Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  The EVAC scans found a registry designation embossed on the ship’s hull and rendered it for me. And I recognized it. I didn’t even have to search my archive. I recognized it from a transport embarkation schedule on the station I had gone to after leaving Port FreeCommerce.

  “That’s—” That’s ART, I almost said on the feed, like an idiot.

  It was so shocking and so weird, my performance reliability dropped and I lost circulation to my organic parts. And not weird = violating norms in an annoying way but weird = eerie, like in Farland Star Roads, the story arc with the haunted station with ghosts and time-shifting.

  Or weird like I was having memory failure again, mixing up archival memory with current data collection.

  That was a terrifying thought.

  That’s what? Amena asked, then the ship—the hostile—ART fired again.

  The EVAC suit tracked it this time as a spark across my scanner. It went wide, so wide I thought it must be aimed at the station responder but it was so far away, what would be the point? I pulled the data the suit had collected about the first shot and saw it had gone wide, too.

  On our feed, Roa said, It’s another miss! No damage.

  Mihail said, The vector was way off, I don’t even think— Maybe a warning shot.

  Maybe I wasn’t having memory failure.

  I said, Baseship, are you still ready to catch us?

  Roa said, Mihail, are you— Then, Yes, yes, SecUnit, go, we’re ready!

  The trajectory Mihail had sent was still good, we just had a little longer to go. With Amena’s suit in tandem with mine, I launched us off the facility’s hull.

  Twenty seconds later, something grabbed my suit and tugged it. It was fairly gentle and wouldn’t have seemed like a disaster at all except for my suit’s emergency alarms and Mihail cursing frantically on the baseship feed.

  The ship—the hostile—ART had us in a tractor and pulled us toward its hull. I was facing the wrong way and my suit gave me a sensor view. It was bringing us toward a large lock in the port hull, not that I could do anything about it. I saw ART’s lab module was in place, which meant it wasn’t acting as a cargo transport, but as a research vessel.

  Her voice high with distress, Amena said, They’ve got the facility, why do they want us?

  I said, I don’t know.

  I don’t know anything.

  * * *

  As the tractor pulled us into the large airlock, Roa’s voice yelled over the feed, It’s accelerating toward the wormhole! We’re losing it—as the hatch slid shut. The baseship feed dropped. I made an attempt to reconnect, but hit a wall as solid as … I don’t know, but it was solid.

  I hadn’t been in this lock before but it still had the clean, well-kept ship look that matched my memories. If I could trust my memories. If this was real.

  I really needed to run a diagnostic but there was no time.

  The lock cycled, air whooshing in, and the hatch slid open. It sure looked real and my EVAC suit scan matched what I was seeing/scanning. No feed, no comm activity.

  The wide corridor beyond the lock was empty, lights tuned to medium-strength, blue bands on the bulkheads serving no function except decorative. A transparent locker built into the bulkhead held a row of empty EVAC suits, dormant and ready for emergencies.

  The corridor was quiet, empty on visual, scan, and audio. The lights brightened for us, which was typical for crewed ships, which adjust the lighting based on what the humans are doing and on request. My suit read the air system level as full, which meant normal for humans and augmented humans. When ART ran as an uncrewed cargo transport, it kept its support level on minimum, though it had upped it for me.

  There were too many ways to kill us using the airlock, so I stepped over the seal into the corridor. I pulled Amena’s suit with me, to make sure there was no opportunity to separate us. The lock cycled closed behind us.

  On our suit comm, Amena was saying, “Where are the crew? Why did they do this? What do they want with us?” Then, in a smaller voice, “Please talk to me.”

  I still had a client, even if I was damaged and hallucinating. If this was a memory failure, I had to tell her. I wished she was Mensah, or any human I trusted to help me. Even Gurathin would have been better in this situation. If I told her that indications suggested that I was having some bizarre memory crash, she would never trust me and I needed her to trust me to get her out of this alive. Except could she trust me when I couldn’t even tell if what I was seeing/scanning was real or not?

  And if this was really ART, then where the hell was it?

  I sent a ping. It was almost like it echoed in the empty feed, like the giant presence that should be here was just absent, like the heart of the ship was hollow.

  Amena was breathing harder with building panic, and I needed to say something. What came out was pretty close to the truth: “I think I recognize this ship, but it’s not supposed to be here.”

  Saying it aloud made it seem a lot less like a memory failure, and more like something that was actually happening.

  Amena made a sniffing noise. She said, “What—what ship is it?”

  Then I had a brilliant idea that I should have had earlier. I said, “What do the patches on those EVAC suits say?”

  Mensah and most of the others would have realized immediately that something was wrong; I never asked clients for information if I could help it. (For a lot of reasons but close to the top was the all-too-common suicidal lack of attention to detail humans were prone to.) Amena stepped closer to the transparent locker. There were two rows of suits visible, one above the other, so if a suit was removed from its slot another would slide down to replace it. The patches were throwing a localized broadcast into the feed in multiple languages, readable by interfaces and our EVAC suits even while ART’s feed was inaccessible, the same way marker paints worked. Amena said aloud, “Perihelion. Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.”

  That was ART’s designation and registry. Okay, so. Good news: I’m not having some kind of memory or system crash, this was really ART. Bad news: what the fuck?

  I sent another ping.

  Amena turned back to me. “This must be a stolen survey ship.” Her voice was firmer, less breathy with incipient panic. “I guess the raiders armed it.”

  “It was already armed.” I thought, It’s my friend. It helped me because it wanted to, because it could. I couldn’t say any of that. I hadn’t told anyone about ART. “It’s a deep space research and teaching vessel with a full crew and passenger complement. Between missions it travels as a bot-piloted cargo vessel, but Preservation isn’t on its route.”

  “Research and teaching vessel,” Amena repeated. “If the raiders had a ship this big, with weapons, why bother with us? Maybe they thought we had something valuable on board? Or they just go around attacking research ships? They hate research?”

  She was being sarcastic but I knew of raiders who had done things like this for reasons almost as stupid. But this wasn’t a memory ghost/hallucination, which meant it was still a statistically unlikely coincidence, and that was … statistically unlikely.

  “Wait, you know this ship.” Her voice turned suspicious. The statistically unlikely part must have occurred to her, too. “Did you do something to them? Are they here after you?”

  “Of course not.” That was a total lie, because ART had to have come here after me, though knowing that didn’t make this any less baffling. It wasn’t like ART’s crew came here for revenge because the murderous rogue SecUnit— Hold it, could they be here for revenge? I hadn’t hurt ART or anything onboard, unless you counted some power and resource usage that ART had expunged from its logs.

  That seemed a weird thing to shoot up an unarmed survey ship over. I mean, they could have just sent Dr. Mensah an invoice.

  Unless somebody had managed to get aboard after I left and do something to ART, and blamed me for it.

  One big problem with that scenario, no wait, two: 1) getting aboard witho
ut ART’s cooperation and 2) doing something to ART without getting violently murdered. (I knew of forty-seven ways that ART could kill a human, augmented human, or bot intruder, and the only reason I didn’t know more is because I got bored and stopped counting.)

  And where the hell was ART? Where was its feed, its drones, its comm, its humans? Why wouldn’t it answer my pings?

  I didn’t forget that I had one of ART’s comms tucked into the pocket under my ribs. (Okay, I did forget until three minutes and forty-seven seconds ago, but it wasn’t like I’d needed to access the information until now.) The comm had been deactivated and inert since I left ART on RaviHyral’s transit ring. If ART wanted to call me, it could have used it as soon as we were in range. But that was assuming that ART was still in control of itself. Was something else—bot or human or augmented human—controlling ART’s ship-body?

  I was starting to panic. I didn’t want ART to be hurt, and anything that could hurt ART could destroy me and Amena.

  This wasn’t helping. Start with the assumption that ART was still here, intact but under some sort of constraint I didn’t have time to speculate about but would anyway.

  Had ART been able to use the deactivated comm to track me after our survey ship arrived through the wormhole? Yes, probably. But why? Why come to Preservation space after me? ART loved its crew, like, a lot. It would do anything to help them.

  Including betray me? Was something forcing ART to do this? Did it want the facility, or was that collateral damage? As soon as it had me and Amena in its tractor, it had increased acceleration toward the wormhole. We had to be in the wormhole by now, heading away from Preservation. The responders wouldn’t be able to track us.

  At least that meant that Overse and whoever was with her in the safepod could be picked up by the baseship.

  I needed to get rid of my EVAC suit. In gravity they made movement cumbersome, and could be hacked if I wasn’t careful, and I wasn’t sure how much protection the suit would give Amena from projectiles or other weapon fire. It wasn’t like it would be a good idea to go outside now, and freedom of movement was more important.

  I got the EVAC suit to open its helmet and released my drones. I told two to take up guard positions at the entrance to the corridor and sent the others to make a cautious sweep through the ship … through ART. Then I opened my suit and stepped out. Amena said, “Is that a good idea?”

  I really didn’t need to be second-guessed by an adolescent human right now. “Do you have any other suggestions?”

  “I guess we can’t stay in these things forever,” she muttered, and opened her suit.

  I waited for her to climb out. She was shaking a little, and sweating, and favoring her injured leg. I needed to get access to the medical suite. Whatever was going on here, it would be easier to deal with if Amena wasn’t hurt.

  I moved toward the corridor, gesturing Amena to stay behind me. My scan still picked up nothing but background interference from ART’s systems. My drones were seeing empty corridors, closed hatches. I directed them toward the control deck, specifically the crew meeting area under the bridge. Somebody had to be here, bot or human or augmented human. This time I pinged the comm system.

  The ship’s comm chimed, an automatic response. Amena flinched at the sound. Keeping my voice low, I told her, “That was me.”

  “Why?” She managed to whisper this in a way that sounded very demanding. Then she grimaced in frustration. “Right. I guess they know we’re here, since they kidnapped us.”

  So far my drones hadn’t detected any crew. There was no response to the comm, and I moved toward the corridor. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Maybe go up to ART’s bridge and bang on the shield over its control core?

  This was one of the corridors I had walked up and down, working on my pretending-to-be-a-human code, where ART had critiqued my performance. Maybe that made me less cautious. That and the fact that my drones had just passed through here seconds ago. As I stepped into the corridor, something moved in my peripheral vision.

  This is why we have drones. Unfortunately, whatever this was, my guard drone hadn’t registered its presence. I didn’t see it until it moved, and that was too late.

  I took the hit right in the side of my head and got body-slammed against the bulkhead.

  Performance reliability catastrophic drop.

  Shutdown.

  Restart.

  I was lying in a heap on the deck, a broken fragment of something grinding into my cheek. I knew I’d had an emergency shutdown. (I miss my armor all the time, but particularly at times like this.)

  I need the organic parts inside my head, but they have much better shock absorption in there than inside a human skull. You can hit a SecUnit hard enough to make our performance reliability drop so fast and so low it triggers a temporary shutdown. (Operative word: temporary.) But it’s really not a good idea. Not if you want to keep your internal organs inside your body and not smeared on the bulkheads of your stolen transport.

  Oh, it’s on now.

  My drones had gone dormant and my systems weren’t online to access them yet. My audio kicked back in and I picked up sound coming from down the corridor. A voice, Amena’s voice, too low for me to make out the words. I tapped the input for my drone relay feed; it was a passive connection and still transmitting.

  Amena’s voice was hard with what was clearly false bravado: “You’ve made a big mistake. There are armed ships minutes away. They’ll be here—”

  “Oh, little child, we’re in the bridge-transit. No one will ever find you again.” The voice (Unidentified: One) was light, arch, with an echo caused by an out-of-date pre-feed translator system. “Now tell us about the weapon.”

  Amena’s bravado was turning into real anger. “Our survey facility wasn’t armed. If it was, you’d be blown to pieces.” (Note to humans and augmented humans: no one likes being patronized.)

  Unidentified One sounded even more amused. “You had better have the weapon we were told of, or I’ll take your ribs out one by one and break them in front of your little face.”

  I saved that for future reference. Unidentified One seemed to have gone to some trouble with the wording of that threat, it would be a shame if they never experienced it firsthand.

  Another voice (Unidentified: Two) said, “I hate lying, all these things lie.” It sounded almost identical to Unidentified One, except it was slightly deeper in tone.

  Amena said, “I’m not lying, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A little of her fear leaked through. I think she was beginning to realize she wasn’t talking to an intelligence that was open to rational argument.

  Unidentified One said, “You lie, it lies, everything’s lying. Don’t think we don’t know better.”

  Tinged with desperation, Amena said, “I can’t do anything about that.”

  The rest of my parts were checking in as functional and my performance reliability was climbing. The temporary shutdown had flushed a lot of stress toxins secreted by my organic parts and I actually felt better. Scan showed the fragments under my cheek were from components shielded by a case that read as stealth material. I’d been hit by a drone, maybe the same type I’d caught an image of in the facility before EVACing. It had hit me so hard it had knocked itself to pieces. None of ART’s drones—at least the ones it had let me see—had stealth construction. And maybe the forced restart had definitely done me some good because I was an idiot to not think of this before. If there were drones receiving orders, there had to be a feed active inside ART, just not on any of the standard channels. As my legs and feet came back online and I eased slowly upright, I tweaked my receivers to scan the whole range for activity.

  My projectile weapon lay on the deck in pieces, like someone had used a tool to pound it apart. My saved schematic of ART’s interior layout came in handy as I mapped the direction of Amena’s voice. Down this curving corridor, to a cross corridor, to a crew lounge area. I didn’t make any noise.

  By the time
I got to the first curve in the corridor, I found their drone control feed. It was on an encrypted channel, like a military feed. Clever, except their encryption was practically ancient, in bot terms if not human. My last update of my ex-owner bond company’s proprietary key-breaker was 8700+ hours out of date, but it snapped their encryption like a twig.

  Their feed was almost empty, no voices that I could detect, just drone commands. If their encryption was old, their drone codes might be, too. I pulled the oldest version of my drone key files and started cycling through them. My own drones were still in standby as I rebuilt my inputs and connections, but they were semi-useless at the moment, since the stealth material prevented them from scanning the hostile drones.

  The doorway to the lounge where I’d detected Amena’s voice was open, brighter light falling into the half-lit corridor. I meant to wait until I was back up to at least 90 percent performance reliability but I heard Amena say, “There’s no weapon, you got the wrong ship.” The fear in her voice was more obvious and I was suddenly in the room.

  (Impulse control; I should try to write a code patch for that.)

  The compartment was large, with padded couches and seats built against the bulkheads, a few low tables that were designed to fold down into the deck, and various display surfaces, now inert, floating above them. Occupants included one client: Amena, backed up against the far wall, disheveled and wide-eyed but no apparent new damage. Two potential targets/possible casualties: both backed toward the far end of the compartment, past Amena. They had visible bruises and shocked/frightened expressions. Both casualties wore red and brown uniforms, disheveled and torn, with corporate logos. Another anomaly, since ART’s crew uniforms were dark blue.

  Two Targets faced Amena and the casualties: possibly augmented human; scan results null.