Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

I staggered and limp-ran across the hangar bay toward the stupid gravity tube. (I know I said I didn’t want to use it but I didn’t have time to do the stairs and compared to what was behind me it was starting to look friendly. Also, with the feed dead it couldn’t be remotely shut down.) I heard steps behind me and flung myself in.

I twisted around as the gravity shaft pushed me up. I saw TargetContact less than ten meters behind me. I had to get out before it got to the tube. Two levels went by with me trying to get off the fucking thing without the feed, then I flailed into the unmarked stop zone. It spit me out at the next level and I tumbled into a shadowy corridor and fell on the floor again.

Ouch. I was beginning to lose control over my pain sensors, a sign of an impending system failure. And I think I’d been too late, I think TargetContact saw I’d gotten off on this level. I was terrified of an involutary shutdown; when I restarted I’d be targetControlSystem.

I was higher up in the structure, and had no idea how to get away. It didn’t matter, I had to keep moving. I got up and limp-ran.

The corridor curved to circle around the hangar bay’s shaft and was way too long. It was cleaner and had more lights, obviously used more recently, and there had to be a lift pod or stairs somewhere.

Then I picked up a brief contact. Like a ping. A familiar ping. Drones, there were drones down here. Not targetDrones, my kind of drones. I sent frantic pings back, because it wasn’t like TargetContact didn’t know exactly where I was, I could hear it behind me in the corridor.

Ahead I saw more light and a foyer for a stairwell. I lurched into the foyer just as an armored SecUnit dropped down onto the landing.

I almost triggered both my energy weapons but just in time I saw the sticker on its helmet. In compressed machine language, somebody had used marker paint to write “ART sent me.” This was 2.0’s SecUnit 3.

The opaque helmet focused on me. It said, “I’ve never retrieved another SecUnit before. There is no protocol for this.”

Seriously, fuck protocol. I said, “Hostile incoming. It’s contaminated. Do not scan and don’t let it touch you.” If the contamination worked the way I thought it did I shouldn’t be able to pass it to another SecUnit but who the hell knew. “Don’t scan or connect with me, either, I might be a carrier.”

SecUnit 3 started to say, “Transport Perihelion was able to obtain that intel from retrieved—” Then it leapt and landed past me, pulled the weapon off its back just as TargetContact rounded the corridor. It fired a burst of explosive bolts and TargetContact reeled back, but the impacts didn’t dent the protective alien remnant coating.

“It doesn’t work,” I started to yell, but 3 aimed the next burst at the corridor ceiling. The impacts cracked the lighting track and shattered the material holding it in place. As chunks of stone hit the floor, 3 leapt back to me and grabbed me around the waist.

It said, “Please hold on. I will—”

“I know!” I yelled and grabbed it around the shoulders. “Just go!”

It bounded up the stairs, two levels, three levels. (Being carried like this was really uncomfortable, I can see why the humans don’t like it.) 3 called in its drones and the swarm formed a protective cloud around us.

We came out through a hatchway into daylight, running onto an open plaza, the one I had seen from the surface dock. TargetDrones lay scattered on the paving, dead when targetControlSystem went down. I didn’t see any Targets, but that was probably because a pathfinder sat in the center of the plaza shrieking on comm and audible: Warning: detonation imminent.

I said, “ART armed the pathfinders? And didn’t tell me?” That asshole.

“The humans were surprised, too,” 3 said.

ART’s shuttle dove over the structure’s ribs and dropped into the plaza. The hatch slid open and 3 bounded inside.

It dumped me in an acceleration chair and I had a view of TargetContact sprinting toward us. Then the hatch slammed shut and Arada was shouting “I’ve got them, go, go!”

The thrust almost knocked me out of the seat as the shuttle flung itself upward. (ART must be driving.) I was sitting on the safety webbing which was not helpful. 3 did what I would have done with a wounded human, and dropped into the seat next to me and stretched an arm across to hold me in place. From the pilot’s seat, Arada demanded, “SecUnit, are you all right?”

“Not really,” I said, “I’m infected with contaminated code. 2.0 tagged it as anomalous so ART can delete it. Tell it not to use a medical scanner on me.” Through the port I got a view of the causeway and the dots that were the Targets/Colonists who had been in the structure, running away.

“We know,” Arada told me, breathless from the acceleration. “The crew who escaped from the explorer knew about the scanning and Perihelion figured out how it was done.”

Of course it did. This sounded like a good time to let go and have that involuntary shutdown.

I was fading out when below us, the pathfinder exploded. ART said, TargetContact is offline .

So was I.

So I wish I could have stayed shut down through the whole thing and skipped all the painful parts, but no such luck.

I restarted by the time we reached ART, so I was able to limp out of the shuttle on my own. Which was great, then I collapsed on the deck and had another involuntary shutdown.

When I restarted again (and I don’t know if I’m underselling it but these rapid performance reliability drops and restarts were not pleasant or fun) I was still on the deck but surrounded by a bunch of unknown humans. One reached for my shoulder and I jerked away and almost restarted again.

Amena’s voice said, “No, it doesn’t like to be touched!” And I realized these were not actually unknown humans.

Ratthi and Arada sat on the deck in front of me with Amena hovering in the background. The others gathered around were Kaede, Iris, and Matteo. ART’s humans wore clean clothes and various medical stabilizing packs, and they all smelled a lot better. Two of ART’s big repair drones hovered nearby, and SecUnit 3 stood over to the side. It had taken its armor off, or been told to take its armor off. It wore a set of ART’s crew clothing and looked, if I was reading the body language right and I probably was, like it had absolutely no idea what to do.

Iris told me, “It’s all right, take it easy.”

Matteo was saying to Arada, “Kaede’s right, we’ll put together a run box so we can isolate the code—”

“Then Peri should be able to delete it—” Kaede added.

“Delete what?” I said.

“The code in your system,” Ratthi explained, tapping his own forehead like maybe I had also forgotten where my brain was. “The contaminated code. We can’t use the medical platform, until Perihelion gets that code out of you. But Overse and Thiago are getting a portable med unit that will be cut off from the feed. We’re going to take care of your physical injuries right here, then by that point, Perihelion should be able to deal with the contamination.”

Physical injuries. Oh right, I had been shot a lot and was still leaking. “What’s our situation?”

“No one’s shooting at us and we aren’t sending armed pathfinders at anyone,” Ratthi told me. “Everyone is back on the ship. And we have some Barish-Estranza personnel to send back to their transport, but we want to make certain they’re free of the remnant contamination first.”

Matteo asked Ratthi something technical about the biohazard testing and I stopped listening, mostly. From what they were saying, it looked like I/2.0 had been right about how the contamination was spread. So, it’s nice to be right, when you’re leaking and parts of you have fallen off.