Марта Уэллс - Exit Strategy

Mensah turned, gripped the collar of my jacket with both hands, and said, “No.”

Everyone got quiet. Ratthi and Gurathin, Pin-Lee still fishing in the bag for hard currency cards, the crew outside the hatch, the voice on the comm. I suddenly needed to see Mensah’s face and I dropped the shuttleSec camera views and looked down at her.

She looked mad and exhausted, which was exactly the way I felt. I sent, You have no idea what I am .

She tilted her head and looked more mad. I know exactly what you are. You’re afraid, you’re hurt, and you need to calm the fuck down so we can get through this situation alive.

I said, I am calm. You need to be calm, to take over a gunship.

Mensah’s eyes narrowed. Security consultants don’t get their clients into unnecessary pitched battles for control of their rescue ship . She added, Because that would be stupid .

She wasn’t afraid of me. And it hit me that I didn’t want that to change. She had just been through a traumatic experience, and I was making it worse. Something was overwhelming me, and it wasn’t the familiar wave of not-caring.

Fine, I sent. I sounded sulky, because I was sulky.

I hate emotions.

“Good,” she said aloud. “Pin-Lee, do we have the money for this idiotic unnecessary bond?”

“Yes.” Pin-Lee waved a handful of hard currency cards. “If that’s not enough, I have our account info, I can transmit an authorization—”

Mensah finished glaring at me and turned around. The crew who had just watched her face down a rogue SecUnit, in person and via the powered armor’s helmet cam, stared wide-eyed. She said, “Since we are bonded clients, may we come aboard while we settle our bill?”

There was a hesitation, then the comm said, “Please come aboard, Dr. Mensah.”

I told you the thing about SecUnits not being allowed to sit on human furniture while on or off duty. So the first thing I did when the crew led us through the lock and down the corridor to a passenger seating area was to sit down on the padded bench.

(I’m not sure it made any impression on the humans. Humans don’t notice these things. But it felt good to me.)

Gurathin sat on the bench against the opposite wall and Ratthi plopped down next to me. This was a big compartment a couple of levels below the flight deck, probably used for meetings with non-company personnel, since it was isolated from the rest of the ship’s structure and the upholstery was relatively new.

The ship’s security crew had stationed themselves in the wide corridor outside the compartment, though the one in powered armor had retreated out of immediate view. (The crew thought they had the SecSystem locked down so I couldn’t get into it. They were wrong.) One crew member was trying to convince Dr. Mensah to go to a cabin to rest, but Dr. Mensah was busy checking over the new bond agreement while Pin-Lee arranged payment.

Listening to the SecSystem’s audio, I heard a crew member in the corridor say, “I’ve never seen one out of armor. They really do look human.”

I made a gesture in that direction that I had only seen in the shows that were rated high on the obscenity scale. Gurathin saw me and made a choking noise.

Then Mensah gave Pin-Lee her okay on the bond agreement, and walked over to glare down at me. In a low voice, she said, “I am so furious with you.”

Ratthi drew back nervously. (Me, Ratthi wasn’t afraid of, but when Dr. Mensah was mad it was better to be in another room.) He said, “Uh, do you want to speak in private—”

“You should sit down,” I told her. “You’ve been through a traumatic experience. Tell them you need the MedSystem’s Retrieved Client Trauma Evaluation protocol—”

“It’s right, you really should get a medical evaluation—” Gurathin began, Ratthi and Pin-Lee chiming in to agree.

“Never mind that.” Mensah had no intention of being distracted. “You stayed behind to get yourself killed.”

Okay, aside from the fact that that was actually my intention at the time, that was not my fault. “They wouldn’t have let me through. I told PortSec if they let you through to the shuttle, I’d stay behind.”

That stopped her. Her brow furrowed. “Is that why you stayed?”

I could have lied. I didn’t want to. “Mostly,” I said. I looked at her with my actual eyes again. “I wanted to win.”

Ratthi, Gurathin, and Pin-Lee all watched me. The company crew incompetently pretended not to try to eavesdrop. Dr. Mensah’s expression softened, just around the edges. Ratthi said, “Why did you come through, then, when Gurathin got the barrier open?”

“Because that last one was a Combat SecUnit and it was going to tear me apart. That’s not winning.” I wish I knew what winning was. And once I started telling the truth, it was hard to stop. “I don’t want to be here.”

Pin-Lee sat down beside Ratthi. “We won’t be here for long. We’re going to rendezvous with a Preservation ship after this wormhole jump and get off this flying vending machine.” She glared toward the crew. “It’s like everything I hate about the corporates wrapped up in one heavily armed package.”

You could say that about me, too. I asked Dr. Mensah, “Then what?”

“That’s what you and I need to talk about,” she said. She glanced at the company crew. “Though let’s wait until we’re not being recorded—”

I lost the rest because I caught an alert from the bot pilot to the gunship’s human captain. We were on approach to the wormhole but the hostile was still tracking us. The ship’s SecSystem had just deflected an attempt to establish a connection via comm to the ship’s internal feed.

“Hostile engaging,” I said. I stood up automatically, but there was nowhere to go. This could be really bad. I didn’t know anything about ship-to-ship combat, but from the alert levels … Palisade couldn’t deliver a code attack via our comm, could they? Outside in the corridor the crew had all gone still, heads tilted, listening to the captain’s feed.

“What?” Ratthi said.

“They’re firing on us?” Mensah said.

“No. It’s a— Incoming!” Too late. Comm had just engaged and was receiving. Above us on the flight deck the captain yelled for someone to manually shut down the feed and someone else was ripping open panels to get to the components. SecSystem snapped into defense mode and walled off life support and weapons. I yelled, “Disengage from the feed, now!” Ratthi and Pin-Lee fumbled to take their interfaces out of their ears, and I cut the connection to Mensah’s implant and threw a wall around Gurathin’s internal augment. Two augmented humans in the corridor fell to the deck, writhing, and I threw walls around them, too. SecSystem should do that, but it was busy fighting off the commands to open the airlocks and allow the ship to decompress.

On the flight deck someone said, “How—How could they—”

Someone replied, “Shitfuckers have our codes, they overrode comm protection—”

Palisade had obtained a set of company comm codes, and had tried the list on our comm until they found one that worked. (Like my list of drone control keys that I used to take over the security drones on Milu and in the TranRollinHyfa port.) Once the connection was made, they had delivered a code bundle to the ship’s feed. Not standard malware or killware, not something I had ever seen before. It was in the ship’s systems, trying to cause a catastrophic drive failure, trying to take down life support, jamming the bot pilot’s command system. SecSystem flung up walls but the hostile code was eating right through them. It was eating SecSystem.

SecSystem lost another wall and the main airlock started to cycle. I slipped into the ship’s control feed and caused a heat surge in all airlock hatches, fusing everything but the manual controls. I tried to cut all non-manual access to engineering but I was too late, the drive started to fail, our engines were cycling down. Sensors showed the Palisade ship on approach. On the flight deck the captain had given two orders to fire main weapons but the bot pilot no longer had access. Gravity ceased abruptly in a backbone tube, trapping the humans trying to get manual access to systems. The captain was trying to assemble the armed retrieval team to repel boarding, but half were augmented humans who were now incapacitated by the attack on their augments and the other half were fighting sealed doors to reach their defensive positions.