Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

I put the vid display back on standby. Amena scraped the last vegetable matter out of the container and said, “Is ART really working on something?”

“Sure,” I said. She stared at me. “Maybe.” I secured a channel just for the three of us, me, ART, and Amena. I sent, ART, answer me. You’re scaring Amena . Ugh, I needed to be honest or this wouldn’t help. I added, You’re scaring me.

It was a relief when ART said, I’m continuing the repair of my normal space drive and examining long-range system scan data to determine possible search patterns for the explorer .

“Are you okay?” Amena asked.

No, ART said.

I hadn’t expected ART to admit it. Really hadn’t expected. Right, so, that isn’t good.

Amena took a breath, visibly regrouping, and nodded. “Sure, I can see that. But we’re not any worse off now than we were before you two figured this out. In fact, we’re better off, because now we’re helping you find out exactly what happened. And it’s always better to have more information to act on.” Her glance at me was wry. “My second mother says that.”

ART pinged me for a private connection and I let it establish one. It said, My crew. What if they never left?

I knew what it meant. I said, ART, there was nothing indicating that humans were killed or injured onboard. I checked. It was the first thing I checked for in the quarters module. There was nothing. And you’ve scanned yourself. The Targets trashed some cabins and left debris and their own fluids, they wouldn’t have cleaned up after a… I hesitated but I had to be completely honest about what I thought or ART would know. They wouldn’t have cleaned up after a mass murder. I’ve seen mass murders, ART, they leave a lot of mess.

It didn’t reply, but I could feel it listening.

I said, Once we get your drones fixed, we can have them check again for bio traces, but I don’t think we’ll find anything. I think that whatever happened, your humans were fine when they left here.

ART said, Is that an indication they left voluntarily?

It was a point to consider. Doing what ART would normally do (if it wasn’t emotionally compromised) and looking at just the verifiable data, we didn’t know if the crew had been abducted, left voluntarily, or escaped. Since ART’s two shuttles were still docked, we knew the crew hadn’t used them to leave.

(Or the crew could have tried to escape and been spaced. I wasn’t going to mention it, because ART had to know that it was a possibility. But it might have eliminated it from its decision tree, knowing it couldn’t function otherwise. There was no point in considering it, not now. We had to search until we found an answer. If that was the answer… we’d deal with it then.) I said, We need to do a full inventory, particularly of your hand weapons storage. If your crew had to abandon you when the Targets compromised your systems, they may have forced their way onboard the explorer .

The pause was long, 3.4 seconds. Then ART said, Agreed .

And it hit me then that ART had been desperate and terrified since the moment the Barish-Estranza explorer had sidled up and done whatever it had done. It had tricked its captors into taking it to me not because it had some kind of grand strategy but because it needed me.

I hate emotions.

On the private channel between ART and me, I said, I apologize for calling you a fucker .

It said, I apologize for kidnapping you and causing potential collateral damage to your clients .

Amena was watching me, her brows drawn together. “Are you two talking?”

“Yes.” I had to look at the wall now.

Amena was still worried. “Are you fighting again or are you making up? Because it looks exactly the same from the outside.”

We’re making up, ART told her.

“Good.” Amena looked relieved. “Good, right. What’s next on our list?”

I went to search the Barish-Estranza transport shuttle. I wasn’t expecting to find anything but it was on the action list, so why not.

ART had notified Arada that while it was working on the engines, it was also prepping a squad of pathfinders just in case we had to search the colony planet. (I hope it didn’t come to that. I don’t like planets.)

Pathfinders are like drones for space, basically, active scanners that would zip around the planet collecting environmental information and terrain imaging, plus looking for comm signals, possible energy sources, and whatever might be planning to kill us. It’s the kind of thing that my ex-owner bond company did via satellite when they prepared to issue safety bonds for a newly opened survey planet. Except the company satellite would mainly be mapping the entire planet, and the pathfinders would be looking for potential locations where ART’s crew might be. They were really expensive, not something normal survey teams had access to. Arada was impressed.

(You couldn’t rent pathfinders from the company, not only because of the cost. They made planetary exploration safer and more targeted, so therefore less need for massive bond companies to rent you all sorts of expensive planetary exploration gear and sell you expensive safety bonds.)

I was monitoring Thiago’s casual conversation with Eletra while the med platform was doing a deep scan on her. Overse was in the maintenance bay reassembling the repair drone I had found in engineering so it could start repairing the other damaged drones. Arada was reviewing the scans of the alien engine remnant, but everything that was left of it seemed to be melting or decomposing so most of the data was garbage. (As Overse pointed out, the thing was illegal to have anyway so if it melted completely it would be for the best, but it looked like it was still going to leave a residue that would have to be scraped off ART’s engines.) Ratthi was shepherding a biohazard cleaning unit through the corridors and picking up pieces of dead targetDrones.

Amena followed me to the shuttle, dragging her feet. (She really needed to sleep. I hadn’t heard anything from Arada about it so I put Humans need to take rest periods on the general action list. Up in the central corridor, Ratthi saw it and muttered, “Please, yes, soon.”)

I did a brief visual check on both of ART’s shuttles, just to verify that they were empty and hadn’t been tampered with. The Barish-Estranza shuttle was parked inside the same docking module, attached to a module lock, which had an extendable tube to enclose the hatch. ART had said there was no one inside the shuttle, and no active bot pilot, but I made Amena hang back down the corridor with her assigned drones while I approached. The hatch was sealed, but not code-locked, which made sense when we thought Eletra and Ras were telling the truth about being captured trying to escape from their doomed transport. (Now that we were certain it hadn’t happened that way, who the hell knew?)

ART had cut the shuttle off from the feed. I touched the lock cautiously. (Considering the inactive state of its onboard systems, I wasn’t expecting alien killware or a sentient virus or something else unspecified to leap across and infect me, but the fact remained that something had happened to ART despite all its protections, and alien killware was still a possibility.) I still couldn’t pick up any feed activity, so I pushed up one sleeve and adjusted my energy weapon to deliver a pulse that caused the seal to disengage. The hatch slid open, releasing a puff of slightly stale air. It didn’t have the algae/growth medium smell associated with the Targets; in fact, it had traces of the dirty sock smell associated with humans. But then an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Or past absence. Whatever, you know what I mean.