Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

I stopped at the top of the bunkroom corridor and let Amena go on alone. I didn’t want Eletra to see me or to realize I was lurking out here, since I thought that might impede Amena’s ability to get her to talk. Amena reached the hatch and sent Eletra a note on the feed: Hello, I brought you some spare clothes, can I come in?

While Eletra opened the hatch with the feed control and they sorted through the clothes, I checked my inputs for the others: Arada and Overse had stopped in the corridor that went toward the engineering module. Arada hugged Overse, and Overse kissed her and said into her ear, “You can do this, babe. You’re a bulkhead.”

“I’m a wibbly bulkhead,” Arada muttered.

(The wibbliness was why I trusted Arada. Overconfident humans who don’t listen to anybody else scare the hell out of me.)

Arada stepped back and smiled at Overse. “Got to get to work.”

ART had dispatched the medical gurney earlier and it had been moving methodically around the ship picking up messy dead Targets. Now it floated into Medical where Ratthi waited, Thiago following it in. There was a lot of congealing blood and fluids. “Oh, this is not going to be fun,” Ratthi muttered.

“No,” Thiago agreed grimly. “I’ll get the biohazard gear.”

ART added to its action list: Repair and reactivate drones. Collect targetDrones for examination and destruction .

In the bunkroom, Amena was asking, “How are you feeling?”

“Better.” Eletra folded a jacket in her lap. “I know you’re going to ask, but we didn’t know those implant things were in us. I don’t remember that at all.”

Interesting, ART said.

I was still mad, right? But it was interesting. I said, Because you have a gap in your memory archive?

Yes. It can’t be the same cause, of course, but it’s the same operational approach. Take a prisoner, cause a memory disruption.

I hate it when ART is right. It was the same operational approach and we really needed to find out if the Targets had used alien remnant tech to cause the memory disruptions or not. I said, The mix of outdated human technology and alien remnant could mean the stupid Pre–Corporation Rim humans established a colony on an interdicted alien remnant site .

Not necessarily, ART said. Before I could argue, it added, The site might have been undiscovered, not interdicted .

ART had a lot stricter standards about what constituted evidence than humans did. It was always wanting to prove things actually existed before it would make plans for what to do about them. (Yes, it was annoying.)

ART said, It’s possible to theorize that something from the original Pre-CR colony may have remained on the site when the Corporate colonists arrived. But it seems strange that the later colonists would preserve and use outdated tech .

I didn’t want to admit it, but ART wasn’t wrong about that, either. This tech wasn’t useless, but I’d taken targetControlSystem down with an attack that was practically from ancient history. (That’s how I’d known about it, from watching historical dramas.) So the facts we know are: that there was a human site in existence before the corporate colony. And that somebody found alien remnants at some point .

ART created a feed graphic (yes, another one) labeled Perihelion and SecUnit’s Initial Suppositions with an access list that included all the humans except Eletra. The first bullet point was: Fact (1) Corporate colony was established on an early Pre–Corporation Rim human occupation site. Questions: Are alien remnants present? If yes, were they original to the site or introduced later? Was the Pre-CR site established because of the presence of alien remnants? Was the corporate colony established because of the presence of alien remnants?

The humans all paused to read it. Amena, listening to Eletra talk about her family, covered her moment of distraction with a cough. (Eletra’s family was in a hereditary indenture to Barish-Estranza and was trying to build up enough employment credit to get her and her siblings and cousins transferred into management training. I knew Amena well enough by now to recognize she was feigning polite interest to disguise horrified interest.)

My queries on ART’s status data started returning results, and I backburnered everything to check them.

Huh.

ART had said it had one forced shutdown and reinitialize, when its crew disappeared and the Targets showed up. Then a second forced shutdown when the targetControlSystem had deleted it. So when had targetControlSystem been loaded into ART’s systems? Presumably its invasion of ART’s systems had caused that first forced shutdown.

Except there were more gaps than that.

I wished Pin-Lee was here. And, though I hated to admit it, I wished Gurathin was here, too. Both were analysts, and while I was way better at it than they were, at least I could have shown them what I was looking at.

I said, ART, look at this .

I was aware enough of ART to know that it was doing several things at once: helping Arada and Overse collect scans from what was left of the alien remnant on its drive, directing the MedSystem’s pathology unit for Ratthi, working on the translation of the Targets’ language with Thiago, guiding the reinitialization and diagnostics of its damaged propulsion systems, plus monitoring all its other ongoing processes. But I suddenly had 86.3 percent of its attention. (For ART, that was a lot.)

It examined my query results. A human in this situation would have said, “That’s not possible.”

ART said, Intriguing .

I needed to put these in a timeline. I looked for major events like wormhole entrances and exits and navigation changes so I would know what they looked like in the status data. ART pulled generic examples for me and I started another query set.

In the bunkroom, Amena had been cautiously working around to the subject of the colony. With a serious expression, she said slowly, “Look, I know you don’t want to reveal things that your… corporate supervisors or whoever don’t want you to, but we really need to know about this lost colony.”

Eletra bit her lip. “It’s proprietary information.”

For fuck’s sake. On our private feed connection, Amena sent, I’m not sure what she means by this. Somebody owns the information?

Yes, I told her. She’s afraid of her salvage corporation. She needs to be more afraid of being recaptured by the Targets .

Amena said, “I understand that but the Targets—those gray people—they could show up again. Especially because no one knows how they got on this transport in the first place, or what happened to the crew.” She lifted her hands helplessly. “Whatever happened to them could happen to us. And it’s more likely the longer we’re stuck here.”

Eletra put her hand on her own shoulder, as if trying to reach for the place where her implant had been. “I thought the new people were the crew?”

ART butted in with, Tell her they are .

Amena nodded earnestly. “Sure, yes, they are, but we’re—they’re missing the crew members who were here when the Targets took over the ship.”

Eletra’s frown deepened. “Why can’t we leave the system?”

“The normal space engines aren’t working yet. But even if we could get to the wormhole, the transport won’t let us go. You heard it. It’s programmed not to leave without its crew, the rest of the crew. And it’s really mean, and determined.” On the feed, Amena said, Sorry, ART .

Apology accepted, ART said. I felt its attention shift in the feed. (Imagine it staring meaningfully at me.) (It could stare all it wanted, I’m not apologizing.)