Martha Wells - All Systems Red

I sat up and said, “The satellite went down.”

The others, except for Pin-Lee who was piloting, all grabbed for their interfaces. I saw their expressions when they felt the silence. Mensah pushed out of her seat and came to the back. “Are you sure it was the satellite?”

“I’m sure,” I told her. “I’m pinging it and there’s no response.”

We still had our local feed, running on the hopper’s system, so we could communicate through it as well as the comm and share data with each other. We just didn’t have nearly as much data as we’d have had if we were still attached to HubSystem. We were far enough away that we needed the comm satellite as a relay. Ratthi switched his interface to the hopper’s feed and started checking the scans. There was nothing on them except empty sky; I had them backburnered but I’d set them to notify me if they encountered anything like an energy reading or a large life sign. He said, “I just felt a chill. Did anyone else feel a chill?”

“A little,” Overse admitted. “It’s a weird coincidence, isn’t it?”

“The damn satellite’s had periodic outages since we got here,” Pin-Lee pointed out from the cockpit. “We just don’t normally need it for comms.” She was right. I was supposed to check their personal logs periodically in case they were plotting to defraud the company or murder each other or something, and the last time I’d looked at Pin-Lee’s she had been tracking the satellite problems, trying to figure out if there was a pattern. It was one of the many things I didn’t care about because the entertainment feed was only updated occasionally, and I downloaded it for local storage.

Ratthi shook his head. “But this is the first time we’ve been far enough from the habitat to need it for comm contact. It just seems odd, and not in a good way.”

Mensah looked around at them. “Does anyone want to turn back?”

I did, but I didn’t get a vote. The others sat there for a quiet moment, then Overse said, “If it turns out the DeltFall group did need help, and we didn’t go, how would we feel?”

“If there’s a chance we can save lives, we have to take it,” Pin-Lee agreed.

Ratthi sighed. “No, you’re right. I’d feel terrible if anyone died because we were overcautious.”

“We’re agreed, then,” Mensah said. “We’ll keep going.”

I would have preferred they be overcautious. I had had contracts before where the company’s equipment glitched this badly, but there was just something about this that made me think it was more. But all I had was the feeling.

I had four hours to my next scheduled watch so I went into standby, and buried myself in the downloads I’d stored away.

It was dawn when we got there. DeltFall had established their camp in a wide valley surrounded by high mountains. A spiderweb of creek beds cut through the grass and stubby trees. They were a bigger operation than ours, with three linked habitats, and a shelter for surface vehicles, plus a landing area for two large hoppers, a cargo hauler, and three small hoppers. It was all company equipment though, per contract, and all subject to the same malfunctions as the crap they’d dumped on us.

There was no one outside, no movement. No sign of damage, no sign 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.

“Are they missing any transports?” Mensah asked.

Ratthi checked the record of what they were supposed to have which I’d copied from HubSystem before we left. “No, the hoppers are all there. Their ground vehicles are in that shelter, I think.”

I had moved up to the front as we got closer. Standing behind the pilot’s seat, I said, “Dr. Mensah, I recommend you land outside their perimeter.” Through the local feed I sent her all the info I had, which was that their automated systems were responding to the pings the hopper was sending, but that was it. We weren’t picking up their feed, which meant their HubSystem was in standby. There was nothing from their three SecUnits, not even pings.

Overse, in the copilot’s seat, glanced up at me. “Why?”

I had to answer the question so I said, “Security protocol,” which sounded good and didn’t commit me to anything. No one outside, no one answering the comm. Unless they had all jumped in their surface vehicles and gone off on vacation, leaving their Hub and SecUnits shut down, they were dead. Pessimism confirmed.

But we couldn’t be sure without looking. The hopper’s scanners can’t 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.

This is why I didn’t want to come. I’ve got four perfectly good humans here and I didn’t want them to get killed by whatever took out DeltFall. It’s not like I cared about them personally, but it would look bad on my record, and my record was already pretty terrible.

“We’re just being cautious,” Mensah said, answering Overse. She took the hopper down at the edge of the valley, on the far side of the streams.

I gave Mensah a few hints through the feed, that they should break out the handweapons in the survival gear, that Ratthi should stay behind inside the hopper with the hatch sealed and locked since he’d never done the weapon-training course, and that, most important, I should go first. They were quiet, subdued. Up until now, I think they had all been looking at this as probably a natural disaster, that they were going to be digging survivors out of a collapsed habitat, or helping fight off a herd of Hostile Ones.

This was something else.

Mensah gave the orders and we started forward, me in front, the humans a few steps behind. They were in their full suits with helmets, which gave some protection but had been meant for environmental hazards, not some other heavily armed human (or angry malfunctioning rogue SecUnit) deliberately trying to kill them. I was more nervous than Ratthi, who was jittery on our comms, monitoring the scans, and basically telling us to be careful every other step.

I had my built-in energy weapons and the big projectile weapon I was cradling. I also had six drones, pulled from the hopper’s supply and under my control through its feed. They were the small kind, barely a centimeter across; no weapons, just cameras. (They make some which aren’t much bigger and have a small pulse weapon, but you have to get one of the upper-tier company packages mostly designed for much larger contracts.) I told the drones to get in the air and gave them a scouting pattern.

I did that because it seemed sensible, not because I knew what I was doing. I am not a combat murderbot, I’m Security. I keep things from attacking the clients and try to gently discourage the clients from attacking each other. I was way out of my depth here, which was another reason I hadn’t wanted the humans to come here.

We crossed the shallow streams, sending a group of water invertebrates scattering away from our boots. The trees were short and sparse enough that I had a good view of the camp from this angle. I couldn’t detect any DeltFall security drones, by eye or with the scanners on my drones. Ratthi in the hopper wasn’t picking up anything either. I really, really wished I could pinpoint the location of those three SecUnits, but I wasn’t getting anything from them.

SecUnits aren’t sentimental about each other. We aren’t friends, the way the characters on the serials are, or the way my humans were. We can’t trust each other, even if we work together. Even if you don’t have clients who decide to entertain themselves by ordering their SecUnits to fight each other.