Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

But a lot of the camera inputs I could temporarily drop because they were showing me unoccupied cabins and corridors. I noted damaged hatches, bulkheads with signs of energy weapon impacts. The Medical section had a dead Target lying on the platform. It had been shot messily at least three times in the face and chest, very unprofessional. I checked the main lock foyer and found more dead bodies, two Target, the others all dead humans in Barish-Estranza livery. Oh, and one armored SecUnit with its head blown off. Was anybody alive on this ship?

Then I checked the bridge, and yeah, there were the other Targets.

There were eight sitting at the monitoring stations, anxiously watching the floating displays where a sensor blip represented ART’s steady approach. They were much the same as our Targets except currently less dead, with the gray skin and skinny bodies. But while the others wore the full protective suits and helmets, one wore more casual human clothing: dark green-black pants and jacket, and a black shirt with a collar. Their shoes had heavy treads, designed for rough planetary terrain. Their hair looked more normal, too, reddish brown in tight curls, cut close to the head. They murmured something to another Target, then picked up the same kind of solid-state tablet our Targets had used.

I felt something on the edge of SecSystem’s connection with the rest of the ship. Something strange and familiar at the same time.

TargetControlSystem was here.

I wouldn’t have much more time for gathering intel so I went back to the cameras. I checked the lower crew quarters, finding more dead Barish-Estranza crew, more signs of a firefight, and two more dead Targets. Then I found a large recreational lounge with seven inert human occupants.

They had been dumped inside, sprawled on the floor or the couches in positions humans wouldn’t have remained in voluntarily. With no drones, I couldn’t get additional angles, but I could get close-up views from the camera. They all seemed to be breathing, just unconscious. No, wait. I spotted some faint muscle movement, eyelid twitches. They didn’t look like humans who were asleep. Drugs would do this, also stasis fields used for crowd control.

Implants, like the ones used on Eletra and Ras, might do it, too.

None of the humans were in combat gear, but four wore various versions of Barish-Estranza uniform livery. The other three…

One wore a blue jacket but the way he was curled against the wall I couldn’t see if it had the right logo. The other two were in casual clothing, one in the loose pants and T-shirt humans wore to exercise. They didn’t look like corporate employees on the job. They looked like the crew of a ship that did deep space mapping and teaching with the occasional cargo run and/or corporate colony liberation on the side, like they hadn’t expected to leave their ship and had been caught by surprise. I collected what data I could and ran a quick query in my stolen storage space, checking it against the identifying information I had for ART’s crew, trying to match weight/height/hair/skin combos.

Result: an 80 percent chance that I was looking at Martyn, Karime, and Turi.

But where were the others? I wasn’t finding any other non-dead humans on board.

The others might be in the piles of bodies where I couldn’t get good images for visual identification. But these three were non-dead and I was getting them back to ART no matter what I had to do.

Now I just had to figure out how.

I checked the corridor outside and realized I’d been so distracted by living humans that I had missed the SecUnit.

It was stationary, still in full armor, standing apparently frozen near the door to the lounge. I checked its status in what was left of the SecSystem and saw it had been ordered to stand down and not move. With clients still alive in the lounge cabin, its governor module hadn’t killed it. Yet.

It was strange to see a SecUnit from the outside. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen other SecUnits since Dr. Mensah bought me, but in this version of me, reality was raw and close to the surface, with no cushion between me and it. I remembered what it was like, standing like this. It was all in the excerpted personal archive files I had with me. How helpless it… I was. (Ugh, I really wanted to watch some media but there was just no time. Having access to the media files helped, though.)

The SecUnit was an obvious resource. SecUnits aren’t affected by most kinds of killware but I wasn’t most kinds of killware. I knew I could take it over if I wanted to.

I didn’t want to.

Right, so let’s try it this way.

From my spot in the SecSystem, I initiated a connection and put a freeze on the SecUnit’s governor module so nothing I did would accidentally trigger it. I could tell I had the Unit’s attention, that it knew somebody had initiated contact. I sent it an old company identifier:

System System: Unit Acknowledge .

This wasn’t a company SecUnit, its configuration was different, but I knew it would recognize the greeting as a protocol, and not one associated with hostile alien remnant entities. After four long seconds, it replied:

System Unit Acknowledge: Identify?

I could lie, say I was from Barish-Estranza. (Face it, considering how often I accuse ART of lying, I lie a lot. I mean, a lot.) But I didn’t want to lie right now. I said, I’m a rogue SecUnit, working with the armed transport who is pursuing this ship with the intention of retrieving endangered clients. I am currently present as killware inside the explorer’s SecSystem .

It didn’t reply. I can tell you as a SecUnit that under these circumstances this is just about the last thing you expect to hear. Also, SecUnits normally aren’t allowed to communicate with each other so it would be reluctant to drop protocol. I said, There’s no protocol for any of this. Just talk to me.

There was another three second pause. I don’t know what to say .

That was encouraging. (I’m actually not being sarcastic here—the last time I’d tried to talk a SecUnit into helping me, it had just gotten more determined to kill me. But it had been a CombatUnit and they’re assholes.)

I said, Three of my clients are inside the compartment nearest you. Have you seen these others? I showed it images of the unaccounted-for members of ART’s crew.

It said, At this time SecSystem is nonfunctional but I have video in my archive . It was way more comfortable giving information than figuring out what to say to a rogue SecUnit killware. It sent me two clips, and then summarized them for me because it was used to reporting to humans who never understood what they were looking at. Eight unidentified humans were forcibly brought aboard by the Hostiles but five disembarked at approximately 2260 ship’s time when we reconnected to the space dock .

In the first clip I watched ART’s crew, all eight of them, being dragged aboard through the airlock, most semi-conscious. The second clip was of a group of five being prodded off the ship into an airlock and yeah I had a bad moment there but the ship’s status in the metadata showed the SecUnit was right, the ship was connected to the dock at that point. Also, four Targets followed them. I asked, Do you know where they were taken?

This time it had an audio clip of two Targets talking as they walked down the corridor past it. They were using that mix of Pre–Corporation Rim languages that Thiago had identified, but a translation had been loaded to HubSystem and the SecUnit had pulled it into its own archives. It summarized, The Hostiles implant humans with devices similar to our governor modules. They ran out of unused devices and returned to the space dock to send all humans without implants to the surface .