Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

Thiago walked down into the bottom of the globe, looking up toward the curving top. “Overse, did you see this?”

I was neck deep in SecSystem errors but I pointed a drone upward to see what he was talking about. At the top of the dome, above the highest row of stations, was a flat art installation. It was a cityscape with low buildings and canals and lots of foliage, with elevated walkways curving around large flat-topped rock formations. The Adamantine logo was embossed in it with a three-dimensional projection, so it was facing you from whatever angle you looked at it.

Overse frowned upward. “The colonists wouldn’t be in this room, would they? That was for the crews who were sending the supplies down. Or for the future, when there would be more people coming through here, going down to work on the site.”

The partially failed install was taking up most of my attention, but I could tell there was more data woven through the image in marker paint. (Markers are limited broadcasts directly to feed interfaces that work even when the feed is down, and are supposed to be for marking exits and emergency routes and are usually used in the Corporation Rim to torture you with advertising displays.) These were just inert images, not a trap, so I told Overse, “Aim your light at it and move it around.”

She tilted her head and pointed her helmet light more directly, then waved her head back and forth. That stimulated the markers and they started displaying their images, which were maps and diagrams and building plans. I saved the images in case we needed them later, but just a quick scan showed they were all colony infrastructure plans. Things like a shuttle/aircraft port, a combo medical center/community services structure designed for expansion as the population increased, archives and educational structures.

And there was a diagram of the surface dock, the space dock’s counterpart. It was a large structure built around the base of the shaft, but while there were a lot of notes about adding admin and commercial space, there was nothing saying how far away from the main colony it had been built. (I don’t know anything about construction but I’m guessing you didn’t put your dock right in the middle of your colony in case the drop box blew up or the shaft fell over or something.)

Overse was thoughtful. “This is a great deal of proposed development. I wonder how much of it they managed to build?”

Thiago agreed. “Whatever happened later, someone at Adamantine seems to have gone into this intending to see it through to a successful developed world.”

Maybe. The plans indicated not just a lot of expensive surveying work onplanet, but a lot of offsite development, too. Maybe they had spent too much and that was why they had gone bankrupt.

I don’t know what was worse, getting a bunch of “volunteer” contract labor colonists killed as part of an investment scheme, or getting a bunch of actual volunteer colonists killed because of mistakes and mismanagement that ended up exposing the controlling corporation to a hostile takeover.

Overse walked farther up the wall. “And most of these control stations are just unused templates. They were leaving a lot of room for expansion, as if this dock was going to be part of a much larger network.”

On the comm, Amena said, “Then why did they try to keep the corporation who was taking over from knowing where the colony was? Did it not need supplies anymore?”

“That’s a good question.” Overse stepped over to another console. “Maybe it was already self-sufficient.”

Thiago told Overse, “Let’s look for the drop box station. If there’s a log file, we may be able to tell if the colonists were actually allowed to use this dock.”

From our comm, Ratthi said, “But they wouldn’t have had a ship, so why come up here?”

“We don’t know that they didn’t have a ship,” I said, before ART could. It was a good line of inquiry; if there was another ship running around this system, even if it was a short-range type without wormhole capability, it would be important intel. Seeing the inside of the dock had caused some recalculations in my assessments. Who the fuck knew; Adamantine, planning optimistically for a future none of them were going to see, might have left the colonists a small fleet.

Thiago and Overse split up, moving up the walls, checking the stations. Some had marker captions, which provided brief descriptions of what they were for, except they were in a language I didn’t recognize. With no systems on the feed but the new Security load, there was no translation.

Frustrated, Overse said, “Thiago, do you have this language loaded on your interface?”

Thiago answered, “Yes, this is Variance063926. Perihelion, if I tag the right module, can you—” ART was already pulling the module from Thiago’s feed storage and creating a working vocabulary to send back to me and Overse. Thiago finished, “Thank you, Perihelion .”

Overse stopped at a station. “This is it.” She leaned over, using the manual interface to try to get the station to boot. Thiago jogged across the wall to join her.

I was finally able to access DockSecSystem’s video archive and started downloading. I kept hitting corrupted spots and having to work around them. I was still worried about encountering killware or malware or targetControlSystem, but realistically, this situation was the same as the B-E shuttle in ART’s dock: setting a trap here on the off chance that a SecUnit might directly access DockSecSystem seemed like a stretch. It still didn’t make me any less paranoid. (Let’s face it, nothing would.)

And the Targets had reasons not to be too worried about SecUnits. They had seen the Barish-Estranza SecUnits ordered to stand down, made helpless by the governor modules.

Overse said, “Hmm. SecUnit, this is showing log entries from two drop boxes.”

Well, that was interesting, but I’d pulled ART’s schematic of the dock already and checked—there was only the one shaft, the box tucked up into its lock below where we were in the control area. ART, who hates to be wrong, said, Physical structure indicates only one.

Overse scrolled through a file, her helmet light turned off so it didn’t wash out the floating display. “Wait, yes… It’s not a box, it’s a small maintenance capsule. It’s inside the structure of the shaft.”

I started to run what there was of DockSecSystem’s video, skimming through it at a much faster rate than a human could view it. The camera placement and lighting was bad, but I could see figures in red-brown Barish-Estranza environmental gear as they moved back and forth through the main corridor. I had to run it back to make sure, but the contact party’s initial boarding of the drop box wasn’t on here. Stupid humans, being impatient and not nearly paranoid enough, they had screwed up the load of their new SecSystem and then hadn’t even waited until it was fully active to head down to the planet. No wonder their contact party had gotten grabbed by the Targets. The activity lessened as the humans returned to the explorer. I spotted one of the SecUnits patrolling the central corridor, but not the one we’d found.

Thiago pointed over Overse’s shoulder. “It did make a trip to the planet, then returned.”

“Right, but that was…” Overse huffed in exasperation. “Hold on, I need to convert these time stamps.”

Then ART said, Hostile contact, ETA six minutes out .

What the hell? How could it get that close? “Six minutes? What were you doing?”

Contact did not appear on scan until now, that’s what the fuck I was doing, ART replied.

I put my video review on hold. “Do they see you?” Okay, it was a stupid question.