Martha Wells: All Systems Red

I did everything I could think of to do, then finally let myself go on standby while I caught up on my serials. I’d watched three episodes of Sanctuary Moon and was fast forwarding through a sex scene when Dr. Mensah sent me some images through the feed. (I don’t have any gender or sex-related parts (if a construct has those you’re a sexbot in a brothel, not a murderbot) so maybe that’s why I find sex scenes boring. Though I think that even if I did have sex-related parts I would find them boring.) I took a look at the images in Mensah’s message, then saved my place in the serial.

Confession time: I don’t actually know where we are. We have, or are supposed to have, a complete satellite map of the planet in the survey package. That was how the humans decided where to do their assessments. I hadn’t looked at the maps yet and I’d barely looked at the survey package. In my defense, we’d been here twenty-two planetary days and I hadn’t had to do anything but stand around watching humans make scans or take samples of dirt, rocks, water, and leaves. The sense of urgency just wasn’t there. Also, you may have noticed, I don’t care.

So it was news to me that there were six missing sections from our map. Pin-Lee and Gurathin had found the discrepancies and Mensah wanted to know if I thought it was just the survey package being cheap and error-ridden or if I thought this was part of a hack. I appreciated the fact that we were communicating via the feed and that she wasn’t making me actually speak to her on the comm. I was so appreciative I gave her my real opinion, that it probably was the fact that our survey package was a cheap piece of crap but the only way to know for certain was to go out and look at one of the missing sections and see if there was anything there besides more boring planet. I didn’t phrase it exactly like that but that was what I meant.

She took her attention off the feed then, but I stayed alert, since I knew she tended to make her decisions fast and if I started a show again I’d just get interrupted. I did check the security-camera view of the hub so I could hear their conversation. They all wanted to check it out, and were just going back and forth on whether they should wait. They had just had a comm conversation with DeltFall on the other continent who had agreed to send copies of the missing survey package files. Some of the clients wanted to see if anything else was missing first, and others wanted to go now, and blah, blah, blah.

I knew how this was going to turn out.

It wasn’t a long trip, not far outside the range of the other assessments they had been doing, but not knowing what they were flying into was definitely a red flag for security. In a smart world, I should go alone, but with the governor module I had to be within a hundred meters of at least one of the clients at all times, or it would fry me. They knew that, so volunteering to take a solo cross-continental trip might set off a few alarms.

So when Mensah opened the feed again to tell me they were going, I told her security protocols suggested that I should go, too.

WE GOT READY to leave at the beginning of the day cycle, in the morning light, and the satellite weather report said it would be a good day for flying and scanning. I checked MedSystem and saw Bharadwaj was awake and talking.

It wasn’t until I was helping to carry equipment to the little hopper that I realized they were going to make me ride in the crew cabin.

At least I was in the armor with my helmet opaqued. But when Mensah told me to get in the copilot’s seat, it didn’t turn out to be as bad as my first horrified realization. Arada and Pin-Lee didn’t try to talk to me, and Ratthi actually looked away when I eased past him to get to the cockpit.

They were all so careful not to look at me or talk to me directly that as soon as we were in the air I did a quick spot check through HubSystem’s records of their conversations. I had talked myself into believing that I hadn’t actually lost it as much as I thought I had when Mensah had offered to let me hang out in the hub with the humans like I was an actual person or something.

The conversation they had immediately after that gave me a sinking sensation as I reviewed it. No, it had been worse than I thought. They had talked it over and all agreed not to “push me any further than I wanted to go” and they were all so nice and it was just excruciating. I was never taking off the helmet again. I can’t do even the half-assed version of this stupid job if I have to talk to humans.

They were the first clients I’d had who hadn’t had any previous experience with SecUnits, so maybe I could have expected this if I’d bothered to think about it. Letting them see me without the armor had been a huge mistake.

At least Mensah and Arada had overruled the ones who wanted to talk to me about it. Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency. I’d rather climb back into Hostile One’s mouth.

I worried about it while they looked out the windows at the ring or watched their feeds of the hopper’s scans of the new scenery, chatting on the comm with the others who were following our progress back in the habitat. I was distracted, but still caught the moment when the autopilot cut out.

It could have been a problem, except I was in the copilot’s seat and I could have taken over in time. But even if I hadn’t been there, it would have turned out okay, because Mensah was flying and she never took her hands off the controls.

Even though the planetary craft autopilots aren’t as sophisticated as a full bot-pilot system, some clients will still engage it and then walk into the back, or sleep. Mensah didn’t and she made sure when the others flew they followed her rules. She just made some thoughtful grumpy noises and adjusted our course away from the mountain the failing autopilot would have slammed us into.

I had cycled out of horrified that they wanted to talk to me about my feelings into grateful that she had ordered them not to. As she restarted the autopilot, I pulled the log and sent it into the feed to show her it had cut out due to a HubSystem glitch. She swore under her breath and shook her head.

The missing map section wasn’t that far outside our assessment range so we were there before I made a dent in the backlog of serials I’d saved to my internal storage. Mensah told the others, “We’re coming up on it.”

We had been traveling over heavy tropical forest, where it flowed over deep valleys. Suddenly it dropped away into a plain, spotted with lakes and smaller copses of trees. There was a lot of bare rock, in low ridges and tumbled boulders. It was dark and glassy, like volcanic glass.

The cabin was quiet as everybody studied the scans. Arada was looking at the seismic data, bouncing it to the others back in the habitat through her feed.

“I don’t see anything that would prevent the satellite from mapping this region,” Pin-Lee said, her voice distant as she sorted through the data the hopper was pulling in. “No strange readings. It’s weird.”

“Unless this rock has some sort of stealth property that prevented the satellites from imaging it,” Arada said. “The scanners are acting a little funny.”

“Because the scanners suck corporation balls,” Pin-Lee muttered.

“Should we land?” Mensah said. I realized she was asking me for a security assessment.

The scans were sort of working and marking some hazards, but they weren’t any different hazards from what we’d run into before. I said, “We could. But we know there’s at least one lifeform here that tunnels through rock.”

Arada bounced a little in her seat, like she was impatient to get going. “I know we have to be cautious, but I think we’d be safer if we knew whether these blank patches on the satellite scan were accidental or deliberate.”