Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

“Don’t fight,” Amena said, coming back into the galley. Thiago was heading to the bulk lock to help Overse and Ratthi.

Arada was still watching me dubiously, absently humming and tapping her teeth, and I realized there was another problem. To Arada, I wasn’t her SecUnit, I was her coworker and she was my team captain. That’s a whole different spectrum of body language. Also, she wasn’t even slightly afraid of me, and even my most confident and contemptuous corporate clients had always been just a little nervous, no matter how hard they tried to cover it. (The ones who weren’t confident and contemptuous were incredibly nervous. It hadn’t exactly been fun for me, either.) I asked her, “Can you treat me like a SecUnit?”

On the feed, Overse said, Ummm . She asked Arada, Can you?

“Sure.” Arada shrugged, clearly having absolutely no idea what we meant by that.

Down in the module dock with Ratthi, Overse sighed. She told me, Right. I’ll work on that with her real quick before you go .

I tapped her feed in acknowledgment. Arada demanded, “What?”

I went into an empty bunkroom to change into the crew uniform ART had just made me. It was dark blue, the pants and jacket of a deflective fabric that was way better than what Preservation Station Security had, with lots of sealable pockets for weapons and drones, plus stability-fabric boots so tough I could probably use them to jam a closing hatchway open. It looked like what a human security person would wear, it looked like what a SecUnit should wear instead of a cheaper version of the contract’s uniform. I don’t know, maybe security-company-owned SecUnits wore something like this. It had ART’s crew logo on the jacket, but somehow that didn’t bother me as much as usual.

I was a little worried the hair on my head would be noticed. After Milu, I had made it this length so I wouldn’t look like a SecUnit and now I had to look like a SecUnit again. ART, watching me watching myself in a camera while poking at my head, pointed me to the bunkroom’s attached bath where there was a dispenser for things humans needed. One was a lubricant-like substance that when I followed the instructions flattened my hair down so it looked shorter. That looked more SecUnit-like. Since ART had apparently decided to be helpful and stop sulking like a giant angry baby, I said, “Why do you want me to pretend to be an augmented human? This way is easier.”

You don’t like it, ART said.

“That’s my problem.” I didn’t like it. But if you put everything that had happened to me on a scale of awfulness and assigned exact values to each incident (which I had done once, it’s in my archive somewhere) dealing with corporates who exploited failed colonies, and probably went through SecUnits as fast as Amena did fried vegetable crunchy things, was in the lower third of the chart.

Despite what I’d told Amena, the existence of the SecUnits on the explorer worried me. If they had been captured and not destroyed, they were a way for the Targets to get intel about what I was capable of.

When my crew is at risk, it’s my problem, ART said.

I was getting tired of being told what to do. Self-determination was a pain in the ass sometimes but it beat the alternative by a lot.

I made sure my collar was folded down so you could see my data port (though anybody who tried to stick a combat override module in there was going to get a violent surprise) and walked calmly out of the bunkroom into the galley. Amena was sitting on the table, frowning at me. She said, “What are you two fighting about now?”

ART said, I made SecUnit’s uniform too nice .

Amena nodded. “You do look great.”

I’m not even going to dignify that with a reaction.

Arada came back to the galley in her crew uniform, which was a less combat-ready version of mine. It was casual and practical and she looked comfortable and natural in it, which would help. “Are we ready?” she asked. “Let’s go.”

“Surely they won’t suspect anything,” Ratthi was saying to the others at the bulk dock. “Who runs around with a friendly rogue SecUnit? Besides us, I mean.”

We used ART’s EVAC suits, which were better than the ones the Preservation survey owned. (They had secondary internal protective suits for planetary exploration, not that we’d need them on the transport.) Though first I ran checks to make sure there was no contamination in their onboard systems. (It was unlikely—the power usage stats said the suits had been inactive throughout ART’s whole memory disruption incident—but I was going to be paranoid until I figured out how ART had been attacked.) (I mean, I’ll be paranoid after that, too, but only about the usual things.)

We were taking Eletra with us, and Arada had offered to bring Ras’s body over, too, but Leonide had said it wasn’t necessary and we could dispose of it. That upset the humans and it sort of upset me, too, which you wouldn’t think it would, since the organic parts of dead SecUnits (and the parts that get shot off, cut off, crushed, whatever) go into the recyclers. But it did. As Ratthi put it, “You’d think they could at least pretend to give a damn.”

ART had closed in to the Barish-Estranza transport and used its cargo tractors to maneuver the container of repair supplies over to the transport’s module dock. Then Arada and I made the short trip to the transport’s starboard airlock, with Eletra’s suit in tow.

(On the way over, I made sure I had a private channel with Arada’s EVAC suit, and I told her, “Remember, I’m not your coworker or your employee or your bodyguard. I’m a tool, not a person.” Overse had told her this earlier but I wanted to make sure she understood.

Arada made an unhappy noise. After 3.2 seconds, she said, “I understand. Don’t worry.”)

Preservation’s ships are different, so stepping onto a Corporation Rim transport was familiar in a weird way. (A weirdly unpleasant way that disrupted the organic parts of my insides.) I had been shipped as cargo to all my contracts, so 90 percent of my experience with transports and bot pilots was after Dr. Mensah bought me and I’d left Port FreeCommerce. At least Eletra hadn’t lied about the lack of SecUnits aboard; there was no HubSystem in place and they were using their own brand of proprietary tech and not company-standard. But the architecture was similar enough that by the time Arada and I cycled through the lock, their SecSystem thought I had full interactive permissions and their bot pilot had accepted me as a priority contact.

I could do a lot with that. They were lucky we weren’t here to hurt them.

The airlock foyer held four humans in the red-brown Barish-Estranza corporate livery, under heavy tactical gear and helmets, all armed with projectile weapons. (My ex-owner bond company would never have paid for such nice equipment. Barish-Estranza must put a lot of effort into their branding.)

Problem? Arada asked me on our private channel that I had made certain the transport’s SecSystem wouldn’t see.

No. It’s security procedure . If it wasn’t, there was going to be a whole lot of trouble for Barish-Estranza.

The first crew person/potential hostile said, “Remove your suits, please.”

That was a relief. Taking out four armed humans while wearing an EVAC suit would have been annoying.

As my suit opened and I stepped out, I detected a subliminal release of tension that made my threat assessment drop by 3 percent. (Note: humans do not generally look relieved when a SecUnit appears, so I doubted they knew what I was. But I was 95 percent certain they were reacting to the fact that I wasn’t a gray Target person.) When Eletra, then Arada stepped out of their suits, the threat assessment dropped a solid 10 percent.