Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

I guess running out of implants made sense, if you were a Target/idiot and hadn’t been expecting to encounter ART or its crew. I said, So all the humans in that cabin have implants, which are holding them immobile .

Correct .

That was not great news, but it was helpful to know. What other intel do you have about the Hostiles?

It sent me another set of audio clips and explained, They had difficulty installing an unidentified object to the explorer’s drive. The bot pilot was deleted and could not assist. Something disastrous happened and it has confused their plans. They needed a weapon to fight against future incursions to this system but the attempt to obtain one failed badly.

I played the clips to confirm the SecUnit’s conclusions, and checked the camera views of the ship’s drive just to make sure. Oh yeah, that looked bad. They had the same sort of alien remnant that had burned itself off ART’s drive and melted, only this one was hanging to the side and looked puffy. The engine casings were discolored on top and the monitoring stations threw a steady stream of error codes into the engineering feed.

So to summarize, the Targets had botched the install of their alien remnant drive onto the explorer’s engines, leaving the explorer no longer wormhole-capable. Also the group assigned to ART had lost control of it and now a giant armed transport was roaming the system implacably searching for vengeance.

The SecUnit continued, Note: Hostiles have fought among themselves while onboard, suggesting they are split into at least two factions, a situation that can be exploited in order to retrieve clients.

It fed me more info, mostly conversations picked up in corridors and the bridge via SecSystem’s cameras. I agreed with the analysis, it looked like there were different factions in the Targets’ leadership with different goals. One group didn’t know what to do, how to follow their plan, until they got ART back. Another group, possibly still on the surface, wanted to cut their losses and do something else. I said, They keep talking about spreading something to other humans? Are they referencing the alien remnant contamination?

The SecUnit said, I’m sorry, I don’t have that information .

Huh. We had always thought that somehow the implants, even though they seemed like boring old human tech, were connected to alien remnant contamination. This sure didn’t disprove that theory but I still needed more intel.

The SecUnit said, Query: do you have intel on SecUnit 2’s position/situation?

I had a bad feeling I knew the answer to that question. What was SecUnit 2’s last contact?

Last contact was on space dock with the client tactical squad. Contact was lost. SecUnit 1 was destroyed when the Hostiles breached the hatch . It hesitated 1.2 seconds and added, I am SecUnit 3 .

I really wanted to lie. I’d seen that SecUnit in ART’s status update before I deployed. But I wanted it to trust me, so I had to tell it the truth. I said, The Targets left SecUnit 2 on the space dock after forcing one of your clients to order a stand down and freeze. It was killed by its governor module.

It didn’t respond. Then it said, Thank you for that information.

I had one of the mostly dead SecSystem’s inputs monitoring the bridge and had picked up a brief conversation. Running it through the translation module told me it was a discussion about how to make engine failure look convincing. The Targets couldn’t contact ART to tell it about the hostages, so they wanted ART to catch the explorer and dock with it. That way they could use its crew to force it to surrender.

I asked SecUnit 3, Is the shuttle’s bot pilot still active? I hadn’t been able to find it but maybe it was hiding.

It was destroyed. But… I have a piloting module . It added, It’s not very good .

That it was willing to admit that to me was a good sign. If I can free the humans, can you get them into the shuttle and away? The transport following us will pick you up . This was hard to ask. Trusting other SecUnits was impossible, when you knew humans could order them to do anything. Trusting a SecUnit another rogue SecUnit was trying to make into a rogue was worse, even if you were one of the rogues involved. I was glad my threat assessment module was back in my body, because it would have metaphorically shit itself.

It didn’t respond and I said, Will you help me retrieve the humans?

My governor module is holding me in stand-down-and-freeze mode, it said, still polite and not pointing out the fact that I should know it would move if it could, and how teeth-grittingly obvious that was.

I’d been investigating possibilities with the SecSystem, trying to see if I could make it override the governor module and rescind the order. I’d have to do a restart and reload first, and there was no way to do that surreptitiously; targetControlSystem would know something/somebody was in the system. Also, taking orders from/making friends with a rogue SecUnit killware definitely fell under the category of “stuff SecUnits are not allowed to do” and the governor module might fry it anyway. That left only one option and me trying to gently hint about it wasn’t working.

I can disable your governor module, I said. I am not good at this kind of thing. Even Mensah was not good at this kind of thing, considering what happened when she bought me. I just knew it had to be SecUnit 3’s decision. I’ll do that whether you help me or not .

But that was too much, too soon, and I knew that as soon as I said it. It gave me a stock answer from its buffer: I don’t have that information .

Right, I wouldn’t have been eager to believe me, either. I needed a different approach.

We didn’t have time for me to show it 35,000 hours of media and I didn’t have access to my longterm storage anyway. And that had worked on me, but I knew I was weird even for a SecUnit. Maybe it would trust me more if it knew me better. I pulled some recent memories from the files I’d brought with me, edited them together, and added one helpful code bundle at the end.

:send helpme.file: Read this .

It accepted the file but didn’t respond. I switched my awareness back to the unfamiliar channels woven through the ship’s systems. Most of the standard architecture had been overwritten. I was cautious, because as far as I could tell targetControlSystem didn’t know I was here, yet. I left a few code bundles in strategic places, including in the set of twelve targetDrones waiting in standby near the main hatch. I checked the bridge control systems and found the code they had used to mask their approach from ART’s scans; ART was right, it was similar to the code that had protected the Targets from my drones. And not nearly as effective as the physical shielding the targetDrones used. I altered a few key parameters to keep the Targets from using it on the ship again.

I knew/had strong evidence for the fact that the Targets had activated Eletra’s and Ras’s implants via the solid-state screen that was similar to the one in use in the explorer’s bridge. If it was using the implants to keep the humans immobile, there should be an active connection. But I was going to have to get uncomfortably close to targetControlSystem whose existence on this explorer was so far mostly theoretical. If mostly theoretical meant tripping over the huge path of destruction where it had slammed through the ship’s systems.

I knew which channel the solid-state screen had used onboard ART and checked it first. There they were, seven connections. Now I had to do this without killing any of the humans. I separated out the individual pathways, and gave one a gentle tweak. In the lounge, one of the humans twitched.