Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

Amena caught her breath and bit her lip, but didn’t say anything.

Still no acknowledgment. I didn’t know if they could hear me, if they had already jettisoned, what the hell was going on up there. We had to be close to the wormhole by now.

(It sounds like I was calm, but I had no idea what the hell I was going to do.)

I felt feed static like a drill through the back part of my head, and then Overse saying, SecUnit, SecUnit, can you hear me? We’ve jettisoned the facility from baseship and are in the safepod, about to launch. Can you get to the EVAC suits in the lower secondary lock? The baseship can catch you in their tractor .

I almost said aloud, “Why are they in the fucking safepod and not in the baseship?” but managed not to. Amena watched me with a not reassuring combination of fear and exasperation. The EVAC suit thing… was not a bad idea at all.

Copy, we’ll go for the EVAC suits, I told Overse. If there was an acknowledgment, I didn’t hear it.

I held out an arm and Amena grabbed my jacket. I picked her up and sent half the drones ahead to scout our path. There was no sign of any hostile movement yet.

I stepped out into the corridor and headed away from the main hatch foyer to the junction to the engineering pod. It looked worse than the lab corridor. Lights were down to emergency levels and the deck had buckled.

Fortunately we didn’t have far to go, just straight through the pod. My audio picked up a banging and grinding noise—maybe the intruder’s drones trying to get through a hatch somewhere.

We reached the engineering outer hatch foyer, light from the emergency markers pointing to the EVAC suit locker.

These were a different model than I’d used before, more expensive, where you could step into them and pull them up with an assist from the suit’s own power supply. I set Amena down and she rapidly tied her hair up, then did a one-legged hop into the suit. I ordered my drones to land on me and go dormant, and had my suit on by the time she was fastening her helmet. Something vibrated deep in the deck; was it the safepod launching? My organic parts didn’t feel good about this. If that was the safepod, I think they’d waited too long. Human actions often seem way too slow to me because of my processing speed, but I didn’t think this was one of those times.

The suits also had secure feed connections, so I could check to make sure Amena’s was working and sealed properly, and access its controls. Don’t use your comm, I told her over the secured feed. They could be scanning for any kind of activity and it was easier for me to mask our feed than the comm.

Got it, she replied. Her feed voice was nervous but not panicky. The suit was supporting her injured leg, letting her stand upright. I’m ready .

I told her suit to follow me and opened the airlock.

Going out in space in an EVAC suit was not something I did before I hacked my governor module.

(One reason was because there’s always a distance limit on a contract. So if you, being a SecUnit, go more than, say, a hundred meters from your clients, your HubSystem uses the governor module to flashfry your brain and neural system. That doesn’t mean a client won’t order you to do something that would cause you to violate your distance limit, it just means they’ll have to pay the company a penalty for destroying their property.)

But the EVAC suits I’d used since then had such good instruction modules that it was almost like having an onboard bot pilot. This one was no exception, plus being new enough to not smell like dirty socks.

(Right, I should probably mention that I find 99.9 percent of human parts physically disgusting. I’m also less than thrilled with my own human parts.)

I came out of the airlock first, towing Amena behind me, and pulled us along the facility’s hull. One of the first things I’d discovered about space was that it was boring when there were no pretty planets or stations or anything to look at. This space was empty of planets but not boring.

The EVAC suit had scan and imaging capabilities but I didn’t need it as something huge moved out from below us. (I designated that direction as “down” because it was toward where my feet were currently pointed.) It was the baseship, falling slowly away. The hostile was above us, clamped to the facility, a big scary blot on the suit’s scan.

I tapped the baseship’s feed and without the interference from the dying facility, they heard me. Roa said hurriedly, We’ve got you on visual. I’m sending coordinates and Mihail will pull you in with the tractor.

I downloaded the projected path, then said, Where is Overse? She reported that she was in the facility safepod with other survey team members .

Roa said, Copy that, we’re contacting them now .

Contacting them now? If the safepod had launched it should be on the baseship by now. But I couldn’t do anything about it, I had to get Amena to the baseship first.

Amena said, What does that mean? Is Overse and everyone okay?

I was about to trigger the suits’ maneuvering system when scan picked up an energy surge. My suit’s imaging went down and the helmet plate went dark, protecting my eyes against a flash. (I didn’t need the protection, but the EVAC suit didn’t know that.)

Amena made a startled noise. Static blotted out the feed connection, then Mihail said, That was a miss, repeat, attacker fired and missed—

Rajpreet’s fainter voice said, Are they aiming at the safepod?

The rest was lost in static. I ordered my suit to clear the visor and swung around so I could see the hostile. I don’t know why—my suit wasn’t armed. I just wanted to see what was after us as something other than a sensor blot. It was almost as dumb an impulse as some things I’ve seen humans do.

I saw a big dark hull, reflecting light from Preservation’s distant primary. There was still nothing coming from it, no feed, no comm, no beacons, so it was like a giant inert object. (A giant inert object dragging us toward the wormhole.) The EVAC imaging system came back online to add in sensor data and give me a more accurate outline, making the hostile show up as part dark shape, part schematic. It was odd, since the configuration looked just like—

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?