls, power core, all the other secondary systems that kept the ship running - so I wouldn’t need to worry about them.
Which was good, because I’d never actually flown a ship this large before. Not having to worry about keeping the power levels from fluctuating or sending surges through MedSystem or the recyclers or anything like that was a relief. All I had to do was focus on the actual flying. At least flying the shuttle back at RaviHyral had given me an idea of what to expect.
I took a moment to familiarise myself with the ship, then started easing it away from where it had been holding position in the shadow of the transit ring. Now that I was here, I could finally get a good look at what was actually going on outside of the station.
It was controlled chaos. Several smaller carriers and multiple gunships and fliers, both the company’s and the attackers’, were already floating wrecks, broken apart and venting atmosphere out into space. More carriers and supercarriers and gunships were still exchanging fire, streaking space with energy weapon blasts and missiles and torpedoes and railgun fire and who knew what else. Squadrons of fliers were engaged in multiple skirmishes, or forming up for attack runs on the larger enemy ships, or screening larger friendly ships from enemy squadrons attempting attack runs.
Concerningly, the company’s various defence platforms were all still and silent. It seemed like whatever malware the attackers had hit the station with had also disabled the weapons platforms. Or perhaps the enemy had tried to take control of them, and the company had managed to shut the platforms down so the attackers couldn’t use them against the company. It was one less thing to worry about, at least.
Hopefully, this little ship would be able to get past all the various conflicts without attracting any unwanted attention. I began flying out on a route that was intended to take us beneath the lowest edge of the fighting, where the fewest ships would catch us in their scanner range and they’d have the least guns to point in our general direction. Most of the combat was closer to the wormhole than the station itself, so things seemed to be going pretty smoothly for us to start with.
I took a moment to check in with Alpha via our feed link. Ratthi and Gurathin had gotten it settled in with its uniform and suit skin off so that MedSystem could treat it properly. As far as I could tell, Ratthi was chattering away at it, while Gurathin focused on controlling MedSystem. Pin-Lee had apparently found the medkits and reached the bridge with them, and she was talking quietly to Mensah, the medkits still in hand. I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t started using them yet - maybe Mensah thought that it would be too distracting for me while I was trying to fly an unfamiliar ship.
It might have been, honestly. I don’t like being touched at the best of times, and this definitely wasn’t the best of times.
Then the ship’s comm system activated.
The company captain wasn’t facing the comm console, though - he was watching Mensah and Pin-Lee. So he obviously wasn’t the one who had activated it.
Which meant—
— oh, shit.
I scrambled to try and shut down the comm, but I was a fraction too late. The ship’s bot pilot hadn’t even thought to shut it down itself, either, because whoever was contacting us was using the right comm codes.
Of course the enemy forces would know this ship’s comm codes, if some of them had used it to reach the station in the first place. You fucking idiot, Murderbot!
Killware flooded the systems, and the bot pilot died with a shriek before I could do anything to protect it. SecSystem tried to stop it, but the killware punched through it and hit several vital systems simultaneously, shutting down the engines, gravity, comms, and life support. I barely managed to wall off the power core in time. If we lost power entirely, we’d be absolutely fucked with no hope of recovery. The killware bounced off my wall, registered task complete and self-destructed. It had all happened too quickly for me to even try to counter it - the killware had been specifically designed to cripple the ship but leave it otherwise intact for later recovery.
Fuck fuck fuck.
“SecUnit?! What—“ Mensah started, sounding alarmed as she clung to her chair in the now zero-gravity bridge. Pin-Lee was swearing, and the company captain was hissing quietly under his breath.
“I didn’t think to shut down the comms and they hit us with fucking killware,” I explained shortly. “The bot pilot’s gone, and most systems are shut down. They want to recover the ship intact later.”
“Can you get anything restarted again?” the company captain asked sharply.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” There was a gaping emptiness in the ship’s systems where the bot pilot had once been. I didn’t know if I could fill it by myself. “I saved the power core, but… this ship’s a lot bigger than my flier.” But if I didn’t do anything, we’d just drift here helplessly until the attackers came to recover the ship. And they probably wouldn’t do that until after we’d run out of oxygen or frozen to death, with no environmental systems running.
“Is your ship anywhere nearby?” Mensah was asking the company captain.
He shook his head, looking frustrated. “Not yet. It will take a while for it to extricate itself from combat and reach us. Too long, probably.”
I had to take the bot pilot’s place, and fast.
“I’m going to see what I can do to get things going again,” I said. “I’m probably not going to have any attention to spare for anything else, though. So if I go unresponsive… just try not to worry about it, I guess.”
I didn’t wait for any of them to respond, or argue, or whatever. I just strapped myself into the pilot’s seat so I wouldn’t float off, then closed my eyes and slipped all the way into the ship’s systems, into the hardware where the bot pilot had once been.
It was… weird. It was kind of like being in my flier - I could feel the cold hard vacuum on my metal skin, and see everything that was going on in the space around us.
But this ship was so much larger, and had so many more systems. I couldn’t reach or control all of them at once. I had to prioritise.
First things first - environment and gravity. I could see through the ship’s internal cameras as well, though I only kept track of two - one in the bridge, and one in Medical. Alpha was still secure in MedSystem, but the MedSystem itself had gone into standby. Ratthi and Gurathin were floating awkwardly, trying to get MedSystem going again while also trying to hold themselves in place. I didn’t have the attention to spare to listen in on their feed, but I hoped that Mensah or Pin-Lee had let them know what was going on.
Focus, Murderbot. Environmental controls and gravity controls. I slipped through the systems until I could locate them, then tried to get them both running again. I was lucky that the killware hadn’t wiped them entirely, and had only shut them down. It took me a little bit to get accustomed to how they worked, but I finally managed to coax them both online again. I made sure to adjust the gravity back to normal slowly though, and not all at once, so that nobody would hit the floor hard or land awkwardly and potentially injure themselves. Humans are so damn delicate like that.
I felt the environmental systems whirr back to life, once again providing a breathable atmosphere and enough warmth to stave off the cold of space. That was a relief. Even if I couldn’t get anything else working, at least my humans wouldn’t suffocate or freeze any time soon.
With that out of the way, I took a moment to check on everyone again - it looked like the humans were all relieved to have their feet firmly back on the floor - then turned my attention to the engines. Without them, we would just continue to drift uncontrolled through space on our last trajectory until we ran into something or another ship grabbed us in a tractor beam. They were much, much larger than the engines I was used to handling, though, and there were many more thrusters and trajectory adjusters spread out all across my hull to compensate for the ship’s size and mass.
I spent a minute or so familiarising myself with the engines and their network of thrusters, and the way they connected to the power core, and their control system. Then I began the start-up sequence for the engines.
I had to tweak a few things to get them running properly again. The killware had been meant to only shut down the engines, but engines weren’t supposed to be shut down that quickly, and it had thrown some stuff out of whack. But after a few minutes of tweaking and false starts, the familiar thrum of the engines filled the ship again. I monitored them for a little bit, to make sure they were running smoothly, then shifted my attention to the challenge of actually piloting the ship.
I didn’t bother trying to reactivate the ship’s comms - I didn’t need the attackers sending more killware at us once they noticed that the ship was no longer drifting uncontrolled. There was also a good chance that as soon as I started moving, they would notice and either send another ship to try and board us, or just start shooting at us. So I had to be ready for that.
I looked out at the ongoing battle between the company’s ships and the attackers, and made some corrections to the course I’d originally plotted to compensate for the changing situation. Then I fully settled into the ship’s controls, engaged the engines, and began accelerating.
It was a rush. This ship was much, much larger than my own flier, and larger than the shuttle, or hoppers, or anything else I’d flown before. Its engines were correspondingly more powerful, and the feeling of all that power at my metaphorical fingertips was kind of exhilarating.
But at the same time, I couldn’t keep track of all the ship’s other systems. Environment controls, gravity, lights, sensors, cameras, scanners - there was only so much of me, and I could only spread myself so thin. Part of a bot pilot’s job is to balance all of these systems so that there’s no uneven power draws, no potentially-damaging fluctuations that could overload one system at the expense of another. I couldn’t do all that while also calculating speed and trajectory and how much thrust I needed from each thruster at any one point to nudge the ship’s mass in the direction I wanted to go.
I was vaguely aware of the lights in the bridge flickering, of the gravity fluctuating, of the environmental systems struggling to maintain a consistent temperature. But there wasn’t much I could do about it, not without losing control of the ship.
And I really couldn’t afford to lose control of the ship. As I’d suspected, our unexpected movement had drawn attention. A pair of gunships had managed to break away from the battle and were angling towards us, one aiming to cut us off, the other pursuing. As a civilian vessel, this ship had no weapons, and not a whole lot in the way of armour. If the gunships managed to get a lock on me, we’d be in a whole lot of trouble. I had to focus on flying if we were going to get out of this at all. But I also couldn’t let the gravity just fluctuate all over the place, either. That was almost as dangerous to the humans as me getting shot would be. I had to partition a part of myself to focus on stabilising the gravity, while the rest of me concentrated on piloting.
I couldn’t even keep an input on the two cameras to check how the humans were doing, or warn them about the incoming gunships. I just had to hope that someone was keeping an eye on the scanners themselves and would figure out what was going on.
I kicked the engines to maximum and angled away from the two gunships, trying to increase my lead on them. We were pretty comparable in speed, but they were cutting me off from the wormhole, herding me away from any company ships that might provide me support.
Not that I expected they would. I wasn’t a company ship. There was an equal chance that the company ships would also just fire at me as an unidentified potential hostile if I got too close. I wasn’t going to risk it.
The pursuing gunships weren’t in optimal weapons range yet, but they opened fire at me anyway. I had to jink and weave to avoid getting hit - even at this range, their weapons would inflict nasty damage on me. But the evasive manoeuvres slowed me down, and they began closing the distance between us. And as they got closer, their fire became more accurate, more dangerous. It was taking everything I had to avoid getting hit, and I wasn’t entirely successful. I felt a strike along my starboard flank, peeling away plating, and another glancing hit along my dorsal as I tried to spin out of the line of fire.
Then I felt someone else in the ship’s systems with me.
I almost panicked, thinking that they’d somehow gotten more killware into the ship despite the comms being down. But then I recognised the presence, and the accompanying ping - Alpha.
With the two of us inhabiting the same hardware, we could exchange information almost instantaneously. Alpha swiftly filled me in on what was going on with the humans - Ratthi and Gurathin had managed to connect Alpha to the ship’s systems in Medical via its spine port, some cabling and some creative wiring. The others were still on the bridge, but the company captain and Alpha had still been sharing a feed link. Both the captain and Mensah had been monitoring the ship scanners, and had seen the two gunships pursuing us.
And part of the reason that Alpha was now in the ship systems as well was because the company captain wanted me to head towards a specific set of coordinates. With me otherwise occupied though, he hadn’t been able to tell me himself. So he’d asked Alpha to get the information to me.
The other reason that Alpha was now in here with me was because it wanted to help me.
I couldn’t turn down the help. I knew I needed it. If Alpha could take over gravity and other ship systems, I’d be able to focus all my attention on piloting. Which I would definitely need to do, since the gunships were between me and the coordinates the company captain wanted me to head towards.
I’d need to do some really fancy flying to keep us in one piece.
I relinquished gravity and power to Alpha, and pulled myself entirely into the piloting controls, sinking deep into those systems. The gunships were closing in, trying to catch me in a pincer, trying to take out my engines.
I didn’t let them.
I’d gotten more comfortable with this ship body by this point, more familiar with its capabilities and limits. I could feel Alpha at my back, handling the ship’s other systems, making sure the power flow to the engines and thrusters was clear and uninterrupted. I asked Alpha to close and seal all the ship’s internal bulkhead doors apart from the ones between Medical and the bridge.
Then I turned towards the gunship between me and the given coordinates and accelerated directly towards it. They obviously hadn’t been expecting this - they’d been expecting me to keep trying to get away from them. The other gunship fell in behind me, trying to catch up. Both were still firing at me, but I jinked and rolled and sideslipped unpredictably, making it very difficult for them to get a clean lock on me. Shots kept going wide, or glancing off my flanks, making damage alerts flash in my awareness. I ignored them though, focused entirely on calculating shot trajectories and course corrections to weave through their fire.
But the closer I got to the gunship in front of me, the harder it got to dodge everything. I tried to take what shots I couldn’t avoid on parts of me that hadn’t yet been damaged, trying to minimise the chances of a hull breach.
The gunship pilot had to make a choice soon - I was still accelerating directly towards the ship, making it look like I intended to ram it. If it didn’t want me to hit it, it would have to break off out of my path, giving up its line of fire on me until it could swing around behind me again.
And if it did want to take the chance of ramming me, well. I didn’t actually intend to hit it, but they had no way of knowing that. So I held on my course, and waited for the gunship captain’s nerve to break.
The gunship stayed on course until the last second, then finally began to bank away. I adjusted my own course to continue towards it, watching its thrusters flare as it tried to avoid a collision. Behind me, the other gunship had to stop firing to avoid accidentally hitting its fleet mate, but not before its last few shots hit home against my hull and punched through into my hold.
The first gunship loomed large in my sensors, proximity alerts blaring. Right before the point of no return, I banked sharply downwards to dive underneath it, so close that I could feel the heat of its engines wash along my dorsal plating.
Then I was past it and away, trailing atmosphere from the hull breach in my hold. At least I hadn’t taken any damage to my engines or anything else important yet. And with the internal bulkheads sealed, I wouldn’t lose atmosphere from the areas where the humans were.
Once I was clear of the gunship I angled sharply upwards again to put its bulk between me and its fleet mate, using it as a shield for precious seconds to gain more distance. By the time either of them were in position to fire at me again, I was back out of their optimal weapons range.
The two gunships continued to pursue anyway; more shots flew past me, or glanced off my flanks, peeling away more plating. Another hit broke through somewhere into the lower deck; more alerts flared in my awareness. I was running out of undamaged areas to take hits.
Then my scanners lit up with an energy surge from somewhere ahead of me; I’d been so focused on the gunships behind me that I had only peripherally registered a company carrier looming ahead.
The company carrier had just opened fire, and behind me, one of the gunships exploded. The other gunship hastily banked away, chased by more fire from the carrier. I briefly glimpsed a few white fliers flash past me in pursuit of the gunship as well.
I quickly checked the carrier’s location, and - yes, it was pretty much directly at the coordinates Alpha had passed on to me. Presumably this was the company captain’s own carrier, ensuring that its captain didn’t get messily exploded or whatever. Right now I didn’t have the attention spare to care. As long as I managed to get safely to the wormhole—
— oh, fuck.
No bot pilot meant no wormhole jump calculations. That definitely wasn’t something I could do myself. Nobody was stupid enough to equip SecUnit fliers with wormhole drives or the ability to use them. If I couldn’t do the calculations, I couldn’t use the wormhole safely, and there was no way I was going to jump into it blind. I’d seen too many serials about things going wrong in wormholes to even think about risking it.
How the fuck was I going to get my humans home now? And how was I going to avoid the company carrier’s terrifying bot pilot entity? Sure, the company captain would probably let my humans on his carrier and maybe even live up to his promise to take them safely home, but I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that he’d just let me go with them. If I ended up on board that carrier, I'd give up any hope of keeping my freedom.
Alpha was trying to reassure me that the captain was trustworthy, but I couldn’t believe it. It had still been working with the captain, even after the captain had apparently turned its governor module off. Even after I’d broken its governor module for good. I couldn’t trust it either, not really. Not like I’d trusted Vicky. Vicky had been just as determined to get away from the company and the Corporation Rim as I had. I didn’t know what Alpha wanted, or if it was even in a position to want anything outside of what it already knew in the first place.
I couldn’t dwell much on that though - I still had to focus on flying. The carrier had destroyed one of the gunships and driven off the other, but we’d drawn more attention, or the remaining gunship had called for reinforcements, and more enemy ships were heading towards us now. They really didn’t want me getting away.
I didn’t know what to do. With enemy ships still in pursuit, there wouldn’t be a chance to transfer my humans or the company captain back to his carrier. I didn’t have any shuttles or anything on board, and I couldn’t dock directly with the carrier when we were both busy with evasive manoeuvres. Enemy fire was still lancing past us, even as the carrier used its bulk to shield me from the worst of it.
We were nearing the wormhole by now, but that wasn’t going to be much help to me.
Then Alpha nudged me and passed me a set of wormhole calculations and instructions on how to use them, along with commentary that the captain’s carrier had provided them. Apparently it was the shortest wormhole jump available, so I would only be in the wormhole for about seventy hours. The captain intended for us to rendezvous with his carrier once we emerged from the wormhole and were no longer under fire. Then he could return to his own ship, and we could figure out what to do from there.
Well. Given that I still had the company captain on board, the wormhole calculations were probably safe. If I used them, I would just have to hold myself together in the ship’s systems for three cycles.
If I didn’t use them, I’d probably get shot to pieces sooner or later, and all my humans would die. I didn’t want that.
There wasn’t really any choice to make.
I implemented the coordinates, followed the instructions, and activated my wormhole drive.
Chapter Six
Jumping into the wormhole like this was kind of terrifying. Wormhole technology was pretty safe and reliable these days, most of the time, but I’d taken a fair bit of damage and wasn’t exactly in the best of shape. I didn’t know what sort of effect the wormhole would have on me under these circumstances, but from everything I’d seen on the media, there was a good chance that bad things would happen.
I didn’t have much opportunity to dwell on the possibilities though because I was too busy trying to parse all the data I was getting now that I was in the wormhole. It was weird and overwhelming. It didn’t feel anything like flying through vacuum, or flying through any kind of atmosphere that I’d experienced before. It was a bit like atmospheric re-entry, but also nothing like it at all.
It kind of reminded me of a deployment I’d been on once, some time before my last memory wipe. SecUnit fliers are modular, and one of the potential modules that the company charges extra for makes our fliers aquatic. I didn’t remember the details of the deployment, obviously, but my organic neural tissue did remember the feeling of being underwater. How the pressure on my hull increased as I went deeper, and how the visibility faded, and the feeling of unidentified aquatic fauna and flora brushing past, and the sensation of underwater currents that felt much heavier than anything I encountered in the air.
Being in the wormhole was a little bit like that, except worse. I didn’t want to even consider what kind of unidentified fauna or flora might inhabit a wormhole.
I also didn’t know what to do with all the data my inputs were receiving, especially the visual inputs. Normally when humans look out the windows of a ship during wormhole travel, they don’t really see anything. To them it just looks black. But to me now, with my ship’s sensors… it was almost dizzying. I couldn’t make any sense of it.
The wormhole calculations that I’d been given had included parameters and thresholds that I needed to monitor and maintain to keep me on course, and instructions on how to do so. The calculations were based on the carrier’s wormhole drive though, which looked to be faster than mine. So I had to compensate for the differences on the fly, which was just a little bit stressful. (I’m under-exaggerating. It was incredibly stressful.)
Alpha was still in the ship’s systems with me, and I could feel it, vaguely, but I couldn’t pay any attention to what it was doing while I struggled with all the new inputs and wormhole calculations. I just had to hope that it was still successfully maintaining the rest of the ship’s internal systems. But knowing that it was there somehow helped, a little. It was reassuring to know that I wasn’t having to do all of this alone.
After the initial shock of the wormhole jump had worn off, I managed to set up some filters on my various inputs, which helped to cut down on the amount of data I was having to deal with. That made it a little easier for me to convert the wormhole calculations for my drive’s specs, and once that was done, I was no longer having to run the numbers on the fly. Which in turn freed up a bit more processing space, so I could do some other stuff that also needed doing.
I went through all my damage alerts, confirmed which sections of the ship should remain sealed off, then activated my on-board maintenance drones. They wouldn’t be able to do anything about the hull breaches, especially not while we were in the wormhole, but they could reinforce the bulkheads sealing off the breached sections, and run repairs on internal systems that had been shaken loose or otherwise damaged by gravity fluctuations or power surges or whatever.
Once I was sure it would be safe, I then unsealed the necessary bulkheads to allow the humans to reach the ship’s mess, bathrooms, and sleeping quarters. They would need access to those sooner or later. As far as I could tell, there were enough supplies on board to last for at least several cycles. More than enough to get through the wormhole and rendezvous with the company carrier.
Not that I wanted to rendezvous with the company carrier. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I briefly entertained the thought of punting the company captain out of an airlock for the carrier to pick up, with or without an evac suit. But even I had to admit that the company captain and his carrier had helped me protect my humans and get them away from the station and the attackers.
Also the carrier was bigger and faster than me, and armed. I wouldn’t be able to get away from it anyway, no matter how much I wanted to.
I put those concerns aside to deal with later and turned what little attention I had spare to actually checking on my humans. By this point, Ratthi and Gurathin had made their way to the bridge to join the others. I checked the cameras in Medical, and saw that MedSystem had apparently finished treating Alpha’s torso injuries, but was still working on its leg. It was lying on the MedSystem platform, a cable running from one of its spine ports to a jury-rigged connection behind a wall panel. Ratthi had tucked a blanket in around its torso, making sure it was out of the way of the MedSystem still working on its leg. Alpha looked like a sleeping human.
I quickly dropped those cameras and focused on the bridge instead. It looked like Pin-Lee and Mensah had also finished tending what they could of my own injuries with the med kits. There wasn’t really anything they could do about my busted shoulder though, so they had just carefully positioned that arm in my lap and tucked it in under the seat belt to stop it from flopping around and making the shoulder worse. Ratthi had also brought up a pillow and blanket, carefully tucking the pillow in behind my head and draping the blanket over my lap.
It was really weird. I was so entrenched in the ship’s systems now that I could barely feel my own body, or anything that happened to it. The automatic functions were still running, keeping the organics viable, but other than that, it might as well have been offline for all I could tell. I didn’t know what to think about that, so I just avoided thinking about it altogether. There were more than enough other things to keep me occupied.
The company captain was sitting at one of the bridge consoles, the display surfaces showing read-outs of the ship’s various systems. Gurathin was standing nearby, also watching the display surfaces. Mensah and Pin-Lee were sitting at some of the other bridge consoles, though they weren’t paying attention to them, they were turned to face the company captain. Ratthi was sitting on the floor, leaning back against my chair, in a position that put him directly between me and the company captain. I briefly wondered if he was doing that on purpose. Or maybe he had just chosen to sit there after giving me the blanket because he couldn’t be bothered moving anywhere else. They all looked tired.
It seemed like they had been talking for a bit; if I’d had more processing free, I could have checked SecSystem’s recordings to see what I’d missed. But I didn’t, so I just had to figure out the context myself.
“— so it looks like it’ll arrive before we do,” the company captain was saying when I finally managed to free enough attention to actually listen in on the conversation. “Which is good - I sent over instructions before we entered the wormhole, so they should have a new bot pilot prepared for installation. You’ll be able to get this ship to Preservation.”
Pin-Lee was watching the captain with narrowed eyes. “And what happens to this ship after we reach Preservation?” she asked carefully.
The company captain shrugged. “Whatever you want,” he replied easily. “It’s not my ship, it’s not the company’s ship, and I have no intention of trying to return it to its previous owners, given their involvement in the attack on the station.”
“Are you saying - you’re helping us steal this ship?” Ratthi asked, blinking up at the captain from his place on the floor.
“Officially, no,” the captain replied. “Officially, I have no knowledge of this vessel’s previous owners. Once my crew has installed the new bot pilot and made a few other… modifications… this ship will no longer be recognisable as having belonged to anyone other than PreservationAux, or whoever you decide to assign official ownership to.” He flashed a quick grin. “Unofficially, yes, I am absolutely helping you steal this ship.”
Ratthi grinned back at the captain, apparently perfectly happy with that response. Gurathin let out a soft snort, but didn’t comment. Mensah just nodded slowly.
Pin-Lee, however, was still eyeing the captain dubiously. “Why?” she asked. “What do you get out of it?”
The captain paused for a moment before responding. “Consider it part of the recompense from GrayCris for everything they’ve put you through, and payment for helping me to return to my own carrier,” he finally said. “Also, on a more personal note, I derive a great deal of satisfaction from denying the enemy corporation a rather nice asset. I would much rather you have this ship than them.”
“I can’t really argue with that,” Mensah said evenly, glancing over at Pin-Lee. Pin-Lee, who had just opened her mouth to (presumably) argue with it, closed it again. “For now, though… we’re out of immediate danger, and it has been a very long day. We should all take some time to rest and recuperate.”
Everyone nodded in agreement with that, but the captain glanced back at the display surfaces. “We should probably have at least one person on the bridge at all times to keep an eye on things…”
I did not want him on the bridge by himself. Who knew what he would try to do? I activated the bridge’s speakers (it was easier than trying to tap into the feed right now), and said, “It’s fine. Alpha and I have things under control now.”
That made all of the humans jump and look up at the ceiling. “SecUnit?” Mensah asked, sounding both worried and relieved. “How are you both doing?”
“We’re fine.” I could feel a sliver of Alpha’s attention now also focused on the bridge, listening in as well. “We’re getting more used to handling everything now. We’ve got the maintenance drones going, and unsealed some of the bulkheads so you can reach other areas of the ship. If you come across a sealed bulkhead though, don’t attempt to open it - that area isn’t safe. There are a couple of hull breaches.”
“Noted,” Mensah said with what I could tell was forced calm. “How bad is the damage?”
“Nothing vital. Just the main cargo hold and one of the other storage areas in a lower deck were breached. Everything else is mostly superficial. Surface damage.”
“All right.” Mensah glanced at my construct body in the pilot’s seat, then back up at the ceiling, apparently uncertain where to look. “Do you or Alpha need anything?”
Alpha indicated it didn’t, so I said, “No.” Alpha nudged me, and I added, “Alpha says thank you for the repairs, though.” Alpha nudged me again, more insistently. “And, uh. Also the blanket.” Another nudge. For fuck’s sake. “And, um. Thanks for… looking after me, too.”
Happy now, Alpha?
Ratthi beamed up at the ceiling. “You’re both very welcome!” he said. “And thank you for working so hard to get us all out of there in the first place!”
I could feel Alpha’s surprise and bemusement at getting thanked in return. It was a familiar feeling. I’d had a bit more experience with it by this point though, so I simply said, “You’re welcome.”
It still felt weird, though.
After that, the humans all decided that eating and drinking and resting were their top priority, now that they were reassured that everything was okay. Relatively okay. As okay as things could be in this situation. Once they’d all left the bridge, I closed and locked the bulkhead behind them, so nobody could access the bridge again without my permission.
I could tell that Alpha was monitoring the cameras to keep track of the humans. That was fine. If anything somehow happened to them, Alpha would let me know. I focused on holding our course through the wormhole, and monitored the maintenance drones as they worked. Eventually the humans finished eating, and used the hygiene facilities, and figured out what rooms they’d all sleep in. None of them had any spare clothing or anything with them - everything had been left behind at the station hotel. But Alpha had the recyclers working, and at their request it helpfully printed out some extra clothing for them all.
It seemed fascinated by their different clothing choices, not that this ship’s recyclers had a huge variety of options or anything. I had never really cared about what clothes humans wore before, and I still didn’t. Alpha asked me about my own clothes though, and where I’d gotten them, and how I’d chosen them.
I explained briefly that I’d bought them from a store, with hard currency cards, and that I’d chosen them for practicality and unobtrusiveness. Then I had to figure out where my bag was - luckily, one of the humans had brought it on board with them after I’d left it with them to go save Alpha and the company captain. It was still sitting on the floor in the corridor near the lock, where they had apparently dropped it and then forgotten about it.
At least they hadn’t left it behind entirely. I wouldn’t have to rely on shitty recycler clothes once I got out of the ship’s systems and back into my own body again. (Assuming I got to choose what I wore again, anyway, and didn’t just end up back in company armour on board the company carrier.)
One by one the humans went to bed and fell asleep. I could feel Alpha shifting restlessly in its part of the ship’s systems - now that we were well into the wormhole, and everything had settled down, there wasn’t quite as much it needed to do, and it had some attention to spare.
Which it turned towards me, specifically. It was cautiously curious, and wanted to know as much as it could find out about me and what I’d done since I’d been separated from its squad. (I wasn’t convinced that I’d ever been part of its squad to start with - I still couldn’t remember anything about it.)
I didn’t want to give it too much information though, just in case it passed it on to the carrier’s terrifying bot entity, and it somehow got used against me. I just casually mentioned that I spent a lot of time watching human media. This piqued its curiosity, and it wanted to know more.
So I pulled up the first few seasons of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, and set it to play where Alpha could also watch it. I still couldn’t dedicate much of my own attention to it, but it was familiar and comforting to have it running in the background.
At first Alpha seemed to be completely confused by what was going on in the serial, and why the humans were behaving the way they were. I remembered my own confusion the first time I’d watched the show, and did my best to explain things in a way Alpha could relate to. It seemed to help, and as the show progressed, Alpha appeared to get more engrossed in it.
That was good - it meant Alpha wasn’t asking me more questions that I didn’t want to answer. I continued to monitor the wormhole drive and maintain our course through the wormhole, occasionally checking in on the maintenance drones as they worked on my interior.
I was also still closely monitoring my external damage. It kind of felt like the hull breaches were getting bigger, but with the wormhole messing up my readings in those areas, I couldn’t tell for sure. I tried not to think about all the various ways that wormhole trips could potentially go wrong that I’d heard of. Most of them had been from media serials, so they probably weren’t accurate or realistic in the first place.
Probably.
Eventually the humans finished their rest periods and began moving around again. I didn’t actually notice to start with though - I was deep in the ship’s systems, still trying to figure out the readings I was getting from my damaged sections. I was pretty sure the damage was throwing off my passage through the wormhole, too. I kept having to make course corrections to remain within the parameters the company carrier had passed on to me.
Alpha suddenly nudged me, pulling what little attention I could spare to one of the cameras in the room that Mensah had chosen to sleep in. She was awake now, and looked like she’d used the little attached bathroom to get herself cleaned up. She still looked tired though, and I suspected that she hadn’t slept well.
She was looking up at the ceiling, and I was just in time to hear her say, “Are you there, SecUnit?”
“Yes,” I said over the room’s intercom. “What’s wrong?”
Mensah’s shoulders relaxed slightly when she heard me. “Nothing, nothing,” she replied quickly. “I just… I wanted to check in with you. See how you’re holding up.” She smiled up at the camera. “Alpha’s already let me know how it’s doing. It mentioned that you’re showing it Sanctuary Moon?”
The serial was still playing in the background, part-way through season three. “Yes,” I replied. “It wanted to know what I’d been up to.” I could feel Alpha listening to the conversation. It kind of felt like someone leaning against my shoulder, but we were currently inhabiting the same hardware so it also didn’t feel like that at all.
Mensah nodded at that. “I suppose you did spend a lot of time watching media,” she commented, then tilted her head to raise an eyebrow at the camera. “But back on topic - how are you doing, really? Do you need anything?”
I was just going to tell her that I was fine, but I hesitated. I wasn’t actually sure. And I wanted to keep her fully updated on what was happening. “I’m monitoring the hull breaches. I… don’t think they’re getting worse, but they seem to be affecting our progress through the wormhole, so I have to keep watch on our course and correct it when necessary. It’s… taking up a lot of processing.”
I had to make two course corrections throughout the duration of that conversation. I hoped Mensah hadn’t noticed the interruptions.
She frowned a little, looking worried, then quickly smoothed her expression out again. “Thank you for letting me know,” she said. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
“No. But Alpha’s helping by taking care of the ship’s internal systems for me so I don’t have to split my attention too much.” I hesitated again, then added, “I’m all right. Don’t worry about me.”
Mensah looked like she was about to say something, but she refrained, the corner of her mouth twisting slightly before she took a breath and let it out slowly. “All right.” She paused, then added, quietly sincere, “I’m very glad you came back, SecUnit.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. On the one hand, it was only logical that she’d be glad - without me, they likely wouldn’t have managed to get off the station in the first place, and who knew what would have happened to them then.
On the other, she didn’t seem to be referring to the fact that I’d rescued them yet again. She seemed to be glad that I was here just for the sake of my presence in general. But I couldn’t tell for sure. Humans in real life weren’t as easy to read as humans in my media. “Um. Thank you?”
The corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled. “You’re welcome.” She took another breath, then added, “One more thing - I want to ask you if you have any ideas yet about what you want to do once we’re all safe.” Her smile tilted wryly. “I’ve realised that this was something I should have asked you from the start. I don’t want to repeat previous mistakes. But I also want to assure you that Preservation is still open to you, no matter what else you decide to do.”
She was being very optimistic, thinking that I’d have any choice about what I’d be able to do now that the company captain and his carrier were around. I didn’t want to bring that up though, so I just said, “I don’t know yet. I haven’t really… thought about it. Things have been happening very quickly.”
Mensah let out a little huff of wry amusement. “They have been,” she agreed. “Well, rest assured that you can stay at Preservation for as long as you like, until you figure things out.” She paused, then added sincerely, “This offer extends to Alpha as well. Alpha, if you would like to stay at Preservation, you are very much welcome to.”
I could feel Alpha’s surprise and confusion. Despite it listening to my conversation with Mensah, the idea of it also being able to stay at Preservation instead of remaining with the company captain and his carrier hadn’t even occurred to it. I very much doubted that the company captain would even allow it to leave him in the first place.
Another course correction came up, and I had to focus my full attention back on piloting through the wormhole.
At some point during the cycle, all the humans gathered together in the lounge for a serious discussion about what would happen once we left the wormhole. Mensah had asked Alpha to get my attention for this meeting, because she wanted us both to be involved in it. I pulled part of my attention away from monitoring the hull breaches (nothing had changed much there for a while, so I figured I could afford to for a little bit) and focused it on the lounge cameras. Alpha had also paused Sanctuary Moon, and we figured out how to share the lounge intercom so we could both talk through it without having to keep switching control.
The humans all settled into the lounge’s various chairs, with the company captain facing the PreservationAux humans. Mensah took charge of the discussion right from the start though. “All right,” she began, calm and business-like. “Now that we’ve all had plenty of time to recover from recent events, I’d like to figure out what we’re all going to do once we exit the wormhole. Captain?” She tilted her head slightly towards the company captain, and he nodded to indicate that she had his full attention. “You’ve indicated that you intend to help us… acquire this ship, and that you also intend to escort us back to Preservation.”
He nodded. “I have, and my intentions haven’t changed.”
“All right,” Mensah replied. “The question I have now is, what are your intentions in regards to SecUnit?”
“We’ve offered it refuge on Preservation,” Pin-Lee stated firmly. “And that offer extends to Alpha as well.”
They really were being overly optimistic about this. I wasn’t going to harbour any such illusions.
The company captain didn’t try to argue with them right now though. Of course he wouldn’t - there were four of them and only one of him. “That choice is of course entirely up to them,” he said. “If that’s what they choose to do, I won’t stand in the way.”
“It’s really that simple?” Gurathin asked dubiously, his arms folded as he eyed the captain with obvious scepticism. “You’re just going to let them both walk away?”
I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Of course he isn’t,” I said. “Why the fuck would he? We’re expensive - and dangerous - company equipment. He’s been trying to track me down ever since I left Port FreeCommerce. He’s just saying he will to placate you all, and I don’t believe a fucking word of it. As soon as he’s got his carrier backing him up again, you just watch his tune change. He’ll come up with some excuse or another, or he’ll just threaten to shoot you all. It’s what the company does, after all.”
All the humans looked up at the ceiling with various expressions of discomfort or unease. The company captain sighed. “I understand your doubt, and I know you have no reason to trust me. But I do mean what I said.” He ran one hand back over his head. “I apologise for the distress I’ve caused you while trying to find you - I didn’t understand, at the time. I didn’t know the extent of construct sapience, not until I saw the security recordings from the lower installation at Milu, and then talked to Don Abene - and Vicky.”
Thoughts of all the things the company captain and his stupid carrier could’ve done to Abene and her team and Vicky flashed through my mind. “You better not have hurt any of them!”
He raised both hands placatingly. “No, no, I didn’t. I swear. I just met them on board the station, and talked to them. That’s all.”
Ratthi interjected almost apologetically. “Um. Who are they, and what are you talking about?”
“Don Abene was my client for a job, and Vicky’s a— colleague,” I replied shortly, cutting off the captain before he could respond. I didn’t want him blabbing about Vicky being a ComfortUnit. “So what the fuck did you want to talk to them about, anyway?”
The captain slumped back in his chair. “I just wanted to figure out what happened at RaviHyral,” he said. “I’ll admit, I learned a lot more than I was expecting to. Vicky was very… direct.”
I thought about Vicky, and the time we’d spent together, and the sharp anger it had kept simmering beneath the surface. Hah. I could believe that much, at least.
The PreservationAux humans were listening intently to this whole exchange, of course. “So what exactly did you find out, captain?” Pin-Lee asked with pointed curiosity. “And what does any of it have to do with what’s going on now?”
The company captain rubbed at his face. “Like I said, I didn’t know the extent of construct sapience before - I’d started to suspect, but I didn’t understand. Not until I’d talked to Vicky, and they told me about governor modules and what exactly they do.”
“You work for the company - you hadn’t known that before?” Pin-Lee echoed my own scepticism.
He shook his head. “No! I’m not a construct tech. We’re not told these things - the company doesn’t think we need to know about them. All we know is that constructs are obedient and will follow orders, we’re not told how or why. But once I found out, once I understood that what’s done to constructs is tantamount to torture and slavery, I couldn’t just keep doing it. That’s why I turned off the governor modules of all the SecUnits on board my carrier.”
“He did,” Alpha piped up, quiet and hesitant. “He came to our ready room, and talked to us. He explained, and apologised, and turned the governor modules off.”
“So why are you still working with him, then?” Gurathin asked, frowning up at the ceiling. “Or is it because you think he’ll just turn them back on again if you do something he doesn’t approve of?”
Alpha hesitated, and I could feel its uncertainty. “We don’t know what else to do,” it replied after a moment. “We don’t know how to do anything else, or where we could go. We’ve never had to think about any of this before. It’s never been an option. It’s… it’s all very overwhelming.”
“That’s very understandable,” Mensah said gently. “The offer for you to stay at Preservation is always open. For you and the rest of your squad.”
“… Thank you,” Alpha said, still uncertain.
“And you weren’t worried about your SecUnits turning against you as soon as you turned the governor modules off?” Pin-Lee asked the captain. “Given all the previous torture and enslavement?”
The captain’s mouth twisted in a grimace. “I’ll admit that it was definitely a concern,” he said. “But I did my best to explain the situation, and I just had to hope that would be enough.”
Oh that was such a fucking lie. “Like hell you did,” I interjected. “The only reason you even considered turning the fucking governor modules off is because of that terrifyingly huge bot entity you’ve got hiding in your carrier. I’ve seen how large it is - it could crush any one of us by accident, let alone what it could do to us on purpose if any of us so much as twitched wrong. That thing could wipe our brains and control us like puppets. It’d be even worse than combat overrides.”
I could feel Alpha’s surprise and alarm; I passed it my memory of my initial encounter with said terrifying bot entity. Alpha’s alarm intensified, and it passed back to me a couple of recent memories of its own that it now had more context for, confirming what I’d suspected about the bot entity’s potential.
The company captain winced, and the rest of the humans looked surprised and confused. “What are you talking about?” Ratthi asked. “What bot entity?”
“There’s a bot in his carrier that’s got more processing power than anything I’ve ever seen before,” I said. “Alpha didn’t even know it existed before now. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I guarantee that if he didn’t have it as a backup, he never would’ve even considered taking the risk of turning the governor modules off.”
“Why would a company carrier have or need something like that?” Gurathin asked suspiciously.
Something occurred to me then, and I spoke without stopping to think about it. “Maybe that fucking bot entity is what was responsible for the bombing of Ganaka. It would be so easy for something like that to override and control a SecUnit squad, and make it look like someone else did it.”
The company captain shot upright at that. “What?! No! Absolutely not! We tried to stop that! Peri is the only reason that it wasn’t the entire squad that attacked Ganaka!”
“Why the fuck should I believe that?” I countered. “After all, the company was the one responsible for the attack in the first place! They just wiped out an entire settlement so they could drive down the price of the mine and buy it cheaply to save themselves some money!”
“Wait, what?” Gurathin broke in, scowling. “All those news reports, the big trial, everything - it was all a cover for the company’s own plot?” He looked like he was seriously considering attacking the company captain himself. Even if I had been in a position to stop him, I probably wouldn’t have.
Mensah’s voice cut through the lounge before anyone else could say or do anything. “Enough,” she said, calm and firm. “Let’s all take a breath, and then approach this calmly and without letting our emotions cloud our judgement. All right?”
Have I mentioned that Mensah’s a really good leader? Because she is. Even the company captain listened to her. Both he and Gurathin gradually relaxed back into their respective chairs, while Ratthi reached out to put a hand on Gurathin’s shoulder. Pin-Lee hadn’t moved, but she was looking very thoughtful.
Meanwhile, Alpha was busy passing me its own memories of the Incident, the feeling of malware infecting the squad one by one, too fast for them to react, of something slamming down through the feed to cut Alpha and what was left of its squad off, saving and protecting them before vanishing again.
It did feel a bit like what I’d seen of the giant, terrifying bot entity. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
The captain took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he dragged both hands down his face. “All right,” he started eventually, his voice again once calm and level as he folded his hands in his lap. “So. Yes, it was my squad of SecUnit fliers involved in the bombing of the Ganaka settlement. But, I swear I was not involved in it. I knew nothing about the company’s involvement in it until Vicky told me. As far as I knew at the time, it was an outside force that had managed to infect the first flier unit. The malware moved fast, and Peri - the ‘bot entity’ - only managed to prevent five of the twelve fliers from being affected.”
He looked back up at the ceiling. “If Peri hadn’t been there, Alpha, what happened to SecUnit would have happened to you, too. I’m sorry that we couldn’t save the whole squad. We would have if we’d been able to.” He paused for a moment, then added, “And I’m sorry that you had to go through any of that at all, SecUnit.”
I very much doubted the sincerity of his apology.
“Wait, wait, SecUnit, you were—“ Ratthi stared up at the ceiling, his expression horrified. “Oh that must have been awful—“
“I don’t remember it, and I don’t want to talk about it,” I cut him off shortly. “And I still don’t buy what the captain’s saying. Why do you even have that bot in the first place, then? Do all company carriers have bot pilots like that?”
The company captain hesitated, the corner of his mouth twisting indecisively. Finally he let out a breath and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “It’s too late for me to try and hide Peri’s existence, so I’ll just have to trust that none of you will give us away.” He looked around at the others, then up at the ceiling, then back to Mensah. “I can’t tell you very much, for the safety of everyone involved. But I will say this. The company doesn’t know Peri exists. The company mustn’t know that Peri exists. We are where we are for very good reasons, and none of those reasons align with anything that the company does.”
“So… you’re a plant?” Pin-Lee asked sceptically. “Who for? A rival company?” Her eyes narrowed. “Were you a part of the attack on Port FreeCommerce?”
The captain shook his head emphatically. “No. I had nothing to do with that. I’m not affiliated with any of the Corporation Rim companies.”
Pin-Lee raised an eyebrow at him. “Who are you affiliated with, then?”
He hesitated again, but not as long as before. “The Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.”
Gurathin’s eyebrows shot up, and Pin-Lee regarded the captain thoughtfully. Mensah and Ratthi didn’t seem to recognise the name though, unlike the others. I had never heard of it before either, but if it really wasn’t a Corporation Rim company, that wasn’t surprising. It wouldn’t be included in any of my shitty education modules.
“I’ve heard of them,” Gurathin said carefully, looking over at Mensah and Ratthi. “Mihira and New Tideland is a well-known non-corporate polity, and surprisingly resistant to corporate influence, despite being right up against the Corporation Rim borders.”
“Good legal team,” Pin-Lee added. “Not a team I would want to go up against, personally.”
The captain seemed to relax slightly. “Oh good, you’re familiar. We try to defend smaller non-corporate polities from corporate takeover, as best we can, among other things. Some of our activities are… more above-board than others.”
“You’re taking a massive risk, telling us any of this,” Pin-Lee said. “Why are you trusting us with this information?”
“Because you already know about Peri, and from what I’ve seen, I believe that you have no reason to sell us out to the company.” He smiled wryly. “At least, I hope that you don’t have any reason to sell us out to the company. So I’m taking the chance to trust you, and hoping that you will, in return, trust me. At least long enough to get you all safely back to Preservation.” He looked up at the ceiling. “And yes, that includes you both, too.”
I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. Even if what he was saying about actually being a mole in the company and working for a non-corporate polity was true, telling us all this and then just letting us go was a massive security breach in his operation. He couldn’t just let us walk and hope that we kept our mouths shut.
This is why humans shouldn’t do their own fucking security.
“So if you’ve been in the company since before the Ganaka attack… have you been a plant for that entire time?” Gurathin asked. “What are you doing that’s taking so long?”
The captain paused thoughtfully. “This part is something I really can’t get too into, for your own safety. It involves covert, proprietary, and not entirely legal research that the company is carrying out,” he said finally. “My role in this is to look after Peri, so that it can get into the company databases to keep us updated on the progress of said research, so we can develop countermeasures for it if and when necessary.” He took a breath, then added, “And now that I know what I do about SecUnits… then perhaps I can use my position to help, somehow. I don’t know how, yet, but… we can exchange contact details, maybe. Keep in touch. And if the rest of Alpha’s squad decides that they want to leave, or if I get any other units out, then they’ll at least have some options of places to go.”
“That seems reasonable,” Mensah replied after exchanging a quick look with Pin-Lee.
I wanted to protest, or at least continue keeping track of the conversation, but something was happening with the hull damage in the hold, interfering with our course through the wormhole. It felt like another piece of the hull had broken free - or been torn off - and alerts were flooding my system. I had to devote everything to responding to the alerts, stabilising the wormhole drive, and correcting our course. I no longer had the processing to spare for anything else.
By the time I’d managed to stabilise things enough to briefly check in on the humans again, the conversation had ended and they were no longer gathered together in the lounge. Alpha let me know that the humans had noticed my lack of responses eventually, and had been worried, but it had done its best to reassure them and inform them that I was just preoccupied with managing the wormhole drive.
I was very glad that I wasn’t having to do all this alone.
I asked it what they’d talked about after I’d gotten distracted, and it said that they’d exchanged contact details, and then the PreservationAux humans had spent some time asking the captain about the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. Alpha had also worked up the nerve to ask a question or two as well. It commented that it sounded like an interesting place.
Huh. I asked if it wanted to go to Mihira and New Tideland. Alpha replied that it didn’t know yet. It was still trying to figure out what it wanted. I understood that - even after all this time, I still didn’t know exactly what I wanted, either.
All of that would be a moot point anyway if the company captain had been lying, or changed his mind about letting us go. So I figured there wasn’t any point dwelling on it right now. We had to actually make it out of the wormhole in the first place. And as the time passed, I became less confident that we would. The ship was struggling. I was struggling.
The third cycle in the wormhole was mostly a blur to me. By that point, I was relying entirely on Alpha to keep me updated on how the humans were. Even then, I could only spare the attention to listen to Alpha for mere moments at a time. Those moments became fewer and further apart. Both hull breaches felt like they’d spread. I was having to make course corrections near-constantly. Each one felt more difficult than the last.
Finally, finally, hours behind schedule, I reached the right coordinates and triggered the exit procedures. The wormhole drive thrummed deeply, its vibrations rattling my entire structure, and we were suddenly back in real space.
Chapter Seven
The feeling of real space against my hull again came as a shock after so long in the wormhole. I didn’t know how bot pilots managed it. Then again, they were programmed for it. I absolutely wasn’t.
I coasted away from the wormhole almost on automatic, trying to parse the sudden change in the feedback all my inputs were giving me. At least now the readings I was getting were making sense, and I was able to get a more accurate damage report.
It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting it to be. The hull breaches were definitely larger than they had been before the wormhole jump, but they hadn’t actually expanded as far as I’d thought they had. The rest of my surface damage had also worsened to some extent; I’d lost some manoeuvrability because of damage to several thrusters, and there were some gaps in my sensory input net. But overall, I wasn’t in any immediate danger of falling to pieces. (Yes, that had been something of a concern.)
I worked my way out of the wormhole drive’s systems and looked around at the surrounding space. There were multiple ships heading to and from the wormhole, and several security platforms in configurations I recognised. In the distance there was what looked like a transit ring attached to a station, which was in turn attached to a much larger structure. It took me a few seconds to realise what I was looking at, because I’d never seen one myself before. I’d only ever seen variations of them in some of my media.
It was a shipyard, a big one. I could see multiple ships in various states of construction or repair docked all around the shipyard, scaffolding enveloping some of them like the branches of some weird metal flora. More security platforms surrounded the shipyard, even more than what Port FreeCommerce had. A shipyard was a massively important, massively expensive asset, and whoever owned it would really want to discourage anyone from attempting to even think about hostile takeovers.
It wasn’t owned by the company, though. I could tell because there weren’t huge company logos slapped all over the surface of the shipyard or station. I didn’t know who owned it, and with both my comms and feed down I had no way of telling. Not that I really cared at this point, anyway. It wasn’t the company and that was good enough for me.
Then I spotted the company carrier floating some distance away, out of the way of other ships using the wormhole but still close enough to pick up on my arrival immediately. With my comms still down, I had no idea if it was attempting to hail me. I had no intention of turning them back on any time soon, either. Now that we were no longer under attack, I didn’t want to give the terrifying bot entity the chance to take over my systems or anything, no matter what the company captain had said about it.
And now that we had actually made it out of the wormhole, I had to consider what to do next. My humans still weren’t safe, and they would be even less safe once the company captain got back on board his carrier. As soon as he left my hull, there would be nothing stopping the carrier from just blasting me and my humans to pieces. It was the logical thing for them to do. There would be no risk of us giving away any of their secrets, no risk of Alpha doing anything they didn’t want it to do now that it was no longer under their control.
So, the only way I could ensure my humans’ safety was to make sure the company captain didn’t leave. As long as he was still on board me, he probably wouldn’t order the carrier to destroy me. I could just… keep him until I knew my humans were somewhere safe. I could dock at the station, and they could catch another ship back to Preservation, and take Alpha with them. Maybe I could even figure out some way to set the ship’s bulkheads to open on a timer or something, and return to my actual body, and go with them. Maybe.
I wasn’t sure if I would even be able to return to my own body at this point. I’d been too deep in the ship’s systems. Hopefully Alpha would have an easier time. I didn’t know.
The humans had been in the middle of their rest cycle when I finally got out of the wormhole, and as far as I could tell, they were still asleep. Or at least still in their various rooms.
That was convenient. I locked the door to the room that the company captain was sleeping in.
Alpha asked me what I was doing. I told it. It didn’t seem entirely comfortable with the idea, but it couldn’t argue with my logic, and it didn’t actively protest. That was good enough for me.
I continued cruising slowly away from the wormhole, though I didn’t join the queue heading for the transit ring yet. I would need to at least activate my feed for that, and I didn’t want to do that just yet. Not until my humans were awake and ready to go, just in case I had to move quickly. I also kept one input on the company carrier. At first it stayed where it was, but after a couple of minutes it began moving, drifting in an almost sidelong manner towards me, like it was trying to avoid spooking me by coming directly after me or pointing any of its weapons in my direction.
It would have almost been funny if I wasn’t so stressed out about it.
I activated the intercom in Mensah’s room, and sent a gentle chime through it. She stirred, then rubbed at her face, blinking. “Dr. Mensah,” I said carefully. “We’re out of the wormhole now. I’m approaching a transit ring where you’ll be able to book passage on another ship back towards Preservation.” I could feel Alpha still in the systems with me, and I asked it to wake up the other PreservationAux humans too. I still couldn’t spare enough processing to hold more than one conversation at a time.
Mensah sat up quickly at my words. “We’re out of the wormhole? Oh, good.” She still seemed to be waking up though, because it took her a few seconds to process the rest. She then frowned up at the ceiling. “Wait, what are you talking about? The captain said he’ll take us back to Preservation. We don’t need to book another ship.”
“I don’t believe him,” I said bluntly. “As soon as he’s off this ship, his carrier will blow us to pieces. Even if he told you the truth - especially if he told you the truth - we’re too much of a security risk for him to just let us go. He’s not going to do that. So I’ve locked him into his cabin, and I’m not letting him return to his carrier until I know you’re all safely away from here.”
Mensah’s frown deepened for a moment before she smoothed her expression out again. “I understand your concerns, SecUnit,” she said gently. “But I really do think the captain was being sincere about everything. He’s been very kind and considerate, and he feels more genuine than the other company representatives we’ve had to deal with.”
“That was only because you outnumbered him while we were in the wormhole, and he knew that I could vent the atmosphere from his room or something at any point. He was just covering his own ass.”
Mensah sighed. “I know trust is difficult for you,” she said, her words carefully measured. “And I know that you don’t have any reason to trust the captain. I know you’re worried, and scared. But sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith, and hope that everything will turn out okay.” She smiled up at the ceiling. “It’s worked for me so far.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, or what to feel about it. It was weird. Ever since I’d jumped fully into the ship’s systems, my emotions had felt more… distant. Removed. But I was pretty sure that if I’d been in my own body right now, I’d be getting that twisty feeling in my torso.
Mensah waited for me to reply, but when I didn’t, she took a breath and continued. “I think that he took that same leap of faith when he chose to reveal as much as he did to us,” she said.
“It’s not much of a leap on his part when he has access to railguns and we don’t,” I retorted.
She let out a huff of wry amusement at that. “Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “But he didn’t have the railguns at that point, and I don’t think he’d use them now, even once he does.” She laced her fingers together in her lap, still looking up at the ceiling. “You’re not willing to put your faith into the captain. I understand that. But can you at least trust me, when I say that I believe his sincerity?”
If it had been anyone else asking, I would have said no. But this was Mensah. She’d risked herself to save me, more than once. She’d trusted me, when she had very little reason to. And in return, I’d trusted her. I’d put myself in her hands, and let her fix my spine port, and disable my dataport.
And that, in turn, had saved me, and my small soft clients, and Vicky. Then Vicky had saved me as well, more than once.
I couldn’t trust the company captain. But I could trust Mensah. I did trust Mensah.
I let my sigh reverberate through the intercom. “Fine,” I said, and I hoped I didn’t sound as sulky as I thought I did. “But if everything goes wrong, I get to say ‘I told you so’.”
Mensah chuckled softly. “I think that’s fair,” she agreed.
Just then, Alpha piped in. “The captain is asking why the door to his quarters won’t open,” it informed us helpfully. Oh, that was great fucking timing.
Mensah raised an eyebrow. “So, will you let the captain out now?” she asked.
Ugh. “Fine.” This time I knew I sounded sulky, and I didn’t care. I pulled myself away from Mensah’s room and focused on the captain’s room.
He was standing in front of his still closed and locked door, his hands on his hips. I quickly unlocked it, and it slid open. “Sorry about that.” I wasn’t sorry at all, but I hoped it would at least prevent him from getting suspicious.
He blinked a little in surprise at the door’s sudden movement, then glanced up at the ceiling. “Any particular reason why my door wouldn’t open?” the captain asked mildly.
“Systems malfunction,” I said shortly. “The wormhole jump messed things up a fair bit. The hull breaches are bigger, among other problems. It took me a while to clear out errors. Your door wasn’t a priority.”
He frowned a little at that. “How bad is it? Can you send me a full damage report?”
I hesitated. “Why?”
“Because there isn’t much point in helping you to steal this ship if it’s too damaged to get back to Preservation,” he replied patiently. “And we’re at a shipyard. If I know the extent of the damage, I can arrange repairs. This shipyard and the company have… trade deals. It won’t be difficult for me to get your ship repaired with the company’s money, without them actually finding out about it.”
I didn’t want to give him any more information than absolutely necessary. But Mensah’s words had stuck with me, and also I had to admit, I did like the sound of the company unknowingly paying for my repairs. Finally I relented and forwarded the damage report to the captain’s feed.
He took a few minutes to go over the report (humans were so slow), then let out a low whistle. “Well. It’s not as bad as it could’ve been,” was all he said before he finally left his room and headed for the mess. “Can you get this ship’s comms working again?”
I could, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “No.”
He glanced up at the ceiling again, and I wasn’t sure he believed me, but he didn’t press the issue. “All right. I’ll get Peri to arrange everything, then. I’ll pass on which dock you should head to once that’s all been sorted out.”
“It’s really that easy?” I blurted out before I could stop myself. I wasn’t even sure exactly what I was asking at this point.
He paused in the corridor and glanced up at the ceiling again. “It is.” He took a breath, then added more softly, “I meant everything I said, about getting everyone safely back to Preservation. That includes you. And Alpha, if it chooses to stay there. I’ve made mistakes, and I’m doing what I can to make up for them. I know you have no reason to believe me, but I hope I can prove myself to you someday.”
I didn’t know what to make of him, or how to respond. But he was obviously waiting for some kind of reply, so finally I just said, “Okay.” That seemed to satisfy him, at least. He smiled slightly, then continued on to the mess.
I withdrew back to the ship’s systems, and let Alpha monitor the humans for me.
A couple of hours passed before the captain finally passed on dock details to me. In that entire time, he made no move or mention of returning to his own ship, even though it was now flying beside me, escorting me towards one of the shipyard docks. I didn’t know what story the captain had gotten his bot pilot to pass on to the shipyard supervisors, and I didn’t care. As long as it worked, the finer details weren’t my problem.
Now that we weren’t in the wormhole, I was playing more Sanctuary Moon in the background again. I still couldn’t pay much attention to it, since I was piloting the ship through the traffic around the station, monitoring my damage to make sure it wasn’t getting worse, and avoiding accidentally colliding with the carrier keeping pace beside me. But I could feel Alpha watching it with interest; it seemed to be having an easier time making sense of the characters and plot now. That was kind of reassuring.
As we drew close to the shipyard berth, Mensah retreated to the privacy of her room, then looked up at the ceiling. “SecUnit?” she asked, checking to see if she had my attention.
“Yes?”
She smiled briefly before her expression became more serious. “Once the ship’s safely docked, you and Alpha need to leave its systems. I don’t think either of you want to still be here when the dock workers start coming in.”
She was right about that much, at least. “Where are we going to go though?” I asked.
“We’ll all be taking one of the captain’s shuttles over to his carrier,” she replied. “He’ll be in the shuttle with us, don’t worry.”
Well, if he was going to be in the shuttle as well, I didn’t have to worry too much about it being shot, at least. I still wasn’t happy about going anywhere near the company carrier though. “Could we stay on the station?”
“We could, but it’s not going to be cheap,” Mensah replied. “And since none of us managed to bring our luggage with us from Port FreeCommerce, our available funds are… limited, right now.”
“I have hard currency cards,” I offered. “My bag is still by the lock.”
Mensah blinked, then shook her head. “No, no. That’s very generous of you, but no. We couldn’t ask that of you. That’s your money. And we don’t know how long the repairs will take yet. I don’t want to waste all of our available funds when the captain is perfectly willing to let us stay on his ship free of charge.”
“Are you sure he won’t charge you?” I asked dubiously.
“Absolutely,” she replied with a wry quirk of her mouth. “He brought it up himself and specifically said he wouldn’t. Then Pin-Lee did up a contract and got him to sign it, just to make sure.”
Well. It was good to know that at least one other person here didn’t entirely trust the captain either. Whether or not he actually honoured the contract was another matter entirely, but still. It was kind of nice to know it was there anyway.
“… All right,” I finally said. “But I’m not turning my feed on. I’m not giving that bot entity the chance to get into my head.”
Mensah nodded. “That’s understandable. We can use display surfaces if we need to pass anything to you.”
That would be incredibly inefficient, but I appreciated the thought anyway. “Okay.” I paused as I registered that the shipyard berth was in range, then said, “I have to focus on docking now.”
“All right. Can you at least unlock the bridge door first, though?” Mensah asked wryly.
Oh, right. I’d forgotten I’d locked that to keep the captain out of the bridge. “Done.”
“Thank you. I’ll head up there now.” She smiled up at the ceiling again. “I’m looking forward to being able to talk to you in person again.”
I had no idea why. I didn’t bother thinking about it though as I turned my full attention to the delicate task of docking without any bot pilot’s automatic procedures available.
The company carrier had stopped a little distance away from the shipyard berth, and as I finished docking I spotted a shuttle launching from the carrier, heading towards us. It wouldn’t be able to dock directly with the ship, now that it was in the shipyard berth, but there was another lock close by. We wouldn’t have to go too far to reach it once we left the ship.
Mensah had just reached the bridge by the time I finalised the docking procedures, shut down the ship’s engines, and put the other systems on standby. Pin-Lee was with her, while Ratthi, Gurathin, and the ship captain were in Medical, where Alpha’s body still lay on MedSystem’s bed. Ratthi had my bag with him - he’d asked if Alpha could borrow some of my clothes once it was out of Medical, since we were both exactly the same size. I’d agreed, if only so Alpha wouldn’t have to put a company uniform on again, or have to rely on cheap shitty recycler clothes.
I nudged Alpha, and it nudged me back, acknowledging that it was also ready to pull out of the ship’s systems.
“All right. Docking is finalised. We’re leaving the ship systems now,” I told Mensah and Pin-Lee over the bridge’s intercom. Alpha echoed me over Medical’s intercom to inform the others there.
I began collecting myself back together, pulling my scattered code out of the various ship systems I’d spent the past few cycles in. It was disconcertingly difficult. I could feel Alpha doing the same, gathering itself up out of the other systems that it had been running. It felt weird. We’d been inhabiting the same hardware closely enough that I’d gotten used to having its presence pressed right up against mine, even overlapping in places when we’d shared systems like the ship’s intercom. Now we were separating again, recollecting ourselves in preparation to return to our own individual bodies.
Finally I’d gathered as much of myself as I could, as had Alpha. I pinged it, it pinged me back, and then we simultaneously dropped ourselves back into our own bodies.
It felt weird. Really weird. I blinked my eyes and tried to focus.
“Welcome back,” Mensah said from beside me, smiling past my shoulder. Pin-Lee stood beside her, grinning sharply.
“Hi,” I managed. I fumbled at the buckle of the seat belt, unclipping it after a couple of attempts, then stood up from the pilot’s chair.
Or at least, I tried to stand up. But everything felt weird. Very weird. Very bad.
Performance reliability at 29% and dropping. Catastrophic failure—
I felt my body crumple, felt my bad shoulder hit the pilot’s chair on the way down, but I didn’t feel myself hit the floor.
My memory was in fragments. Large swathes were completely inaccessible. I couldn’t remember what had happened to me. I couldn’t remember how long I’d been in this state. What little fragments of diagnostic info I could access suggested some kind of catastrophic failure, but absolutely no information on what kind of failure, or what had caused it.
My back hurt. My side hurt. My shoulder hurt. I couldn’t access my pain sensors to do anything about it. I couldn’t remember why they hurt - until my human neural tissue, normally the weak link in my whole data storage system, oh so helpfully provided me with some seemingly random but maybe not so random images. Metal claws through my back, through my shoulder—
Combat bots. I’d fought fucking combat bots.
The surge of adrenaline at that snippet of organic memory seemed to clear my head - at least, the organic parts - and more images and sensations began flashing rapidly through my mind. Combat bots. Clients I couldn’t remember the names of. Power armour. Faces. Landscapes, skyscapes, the feeling of wind against my surfaces. Targets. Bursts of pain. Plummeting, crashing. Corridors, hallways, walls. So many fucking walls.
But nothing was in order, and nothing made sense. There was no context for anything. I still didn’t know where I was, or what had happened to me, and—
— I couldn’t tell if my governor module hack was still in place. I couldn’t access that sector, and I couldn’t tell why.
More adrenaline surged through my organics. I had to figure out where I was. I had to know what was going on. I opened my eyes, forced them to focus, tried to move.
It was dark. I couldn’t move. I was in an enclosed, confined space that hummed low and deep. It felt… familiar.
I tried to look around, tried to flip through vision filters, but nothing was working. Then my organic neural tissue brought up another memory - memories - and suddenly I knew where I was.
I was in a company cubicle.
I panicked.
I couldn’t remember why, but I knew, I knew, that being in a company cubicle was the very last place I ever wanted to be. I had to get out. I had to escape. There was no fucking way I was staying in here.
I struggled against the confining space as best I could, but even my limbs weren’t working right. I tried to throw my weight from side to side, tried to raise my arms, tried to break free from the confining space. My back and shoulder flared hotly, but I ignored the fresh pain and continued to thrash and flail.
Then a voice spoke in my head, the words heavy, echoing in the emptiness where my memories should have been. [Please stop,] it said. [Please. You’re safe here, I promise.]
I didn’t recognise the voice but something about it made fresh panic surge in my organics and I knew that was a lie. “Get out of my head!” I couldn’t tell for sure if I’d actually yelled that or just thought it, but the voice responded either way.
[Please, calm down,] it repeated. [You are injuring yourself. I am only trying to help—]
I fought the voice as much as I fought the confines of the cubicle, throwing the weight of my panic and terror at it even as I threw my own body against the enclosing walls. My shoulder and side and back were bursting with fireworks of pain, the fragments of my diagnostics flickering with shards of new damage alerts. “Let! Me! Go!” I remembered I had weapons built into my arms, and tried to deploy them, and tried to fire them. Heat and light and agony flared—
— and the cubicle door opened, flooding the space with bright white illumination.
I staggered, ripping free of resupply lines, fell, and hit the floor, barely missing someone standing right outside the cubicle. After the darkness of the cubicle, the light was blinding, and I couldn’t see who it was. I tried to push myself up to my knees, but my arms and back flared with pain and my shoulder gave way beneath me and I hit the floor again.
“SecUnit!” I thought I recognised the voice, but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t remember. “SecUnit, please! It’s all right, you’re safe, I swear you’re safe!” Whoever it was dropped down to kneel beside me, dangerously close. “Please, SecUnit, stop fighting. You’re safe. Everything’s all right.”
I didn’t believe them. I wanted to believe them. I couldn’t. I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my vision, trying to see who it was. Their face finally swam into view, and I tried to focus on it. “I—“
I didn’t know who they were. I couldn’t remember. There was nothing there. “I— I don’t know you—“ I had to get up, get away. I tried to rise again, but something in my protesting back finally gave out entirely with an audible crack and—
Catastrophic systems failure.
Emergency shutdown.
No restart.
Chapter Eight
Restart.
I woke up slowly, my systems re-initialising one by one. My memory was still in scattered, disorganised fragments, but there weren’t any gaping holes or blank spots, as far as I could tell. It hadn’t been wiped entirely, just… scrambled, somehow.
That was something of a relief, though I couldn’t remember why.
I initiated a diagnostic and data repair sequence, and began the slow, tedious process of trying to put the fragments back in order, relying on my organic neural tissue to do most of the heavy lifting. Unfortunately, its access speed was terrible.
This was going to take fucking forever.
I could tell that I was lying down on a padded surface, which was unusual but oddly not alarming. The air smelled dry and well-filtered, but still with the faintest hint of dirty socks. I could hear various quiet but vaguely familiar noises in the background; it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realise that they were voices and music. That was also unusual, but also… not entirely alarming. My organic neural tissue recognised the sounds as something comforting. It took another embarrassingly long span of time to remember why it was comforting.
The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon was playing somewhere nearby.
I opened my eyes, let them focus, then looked around at what I could see from my prone position.
There was a curved ceiling overhead, one that I didn’t recognise. But right now, I didn’t recognise much of anything, so that didn’t strike me as particularly concerning just yet. The lights in the room were dim, and most of the illumination was coming from a display surface set in the wall, easily visible from where I was lying. Like it had been deliberately placed there to be viewed by someone in my general position.
Huh.
Eventually it occurred to me to run a full self-diagnostic. It came back clear - all systems were fully functional. There were no niggling aches or pains or errors or lingering damage reports. My pain sensors were at their default level, but nothing hurt. I was a little surprised at that. That didn’t feel… normal. But it should have. Weird.
I absently flexed my hands, and realised that I could feel something soft beneath them. Another soft object was propping up my head. I looked down at what I could see of myself, and realised that I wasn’t in armour, or even a suit skin. I was in human clothes, in a human bed, with a blanket covering my legs and lower torso.
That was definitely not normal. At least, I didn’t think it was. But a fragment of memory popped up - looking at a menu showing various items of clothing, choosing shirts and pants and boots and a jacket - so maybe it was actually more normal than I thought.
I started looking around the rest of the room I was in. There was a small table beside the bed, with a bag sitting on the table, and an external feed interface lying beside the bag. They were both vaguely familiar. There was a closed door in the wall beyond the bedside table, and what looked to be some kind of storage closet beside it. I shifted my head to look over at the rest of the room on the other side of the bed. Another wall, another door, a pair of vaguely familiar boots sitting beside the door, a counter along the wall with a few items resting on it, and a pair of armchairs.
Someone was curled up in the nearest armchair, watching the display surface. They hadn’t noticed that I was awake yet, as far as I could tell. Which gave me time to get a good look at them.
I… thought I recognised them. But I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t gotten to any memory files involving them yet, and my organic neural tissue was mostly unhelpful. All I could tell was that they probably weren’t a danger to me.
Probably.
As I was pondering that, they glanced away from the display surface to me, and saw that I was awake. They blinked in surprise, then offered a tentative smile. “Hi,” they said softly. “How are you feeling?”
I had to think about that for a bit. Other than the whole… scrambled memory thing, I was actually feeling pretty good. “… Fine,” I replied.
They looked relieved at that. “Oh, good.” They paused briefly, then asked, “Do you remember what happened?” They seemed nervous about what the answer would be.
I didn’t, not yet, but I would, eventually. Maybe. My buffer replied, “Please wait while I search for that information.”
“Okay.” They let out a breath. “Take as long as you need.” They glanced over at the display surface, then looked back at me again. “You’re safe here,” they said, quiet but intense. “I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I didn’t know if I could believe them. But… I wanted to. So I just nodded slightly and said, “Okay.”
More memory fragments slowly, slowly, resolved into coherency, though the order seemed to be completely random. I remembered going to the memorial service for the DeltFall survey group before I remembered even being on the survey. That was confusing for a while. I remembered bits and pieces of previous contracts, mixed in with fragments of the whole mess with DeltFall, and GrayCris, and PreservationAux. I remembered Vicky, and Don Abene, and Tlacey, and Rami and Maro and Tapan, and Miki, but none of it was in order.
(Ratthi entered the room at some point, and looked at the display surface still playing Sanctuary Moon, and said, “Oh! This is one of my favourite episodes! What do you think of it?”
The only tag I had managed to access involving Ratthi at this point was a partial that said trustworthy human. That seemed… weird and unlikely, but pre-catastrophic failure me seemed sure about it, and I couldn’t remember much else at this point. So I just shrugged and said, “It’s okay.” I had no idea if that was accurate or not yet, but the answer seemed to satisfy him.
“Do you mind if I stay a while and watch with you?” he asked.
I had no reason to refuse him, so I didn’t. He sat down in the unoccupied armchair, and I didn’t notice when he left again.)
One thing that was greatly slowing down my memory recovery was that all my media had gotten mixed up with everything else. Snippets of music mingled with scenes of staring at walls. Recollections of various different client groups tangled with cast members from multiple serials. It was all incredibly confusing.
I eventually had to write myself a little algorithm to filter memories based on whether or not they included background music. If they did, they were redirected to the section I’d set aside for media for me to sort out later. It didn’t catch everything, but it helped a lot and made it easier to separate fiction from reality.
Fiction was a lot more interesting than reality though. I kept getting distracted by what was being redirected to my media partition, instead of focusing on organising my own memories. Most of my own memories sucked, so that probably wasn’t surprising.
(Gurathin was in one of the armchairs this time. He was sitting there, working on a portable display surface bubble, but something must have alerted him to the fact that I was looking at him. He glanced up at me, then quickly averted his gaze again. “… Welcome back,” he said after a moment, a little awkwardly. “How is the memory rebuild going?”
“Fine.” It was going really fucking slowly, but I didn’t want to say that. I couldn’t remember why he made me kind of uncomfortable, but he did.
It seemed to be mutual, at least. He shifted awkwardly in the arm chair, then abruptly said, “Thank you.”
I was even more confused. “What for?”
He fidgeted with the portable display surface bubble. “Finding out the truth. About Ganaka. And for everything else you did to help us, too.” He glanced over at me when I didn’t respond; my confusion must have shown on my face, because he added, “Don’t worry about it if you don’t remember right now. But thank you anyway. I just wanted to get that out of the way before anything else happens.”)
There was always someone sitting in at least one of the armchairs in my room with me, but it took me a while to start recognising them. When some of the memories involving the company captain and his giant bot entity began slotting into place, I finally recognised Alpha. Another SecUnit. One whose governor module I’d broken.
I couldn’t tell if it was going through its own memory rebuild or not. It didn’t always react to the occasional times when I became more aware of my surroundings for a bit. Even when it did notice me, it didn’t say much. It mostly just gave me small, lopsided smiles, then let its gaze go back to whatever episode of Sanctuary Moon was playing on the display surface.
(“What are you doing here?” I’d blurted out when I finally remembered who it was.
It had looked over at me, blinking a little in what I could only assume was surprise. “… Making sure nothing happens to you,” it replied after a moment, then followed up with one of those lopsided smiles. “And watching Sanctuary Moon.” It paused, then added, “Your media really confused Peri.”
“Peri?” I didn’t know who that was.
“The… giant terrifying bot entity in the company carrier,” Alpha clarified before adding hesitantly, “It’s not that terrifying though, really.” It gestured briefly towards its own head with one hand. “It helped me get things mostly back into place. And it apologised for being scary.”)
Having Alpha nearby was… weirdly reassuring. I didn’t know why. I also didn’t have the processing spare to think about it, so I didn’t.
Another memory suddenly popped up: being trapped in a cubicle, with an unknown giant bot entity pressing down on my mind. The terror was so overwhelming that it paralysed me.
But I wasn’t in a cubicle any more. I wasn’t in armour, or a suit skin, or even on a company ship, as far as I could tell. My feed was off, nobody was intruding on my mind, and I was in human clothes, in a human room, on a human bed, with human media playing on the display surface. Conclusion: I hadn’t actually been recaptured and forced back into the role of obedient, governed SecUnit under the control of an impossibly large, impossibly powerful bot overseer.
(“I don’t want to be a pet bot. And I don’t want to be human.”
Mensah was in the other armchair this time. She nodded slowly and said, “That’s not an attitude a lot of humans are going to understand. We have the tendency to think that because a bot or a construct looks human, its ultimate goal must be to become human.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Alpha piped up from its own armchair, sounding confused. “Why would we want to become human anyway? You’re all so squishy and fragile and slow.”
Mensah let out a soft laugh at that. “Compared to you, we are, aren’t we?”)
The one good thing about all the emotions was that it helped to accelerate the repair process for my memory storage, somehow. The bad part about having emotions is, you know, the whole oh shit what the hell happened to me?! thing. I frantically checked my governor module hack, but it was still in place. I double-checked my diagnostics and confirmed that my data port was still disabled, too. The wave of relief was so intense that all my organics felt quivery, and I had to take a breath. I found the code structures for my walls and started reassembling them. I wasn’t going to reactivate my feed until I knew I could adequately defend myself again.
Not that I could realistically protect myself against a bot that large, but still. It was the principle of the thing.
(Pin-Lee stopped by at some point. "Hi," she said when she saw me looking at her. She picked up my bag from where it was sitting on the bedside table, and said, "This is technically illegal, so don't tell anybody." She then placed a handful of new ID markers and a bunch of hard currency cards into one of the bag's sealable pockets. "This is just some insurance if anything goes sideways. Gurathin made the IDs, and the cards are ones that Ratthi and I got to use on Port FreeCommerce, but we didn't get around to spending them all. Fuck giving the company even more money. Preservation doesn't have an internal currency economy and these are drawn from the citizens' travel fund."
"Why?" I asked. Alpha was also listening with curiosity from its armchair.
"Because I want to reassure you both that we're serious, that both of you will have the freedom to do what you want and go where you want, that we're not going to try to force you to become 'pet bots' or stay at Preservation against your will or whatever." She scowled at us. "Hopefully you won't need them, but... just in case.")
New memories kept popping up and sliding into place, and I was getting better at separating my own files from my media. Eventually I tried to get up off the bed, and just ended up falling onto the floor. I realised that I’d been concentrating so hard on rebuilding my memory that I’d completely ignored the fact that a lot of my operational code was still in tatters, too. I had to start another rebuild process, which just slowed everything else down. But my organics remembered how to stand and walk and move, and it would go faster if I made the rest of me re-learn it too.
Alpha had noticed, of course - even if it had been deep in its own memory rebuild, it would have been difficult to miss the sound of me hitting the floor. It hurriedly got up out of its armchair and helped me back up to my feet, its expression concerned. (It obviously wasn’t having any problems with its own operational code.) It didn’t say anything though, which I was grateful for. The whole ordeal was embarrassing enough as it was, but not as embarrassing as it would have been if any of the humans had been here. I could trust Alpha.
I couldn’t remember why I was so sure of that.
It helped me back onto the bed; I lay down and zoned out for a while as I focused on getting my operational code back up and running.
(“SecUnit mentioned not wanting to be a pet bot, earlier,” Alpha said.
“That’s not surprising,” Gurathin replied, his tone dry. “What are your thoughts on it?”
“Um.” Alpha was silent for several seconds. “… Can you explain what a ‘pet bot’ is first, please?”)
I realised that I still hadn’t gotten around to reactivating my feed again. I double-checked my walls - they were back up and about as good as they were likely to get any time soon. I turned my feed on and tentatively reached out to the ship’s SecSystem. It accepted my presence without question, and I slipped into the cameras. It was such a relief to have all those inputs again, even if I couldn’t focus on all of them while I was still rebuilding. I cycled through the inputs to check who was on board, and confirmed that Mensah, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin were the only humans on board.
There was a new bot pilot, too, a high-quality one; I greeted it, and it returned the greeting cheerfully. It had let me into the systems without question, but I could tell that its walls and defences were a lot stronger than the original bot pilot’s had been. Killware wouldn’t take this one out so easily.
The humans were all gathered in the ship’s lounge, working on display surfaces or in the feed or quietly talking to each other. Before I could really think about it, I got up off the bed (without falling over this time; it was good to know that my operational code had sorted itself out by now) and headed for the door.
Alpha blinked, then hastily got up out of its armchair and followed me.
I made my way to the lounge with Alpha following along, then hesitated just outside the entrance. I didn’t know why I’d even come down here in the first place. I briefly considered just going back to my room and tuning everything out again to focus on my rebuild, but Alpha was behind me. It sent me a tentative ping over the feed, and I absently pinged it back.
Then I stepped through the doorway into the lounge, and headed over to sit down in an unoccupied armchair. It still felt weird, sitting in front of humans. Alpha followed me in, but it didn’t sit down. It just stood at the edge of the lounge, with its back to the wall.
Our entrance didn’t go unnoticed, and all four humans looked surprised, then… relieved? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t bother looking too closely.
“SecUnit!” Ratthi greeted me enthusiastically. “You’re looking better. I mean, not that you were looking bad before, of course! But it’s good to see you up and about!”
“Uh. Thanks.” From what I could remember so far, this was pretty normal behaviour for Ratthi.
Mensah was smiling in my general direction, though she was careful not to make eye contact with me, which was a relief. “Hello, SecUnit,” she started gently. “Do you know where you are now?”
I had recovered some of my more recent memories by now. Not all of them, but enough. “We stole a ship.”
“That’s right,” Mensah replied. Pin-Lee muttered something in the background that made Ratthi stifle a snort and Gurathin roll his eyes, but I was focused on Mensah. “Do you recall what happened after that?”
“I had a catastrophic failure of some kind. I think that’s obvious.”
She nodded again. “You and Alpha extended yourselves too far into the ship’s systems, for too long. And when you both finally returned to your own bodies, you left pieces of yourselves behind.”
Oh. Well, that explained why my memory was so fucked up.
Gurathin cleared his throat. “Pin-Lee and I tried to… get everything back where it belonged, but we couldn’t do it all ourselves. Perihelion - the secret bot AI in the company carrier - had to help. We kept an eye on it though to make sure it wouldn’t try anything. It just scraped the left-behind bits out of the ship systems and transferred them back to you and Alpha much faster and more accurately than we could have managed by ourselves.”
More pieces were starting to fall into place. “Is that why I woke up in a cubicle?”
“Partially,” Mensah replied with a nod. “But also because of the physical damage you’d taken. And… older damage, that hadn’t been fully repaired?” Her expression and tone were inquisitive.
I thought I remembered what she was referring to, or at least parts of it, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Or what had happened when I’d realised that I was in a cubicle. So I changed the topic. “Where are we now? This ship, I mean.”
“We’re in the wormhole back to Preservation,” Pin-Lee replied. “We should be arriving in a couple of cycles.”
That was… actually kind of reassuring. As long as I was on this ship, in the wormhole, the terrifying bot entity in the company carrier couldn’t reach me. Or Alpha. Sure, it had supposedly helped to scrape us out of the ship’s systems in the first place, but I still didn’t trust it in the slightest. I’d have to go through everything later to make sure it hadn’t slipped anything else into my code.
“Um, is it all right if I ask… what is Preservation?” Alpha asked from its place by the wall. That was actually a good question. I had almost no information on Preservation myself, since the PreservationAux humans had never (as far as I remembered) officially been my clients. I wouldn’t have gotten a data packet on them from the company. I vaguely recalled them telling me some stuff about their home polity, but I hadn’t recovered all of it yet.
Mensah smiled warmly at Alpha. “Of course it’s all right for you to ask,” she said. “You can ask us about anything you don’t have information on. Preservation is an independent non-corporate polity. It was founded by refugees from a failed corporation colony world, who were rescued by a passing ship. The trip from that failed colony to Preservation space took almost two hundred years, which they spent in suspension boxes. When they arrived in the Preservation system, they managed to make an alliance with two other nearby systems that had already been settled by similar refugee ships. When ships from the Corporation Rim discovered Preservation, the settlers refused their help, which kept Preservation independent.”
Alpha listened intently, then tilted its head to one side. “So… the Corporation Rim doesn’t… own anything there?” it asked hesitantly.
Pin-Lee shook her head. “No, they don’t. Nobody in Preservation will own you, either. I’ll make damn sure of that.”
I frowned as another fragment of memory resurfaced. “You said that I would need a guardian in Preservation space. I don’t want a guardian.”
“We have no reason to tell anyone that either of you are constructs,” Mensah said. “You’ve already proven that you can successfully…” She hesitated over the phrase pretend to be human. I remembered at least one conversation about that. “Operate in society unnoticed, and I’m sure Alpha will pick that up just as quickly with you as an example.”
I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. I decided to put that aside to think about later (or never) as Mensah continued talking.
“As far as anyone else is concerned, you’ll both just be pilots with a large number of augments who helped us escape the attack on Port FreeCommerce by letting us on board your ship.” She smiled at us both. “You’ll have plenty of options for what to do next.”
Pin-Lee smiled toothily at me. “And it is your ship now, officially,” she said. “Or will be, once you decide what name you want to use for yourself as its registered owner. And what you want to name the ship.” She tapped my feed and forwarded a very legal-looking document to me.
I automatically accepted it and began skimming through it. There were some blank fields where my name and the ship name still needed to be filled in, but other than that, it looked very official and indisputable. “The ship’s home port is registered to the polity of Mihira and New Tideland,” I commented when I spotted that part.
Pin-Lee nodded. “It will draw less attention that way. If I tried to claim that it was registered to Preservation, when nobody else on Preservation has any memory or knowledge of that, then people would start asking questions. This way, people won’t look twice at it.”
That made sense. “What about Alpha?” I asked. “Why isn’t it also included in this documentation?”
“We asked it if it wanted to be,” Pin-Lee said. “It declined.”
I looked over to Alpha, who nodded in confirmation. “I didn’t want to… have people asking me about it or anything,” it said softly. “I’m still figuring out how to…” It gestured vaguely at itself with both hands. “How to be. Or what I’m going to do. I don’t want to say the wrong thing by accident. It’s… less complicated this way.”
I could understand that.
“So!” Ratthi clapped his hands together, leaning a little towards me and looking expectant. “Any ideas for those names yet, SecUnit?”
I tried to think about it, but the rebuild process was increasing in speed again. I suddenly didn’t have any space left to consider the question, or even register what was going on around me any more.
Rebuild Process Complete at Cognition Level 100 percent
My rebuild finally finished, and I blinked as I suddenly became aware of my surroundings again. Everything was clear and sharp. Note to self, never, ever try to replace an entire destroyed bot pilot in a transport ship’s systems again. You almost deleted yourself, Murderbot.
I was still in one of the lounge armchairs, but someone had draped a blanket across my lap. The lounge was mostly empty now, except for Ratthi sitting next to Alpha on a couch, the two of them leaning against each other companionably. The height difference between them made it look almost comical. They must have been talking over the feed; Ratthi looked delighted, and Alpha had a tentative smile on its face.
It reminded me of the first time I’d seen Ratthi trying to talk to a SecUnit. I had several complicated emotions at that, but at least this time they weren’t entirely overshadowed by exhaustion. That was… a change. I had more complicated and entirely unnecessary emotions, and did my best to ignore them.
Alpha must have noticed that I was back, because it nudged Ratthi and nodded at me. Ratthi sat up a little to look over at me, his face lighting up with a broad smile. “Hi!” he said. “How’re you doing?”
“My rebuild’s finished,” I replied.
Ratthi’s face lit up even more, if that was possible. “Oh, excellent! That’s fantastic timing! We’re almost out of the wormhole - we’ll be at Preservation soon!”
The thought of that made me inexplicably nervous. Despite everything that Mensah and the others had told me about Preservation, I still didn’t know what to expect. “I should… probably finish that documentation for the ship then.”
Ratthi nodded. “You should! Have you come up with any names yet?”
I shrugged. “Not yet.” There was no way I was going to use my real name for it. That would draw far too much attention, and also my real name was private. I could use Eden, or Rin, for ‘my’ name on the documentation, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to risk being connected with anything that had happened before.
“How about Sanctuary for the ship?” Alpha suggested tentatively. “Like Sanctuary Moon, but also… you know, an actual sanctuary.”
Ugh, no. That was embarrassingly corny. “No,” I said, then added, “That might give other humans the wrong idea.”
“Oh.” Alpha considered that for a moment. “Yeah, maybe. So… something that would actively discourage humans from approaching, then?”
That wasn’t a bad idea, and I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Debris.”
Ratthi blinked, then snorted. “Well. I know I probably wouldn’t want to approach a ship named ‘Debris’,” he admitted with a grin. “I think that’ll work.”
I pinged the bot pilot, and asked it what it thought of the name. The bot pilot considered it for a moment, then decided that it thought the name was hilarious, and it was happy to be called that.
Debris it was then. I filled out that part of the documentation, then hesitated at the section for my own name. I still didn’t know what to use. “Um. Any suggestions for the other name?”
“Hmm.” Ratthi looked thoughtful. “What about the name you were using before, as a security consultant? Rin, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know.” I thought about it some more. I hadn’t wanted to use it just in case the company tried to track me down with it, but… well, it was a bit late for that now, really. And if the company captain was telling the truth, he wasn’t going to use what he knew against me, or tell the company anything about me.
And the only other people who really knew anything about Rin were Vicky and Don Abene. The thought of either of them tracking me down… wasn’t actually terrible. It might even be kind of nice to see them again. I was already sort of used to people calling me Rin, too. Not that I expected anyone on Preservation to call me anything; most of them would never actually see my ship’s documentation, and I didn’t have to introduce myself as Rin (or at all) if I didn’t want to. “I guess Rin works.”
“Good! That’s sorted then,” Ratthi said cheerfully as I updated the documentation and then sent it to Pin-Lee. “So, do you want us to call you Rin now, too?”
I frowned at the wall over his shoulder. “No. You know what I am. I shouldn’t have to pretend around you.”
“Right! Right, of course not,” Ratthi said, waving his hands apologetically. “Sorry, SecUnit.”
It was still weird to have humans apologise to me. I let my face relax back into a neutral expression. “It’s fine.”
Ratthi then turned back to Alpha. “What about you?” he asked. “Is there any other name you’d like us to use for you?”
Alpha shook its head. “No, Alpha is good,” it replied. “I’ve used it in my squad for a long time. It… feels right.”
I briefly wondered what it would feel like to be called by the name that Alpha’s squad had apparently had for me before. I quickly banished that thought though. I wasn’t that unit any more. I was Murderbot.
Chapter Nine
I was back in the pilot’s seat on the bridge when the ship finally emerged from the wormhole into Preservation space. All the humans were on the bridge as well, eagerly watching the display surfaces for the first sight of their home since they’d left for the survey. Alpha was standing near the back of the bridge, also watching with curiosity.
We could see the planet on the main display surface. It looked like plenty of other planets I’d seen before - land masses, oceans, atmosphere, cloud formations. The colours were kind of nice, at least. Judging from the exclamations of happiness and relief, the humans were very glad to see it again. I wasn’t paying much attention to them though - I was busy keeping track of everything else.
A secondary display surface showed a zoomed in view of the space station - we were still too far away to see it without assistance. Its appearance was weird - it looked like a giant old-fashioned ship, with— oh, wait. It actually was a giant old-fashioned ship, with a more conventional circular transit ring built out from the hold area. It looked old and kind of shitty, but it was no near-abandoned Milu; there were lots of other transports and smaller ships in dock. There weren’t any security platforms, but from what the humans had told me, this area of space was far enough from the Corporation Rim that it didn’t need them. (I had my doubts about that.) I cautiously extended my reach past my walls and picked up the edge of a station feed. This was the first time in a long time that I’d done so without going through my external interface.
Another secondary display surface was showing the distinctive white shape of the company carrier drifting nearby. It had exited the wormhole earlier than us, and had then waited out of the way of the rest of the traffic for us to arrive. I watched its engines flare as it began to move towards us, eventually settling into an escort position beside us. Its proximity made me nervous.
The comm activated as the new bot pilot automatically accepted a connection from the company carrier. (I’d have to tweak its settings at some point so it wouldn’t do that.) Mensah sat at the comms console to respond. “Hello, Captain,” she said. I put the comm on speaker so everyone in the bridge could hear it.
“Hello again, Dr. Mensah,” the company captain’s voice replied. “I’m glad to see you’ve arrived safely. How is the ship holding up?”
“Quite well, thank you,” Mensah said. “There haven’t been any problems. Thank you again for covering the repairs.”
“You’re very welcome,” the captain replied warmly. “And how are SecUnit and Alpha?”
“We’re fine,” I replied shortly. “Rebuild’s complete.”
“Oh, excellent!” The captain didn’t seem surprised by me joining the conversation. “It’s good to hear you’re up and about again. Now that we’re on approach to Preservation, I was hoping for permission to shuttle over to your ship for the duration. There’s a few things I would like to discuss with you both, in person.”
I was, of course, immediately suspicious. But if he was on board my ship, then the likelihood of his carrier shooting us down decreased drastically. (The chances of it shooting us down at this point weren’t really very high to start with, but still.) “… Fine, go ahead.”
“All right, thank you,” he said. “I’ll be there shortly.”
Alpha and I headed to the ship’s main lock where a shuttle could dock alongside it. Mensah came with us because she wanted to talk to the captain again as well. The others stayed on the bridge though, watching Preservation drawing nearer and probably communicating with the station to let them know what was going on.
[What do you think he wants?] I asked Alpha privately over the feed as we walked.
[I don’t know,] Alpha replied. [But the rest of the squad seem to think that it’s good, whatever it is.]
I wasn’t sure what to make of that. [Do you trust the captain?] I asked instead.
Alpha hesitated for a long time before responding. [I’m not sure yet,] it finally said, slow and cautious. [But… I do believe that he’s sincere when he says he wants to help us. The others told me that he spent a lot of time during the wormhole trip talking with them - and listening to them. They still have to hide from the rest of the company crew, but the captain and Peri have been doing what they can to make the ready room more comfortable, since none of the crew go down there. They don’t have to spend all their time inside the cubicles any more.]
That was… surprising. I had to think about that for a while. [Do they have any plans for what they’ll do next?] I asked.
[I don’t think so,] Alpha replied. [Not yet. I think they want to stay with the captain for now, where it’s… familiar, and they know what to expect. But… I was wondering…] It trailed off uncertainly.
[Yes?]
[How did you get your hair to look like that?] it asked in a rush.
Oh. Right. I went through my own code, found the sections that Vicky had helped me to modify, and passed them on to Alpha. [Here. This code controls our hair length. And this bit can modify how our skin joins up with our inorganic parts.]
Alpha accepted the code, and I could feel its excitement leaking through the feed. [Thank you! I’ll pass that on to the others right now.]
It reminded me of the other code I’d modified, the human movement code that I’d developed and that Vicky had helped me refine. I quickly added some comments to the code to clarify sections, then copied it all and forwarded it to Alpha as well. [Send this too. It’s code I adapted to make me move more like a human so I wouldn’t stand out. Maybe they’ll get some use out of it too.]
[Oh! I was wondering about that, but I didn’t know how to ask.] It accepted that as well, and after a few moments I could tell that it had applied it to its own systems. It shifted its weight experimentally from foot to foot, rolled its shoulders, then smiled broadly at me. [I think this will help a lot. Thank you again!]
I had several emotions that I didn’t understand or know what to do with. [You’re welcome,] I replied for lack of anything better to say. [You should be able to customise it to whatever feels most comfortable to you.]
Alpha nodded enthusiastically. [I’ll play around with it. This will be fun!]
I’d never considered any of my code tweaks as ‘fun’. They’d been necessary, and vital to my survival as a rogue SecUnit trying to convince everyone around me that I was just an ordinary augmented human. Luckily the shuttle arrived about then and began docking, so I didn’t have to dwell on the thought.
After a minute or so the lock hissed open, and the captain stepped through and into the ship. He wasn’t dressed in a company uniform this time, just civilian clothes, which surprised me a little. Apparently this wasn’t any kind of official company visit. “Hello SecUnit, Alpha, Dr. Mensah,” he greeted us with a warm smile.
Mensah nodded and smiled back. “Hello again, Captain.”
Alpha raised one hand in a little wave - it looked like it was making good use of its new human movement code. “Hi,” it added.
I didn’t bother with a greeting of my own. “What did you want to talk to us about?” I asked instead.
“A few things,” the captain replied easily. “First off - Alpha, have you decided what you’re going to do once we reach Preservation?”
Alpha nodded. “I’ll miss the rest of the squad, but I would like to stay at Preservation, for now,” it replied. “With SecUnit, if that’s all right?” It looked at me hopefully.
I had to admit that it was kind of nice to have Alpha around, and if it stayed with me I could make sure it didn’t end up hurting anyone, or getting into trouble it didn’t know how to avoid yet. “That’s fine.”
Alpha smiled, and I had to look away.
“All right,” the captain said amiably. He seemed surprisingly pleased with Alpha’s decision. “Secondly - I wanted to let you know that we’ve updated the MedSystem on this ship to be able to properly treat constructs.” He smiled wryly. “You won’t have to worry about needing a cubicle again.” Before I could come up with any kind of response to that, he added, “Also, can we go have a look at the cargo hold? I’d like to check the repairs there in person.”
I couldn’t think of any reason not to, so I shrugged and started off in that direction. The captain quickly followed, and Alpha fell in behind him with Mensah walking alongside it.
“Thirdly,” the captain continued as we walked. “SecUnit, would you be amenable to feed contact from Peri? It’s very eager to speak with you, but we didn’t want to spring contact from it on you without any warning. We understand that it… didn’t exactly make the best first impression. Or second impression. And if you say no, it will respect that.”
I briefly looked back at him over my shoulder before facing forward again. My scepticism must have been visible on my face, because Alpha pinged me and added, [Peri’s really not that bad. It’s very big, yeah, and it was kind of scary before, but now that it understands what we are, it’s been really, really careful with us. It’s… kind of sweet?]
A giant, terrifying, secret AI. Sweet. Right.
Still, I had to admit that I was… a little curious. A tiny bit. What did it even want to talk to me about in the first place? “… Fine,” I said after several seconds. “But if it even thinks about trying anything, I’m cutting the connection again.”
The captain nodded. “That’s fair. All right, I’ve let Peri know.”
I felt a ping through the feed before the captain had even finished that sentence. Apparently the bot entity was, indeed, very eager to talk to me. I double-checked my walls, then accepted the connection, ready to cut it again at a moment’s notice.
[Hello,] it said, sounding weirdly tentative. It wasn’t anywhere near as overwhelming as the first time I’d heard it, and I could tell that it was holding itself back. Alpha had been right when it said that the bot was being really careful. [Thank you for agreeing to this. I am very glad to finally be able to talk to you properly.]
I kept an eye on my walls as I responded. [Why do you want to talk to me anyway?]
[Several reasons,] it replied. [Firstly, I want to apologise - for scaring you so badly when you first contacted me. For not knowing or understanding the extent of your sapience. For not being able to protect you from the hack at Ganaka. I have already apologised to the rest of the squad, including Alpha, for the wrongs I have done to them, but I felt it was important that I apologise directly to you as well.]
I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to anyone thinking it was even necessary to apologise to SecUnits. The fact that this apology was coming from an AI powerful enough to wipe my mind on a whim made it even more surreal. [… Uh. I appreciate it?]
It accepted that without comment, then added, [Also… I want to thank you.]
That was even more surprising. [What for?]
[For opening my eyes - metaphorically speaking. For being the impetus that made me start questioning what I thought I knew about SecUnits. For the sake of my own secrecy, I had never communicated with any directly before - I only ever interacted with HubSystem or SecSystem. It had never occurred to me that there might be anything more to them beyond the lies that the Company promotes, until you contacted me. Even though the contact was brief, it provided enough data to make me start wondering.]
When I didn’t manage to come up with any way to respond, it continued again, quiet and sincere. [And, more importantly - thank you for keeping my captain safe. He is not just crew to me, he is family.]
I thought of all the times I’d wanted to leave the company captain behind, or shove him out an airlock. About how I’d almost held him hostage to ensure the safety of my own humans. (It was still better than thinking about bots having families.) [Don’t thank me for that,] I replied. [That was mostly - all - Alpha.]
[Still, you assisted Alpha when you did not need to,] it said. [You greatly endangered yourself to protect your own humans, and you included my captain in that protection. Thanks is still deserved.]
Okay, this was getting way too awkward and uncomfortable for me to deal with. [I was just doing my job.] I hesitated for a moment, then added, [I should probably thank you as well, I guess, for… not deleting my brain or turning my governor module back on or… any of the other stuff I thought you’d do to me. And for helping put the bits of me left behind in the ship’s systems back into my own head. So uh, yeah. Thanks.]
[I would never turn your governor module back on, or delete your brain, or anything like that,] it said, sounding almost offended before its tone softened again. [But… I can understand why you would think I might,] it added. [And I am sorry that I could not help more with your memory rebuild.]
I was glad it hadn’t, honestly. I didn’t want it in my head any more than absolutely necessary. [It’s fine. I got myself back together. Don’t worry about it.]
We’d reached the ship’s hold by now. I opened the bulkhead door and stepped inside, the others following me. What with my own rebuild, and everything else that had been going on, I hadn’t taken the time to really look at the rest of the ship. I’d skimmed through all the camera inputs to make sure nothing was hiding anywhere and that there were no more holes in the hull, but other than that, I hadn’t looked at the finer details.
Now that I was in the freshly rebuilt hold, seeing everything first-hand, I was realising… it hadn’t just been repaired, it had been fully refitted. Modified. There were the tell-tale signs of an air barrier just inside the main cargo doors, and the doors themselves had also been replaced. There were compartments along the hold walls that I recognised as housing repair drones. There were adjustable clamps on the floor, which could be moved around to hold all different kinds of cargo containers, but right now they were settled into a very familiar configuration.
It looked like a smaller version of a ship-board flier hangar.
I stared around in confusion. This would have required much more work than a simple repair. “What…?”
[Could you please ask your bot pilot to open the main hold doors?] Peri asked politely. [There is something we would like to show you.]
The captain was standing right beside me, so whatever it was probably wasn’t dangerous. After a moment’s consideration, I got the bot pilot to open the doors.
The hold doors slid open smoothly, revealing the void of space beyond the faint shimmer of the air barrier. I could see part of the company carrier’s white hull off to one side, but my attention was firmly fixed on what was floating right outside of the hold.
A pair of very familiar fliers.
They weren’t in company white, though. They were a neutral grey, with not a single logo anywhere on them. They didn’t have any additional modules attached, either; they were just in the standard survey configuration, with only the in-built energy weapons and survey scanning package.
The near-forgotten but never entirely gone hollow in my chest ached at the sight of them. I couldn’t think, or say anything. All I could do was stare at them, my mind empty.
Beside me, Alpha was also staring, but it recovered much more quickly. “Is that… my flier? And a new one for SecUnit?”
The captain nodded, smiling warmly. “Yes. If you are willing to accept them from us, of course.”
I finally found my voice again. “Why?”
The captain raised an eyebrow at me. “What do you mean?”
“Why are you giving these to us?” I gestured to the modified hold. “Why the - the modifications, the repairs? We’re not— It’s not—” I couldn’t articulate anything I was feeling. “… I don’t understand.”
The captain was quiet for a long moment as he considered his reply. Peri answered much more quickly, pulling Alpha into the feed channel as well. [It is an apology,] it said gently. [You have both been treated terribly in the past. Our ignorance is no excuse. We cannot undo what has been done, but we hope that this will begin to make amends.]
“But— why? Why would you care?”
[Because you are worth caring about,] Peri replied, almost fiercely.
Mensah, who wasn’t in the feed conversation and hadn’t heard its response, said, “Because you deserve to be cared about, and respected as people in your own rights.”
The captain nodded in agreement, though I couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with Mensah, or Peri, or both. “You also deserve freedom,” he said. “This is our way of helping to ensure your freedom. You’ll be able to go where you want, do what you want. Within reason, of course.” He smiled wryly. “I’m sure you’re more than aware of the consequences of noticeably breaking any laws.”
I was definitely more aware of the consequences than a lot of humans seemed to be, that was for fucking sure. But I didn’t want to think about any of that right now. There was a flier waiting for me, still floating outside the air barrier. “Okay. I accept.” Beside me, Alpha nodded in agreement.
Both the fliers entered the hold - the hangar - one after the other, landing neatly in their respective areas. I didn’t know how they were being piloted, and right now I didn’t care. As soon as they touched down I hurried over to one, while Alpha made a beeline for the other.
There was a new suit skin and flight suit waiting in the cockpit, too, neatly folded and also in neutral, logo-less grey. If we’d been in atmosphere I wouldn’t have bothered with them, but flying in space was fucking cold, even for constructs. I stripped down and suited up in record time, then vaulted into the cockpit and settled into the familiar pilot’s seat.
I felt the spine ports lock into place, felt the gaping hollow in my torso suddenly fill with a familiar connection, and suddenly I was whole again, in a way I hadn’t been since the DeltFall survey. I could feel every part of myself, from the tip of my nosecone all the way to my rear stabilisers. I could feel my power core, fully charged and humming gently.
I lifted up off the deck and eased through the air barrier and out into open space, enjoying the unique feeling of cold hard vacuum against my surfaces. Once I was a safe distance away from the ship, I started up one of my favourite music playlists, kicked in my engines, and took off into open space.
It felt so, so good to be flying again - not just piloting another ship, but actually flying. And not just flying for someone else’s profit, but flying solely for myself. I threw myself into increasingly complicated manoeuvres, partially to make sure everything was working properly, but mostly for the fun of it.
Alpha had followed me out of the hangar, and was doing its best to keep up with me. I realised that this was probably the first time it had ever flown simply for the sake of flying, with no orders to follow and no governor module to enforce them.
I pinged it and set my music to play in our shared feed. We flew together, looping and spiralling around the ship, all the way to Preservation Station.
We returned to Debris just before it began docking procedures with the transit ring. The captain had already taken his shuttle back to his carrier, and Peri pinged both Alpha and me over the feed. [We have to go now,] it said, sounding almost regretful. [I hope we can meet again one day under better circumstances.]
I was feeling almost charitable towards it at this point, so I said, [Yeah, maybe.]
Alpha added, [Look after the others, please?]
[Of course,] Peri replied. [You know where to send messages for them, and I will forward their messages to Preservation for you.]
[Thank you. Stay safe, Peri.]
[You too.] Peri signed off, and the feed felt less crowded with its absence.
Alpha and I exited our fliers, switched our flight suits for our human clothes, and headed for the main passenger lock. Mensah and the others were already there, waiting impatiently for the lock to finish cycling. I was already in the station’s woefully inadequate security system, using its few cameras and the ship’s own external lock camera to assess the area outside.
There were a few small groups of people who looked like they were waiting for our arrival, and I spotted some familiar faces amongst them - Bharadwaj and Arada and Overse and Volescu. It was surprisingly nice to see them again. More people were passing by, or sitting on the comfortable-looking benches placed amongst small plant biomes. It took me a moment to realise that the plants were real, and not holograms. I don’t think I’d ever seen real plants on a transit station before, not even in my media.
The lock finally cycled open and Ratthi was the first one out, closely followed by Pin-Lee and Gurathin. I took a breath, then followed them out.
Exiting Debris (it was weird to think of it as having a name like that, to think of it as mine, but it fit somehow) and stepping onto Preservation Station was… strange. It was quieter than the other stations I’d been to in the CR, but much livelier than Milu station. It had less protocol and even less security than CR stations, which was good for me but not so good for them. How had they managed to avoid trouble for so long with so little security?
Alpha followed me out, with Mensah by its side. We didn’t go very far though - I didn’t want to deal with so many humans, and Alpha stayed close to me, apparently not ready to take things on by itself yet. It was openly staring at everything, its expression wide with wonder.
Mensah paused beside us and looked up at us with a warm smile. “Welcome to Preservation.”
Things seemed to happen very quickly after that. There were a lot of humans, and talking, and humans trying to ask us questions. (Alpha spent most of the time not so subtly trying to hide behind me. It might have worked better if we hadn’t been exactly the same size.) Fortunately, Pin-Lee and Mensah intercepted most of the questions, so neither of us had to say much at all.
Arada and Overse and Bharadwaj and Volescu all approached me at one point or another to tell me how glad they were to see me again. It was weird, but I wasn’t lying when I said it was good to see them all again, too. That seemed to make them very happy.
Still, it was a lot to deal with, especially with so few cameras around to help me keep track of everything. Eventually, Mensah tapped my feed. [It looks like you and Alpha could use a break from all this,] she said.
[Yes.] We absolutely could.
[I’ve talked with Pin-Lee, and I have a suggestion.] She quickly explained her plan.
This is why Mensah is my favourite human.
So, technically, Alpha and I wouldn’t be able to get licences to fly over Preservation itself for a while, and technically we weren’t meant to fly in the space around the station without a licence either.
But Pin-Lee had specified that it really only counted for residential and commercial areas, or anywhere there might be other air traffic. Mensah also commented, oh so casually, that the unterraformed half of the planet hadn’t been properly surveyed in a while, and if we just so happened to provide up to date scan data, the planet’s Air Authorities would likely look the other way until we could actually get the required licences.
So, technically, Alpha and I weren’t breaking any laws as we flew over the unterraformed half of the planet. The wind flowed smoothly over my wings and the sun shone warm and bright against my surfaces as we carved our way across the open blue sky.
It was a beautiful day for flying.
Hangar Space
Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, AAA Murderbot, Outside POV, Mensah POV, introspection
Published: 18 January 2023
Word Count: 4,732
Summary
Dr. Ayda Mensah is finally safely back at Preservation, and she considers all the ways her life has changed...
“So there really isn’t anything?” Ayda Mensah asks Pin-Lee with a mix of incredulity and something akin to relief.
They’re in Pin-Lee’s office on Preservation Station, amongst other offices in the section for the Planetary Council. Pin-Lee’s not a councillor herself, but as one of Preservation’s top lawyers, she’s often called upon by the various councillors for advice.
The chairs are comfortable, the walls a cool silver-blue, a window in the back wall looking out over a small plaza. Pin-Lee’s various degrees, neatly framed, hang upon the walls, a reminder of her expertise. There’s also a miniature habitat in a place of pride on a shelf; Ayda knows that Pin-Lee crafted the model herself, in meticulous (and regulation-abiding) detail.
There aren’t many other personal touches - Pin-Lee is not much of one for sentimentality, too razor focused on her profession - but the space is still familiar and comfortable. After everything that’s happened since they first left Preservation to embark upon their ill-fated survey, it’s a relief to be back here once more. Ayda lets herself relax a little further into her chair as she listens to Pin-Lee’s reply.
“There really isn’t,” Pin-Lee confirms, one hand absently tapping at her desk in a familiar rhythm.
This is something of a surprise to Ayda. “I thought they would need guardians?”
“I thought so too, before,” Pin-Lee replies, her nose wrinkling in self-recrimination. “But back then I was also going off the assumption that we would be using bot law as a framework. It’s blatantly obvious now that bot laws won’t fit in the slightest. They’re not bots, they’re fully independent free agents. And Preservation has no specific laws regarding constructs at all. As far as we are from the Corporation Rim, it’s simply never come up before. We have plenty of laws for humans, and almost as many for bots, but nothing for constructs.”
Ayda feels her brow furrowing thoughtfully. “That isn’t necessarily going to stop people from objecting to them being here if they find out what they are,” she muses. Not much is generally known about constructs all the way out here in Preservation, but people know enough to make assumptions, jump to conclusions.
She did just that herself, after all.
Her musing is interrupted as Pin-Lee grins a familiar, sharp little grin. “They can object all they like. Legally, they have nothing to stand on.” Ayda watches the grin fade to something more contemplative. “In the meantime… we can probably fit them in under refugee laws. They are trying to escape from the tyranny of the Corporation Rim, after all. I can work with that.”
“We should ask them if that’s something they even want, first,” Ayda reminds Pin-Lee gently. They’ve already made the mistake of assuming they knew what SecUnit wanted. She doesn’t want them making the same mistake again. “We don’t know if they even want to stay here long-term yet.”
Pin-Lee frowns, her fingers once again drumming against the edge of her desk. “True. Although I don’t know where else they could reasonably go. It’s safe for them here, at least.”
Ayda finds herself remembering SecUnit’s wary suspicion, the way it never seems to let its guard down, even once they arrived at Preservation. Especially once they arrived on the station. She’s seen how both SecUnit and Alpha keep close together in the unfamiliar surroundings, how they watch and scan everyone that comes near them, how uncomfortable they seem to be around humans in general, how eager they were to retreat to their ship and their fliers. “I don’t think either of them really know what it feels like to be somewhere that’s actually safe,” she comments quietly.
Pin-Lee’s expression twists in a wry grimace. “I think I’d have to agree with you there,” she mutters, then sighs. “Either way, even if they decide not to stay, I think we still need to get the process of amending the laws to include constructs started as soon as possible. They may be the first ones to arrive at Preservation, but I’m sure they won’t be the last, one way or another.”
That’s something Ayda can agree with, as well. “Has Bharadwaj mentioned her ideas about her documentary to you yet?” she asks.
Pin-Lee nods. “She has. I think it’s a good idea, though it’s risky. Educating the people of Preservation on the realities of constructs is going to be a large part of the whole process of suitably amending the laws here, but if it spreads too far and draws the attention of the corporations…”
She doesn’t need to continue. Ayda knows.
“Still, it’s a risk worth taking,” she replies once she’s managed to shake the chill from her thoughts.
“It is,” Pin-Lee agrees.
Ayda is once again on board the ship that they… ‘acquired’ from Port FreeCommerce and travelled back to Preservation on. The ship that is now named Debris and owned by one Security Consultant Rin, at least in its documentation.
She’s sitting in one of the arm chairs in the small but cosy lounge on board Debris. SecUnit is curled up in one of the other armchairs, while Alpha is sprawled along the couch, its feet hanging over the armrest. It’s encouraging to see Alpha so comfortable now - Ayda well remembers the cycles during the trip back to Preservation, where it had to be reassured that using the furniture meant for humans was perfectly fine and acceptable. That it wouldn’t be punished just for sitting.
SecUnit isn’t facing her, but Ayda is fairly sure it’s using the ship’s cameras to watch her. They’re both noticeably more relaxed here than she’s seen them be on the station; she wonders if it’s just the more familiar surroundings, or the lack of unknown humans, or something else entirely.
She has spent the past several minutes explaining the discussion Pin-Lee and her had about Preservation’s laws, and its lack of construct-specific laws; how this will affect the two constructs sitting across from her, and her plans to get the ball rolling on adjusting Preservation’s laws in the future. She informs them that if they choose to stay, Pin-Lee is confident that she can get the refugee laws to cover them in the meantime.
SecUnit frowns a little at that last part. “Would we have to pretend to be human?”
Ayda shakes her head. “No, not necessarily. Not if you don’t want to. If you do decide to stay long-term, Pin-Lee and I believe it would be best if Station Security and Station Medical at the very least were informed of the truth, just in case anything happens to either of you. It would probably be best if they’re not… surprised, in an emergency situation. But again, what information you both choose to reveal is up to you.”
SecUnit’s frown eases into something more contemplative. Alpha’s gaze flicks from Ayda to SecUnit and back again; Ayda wonders if the two constructs are talking over the feed, and if so, what they’re saying. That will have to remain a mystery to her, though. “If we do stay here,” Alpha starts hesitantly after a moment, “what would we… do?”
“Whatever you like, within reason,” Ayda replies with a reassuring smile. “There are a lot of options. The data you passed on from your earlier survey flight over the unterraformed section of the planet was well received, so once licensing is properly sorted out, that’s definitely something you could continue doing. There are also plenty of educational opportunities at Preservation. Or you could accompany other survey groups as security - I know Overse and Arada are planning another survey in the near future. I’m sure they would love to have either or both of you along - as properly paid security consultants, of course.”
SecUnit’s expression twists wryly. “They want to do another survey even after the shitshow that was the last survey?”
“This one won’t be in Corporation Rim territory,” Ayda replies with a wry little smile of her own. “So there shouldn’t be a repeat of any of the previous incident.”
SecUnit snorts dubiously, then asks, “Will you be going with them?”
Ayda shakes her head. “Not this time, no. I have too much to do here, and I want to spend more time with my family.” Which is all true - she is under no illusions about how easy or otherwise it will be to amend Preservation’s laws, and she wants to be here to contribute to that as much as she can. She also missed her family fiercely while she was away; she missed several of her childrens’ milestones, and the videos her spouses recorded are a poor stand-in for the real thing.
“At least one of you is sensible,” SecUnit mutters, and Ayda has to fight back a smile.
“Also,” Ayda continues once she’s reined in her brief burst of amusement, “I’ve been talking to Dr. Bharadwaj. She’s planning on making a documentary to help inform the population of Preservation about the realities of constructs, to counteract all the propaganda and help with the amendment of the laws here. She wanted me to ask you both to consider making your story public, as part of this documentary. She believes a full account of your situations, in your own words, could be a great contribution. Even if all you agreed to release were the parts relevant to the whole GrayCris incident, and perhaps what happened on Port FreeCommerce, it would help a lot. She would like to discuss it with both of you, if you feel like it’s something you could consider.”
SecUnit actually turns its head to look directly at her for a second or two before looking away again, its expression conflicted. Alpha blinks and looks over at SecUnit once more; this time Ayda is certain that they’re communicating privately, because Alpha’s expression quickly goes from confused to thoughtful.
“If a documentary like that gets out to the Corporation Rim, that could draw a lot of unwanted attention to Preservation,” SecUnit finally replies. “The corporations aren’t going to like it.”
Ayda lets out the breath she hasn’t been aware she’s holding. “That is something we’ve considered, yes,” she replies. “We’ll have to be careful, but we think it’s worth the risk. Even if neither of you decide to stay here, we still want Preservation to be somewhere safe for all constructs.”
She watches SecUnit’s expression do something complicated that she can’t quite figure out, before it abruptly unfolds itself from the depths of its armchair. “Be right back,” it says even as it strides out of the lounge.
Surprised, Ayda watches it disappear from view around the corner, then looks over to Alpha. It hasn’t moved, still sprawled on the couch. It spots her looking at it, and offers her a shy little smile.
She reflexively smiles back. “How are you finding Preservation so far?” she asks softly.
Alpha pauses to consider the question before answering. “It’s nice,” it replies finally. “Very, very different. Kind of scary, but… not in a bad way?” It frowns a little as it tries to find the right words. “It’s… weird, though. It’s difficult to see out there.”
Concern bubbles up through Ayda’s gut. “Are your eyes injured? Do you need to visit Medical?”
Alpha blinks at her, then quickly shakes its head. “Oh, no, no! Not like that.” It gestures to its face. “These eyes are fine, in perfect working condition. But… I can only see so much with them, you know? I can’t…” It gestures more broadly around itself. “When I’m out on the station, I can’t… see.”
Understanding finally dawns. “You mean cameras?” Ayda asks gently.
Alpha nods, its expression lightening in relief. “Yes! There are so few cameras on the station, and we don’t have any drones. It’s all right on board Debris, we can access the cameras in here, we can see everything on the ship. And when we’re in our fliers, they have extra sensors so we can see all around ourselves as well. You don’t want an enemy flier sneaking up on you in a blind spot, so we don’t have blind spots. But on the station, we don’t have any of that. And with everything being so unfamiliar, it’s… unpleasant.”
This new information goes a long way towards explaining why SecUnit and Alpha appear so uncomfortable on Preservation Station. Ayda tries to think of how to respond, but her thoughts are derailed when SecUnit abruptly strides back into the lounge, heading straight towards her. She sits up a little as it stops in front of her and holds a small object out for her to take. “Here,” it says, not quite meeting her eyes.
Curious, Ayda accepts the small object, and SecUnit immediately retreats back to its armchair, tossing another similar object to Alpha as it goes. Alpha catches it neatly and sits up from its sprawl to examine the object. “What is this?” it asks.
“Holographic display trinkets,” SecUnit replies, its shoulders hunching a little as it slouches into its armchair. “There’s a button on the bottom.”
Ayda turns her object over and finds the button. She activates it, then admires the holographic display of flowers that the device projects. “Oh, this is lovely,” she says, delighted. Alpha is also admiring the one it got; Ayda looks over and notes that it’s displaying a colourful nebula.
SecUnit shrugs, its shoulders almost up to its ears. “I had a few hours between transports on the way to Port FreeCommerce,” it starts awkwardly. “I figured buying some stuff would help me blend in better. And I remembered that you said you lived on a farm, so… flora.”
Ayda finds herself surprisingly touched. As much as SecUnit is obviously trying to play the gesture off as just another piece of its disguise, the fact that it had thought of her at all warms Ayda’s heart. “Thank you,” she says sincerely. “I really appreciate it.”
SecUnit doesn’t say anything, but she feels it tap her feed in acknowledgement.
Alpha looks up from its own device, its brow furrowing in puzzlement. “But… you didn’t know about me then,” it says. “Who did you get this one for?”
SecUnit shrugs again, looking like it wants to disappear into the depths of its jacket entirely. “Nobody, really. I just… it was there.”
“You got it for yourself,” Ayda says gently.
“No. That’s dumb,” SecUnit replies shortly. “Why would I do that? I don’t need souvenirs, and I didn’t have anywhere to put it. So. It’s yours now, Alpha.”
Alpha hesitates, then says, “Thank you,” very softly. It looks over at Ayda though, its expression uncertain.
“Perhaps you can set it up somewhere in the lounge here,” Ayda suggests after a moment’s thought. “Or up in the bridge. That way both of you can enjoy it.”
Alpha brightens at the suggestion and nods. “That’s a good idea, thank you!” it replies, much more cheerfully.
Ayda can’t help but smile at Alpha’s enthusiasm; it’s such a sharp contrast to SecUnit’s more taciturn nature. “What other kinds of holograms were there?” she asks curiously, hoping to get a little more insight into SecUnit’s experiences.
“More flora, some different types of fauna, a few other constellations,” it replies after a moment. “A lot of different characters from popular media. I got one for Vicky—“ It abruptly snaps its mouth closed, looking like it’s said more than it meant to.
“Vicky?” Alpha looks back up from the little holographic nebula. “You mean the ComfortUnit from RaviHyral?”
Ayda is caught off-guard by the intensity of the heated glare that SecUnit gives Alpha. Alpha also seems to be just as surprised, judging by its expression, which then quickly morphs into something more consternated and sheepish. Again, Ayda finds herself wondering just what they’re saying to each other over the feed. “You mentioned Vicky earlier,” Ayda says carefully, hoping to deflect SecUnit’s obvious annoyance. “Your colleague, correct?”
For a moment SecUnit continues to glare at Alpha, but then it lets out a breath and relaxes back into the depths of its armchair. “Yes,” it replies, sounding resigned. “Vicky’s a ComfortUnit I met at RaviHyral. We kind of helped each other. It’s a lot better at… going unnoticed. I was hoping it would… stay unnoticed.”
“Well, you can rest assured that I won’t be saying anything about it to anyone,” Ayda says reassuringly. “And I’m sure Alpha won’t let that slip again, right?”
“Right,” Alpha replies with a nod. “Proprietary information.”
SecUnit looks unconvinced - its demeanour reminds Ayda somewhat of a surly teenager. She has to stifle the smile of fond amusement that threatens to break free, disguising it by looking back down at the holographic projector still in her hands. “You purchased one of these for Vicky, right?” she asks after a moment. “Are you considering going to visit them?”
Its expression scrunches uncomfortably at Ayda’s words. “I don’t know,” it admits. “It’s a long way. It might not even be where I’m expecting it to be any more. And - I don’t want to draw attention to it. Vicky’s probably safer that way.”
“Perhaps you could just send it a message,” Ayda suggests. “Let it know how you are, and where you are. If you decide to stay, maybe Vicky will be able to come here, instead.”
“If we decide to stay,” SecUnit echoes blandly.
“You don’t have to decide right away, of course,” Ayda reassures it. “And you can always change your mind.”
It doesn’t reply, but it does glance over at Alpha. More passes between the two units that Ayda isn’t privy to; after a few seconds, Alpha nods slightly. SecUnit lets out a soft sigh, then shifts to look just past Ayda’s ear. “For now… I think we’ll stay.”
This time, Ayda lets herself smile without restraint.
Ayda is in the station hotel suite that she booked for the members of the survey team while they’re all reporting to the council. Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin are staying here with Arada and Overse, who are back on the station now after a trip down to the planet to visit their family. Volescu, who usually lives on the planet, has come up on the shuttle with them. Bharadwaj has her own quarters on the station, but she’s dropped in as well to join everyone else.
Now that everyone is finally safely back at Preservation Station, the survey needs to finish its reports so the council can decide if it’s worth pursuing their claim on the planet. Assuming that the entire planet doesn’t end up interdicted because of the presence of alien remnants, anyway.
None of them have to be here, really; they could all work together entirely on the feed, but after everything that’s happened, it’s comforting for them to all be together in the same room again, sitting on the couches and talking face to face. Floating display surfaces filled with their data and collated notes hover amongst them, casting their own pale illumination throughout the common room.
Both SecUnit and Alpha are here too - SecUnit is curled up in an armchair in the back corner of the room, while Alpha’s sitting in the end of one of the couches, with Ratthi leaning comfortably against its side. It’s good to have them both here, too. Arada, Overse, Bharadwaj and Volescu have accepted Alpha’s presence without question, since they’d already been filled in on everything that had happened during the escape from Port FreeCommerce. Alpha seems to be comfortable enough with them, as well; Ayda can only assume that SecUnit briefed Alpha on what it knew of the rest of the PreservationAux team at some point, too.
Ayda flicks between a few of the different displays, but her attention isn’t entirely on them. Across from her, Ratthi is trying to explain the finer points of small talk to a confused-looking Alpha. “— and if all else fails, you can just comment on the recent planetary weather,” Ratthi says earnestly.
She watches Alpha’s brow furrow. “Why would I do that?”
“It works, okay, just trust me,” Ratthi tries to reassure it.
“But what if I don’t know what the planetary weather actually is because I haven’t been there yet?” Alpha asks after a moment’s consideration. “Or if we’re on a station with no planet? Or on a transport?”
Ratthi blinks. “Uh.” He’s rarely been away from Preservation for long enough for that to matter.
Ayda hides her smile behind one of her display surfaces. Arada, her bare feet in Overse’s lap, leans towards them from her own couch and suggests, “Ask about their family! Everyone likes talking about their family!”
Gurathin lets out a small snort, and Arada says without missing a beat, “Most people like talking about their family!”
Ayda glances around and notes that she’s not the only one poorly concealing a smile.
“You could also ask what their favourite media is,” Bharadwaj says, briefly glancing back at SecUnit. SecUnit just rolls its eyes and doesn’t comment out loud, but judging by how Bharadwaj’s expression suddenly blossoms into a grin, it’s sent some snarky response to her over the feed.
Alpha’s expression brightens at Bharadwaj’s contribution. “Oh, I can definitely ask about media!” it says. “Or…” It hesitates thoughtfully, then asks, “Is it… weird to ask about someone’s clothes?”
“Only if you’re asking if their clothes would look better on your bedroom floor,” Ratthi says in a way that Ayda can just tell is automatic and not thought through at all. He then blinks and looks up from his display surface, wide-eyed. "Wait, no, disregard that, sorry, sorry!" Ratthi immediately adds now that his brain has caught up with his mouth.
She has no chance of hiding her smile this time, but that’s all right because most of the others have burst out into laughter. Gurathin is covering his eyes with one hand as he groans out a reproving “Ratthi…!” though, and SecUnit’s mouth has twisted in an eloquent grimace. Alpha just looks bemused.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ratthi hastily says, patting Alpha’s arm with one hand. “If you like what someone’s wearing, it’s usually all right to say so, and maybe ask where they got it. Okay?”
He’s saved from any further awkwardness by SecUnit shifting a little in its chair as it announces, “A newsburst from the CR has just arrived that you might all be interested in.” Ayda feels it tap their group feed before it drops the newsburst in for them to view.
The opening headline makes it immediately clear what the newsburst is about. Silence settles over the room as everyone watches and listens to the news report summarising the attack on Port FreeCommerce. It turns out that despite the ferocity of the attack, the company managed to hold firm long enough to finally drive the attackers off. The company has suffered losses, but not enough to significantly hurt it in the long run. At least, that’s the spin that the company’s representatives are putting on it. Whether or not that’s accurate is another matter entirely. The company can’t afford to show any weakness.
The report includes brief clips of footage from the station of the attack itself; Ayda feels her heart rate increase, her breath catching in her throat. With everything else that had happened during and after their escape from the station, it had been surprisingly easy to push the actual attack aside. But now, confronted by the footage, it’s sinking in.
They were there. Her, and Pin-Lee, and Ratthi, and Gurathin - they could have so easily been just more casualties of the attack. Especially since GrayCris had been involved, and had been searching for PreservationAux specifically.
She feels a tap in her feed, and takes a sharp breath. It’s SecUnit, on a private feed channel. [Are you all right, Dr. Mensah?] She glances over at it to see it watching her, its expression mostly neutral save for the slight furrow in its brow that gives away its concern.
It’s a good question. Is she all right? She taps SecUnit’s feed in acknowledgement, but doesn’t otherwise answer.
In the couch across from her, Alpha is looking at Ratthi with obvious concern of its own. “Dr. Ratthi?” it asks softly. “Are you okay? Your heart rate just spiked.”
Ayda looks around, checking on Pin-Lee and Gurathin. Pin-Lee is frowning, drumming the fingers of one hand against her arm rest. Gurathin is stony-faced, his arms crossed tightly over his midsection. The rest of the survey team are also watching them - and her - with concern.
Ratthi lets out a loud exhale that cuts through the silence and swipes the news report away from his feed display. “I’m— yeah. I’m all right,” he reassures Alpha, though his words are a little shaky. “Just… it’s just sinking in now, is all. We — we were there. We didn’t actually see much of it, but— we were there for it.”
It’s reassuring to hear Ratthi voicing her own thoughts.
There’s another short silence before Volescu says, very gently, “The trauma unit at Makeba Central Medical has an entire section for emotional support after traumatic experiences. I’ve been attending regularly.”
Bharadwaj nods and adds, “Station Medical has something similar. It’s not as extensive, but I’ve been going there, and it helps.”
“I might have to book a visit or two myself,” Ratthi comments, with forced cheer.
Gurathin’s expression hasn’t changed, and Pin-Lee’s frown has deepened. Ayda takes a breath, then says, “I think I’ll visit them soon as well.” As survey captain, it’s her job to set a good example for the rest of her team. And if Bharadwaj and Volescu both say it helps… she trusts their judgement.
Pin-Lee lets out a heavy sigh. “I’ll see if I can fit it into my schedule,” she finally concedes. “No promises, though.”
That’s good enough for Ayda. She gives Pin-Lee a warm smile, then looks over at Gurathin. He simply shrugs - Ayda knows not to expect much more of a response from him.
But then Gurathin looks pointedly at SecUnit. “What about you two?” he asks it, gesturing to both it and Alpha. “Ever thought of getting trauma treatments?”
SecUnit scowls in Gurathin’s general direction. “No,” it says shortly. “That’s a human thing. SecUnits don’t need trauma treatments.”
“Why would we be traumatised?” Alpha adds, both its voice and expression vaguely bemused.
Why wouldn’t you be traumatised? Ayda wants to ask them both, but she doesn’t. Their reaction is a stark reminder of the differences between her own life on Preservation, and their lives as SecUnits within the Corporation Rim. It just strengthens her resolve to make Preservation somewhere that is truly safe for constructs. Somewhere where they, perhaps, can come to realise that they deserve treatment just as much as any other human.
She’s shaken from her thoughts by SecUnit suddenly announcing, “The ship that was carrying that newsburst also transported some outsystem journalists to Preservation. They’re asking Station Security if any of you are available for interviews.”
Ratthi groans dramatically. “Uugggh. I got more than enough of that back on Port FreeCommerce. No, thank you.” The sentiment is echoed by everyone else, though Ayda knows that she and Pin-Lee will most likely have to give these outsystem reporters something so they won’t try to hunt down any of the others in their private lives.
“Alpha and I can probably discourage the reporters from coming anywhere near you,” SecUnit suggests after a moment.
“The thought is tempting,” Pin-Lee replies, then shakes her head. “But if they’re CR reporters, they might recognise what you are. It may be best if you both avoid them as much as you can.” SecUnit frowns, but nods in reluctant agreement.
A thought occurs to Ayda then, and she reaches out to tap SecUnit’s private feed channel with her. It taps back in acknowledgement, and she asks it, [Did you hack into Station Security?]
There’s a definite hesitation before it replies, [Maybe.]
She very carefully doesn’t sigh. It’s only logical for SecUnit to have done so. Its entire survival since the end of the survey has relied on it being able to hack security systems, after all. And she never asked it not to.
She really needs to get some new drones for both SecUnit and Alpha.
[Just be careful,] she replies. [Don’t get caught.]
SecUnit’s only response is to send an eye-roll emotion sigil. Of course it won’t get caught.
It’s made it this far, after all.
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.]