Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

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.