Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

Still no sign of any bodies. I sent to Amena, Don’t tell the corporates that you’re Dr. Mensah’s daughter .

I’m not stupid, she shot back. They were past the explanation of what Preservation was and were finally exchanging actual information, including their names and what the hell was going on. Amena said, “This ship attacked us right after we came out of the wormhole. How did you get aboard?”

“It attacked us, too. We were on a supply transport, supporting the main expedition ship, an explorer, when this ship started to fire on us. We escaped in a shuttle, then we were pulled aboard. At least, that’s what I think happened.” Eletra shoved her hair back and looked exhausted. “They did something that knocked us unconscious in the shuttle. One moment we were there, the next we were lying on the deck in this ship, and those gray people were laughing at us. I don’t know what happened to the others.”

I wondered if the shuttle was still aboard. If ART’s shuttles were still aboard. Without access to ART’s systems, I couldn’t tell without a physical search, like I didn’t have enough to do right now. Speaking of which, I tapped Scout One, which was still trapped in the bridge/control area, and told it to do a systematic scan of any active displays it could find.

“We don’t know why they took us,” Ras said. “They locked us in a cabin and just left us there. We don’t know what they want, they wouldn’t tell us.”

“The explorer was much faster,” Eletra said. “It might have gotten away.”

“I think our baseship got away,” Amena said slowly. “SecUnit was trying to get us over to it and they grabbed us and pulled us into their lock.”

There were too many places in ART that I hadn’t searched yet where the bodies of the crew might be stashed.

Maybe I do watch too much media, because in the empty corridors, passing empty but recently used rooms, I had an image of finding Mensah’s family camp house like this. Empty, no humans, just their possessions left behind and no trace in the feed, no cameras, no way to find them.

This was no time to be an idiot.

“Is there any food or water in here?” Eletra said. She rested her head in her hands. “I’ve got a terrible headache.”

Ras pushed to his feet, wincing. “There’s a restroom with a water tap.”

In the next set of quarters I started to find the anomalies. One cabin I was pretty certain was the one used to lock up Ras and Eletra. A crumpled jacket that matched their uniforms lay on a bunk. The cabin didn’t have an attached restroom, but didn’t smell as bad as I would’ve expected. (Humans trapped for multiple cycles with no access to water or sanitary devices is usually harder on the furniture.) The Targets must have been letting them out periodically.

My process to select some audio (a series of conversations between two of my favorite recurring characters on Sanctuary Moon ) finished. I stripped out music and effects, lowered the volume, and cut the sections together into an hour and twenty-two minutes, then relayed it to Scout One inside the sealed control area. It started to play the audio. I’d constructed the query to search for conversations where the two characters were whispering, or speaking in low agitated voices. The effect would be even better with Scout One roaming the control area looking for display surface data.

I continued to search the quarters. I thought the Targets must have been using these cabins, too (they didn’t exactly strike me as beings who would respect other beings’ personal space) but the odd smell was the first indication I was right. Human living spaces tend to smell like dirty socks, even when they’re clean. But this smell was oddly… agricultural, like the growth medium used in food-producing systems.

According to Scout Two in the control area foyer, all the Targets now had their helmets pressed up against the hatch, trying to hear the conversation inside.

Despite everything, it was a little funny.

“So were you on a survey, too?” Amena asked. I could tell she was trying to sound casual, but it may have been less obvious to the other humans.

“No. Well, in a way,” Ras said. He had filled some water containers from the restroom tap and brought them back for the group. “It was a recovery.”

“An attempted recovery,” Eletra said. She took a long drink from a container and wiped her mouth. “Our division was assigned to work on lost settlements.” She hesitated. “I’m not… It’s proprietary information…”

“I’m a junior survey intern and I’m not even from the Corporation Rim,” Amena pointed out. “I’m not going to tell anybody.”

Ras didn’t seem as reluctant to explain as Eletra. “We were on an assignment to recover a viable planet. In one of the systems that were mapped before the Corporation Rim formed. Do you know about those?”

“Of course.” Amena’s brow was furrowed in confusion. I didn’t get it, either. My education modules have gaps you could fly a gunship through but I knew from the entertainment media that there had been exploration surveys Pre–Corporation Rim. (Corporations didn’t actually invent space and planets, despite the patents the company had tried to file.)

Eletra shifted, winced, then took a breath. “The locations to a lot of systems were lost before wormhole stabilizing tech was developed, but researchers find them sometimes in reconstructed data troves. If a corporation can find the planet’s location, they can file for ownership, then they’re free to establish a colony.”

“There was a lot of this type of speculation forty or fifty years ago,” Ras continued. “Of course, a lot of corporations overextended and went bankrupt over it, too, and the colonies were lost.”

“Lost?” From Amena’s expression, she understood now, but she didn’t like it. “You mean abandoned colonies, settlements where the first arrivals were just left to fend for themselves.”

I understood now, too. This was in Preservation’s historical dramas and documentaries. It had been settled by survivors of a colony which had been seeded and then began to fail as supplies were cut off. In Preservation’s case, an independent ship had arrived in time and managed to take the colonists to a more viable planet.

(The story was popular in Preservation media. There’s always a dramatic rendition of Captain Consuela Makeba’s speech about not leaving a single living thing behind to die. Mensah has a clip from one of the most popular ones on a display surface on the wall of her station office.)

(If there’d been a SecUnit in the colony, there probably would have been a compelling reason why it had to stay behind on the dying planet.)

(I don’t actually believe that.)

(Sometimes I believe that.)

“Reclaiming the lost colonies is big business now,” Ras said. He finished his water and set the container aside. “The terraforming equipment is usually still in place, as well as habitats and other salvage.”

Amena’s expression was flat and stony. She pretended to need to fiddle with her wound pack, so she didn’t have to look at them. “So did you find a lost colony?”

“We were attacked on the way there,” Eletra said, as Ras was drawing breath to answer.

I found a larger cabin that looked like it had been deliberately trashed. Clothing lay trampled on the floor, some of it in the blue of ART’s crew uniform. Hygiene items had been opened and dumped or smeared around on the small attached restroom. A couple of actual static art pieces and a holographic print of humans playing musical instruments had been thrown on the floor and broken. Someone had tried to break a display surface, but hadn’t managed it, and it floated sideways, still showing a static image of two male humans, not young, maybe Mensah’s age or older, but that was as much as I could guess. (I was no good at judging human ages.)