Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

Amena followed the gurney into the foyer. “That’s the ship. It’s SecUnit’s friend.” She threw a glance upward. “That’s you, right? You’re the transport?”

Thiago knelt over dead Target Six, turning the helmeted head to see the face. He looked up, startled. “The transport?”

ART said, Correct .

“But bot pilots don’t talk like this,” Thiago said to Arada, keeping his voice low. “It can’t be a bot.”

Hah.

Arada didn’t bother to comment on that. “Transport, what happened here?” she asked. “Why did you attack our survey facility?”

ART said, I am still reinitializing after a forced shutdown and deletion. I have prioritized restoring the MedSystem to full function .

Amena’s drones caught an image of Arada and Thiago exchanging a brow-lifted look before she followed the gurney. Yeah, I think they had both noticed that ART had deliberately not answered the direct question. (Pro tip: when bots do that, it’s not a good sign.)

I had to forward again through all the back and forth of getting me to Medical. Arada and Thiago stayed in the control area, and Overse went to join them, but Amena’s drones didn’t see a lot of that. She was sitting in Medical watching the surgical suite work on me and trying to tell Ratthi what had happened. It was confusing, with the humans talking on their comms, but I didn’t care enough to filter the raw video and separate out the different conversations. The only part that was new was about the safepod.

It had been damaged when they separated from the facility. The decision to clamp onto what at the moment had been a hostile ship hadn’t been a voluntary one; the safepod’s guidance system had been damaged and had directed it toward the nearest functional transport before Overse could stop it. Then we were in the wormhole and it was too late to escape. By the time we had exited the wormhole, Overse and Arada had already had to cannibalize four of the EVAC suits aboard while they were trying to repair the failing life support, and they had estimated that they would last another seventeen hours, if that. All four of the humans needed treatment for toxic air inhalation, plus Ratthi had damaged a knee when a gravity fluctuation had slammed him into a bulkhead.

At one point, Amena and Thiago had this conversation over the comm:

“Are you sure you’re all right?” This was the fourth time he had asked her that and I was beginning to understand why she was so annoyed with authority figures all the time. “Those people, they didn’t hurt you?”

“Uncle, I’m fine.” She said that in the normal human adolescent exasperated and borderline whiney tone. (That’s actually statistically normal for human adults, too.) Then she hesitated and added, “When we got here, they hit SecUnit with one of those big drone things and knocked it out and I thought it was dead and I was alone with them. The corporates, Eletra and Ras were there, but they were so scared and I knew… I was in a lot of trouble. Then SecUnit was just suddenly in the room and—and I knew we were going to fight these people, and we were going to win.” She leaned her hip against the med platform and folded her arms, tucking her hands up in her armpits like she was cold. “Are you sure SecUnit’s going to be all right? The transport said it was, but… it looks bad.”

“I’m sure,” Thiago told her, sounding all warm and confident. Liar, you’re not sure. The others, who had seen me in way worse shape than this, they were sure. “Do you still have those drones over your head? Why are they there?”

She glanced up, brow furrowed like she had forgotten them. “SecUnit gave me these when it had to go search the area and make sure there weren’t hostiles in our safe zone.”

Sitting on the bench with a wound pack wrapped around his knee, Ratthi smiled. “That’s SecUnit. I’m glad it kept you safe.”

Thiago sounded like it just made him more worried. He said, “What exactly were you doing?”

I checked all my video inputs. Scout One was still in the control area, watching Arada and Overse, who sat in ART’s station chairs, flicking through its displays. Scout Two was still in the foyer with a view of Thiago, who had searched Target Six’s suit and was trying to get the Targets’ screen device to work. Everyone was listening.

Amena wiped her face impatiently. “We had just found the alien remnant tech on the engines, right before we came out of the wormhole into this system. We think that’s what let us get here so fast. SecUnit realized there was something wrong about the story Eletra and Ras told us, like they had only been captured a couple of days ago, which wasn’t nearly long enough for a trip to Preservation from even the nearest wormhole. We were trying to figure out what to do about it when we got the signal from you.”

“Alien remnant tech?” The look Ratthi threw at Eletra was suspicious. Her eyes were open now and tracking, though she still looked confused. He had tried to talk to her earlier, but while she had blinked and shifted position occasionally, she hadn’t seemed aware of her surroundings. Ratthi was probably thinking about past evidence of corporations collecting illegal alien materials and how great that had turned out.

On the comm, Overse said, “Is it dangerous? Should we try to remove it from the drive?”

On the general feed and comm, audible to the whole ship, ART said, The foreign device detached from my drive and ceased to function when the invading system was deleted. Further interference is not advisable.

That was definitely not menacing. Oh no, not at all.

On a private feed channel to ART, I said, You set me up, you fucker . I was still catching up on archived drone video and fifty-four seconds behind actual time, so ART ignored me.

Right, hear me out. The message packet with the World Hoppers video clip had been sent through ART’s internal comm before it went down, presumably not long after ART hid a backup copy of itself passcode-protected by my hard feed address. ART had been expecting me to be aboard at some point to run its emergency code, which would uncompress the backup and reload it into its hardware. Which meant it had sent the Targets to find me in Preservation space and given them the ability to track me via the comm I had stashed in my rib compartment.

Which meant ART had been conscious and capable of affecting events during the attack on our facility and baseship.

ART’s sudden and obviously intentionally dramatic reentrance into the general feed and comm conversation had made the humans tense. It startled Eletra into awareness. “Who’s that?” she asked, looking from Ratthi to Amena.

“It’s the… the transport,” Ratthi told her, watching the ceiling warily. “I don’t suppose you could call it a bot pilot.”

I don’t suppose you could, ART said.

Listening from the control area, Arada’s brows drew together. She asked Overse, “Could we get a display link to Medical?”

ART said, It’s better if I do it, and a holo display of Arada and Overse in the control area blossomed in the center of Medical. Scout One showed me that a corresponding display of Medical had unfolded in the control area. There was an attached sidebar in both displays showing Thiago out in the foyer area, sitting in a chair with the Targets’ screen device in his lap. He looked wary.

Okay, so: (1) I had never been able to access cameras aboard ART, except through its drones. It saw the interior of the ship through its internal sensors, which provided data (heat, density, angles of motion, etc.) that didn’t translate into visual images, at least not visual images useful to humans. I thought it didn’t have cameras in most areas. This was proof it had been holding out on me AGAIN. (2) The video effects were smoother and more polished than anything I could have done and that just made me more furious. This was a vid conference link for humans trying to figure out how screwed they were, not a professional newsfeed production. ART had dissolved the edges and corrected the color just to show off. Next it would be providing theme music and a mission logo.