Марта Уэллс - Rogue Protocol

Abene was all for hurrying and I didn’t want to give Wilken time to argue. Abene said, “Yes, go ahead.”

I started up the corridor, walking faster. Wilken hesitated, then followed me, her powered armor letting her catch up. “Hold it,” she said. I stopped, to humor her, and because I could tell from the feed she was checking the schematic. “I see. Let’s move.”

I let Wilken lead the way.

We followed the tube that bypassed the central node to curve toward engineering. I’d been scanning automatically for drones, but I was still turning up a negative result. I tapped Miki’s feed. Have you checked the ship recently?

I’m monitoring Kader’s feed for Don Abene and checking the onboard system status every 2.4 seconds, SecUnit. Ejiro is in the medical suite and is expected to fully recover.

This was the first time I’d heard Miki sound even minimally annoyed. I was vaguely encouraged by that, for some reason. Acknowledged, just checking.

Miki sent me a smile glyph. It’s good to check on our friends.

Well, I’d asked for that.

The tube curved ahead and, as I’d suspected, I saw the shadows and light play that indicated big windows in both walls. What we were about to do was an obvious tactic, and the combat bots could have sent some miniature drones up here to see if we tried it. But I wasn’t picking up any hint of surveillance, movement, or suspicious static on my scan. It was support for the theory that they didn’t have an on-site controller; the schematic didn’t show that these access tubes had windows, it had just seemed likely given the rest of the facility’s design. That wasn’t something a combat bot was going to pick up on.

I stopped inside the shadow of the opaque part of the tube, and Wilken halted nearby. In the feed, I saw she was adjusting the magnification on her helmet cam.

One side of the transparent tube looked down at the engineering pod’s hub. It was only twenty-two meters away at this point, and we had a view through the big curving roof, identical to the one in the geo pod. Wilken put her helmet cam against the tube wall, then sent me the video.

I could see the movement and extrapolate the positions myself, but the greater detail was nice.

One combat bot stalked across the hub floor as we watched, passing under a central sculptural structure that must have been part staircase to the upper gallery level, and part artistic statement. Wilken’s scope registered powered movement in the upper level, and I could tell by the pattern it was a flight of combat drones. Most of my contracts used the much smaller (cheaper) model, designed for intel and better for collecting the clients’ proprietary data, as well as keeping an eye on your base perimeter and making sure nothing snuck up on your teams in the field. These were the bigger model that had intel capacity, extra shielding, and an onboard energy weapon.

Still scanning, Wilken muttered, “So we’ve got one more combat bot, plus the drones.”

We had at least two more combat bots; one was standing back under the shadow of the gallery. Wilken had missed it but I was extrapolating its existence based on the energy patterns Wilken’s scope had picked up. I was willing to bet there were one or two more in reserve, or active somewhere else in the facility. Probably between us and the shuttle, because that’s how these things work.

Then Wilken said, “There’s the target.”

By “target” she meant her client Hirune, lying on the floor next to the foot of the staircase. (You should never refer to the clients as targets; you don’t want to get confused at the wrong moment.) (That’s a joke.) She lay curled on her side, facing away from us, and I couldn’t tell if she was alive. There was something else that worried me. “Why did they choose the engineering pod?”

We had to pass through the central node to get there, and unless there was a trap set there, the atmospheric pod was closer and better defended, as it only had the one entrance. The engineering pod had one access through the central node and a second tube branching off from the production pod, plus a lift junction in the hub, right under that gallery.

“No telling what goes on in bot brains,” Wilken said, then threw a glance at me. I stared straight ahead. If there was one thing good about this situation, it was reinforcing how great my decisions to (a) hack my governor module and (b) escape were. Being a SecUnit sucked. I couldn’t wait to get back to my wild rogue rampage of hitching rides on bot-piloted transports and watching my serials. Wilken added, “Let’s go. I’ve got a plan.”

Yeah, I’ve got a plan, too.

Now that we knew where the combat bots were, Wilken had us take the central node access to the production pod, where we could walk across the alternate tube access to the engineering pod. Or where I could walk across the alternate tube access, because that was her plan.

“We’ll send the SecUnit in to distract them, and then I’ll go in to get Hirune,” Wilken told Abene.

Miki cocked its head. Abene’s brow furrowed, and the look she threw at me was startled. “That’s suicide, surely.”

Wilken said patiently, “It’s a SecUnit. That’s what they do.”

Miki signaled alarm through the feed. This is not a good plan, SecUnit.

Abene’s expression went hard again. “It’s against the GI standards of operation.”

Wilken lifted her brows. “Do you want Hirune back?”

I watched Abene’s face. She was struggling, torn between her fear for Hirune and the thought of sending me into what was probably going to be a terrible but at least abrupt death. It was interesting to watch, because she knew I was a SecUnit. She grated out, “There has to be another way. Consultant Rin would surely not allow this.”

But she had said she had never seen or worked with a SecUnit before, and Miki didn’t even have an entry in its knowledge base for it. And Abene was a human with a pet robot. She might think of me as Consultant’s Rin pet, like Miki was hers.

We didn’t have time to argue, and I really didn’t want anybody thinking about Consultant Rin, whose fictional existence seemed to be increasingly flimsy, at least to me. I said, “It’s all right, Don Abene. It’s what I do.” It was still extremely difficult not to sound ironic.

On our private connection, I said to her and Miki, It’s all right, I have another plan. It’s safer for Hirune.

Are you sure? Abene said, then, You don’t want to tell Wilken your plan.

No, I didn’t, mostly because I didn’t want her giving me orders I had to ignore. Also because I had only a vague idea of what I wanted to do; most of it was going to be created on the fly. You’re my client. You can monitor me on this connection. I told Wilken, “We should go now. Give me your weapon.”

“What?” Wilken didn’t fall back into a firing position, but the way the armor shifted over her joints made me think that was her first impulse.

I said, “If I’m going in first, I’ll need a projectile weapon.” I just wanted to see what she’d do.

“No, I’m going to follow you in,” Wilken said, not so patiently. “I’ll be at the hatch junction between the production pod corridor and the tube, to give you cover.” She started up the corridor, telling Abene, “Wait here. If I send you a feed message to run, get back to the shuttle.” I followed her, like a good little SecUnit/killing machine.

Behind me, Miki moved to watch us head away up the corridor, sending its camera-view to Abene.

Once we were out of earshot, Wilken muted her comm and feed and said, “Any word from Consultant Rin?”

“No, the station feed isn’t accessible from here.” Which Wilken knew. “I may be able to reach her on comm if you need to speak to her.” I could fake that, but I’d need a little time to work on it.