by Martha Wells
I sat on my heels in front of them.
Rami said, “They were going to kill us.”
“Again,” I said.
Rami bit ter lip. “I believed you about the shuttle. I believed you…”
“But now you’ve seen it,” I said. I knew what te meant. There was a huge difference between knowing something happened and seeing the reality of it. Even for SecUnits.
Maro rubbed her eyes. “Yeah, we were idiots. Tlacey was never going to let us give her the bonus for our files.”
“No, she wasn’t,” I agreed.
Rami nudged her. “You were right.”
Maro looked more depressed. “I didn’t want to be.”
Tapan said miserably, “We’re wrecked.”
Rami put an arm around her. “We’re alive.” Te looked at me. “What do we do now?”
I said, “Let me get you out of here.”
Chapter Six
I TOOK THEM TO the public shuttle slots first, then past that section to the private docks. Checking the schedules, ART had already scanned a likely shuttle. It was privately owned but the frequency of its trips to and from the transit ring suggested an entrepreneur who was offering private rides for hard currency.
This proved to be accurate, and it would allow Rami, Maro, and Tapan to leave without their employment vouchers being scanned. It would probably have been safe at this point to put them on a public shuttle, as long as there was no advance notice of which one they were taking. Killware couldn’t travel over the feed to infect a shuttle; there were too many protections in place. Whoever had planned to kill us on arrival had had to deliver the killware directly, through a data port actually inside the shuttle’s cockpit.
But I’m programmed to be paranoid. This private shuttle had the benefit not only of anonymity, but of an augmented human pilot who would be in place in case something interfered with the bot pilot. Plus ART, who was already cozying up to said bot pilot and would be keeping an eye on the shuttle during the brief trip. (ART’s idea of “cozying” being somewhat overbearing, I had already had to intervene once to assure the bot pilot that the big mean transport had promised not to hurt it.)
“You’re not going with us?” Rami asked, standing in the small embarkation area. The private docks were dingy and small compared to the Port Authority’s docks, with stains on the metal partitions and some of the lights up in the rocky ceiling broken or dim. Humans and a few bots were moving along the walkway above us, and I kept an eye on both approaches through the security cameras. The shuttle was already loaded into its slot and its hatch was open, with a small augmented human standing on the ramp to take the money. Six other passengers had already boarded and it was taking a large portion of my self-control not to just scoop up my clients and carry them onboard.
I said, “I still need to do some research here. I’ll go back to the transit ring when I’m finished.”
“How do we pay you?” Maro asked. “I mean, can we still afford you after … everything?” After they tried to kill us, she added in our joint feed connection.
“I’ll check my social feed profile on the ring,” I said, and felt pretty good that I had even remembered it existed. “Send a note to me there, and I’ll find you when I get back.”
“It’s just, I know we’re—” Tapan glanced around. Her expression was tense and unhappy, her body language bordering on desperate. “We can’t stay here, but I can’t give up, either. Our work—”
I said, “Sometimes people do things to you that you can’t do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.”
They all stopped talking and stared at me. It made me nervous and I immediately switched my view to the nearest security camera so I could watch us from the side. I had said it with more emphasis than I intended, but it was just the way things were. I wasn’t sure why it had such an impact on them. Maybe I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. Maybe it was the two murder attempts.
Then Maro nodded, her mouth set in a grim line. She and Rami looked at each other and Rami nodded sadly. Maro said, “We need to get back to the others, figure out what to do next. Look for the next assignment.”
Rami added, “We’ll start over. We did it once, we can do it again.”
Tapan looked like she wanted to protest, but was too depressed to argue.
They wanted to say goodbye a lot and thank me, and I herded them up to the ramp while they were doing it, and watched Rami pay for their passage with a currency card that the crew person pressed to an interface. Then they were aboard.
The hatch closed and the shuttle’s feed signaled post-boarding mode, waiting for its clearance to leave. I went back down the access, heading for the walkway. I needed to get the tube over to the area where the tunnel diversion had occurred and start searching for Ganaka Pit. It was a relief to have my clients headed back to safety. But it felt odd to be on my own again, working for no one except myself.
I went to the tube access and boarded the next capsule to stop. Each capsule had seating for twenty people, plus an overhead rack to hold on to. The gravity was adjusted inside the cab to compensate for the motion. I took a seat with the seven humans already aboard. ART said, The shuttle has launched. I’ll monitor your feed, but much of my attention will be on it.
I sent an acknowledgment. I was trying to isolate why I felt so uneasy. Trapped in a small enclosed space with humans, check. Missing my drones, check. My Giant Asshole Research Transport too busy to complain at, check. Needed to actually focus on what I was doing so couldn’t watch media, check. But that wasn’t what it was. I hadn’t done a good job for my clients. I had had the opportunity, and had failed. As a SecUnit, I had the responsibility for my clients’ safety but no authority to do anything other than make suggestions, and try to use the company regulations inbuilt in a SecSystem to override the humans’ suicidal stupidity and homicidal impulses. This time I had responsibility and authority, and had still failed.
I told myself they were alive, I just hadn’t gotten their property back, which had actually not been part of the job they hired me for. It didn’t help.
I got off the tube on the far end of its circuit. This was a warren of tunnels that according to the map led off to various private tube accesses for the distant mining pits. Only a few humans got off the tube here, all heading immediately down the tunnel for the nearest tube interchange. I went the other direction.
I spent the next hour hacking cameras and security barriers, slipping in and out of half-completed tunnels, many with warning markers for air quality. Finally I located one that showed evidence of past use as a mining access. It was big enough for the largest hauler bots, and the cameras and lights were down. As I went along it, climbing over rock and metal debris, I felt the public feed drop out.
I stopped and checked ART’s comm, but it was only picking up static. I didn’t think it was any deliberate attempt to block my connection to the rest of the installation; I’d experienced that type of outage before and this felt different. I think this tunnel was so deep below the surface that the comm and the feed needed powered relays to get out, and those weren’t functioning anymore. Something ahead still had power, because my feed was picking up intermittent signals, all automated warnings. I kept going.
I had to open another security barrier, but past it found a cargo tube access and managed to push the sliding door open. A small passenger tube was still there. It hadn’t been used in a long time, long enough for the water and scattered trash on the carpet to combine and grow something squishy. I made my way up to the front compartment where the manual emergency controls were. There was still power in the batteries, though not much. It had been left here, forgotten, slowly dying in the darkness as the hours ticked away.
Not that I was feeling morbid, or anything.
I checked to make sure there was no active security attached to it, then got it started. It groaned into life, lifted off the ground, and started down the tunnel into darkness, following its last programmed ro
ute. I sat down on the bench to wait.
* * *
Finally the tube’s scan picked up a blockage ahead and threw an alarm code. I had five episodes of different drama series, two comedies, a book about the history of the exploration of alien remnants in the Corporation Rim, and a multi-part art competition from Belal Tertiary Eleven queued and paused, but I was actually watching episode 206 of Sanctuary Moon, which I’d already seen twenty-seven times. Yes, I was a little nervous. When the tube started to slow, I sat up.
The lights shone on a line of metal barricades. Glowing markers had been sprayed on the material, sending out bursts of warning into my feed. Radiation hazard, falling rock hazard, toxic biological hazard. I got the emergency lock to unseal for me and jumped down to the gritty ground. I was scanning for energy signatures and I adjusted my eyesight to be able to see past the bright marker paint. There was a gap three meters along, a darker patch against the metal. It was small but I didn’t have to pop any joints to wriggle through.
I walked down the tunnel to the platform that had been part of the passenger tube access. Farther down there was a set of ten-meter-high doors, big enough for vehicles and the largest hauler bots to maneuver through and for the loads of raw mineral to come out. The passenger access had a cargo unloading rack still extended, and I used it to swing up to the high platform. Everything was covered with a layer of damp dust, which showed no recent tracks. The sealed crates of a supply delivery, with the logos of various contractors stamped on the boxes, still stood stacked on the platform. A broken breather mask lay beside it. My human parts were experiencing a cold prickling that wasn’t comfortable. This place was creepy. I reminded myself that the terrible thing that had most likely happened here was me.
Somehow that didn’t help.
There wasn’t enough power to move the doors, but the manual release for the passenger access lock still worked. There was no powered light in the corridor either, but the walls were streaked with light-emitting markers, meant to guide everyone out in the event of a catastrophic failure. Some had already failed with age, others were fading. The lack of any feed activity except from the warning paint was vaguely disturbing; I kept thinking of the DeltFall habitat and I was glad I had had ART make the adjustment to my data port.
I followed the corridor into the installation’s central hub. It was a large domed area, dark except for the fading markers on the ground. There were no human remains, of course, but debris was scattered around, tools, broken slivers of plastic, a chunk of hauler bot arm. Openings to corridors, like dark caves, branched off in all directions. I had no sense of having been here before, no sense of familiarity. I identified the passages that led toward the mine pit, then the corridors that went toward the quarters and offices. Branching off from that was the equipment storage.
The emergency power failure releases for the sealed doors had unlocked everything, but whoever had cleaned up afterward had left them shut, and I had to shove each one open. Past the maintenance stations for the hauler bots, I found the security ready room. I stepped in and froze. In the dimness, among the empty weapon storage boxes and the missing floor panels where the recycler had stood, there were familiar shapes. The cubicles were still here.
There were ten of them lined up against the far wall, big smooth white boxes, the dim marker light gleaming off the scuffed surfaces. I didn’t know why my performance reliability was dropping, why it was so hard to move. Then I realized it was because I thought the others were still in there.
It was a completely irrational thought that would have confirmed ART’s bad opinion of the mental abilities of constructs. They wouldn’t leave SecUnits here. We were too expensive, too dangerous to abandon. If I wasn’t locked inside one of these cubicles, the organic part of my brain dreaming, the rest helpless and inert, then the others weren’t here.
It was still hard to make myself cross the room and open the first door.
The plastic bed inside was empty, the power long cut off. I opened each one, but it was the same.
I stepped back from the last one. I wanted to bury my face in my hands, sink down to the floor, and slip into my media, but I didn’t. After twelve long seconds, the intense feeling subsided.
I don’t even know why I’d come in here. I needed to look for data storage, records left behind. I checked the weapons lockers to make sure there was nothing handy, like a package of drones, but they were empty. A firefight had left burn scars on the wall and there was a small crater impact from an explosive projectile next to one of the cubicles. Then I went back toward the offices.
I found the installation control center. Broken display surfaces were everywhere, chairs overturned, interfaces shattered on the floor, and a plastic cup still sat on a console, undisturbed, waiting for someone to pick it up again. Humans can’t work completely in the feed with multiple inputs the way I can, and bots like ART can. Some augmented humans have implanted interfaces that allow it, but not all humans want lots of things inserted into their brains, go figure. So they need these surfaces to project displays for group work. And the external data storage should be tied in here somewhere.
I picked a station, set a chair upright, and got out the small toolkit I had borrowed from ART’s crew storage and brought along in the large side pocket of my pants. (Armor doesn’t have pockets, so score one for ordinary human clothing.) I needed a power source to get the station operable again, but fortunately I had me.
I used the tools to open a port on the energy weapon in my right forearm. Doing it one-handed was tricky, but I’ve had to do worse. I used a patch cord to connect me to the console’s emergency power access and then the station hummed as it powered up. I couldn’t open the feed to control it directly, but I reached into the glittering projection and fished out the access for the Security Systems recorded storage. It had been wiped, but I’d been expecting that.
I started to check all the other storage, just in case it hadn’t been the company techs who had wiped SecSystem. The company wants everything recorded, work done in the feed, conversations, everything, so they can data mine it. A lot of that information is useless and gets deleted, but SecSystem has to hold on to it until the data mining bots can go over it, and so SecSystem often steals unused temporary storage space from other systems.
And there they were, files tucked into the MedSystem’s storage space for non-standard procedure downloads. (Presumably if MedSystem suddenly needed to download an emergency procedure for a patient, SecSystem would have whisked the files out and put them somewhere else, but sometimes it couldn’t act in time and chunks of recorded data would be lost. If you’re a SecUnit and you like your clients and want to keep something they’ve said or done (or that you’ve said or done) away from the company, this is one of the many ways you can make files accidentally disappear.)
SecSystem must have shifted files over right before the power failure. There was a lot of material and I skipped past random conversations and mining operations data to the end, then scrolled back a little. In the feed, two human techs had discussed an anomaly, some code that didn’t seem to be associated with any system, that had been uploaded on-site. They were trying to figure out where it had come from, and speculating, with a lot of profanity, that the installation had been bombed with malware. One tech said she was going to notify the supervisor, that they needed to sequester SecSystem, and the conversation ended there, in mid-word.
That was … not what I was expecting. I’d assumed a malfunction of my governor module had caused the massacre the company euphemistically referred to as an “incident.” But had I really taken out nine other SecUnits, plus all the bots and any armed humans who might have tried to stop me? I didn’t like my chances. If the other SecUnits had experienced the same malfunction, it had to come from an outside source.
I saved the conversation to my own storage, checked the other systems for stray files but found nothing, and unhooked myself from the console.
The security ready room had been strippe
d to the bone. But there were other places I could check. I pushed away from the console.
As I went through the other door, I noticed the impact points in the wall opposite, the stains on the floor. Someone—something capable of taking a high degree of injury had made a last stand here, trying to defend the control center. Maybe not all the SecUnits had been affected.
In the corridor near the living quarters, I found the other ready room, the one for the ComfortUnits.
Inside were four shapes that were clearly cubicles, but smaller. Their doors stood open, the plastic beds inside empty. In the corner there was space for a recycler, but no weapons lockers, and the storage cabinets were all different.
I stood in the center of the room. The cubicles for the murderbots had been closed, not in use. Which meant none of the SecUnits had been damaged and all had been either out on patrol, on guard, or in the ready room, probably standing around pretending not to stare at each other. But the cubicles for the sexbots were open, which meant they had been inside when the emergency occurred and the power shut off. If the power is off, you can manually open a cubicle from the inside, but it won’t shut again.
It meant they had deployed during the “incident.”
I used the energy weapon in my arm again to power the first cubicle’s emergency data storage. I didn’t have anywhere near the energy needed to get the whole thing powered up, but the data storage box is for holding error and shutdown information if something goes wrong during a repair. (There are a lot of other things you can do with it if you’ve hacked your governor module, like use it to temporarily store your media so the human techs won’t find it.) SecSystem might have used it before its catastrophic failure.
It had been used. But by the ComfortUnits, to download their data during the incident.
It was patchy and hard to put together, until I realized the ComfortUnits had been communicating with each other.