Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

That was beside the point. I’d saved a lot of humans and the number who had trusted and/or noticed me as anything other than an appliance attached to HubSystem afterward was statistically insignificant. He didn’t like the way I did it .

She sighed and rubbed at a dark stain on her shoe. He’s still getting over what happened with second mom getting abducted after her survey. Things like that don’t happen on Preservation. It was a big shock. And… maybe he’s a little jealous. She can talk to you about what happened to her, but she can’t talk to us .

Mensah had said that, too. I didn’t understand why they wanted her to talk about it. Couldn’t they just read the report? That’s not what we talk about. Most of the time.

Amena hesitated. They wouldn’t really have killed her. They couldn’t get away with that .

That sounds incredibly naive, but Amena and Thiago and the rest of Mensah’s family and 99 plus percent of Preservation’s population still didn’t know about the other assassination attempt. If GrayCris had managed to cut a deal with the company, they would have. They would have taken the ransom from Preservation and killed her, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin, and no one would have been able to do anything about it .

My scout drones encountered a closed safety hatch into the main engineering module section. This was a good sign: if the targetDrones had been circulating through here, it would have been open. I reached it and hit the manual release. As soon as the hatch started to slide upward I sent my drone cloud under the gap, directing it to spread out into the corridor ahead. No lost contacts, and their cameras and scans detected no movement. So far so good, though I was picking up a vibration just on the edge of my perceptible range. Maybe it was normal? I hadn’t spent any time here when I’d traveled with ART before.

My drone cloud didn’t encounter any targetDrones as it followed the circular corridor around to the engine control access, which was a relief. The last thing I needed was to be whacked into an involuntary restart again. Figuring out a countermeasure for the stealth material on the targetDrones and on the Targets’ helmets was on the long list of stuff I needed to do so we could survive. But none of the things on the list would matter much if the targetControlSystem had sent us into the wormhole with no destination.

I’d seen shows about humans and augmented humans trapped in wormholes indefinitely. They ranged from bleakly depressing (due to an excess of realism) to highly unlikely (due to an excess of optimism). At least the humans in the shows knew they were on a potentially endless trip, and not just a long one.

I hadn’t seen any sign of damage or disturbance up to this point, but then I came around the curve into a foyer where quiescent display surfaces floated along the walls above specialized control interfaces. The weird thing was that the stations were active, though in standby mode, and not shut down. Even I knew you didn’t mess with the engines while they were actually making the transport go. These stations would be for fine-tuning or altering or something, which should only be done while the transport was in dock.

Also, one station chair was twisted around to face the entrance, and near it one of ART’s repair drones lay smashed on the deck. My drones are tiny intel drones, but most of ART’s were larger, with multiple arms and physical interfaces so they could perform maintenance and other specialized tasks. This drone had six of its spidery arms deployed when something had knocked it out of the air, and it was splayed and flattened to the deck like something had stepped on it.

I wanted to pick it up and have an emotion over it like a stupid human. But I smelled growth medium again.

Amena said, This is such a different set-up from the ships I’ve seen. Can you look for a display somewhere with—

Oh, I had a bad feeling about this. I followed the smell. It led me through the next hatch and down a short gravity well where blinking caution markers floated in the air. (The gist was that various component manufactories and shipwrights and the University of Mihira and New Tideland did not want you to come down here without a Class Master Engineering License or Local Jurisdictional Equivalent and if you felt you just had to then really don’t fucking touch anything.) Amena had stopped talking, and her assigned drone camera showed her squinting in concentration as she watched the scene through my eyes.

At the bottom of the gravity well, there was a platform where I could look down through the transparent shielding bubble over the engines.

Confession: I didn’t know what the engines were supposed to look like, exactly. I’d never had to guard a transport’s engines and they were usually too boring to show on the entertainment media. But I knew whatever was down there wasn’t supposed to have a large organic mass on top of it that smelled of algae and growth medium.

Amena said softly, What… What the… What is that?

Believe me, it was the question occupying 92 percent of my attention right now.

Organic neural tissue can be melded with inorganic systems (Example A: the squishy bits inside my skull) so there was an outside chance (it was so outside I couldn’t estimate a percentage) that this organic mass was a normal part of ART’s systems, maybe something unique and proprietary.

But then why did it smell like the Targets?

I got an alert from Scout Two in the control area foyer. I checked its input and saw Target Five stride over and pick up the screen device where it lay on a chair. (Why the hell does everything have to happen at once? But at least the freaky thing on ART’s engines wasn’t trying to crawl up here and kill us yet.) As Target Five tapped his fingers on the solid-state screen, I widened my input range to pick up any active channel. In 2.3 seconds, I caught a data transmission.

More importantly, .2 seconds later, I caught targetControlSystem’s response.

Got you, you piece of shit.

But something about the view from Scout Two bothered me. It had been bothering me for a while, but I had been too agitated to pay attention.

A lot of my ability to do threat assessment (like pick potential hostiles out of crowds or tell which stupid boat is full of raiders instead of curious locals) is based on pattern matching off a database of human behaviors. The Targets were anomalous, but they weren’t so anomalous they didn’t exhibit the same basic types of behaviors as other humans. And something was off about their behavior in the control area foyer, something that couldn’t be accounted for by their overconfidence or the fact that they were all assholes.

Scout Two watched the Targets waiting impatiently, standing around the control area foyer as Target Five tapped at the screen. Standing. Even after they had apparently realized that the noise from the sealed control area was a decoy, after their security update made them much less vulnerable to drone attacks, they had stood around and waited. (SecUnits weren’t allowed to sit down, ever, but humans and augmented humans did it every chance they had.)

They hadn’t tried to search for us, they had stayed in the foyer, sending their targetDrones into the surrounding corridors but no further. We were hostiles trapped in an enclosed space with them, moving through it at will as far as they knew. Why weren’t they trying to protect themselves by making their own safe zone? Why hadn’t they at least found a compartment to lock themselves in? Were they relying completely on the targetDrones? Or were they waiting for outside help, because they knew they hadn’t long to wait?

They hadn’t even bothered to sit down.