Марта Уэллс: Fugitive Telemetry

The historical story currently playing on the colony ship’s comm sounded interesting, so I set one of my inputs to record it as I carried the life-tender to the airlock. Following the instructions, I pulled the tabs, set the safety to active, tossed it into the lock, and cycled it through. It was old, but its sealed storage was designed to keep equipment functioning for long periods of time, just like everything else on this ship; it was how these old colony ships worked. (You couldn’t be on Preservation for more than five minutes without being forced to listen to a documentary about it.)

I just hoped all the documentaries were right.

The life-tender signaled the ship’s comm that it was ready and I stepped into the airlock and let it cycle shut. I could see the life-tender on the lock’s camera, where it had clamped itself around the outer hatch. Wow, that is just a bag, is what that is.

I didn’t need as much air as humans did, but I needed some, and it was really cold out there, in the colony ship’s shadow. This meant that if the life-tender failed it would take me longer to die so I’d have longer to feel dumb about it than a human would.

So here goes. I told my drones to get in my pockets and go dormant. Then I opened the hatch and leaned out to sort of float/fall into the tender. Okay, new problem. It’s really fucking dark.

The huge hull of the colony ship blocked any light from the primary, the station, the planet, whatever, which was probably why the hostile ship had picked this spot to hide.

It’s cold, it’s dark, whatever was generating the air smelled terrible, I’m in a bag in space. I thought about going back for the EVAC suit, but the chance that the hostiles were scanning for transponders on the station search and rescue channel was still hitting 96 percent. If what I was doing in this stupid bag was dumb, going out here with a beacon I couldn’t turn off or disguise was much more dumb.

Okay, fine, let’s just get it over with.

I sealed the bag’s entrance and let the ship’s hatch close. The tender was controlled via a local connection to its drive and navigation, so it could still be used if, say, your ship blew up and you couldn’t access its comm or feed. I had the location for the hostile ship and I fed it into the simple system, and my little bag headed off through the dark.

I carefully explored the control options, and wow, I now knew why the bag was described as “difficult to locate in a combat situation” because its power supply was so minimal it was almost nonexistent. Even my body heat was already causing condensation. I found the menu for monitoring life support, such as it was. The bag had lights but turning them on would just be stupid plus I didn’t really want to see what was happening.

Then the bag bumped (it wasn’t really a bump, it was more like a blorp) into something solid and stopped. I checked navigation and holy shit, we’re here.

The bag’s sensor system was primitive but it knew it had blorped itself up against the curving hull of a ship. I detected the ship’s feed connection but it was silent. Not locked down, just quiet as whoever was aboard tried to minimize contact.

Modules didn’t have an airlock, they relied on attaching to the transport or station cargo lock; I wouldn’t have been able to open the module’s hatch for the EVAC suit without killing everyone inside, so the plan had been to get into the hostile ship through its lock and then run around getting shot and murdering my way through whoever was aboard until I could get control. (I hadn’t used those exact words during the planning process with Indah and Aylen, but we all knew what we were talking about.) But my maybe-not-so-dumb bag made its own airlock, that was the whole point of it.

If I could get the refugees out of the module and over to the colony ship’s lock without the hostiles even realizing I was there, then the responder would be free to take over the hostile ship.

That plan was easier plus 100 percent less murdery. And I liked it better.

Huh. I liked it better because it wasn’t a CombatUnit plan, or actually a plan that humans would come up with for CombatUnits. Sneaking the endangered humans off the ship to safety and then leaving the hostiles for someone else to deal with, that was a SecUnit plan, that was what we were really designed for, despite how the company and every other corporate used us. The point was to retrieve the clients alive and fuck everything else.

Maybe I’d been waiting too long for GrayCris to show up and try to kill us all. I was thinking like a CombatUnit, or, for fuck’s sake, like a CombatBot.

I got the bag to blorp along the hull over to where the module should be, then along its side to where scan detected the outline of the module’s access hatch. Once the bag was in place, its automatic functions took over and it enlarged itself to completely cover the hatch. The bag assured me it had made a secure seal. Okay, it hadn’t lied to me so far.

Now this part might be tricky. I carefully felt around in the empty feed, looking for the ship’s bot pilot. Oh, there it was. It was a limited bot pilot, just there to steer and dock the ship and guide it through wormholes. It was startled to be accessed, even though I was spoofing a Port Authority ID. It’s usually easy to make friends with low-level bot pilots, but this one had been coded to be adversarial, directed to operate in stealth mode, and was wary of incursion attempts. It tried to alert its onboard SecSystem, but as the old saying (which I just made up) goes, if you can ping the SecUnit, it’s way too late.

I took control, disabled the SecSystem, and put the bot pilot in sleep mode. Having to keep it dormant was annoying, because it limited my ability to use the ship’s functions, but it meant the hostiles wouldn’t be able to fly off toward the wormhole or fire weapons at the responder or whatever else they felt like shooting at.

Next I accessed the module’s hatch control. I didn’t want to risk trying to use the comm or feed to check if anybody was inside, because not alerting the hostiles was the whole point of going in this way.

I checked the bag’s airlock seal again, then told the module to open its access hatch.

Oh, shit, my stupid, stupid feed ID that identified me as a SecUnit. Just as the hatch slid up, I switched it to the last one in my buffer, the Kiran ID I’d used on TranRollinHyfa.

The lighted interior would have blinded me if my eyes worked that way. I meant to say something before I went inside but the bag had no grav function and the module did, so let’s put it this way, my entrance was abrupt and not graceful.

The module was a big oblong container with ribbed supports and racks folded into the bulkheads and no padding anywhere, making it clear it was designed for cargo, not passengers. It was colder than the bag and the air smelled wrong. The bunch of humans inside screamed and threw themselves away from the hatch that from their perspective had apparently just opened into empty space. Then they realized I was standing there and they screamed again.

Fortunately I had a lot of experience being screamed at and stared at by terrified humans. It was never comfortable, and I couldn’t let my drones deploy so I had to look at them with my actual eyes, but I was sort of used to that by now. Also, I’d spent a whole trip through a wormhole pretending to be an augmented human security consultant for humans who badly needed one, so I had coping mechanisms in place. Sort of.

I held up my hands and said, “Please calm down. I’m from Preservation Station Security and I’m here to get you to safety.” They huddled at the other end of the module, still staring, but I thought that was shock and surprise. I added, “You’ve been abducted by whoever is aboard this ship, they were not sent by your contact Lutran.”