Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

It got a good image of the human crouched behind the glass wall. It was Iris, ART’s Iris.

I had a moment. ART was going to be so relieved.

Iris was small, shorter and slimmer than Ratthi, not much bigger than Amena. Her dark hair was the curly kind that puffed out a lot but she had it pulled back and tied up in a band. Her long-sleeved T-shirt and pants and soft shoes were the casual version of ART’s blue crew uniform, and she had stains at her knees and elbows, cuts on her hands, and a discolored bruise on her left forearm, but I didn’t see any worse injuries.

The drone crept in past her, around a corner and down a short corridor into the lift pod lobby. And there were the others.

Four humans crouched beside the wall next to the pod access. They had pulled the panel off the control board and were working on it with inadequate tools and a tiny pin light. They must be trying to get one of the pod tube doors open so they could climb the shaft.

Well, this was going to be tricky. I sent, Overse, what’s your status?

We’re fine, she replied. Did you find anything? My drone cam showed that she and Thiago were in the maintenance capsule’s lobby, searching the cabinets.

I sent them a drone view of the confrontation and ART’s crew. There was some quiet but excited flailing. Then Thiago said, Can we get them out via the lift pod, get power to it somehow?

Overse said, That wouldn’t work—we’d have to find the power plant, restart it. But if we could get into the pod shaft just above them and open the doors on their level from the inside—

I didn’t like that plan. We didn’t know how long the fighting had been going on and it might stop at any moment, and whoever won would go after the trapped humans. I said, It would take too long, and the pods might be blocking the shaft. I’ve got a better idea .

At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

The hard part was fighting against thousands of hours of module-training and experience plus common sense that said never hand a weapon to a human and especially never tell them to do something with it. The weapons in question were just poppers, and the human was Overse who never panicked, but still.

Now she was following a drone up to the balcony I’d found. It was terrible as a sniper position, but it would work fine for this. I was with Thiago in the lower corridor that would hopefully be our escape route. With no feed except my drone relay, I’d had to send a drone to make a direct connection with Distraction01 and Distraction02. It had made contact seventeen seconds ago, so we were go to proceed as soon as Overse was in position. Just in time, because 1.4 minutes ago I had marked a lull in the second area of conflict, the corridors to the east of the arrival chamber, and the last thing I needed right now was for the Targets to declare a truce and stop shooting each other.

And Thiago, standing behind the corridor support girder with me, looked tense. Keeping my voice low, I said, “Are you sure you’re okay to do this?”

“Yes, I’m sure, and it doesn’t help to keep asking me over and over again,” he whispered back.

Well, he wasn’t wrong about that. The problem was mostly me, I felt guilty asking for help, though I’d tried to set things up so neither human would be exposed to fire.

My drones showed Overse just reaching the doorway to the balcony. She dropped to her knees and crawled up to the low wall. I switched to our joint feed and said, Clear to proceed .

Thiago braced himself.

As Overse armed the three poppers, I started to run. She flung them over the rail two seconds before I hit the archway into the arrival chamber. Still falling, the poppers popped. Lights flashed like lightning in a biozone and booms echoed off the chamber’s walls. I’d tuned my hearing down and filtered my vision but I could still see and hear the effects. Just not as dramatically as the Targets on either side of the chamber who yelled, screamed, fell down, and randomly fired their weapons. I sprinted the fifteen meters along the back wall of the chamber and ducked around the glass partition shielding the doorway of the lift pod lobby.

As I whipped around the wall, Iris scrambled backward and almost fell out of cover. I stopped and said, “Don’t get into the line of fire, Iris.” (I know, I’m bad at this part. On a contract, I could say, Please don’t be alarmed, I’m your contracted SecUnit. You are in a dangerous situation. Please stop doing:insert stupid thing here: immediately .) Out in the drop box chamber, Targets shot blindly at each other, each side convinced the other had set off the poppers as the prelude to a rush attack. The rest of ART’s crew, still in the back of the lobby and working on the pod control, had reacted to the noise but hadn’t heard me enter the foyer. I added, “There’s only five of you here—where are the others?”

“Who are you?” Breathing hard, Iris pushed away from the wall but didn’t panic. I saw the change in her expression as she started to recognize the enviro suit I was wearing. (It went from righteously pissed off and terrified to confused.) “How did you get that suit?”

Overse and her drone raced through the upper corridors, headed back to the maintenance capsule to get it ready for our escape. Thiago waited in the corridor, one knee bouncing impatiently. I said, “I borrowed it from your transport. It sent me to retrieve you. Where are the other three?”

She frowned, uncertain and wary. “They didn’t make it off the corporate ship. A colonist helped us escape when they were transferring us to the space dock’s drop box. We couldn’t—” Her self-control was good but raw pain made her voice go thick. “She said it was too late for them. Then she was killed in the dock before I could find out what had happened—” She stopped, glaring. “If our transport sent you—from where? Where did you come from?”

A scan showed no anomalous power sources. I said, “They didn’t put an implant in you, did they? Show me the back of your neck.”

She was understandably pissed off. “I’m not going to turn around and show you my neck, strange person I just met on a hostile planet.”

Right, so, I could point out that I was the one with the weapons, but I didn’t want to make my first interaction with one of ART’s humans all about me threatening her when I had no intention of following through. It just seemed unproductive, basically. I said, “That’s what someone with an implant would say, strange person I just met on a hostile planet who I am trying to rescue.”

She was keeping her expression somewhere in the vicinity of angry tough, and doing a pretty good job of it, but I could see she knew it wasn’t an unreasonable request. “No, no implant. I know they did that to some of the explorer’s crew, but not to us.” She turned around, lifting her hair to show me.

“I’m going to touch your back briefly.” I stepped close enough to pull down the back of her T-shirt and make sure there was no wound. I stepped back. “Clear. Now in approximately five minutes I need you and the others to follow me out of here, turn to the left, and run down the first corridor. You’ll meet a human wearing one of Perihelion ’s enviro suits. Follow him and do what he says.”

She turned back around, lowering her hair and eyeing me with startled speculation. “Are you a SecUnit?”

That’s never not an awkward question. And my first impulse was to lie, since she was an unknown human, except she was ART’s human, so what came out was, “What makes you think that.”

(I know, I know.)

She just looked more certain. “You’re Peri’s SecUnit.”