Марта Уэллс - Exit Strategy

I flailed. I tried to help SecSystem but it was dissolving under my hands.

The bot pilot couldn’t speak in words like ART, but in my head I felt its terror. It sent Code: System System. Assistance. Endangered.

It was trying to ask me for help using the company codes, the way I’d asked for help for my clients.

Fuck this. GrayCris is not going to win.

I slipped all the way into the ship, into the pilot bot’s hardware. I’d seen ART do it.

(Yes, ART’s processing capacity is much larger than mine. I’ll address that issue when it comes up, which is real soon now.)

I suddenly had a different body, hard vacuum on a metal skin, I saw the approaching ship with my eyes, not just sensors. It had dispatched a boarding shuttle that was coming in fast, heading toward the gunship’s main docking lock. I pulled back in; there was no time for sightseeing. The bot pilot wanted to know what we should do. It was a good question.

Inhabiting the same hardware like this, the bot pilot and I could communicate almost instantaneously. I pulled SecSystem’s analysis of the attacker so we could both examine it. It wasn’t just a code sequence like malware or killware. It was a conscious bot, moving through the feed like I did, like ART, but with no physical struc ture to go back to; that was why it was so fast. It was like a disembodied combat bot.

The bot pilot asked if the Attacker was a construct created from human neural tissue, rather than a bot, and indicated points in the analysis that would confirm that theory.

I told it that was worse, and better. A disembodied construct would be more vicious, but it would also be easier to trick.

I had an idea I outlined for the bot pilot. If we could trap the Attacker’s code bundle in a contained area and destroy it, we could regain control of the affected systems. But to get the Attacker to go into a contained area, we needed bait. We needed to know what the Attacker wanted/had been sent to do.

Bot pilot said that it wanted to destroy the ship and crew.

I said there had to be a reason. There was no profit for GrayCris in killing us, and a lot of risk in antagonizing the bond company by destroying a ship this expensive.

I reactivated my body, standing rigid in the passenger seating area. Ratthi was out in the corridor, doing rescue breathing on an augmented human crew member who had collapsed due to the attack on her augments. Gurathin was out there, too, both hands in a panel access, holding a corridor hatch open so crew could bypass the backbone and get to the drive. Pin-Lee and Mensah both sat on the floor with two crew members. All four had portable manual interfaces open and were frantically entering code, shoring up SecSystem’s walls. They weren’t fast enough, but what was left of SecSystem probably appreciated the thought.

I said, “Dr. Mensah, why do you think GrayCris is doing this? What do they want?”

Everybody flinched. “What is it doing?” a crew member demanded. “It could have been taken over by the—”

“Shut up,” Dr. Mensah snapped at the crew member. To me, she said, “We think it’s Milu. They must think you have the data you took from Milu with you.”

“It’s got to be that,” Pin-Lee added, not looking up from her display surface. “They could have killed us as soon as we arrived on TranRollinHyfa, but they wanted the money. It’s only been since they realized you were here that things got violent.”

You know, I bet that’s it. And I bet it had something to do with the memory clip I took from Wilken and Gerth. CrayGris must know it existed, must believe I had it. They were too late, since it was in the Preservation system by now, but I doubt they were going to believe that. But it did give me something to work with. “I need someone to trigger a manual disengage of the shuttle we arrived in.”

Mensah dropped her interface and shoved to her feet. “We’ll do it. Pin-Lee—”

“Coming!”

“Thank you for your assistance,” my buffer said, as I shut down again and went back to the bot pilot.

Back in accelerated time, I explained to the bot pilot what I wanted to try. It was fighting for control of its weapon systems, trying to follow the captain’s order to fire. It showed me an intel fragment from the boarding shuttle: manifest suggested a Combat SecUnit was aboard, along with an augmented human boarding team.

Yeah, we couldn’t let that shuttle lock on.

I hadn’t made a copy of the memory clip, but I still had all that data I had recorded on the trip to Milu, all those cycles of Wilken and Gerth talking about not much of anything. It had been analyzed and compressed, but it might resemble the parameters of what Attacker was searching for long enough to make this work.

I couldn’t risk cameras or feed, so I walked my body out of the passenger area and into the shuttle access corridor. I’d fused that hatch, too, but Mensah and Pin-Lee had the panel open for the emergency disengage. “Wait for my signal,” I said.

I told bot pilot we were going to have to make this good. It agreed, and we worked out what we were going to do.

Then bot pilot disengaged SecSystem.

I knew we had to do it but it was terrifying to be so vulnerable. I could feel Attacker bearing down on bot pilot, on me. I told bot pilot we needed to protect this important information so the company could retrieve it later and that I would hide it in the shuttle. Bot pilot ripped the confused ShuttleBotPilot out of its memory core and I dumped the data bundle into its place.

And Attacker transferred itself into the shuttle’s system.

Three things happened at once: (1) ShuttleSecSystem walled the shuttle’s comm system. (2) Bot pilot deleted its own comm system codes and I overloaded and fused its hardware. (3) My body told Dr. Mensah and Pin-Lee, “Now.”

Pin-Lee’s hands moved in the panel and Dr. Mensah worked the controls. The shuttle disengaged.

The gunship was moving slowly at that point, so the shuttle didn’t drop very far away, but with our comms fried it might as well have been on the other side of the wormhole. Attacker was gone, trapped in the shuttle.

Hah, I thought. Take that, you fucker .

Ship’s feed and system codes were trashed, but bot pilot was already reasserting control. SecSystem did the system equivalent of staggering drunkenly to its feet. Someone on the flight deck said, “Oh, mothergods, we’re clear!”

Bot pilot regained control of its weapon system and queried the captain. The captain said, “Confirm, fire.”

I stayed long enough to enjoy the boarding shuttle disappearing in one explosive burst, and the multiple impacts breaching the Palisade ship’s hull, then pulled my scattered code together and dropped back into my body. It felt weird.

Mensah and Pin-Lee still stood in the corridor, watching me worriedly. “We’re clear,” I told them.

Pin-Lee made an excited whooping noise and Mensah grabbed her and swung her around.

I felt weird. Very weird. Very bad.

Performance reliability at 45 percent and dropping. Catastrophic failure—

I felt my body crumple, but I didn’t feel myself hit the deck.

MY MEMORY WAS INfragments. I didn’t feel great about it, but it wasn’t the disaster it would have been for a full bot. My human neural tissue, normally the weak link in my whole data storage system, couldn’t be wiped. I had to rely on it to put the fragments back in order and unfortunately its access speed was terrible.

It was taking fucking forever.

I wandered through random images, bursts of pain, landscapes, corridors, walls. Wow, that was a lot of walls.

(Unidentified voices on audio: “Any change?”