Марта Уэллс: Rogue Protocol

The silence was still weirdly unnerving. The station was triangle-shaped and smaller than RaviHyral. The scan showed two ships in dock and a scatter of shuttles, a fraction of its capacity.

Ship had moved into docking position before I finally heard anything on the feed. The welcome message sounded normal enough, but the station index looked like the info system had glitched. There was a list of businesses and services, but each entry had been updated with a closed/inactive notice. So the place might not be haunted, but it was teetering on the edge of dead/inactive status.

While I waited for Ship to finish docking, I checked the results of my analysis. Wilken and Gerth were security consultants, hired by a fact-finding research group contracted by GoodNightLander Independent. GI had filed the abandonment markers on GrayCris’ deserted terraforming facility, and set up the tractor array to protect it from disintegration, and now they were starting the process to take formal possession. The research group’s job was to go into the facility and to make a report on its status.

This was exactly the kind of contract that bond companies supply SecUnits for, the kind of contract I had done more times than I still had in my memory. But from Wilken and Gerth’s conversations over the past twenty cycles, it was clear there was no bond company, no SecUnits. I tried not to take it personally.

(If a bond company with SecUnit security had been involved, I would have had to abort this… whatever it was I was doing. The change in my configuration would fool scans but not another SecUnit, and any Unit that detected me would report it to their HubSystem immediately. I sure as hell would have reported me. Rogue SecUnits are fucking dangerous, trust me on that.)

While I was waiting for Ship to finish its docking procedure, I figured the clanking of the docking process would mask any noise from small movements. I pulled my knapsack around, opened the skin of my right arm where it met the edge of my energy weapon, and inserted all the memory clips I’d bought into the space. They felt weird and bulky, but I’d get used to it. I was going to leave my knapsack here in the locker.

We docked, and Wilken and Gerth gathered their gear and went out the airlock into the station. As I unpacked myself from the locker, I used the station’s public feed to hack its security system. Most of the cameras weren’t active, and the scans were checking exclusively for environmental safety and damage detection. They were more worried about their equipment failing than people attempting theft or sabotage, but maybe that was because there weren’t that many people.

Once I’d repacked the locker and made sure I hadn’t left any traces of my presence, I poked around a little to see if the humans had left anything behind. No luck. I hesitated, considering Ship’s drones. With not many cameras to rely on, drones would be nice. But the repair drones were much larger than the ones I was used to working with, mostly to accommodate the little arms and hands they needed for maintenance. I decided depriving Ship of any of them wasn’t worth it.

I did make a few other adjustments. I had Ship note itself in the port’s schedule as under maintenance and made it think it needed my authorization to leave. Since Ship took care of itself and the company that owned it didn’t even have so much as a kiosk in this system, I didn’t think anybody would bother to check on it as long as it didn’t outstay its schedule by more than a few cycles. With so few ships in dock, I didn’t want to get stuck here.

When I cycled through Ship’s lock, the embarkation area was empty. A lack of adequate lighting created lots of shadows, which didn’t disguise the scuff marks and stains on the big floor panels. A lone food wrapper drifted along in the breeze from the air recirc, like they weren’t even running the cleaners anymore. There were no drones, no hauler bots. There were two big bot-piloted lifters outside now removing Ship’s cargo modules for transfer, and I was glad to be able to hear them banging around out there and sending each other data over the station’s mostly silent feed. I don’t like having to navigate halls crowded with humans staring at me and making eye contact, but the opposite was oddly just as creepy.

I found Gerth and Wilken on one of the few working security cameras and started after them. They were heading down the embarkation hall, not up to the habitation levels. There was no tourist map info in the feed, but hacking the cameras gave me access to the station’s maintenance system and I pulled a schematic from there. All the areas except for what was essential for minimum station operation were shut down. I wondered if GoodNightLander Independent’s petition for reclamation from abandonment was popular up here on the transit station. I already didn’t like this place much and I didn’t have to live here.

I have code for freezing cameras and deleting myself from them that I’ve used under much more difficult circumstances, and I altered it to work with the station’s proprietary security system. Though really, the biggest danger was a human spotting me from down the terminal and thinking, Hey, who’s that? Fortunately the station was mostly dark.

I trailed Wilken and Gerth to the end of the embarkation hall and up the ramp toward what the schematic said was the Port Authority/Cargo Control offices.

As I passed the lock junction at the top of the ramp something bright and colorful popped up right in front of me and I nearly screamed. It was an ad for a cargo service, created by marker paint on the floor that reacted to movement. It threw a little video into the feed, too, just in case you somehow missed the glowing thing in your face. Usually these markers are only used for emergency procedures because they work even if the power is down. I had never seen them used for ads before. The whole point of markers was that they were the only thing visible in a power outage so it would be easy to see them. It was hard enough trying to get stupid humans to follow the markers to safety without ads popping up obscuring the emergency route—

I reminded myself it wasn’t my job to get humans to safety anymore.

I still hated the marker ads.

I checked the cameras again and saw Wilken and Gerth had found signs of life in the Port Authority area. They stood outside an office center with three levels of bubble windows looking out over what should be the station mall. It was an open plaza area with a couple of tube transports arcing overhead, and a big globular display that was currently on standby hovering in the air. It was surrounded by multi-levels of dark shadowy occupation blocks and empty fronts for places that should be cafés, hotels, cargo brokers, transit offices, tech shops, and so on. Much of it looked unfinished, like no one had ever moved in, and the rest had closed, nothing left behind but a few stray floating display surfaces.

I turned into a corridor that would have led away from the Port Authority district into the main habitation block, if there had been one. I walked in the near-darkness until I found an empty cubby prepared for something that had never been installed, and crouched down inside it. I could monitor the cameras now without worrying about any random station personnel spotting me. A maintenance/weapons scanner drone brushed my feed, and I grabbed it and got control. It was on a desultory patrol outside the PA offices and I used it to give me better views and audio than the static security camera.

Wilken and Gerth were talking to two new humans. There was also a human-form bot standing nearby. I hadn’t seen one in a while in person, just on the entertainment feed. They aren’t popular in corporation territory, because there’s not a lot of things they can do that task-specific bots can’t do better, and with the feed available their data storage and processing ability isn’t that exciting. Unlike constructs, they don’t have any cloned human tissue, so they’re just a bare metal bot-body that can pick up heavy things, except not as well as a hauler bot or any other kind of cargo lifter.