by Martha Wells
Amena’s expression was flat and stony. She pretended to need to fiddle with her wound pack, so she didn’t have to look at them. “So did you find a lost colony?”
“We were attacked on the way there,” Eletra said, as Ras was drawing breath to answer.
I found a larger cabin that looked like it had been deliberately trashed. Clothing lay trampled on the floor, some of it in the blue of ART’s crew uniform. Hygiene items had been opened and dumped or smeared around on the small attached restroom. A couple of actual static art pieces and a holographic print of humans playing musical instruments had been thrown on the floor and broken. Someone had tried to break a display surface, but hadn’t managed it, and it floated sideways, still showing a static image of two male humans, not young, maybe Mensah’s age or older, but that was as much as I could guess. (I was no good at judging human ages.)
One had dark skin and no hair on the front half of his head, and the other was lighter, with short white hair. They were both smiling at the camera, with an embossed version of ART’s logo on the wall behind them. I could look them up in my archive of ART’s crew complement, but I didn’t want to.
I felt something build in my chest. I pulled the recording of my conversations with ART, the way it said “my crew.” It was bad enough that ART must be dead, it wasn’t fair that the humans it had loved so much were dead, too.
I wanted to find a bunch more algae-smelling gray snotty assholes and kill the shit out of every single one.
A sudden 5 percent dip in performance reliability made my knees go shaky and I leaned on the cabin hatch. For twelve seconds it seemed like a good idea to slide all the way down to the deck and just stay there.
But I should get back to Amena.
Also, after the Targets had rampaged through here, the deck was pretty disgusting.
In the medical suite, the conversation had moved back to me. (Oh goody.) Eletra was saying, “You really have to be careful. That SecUnit seems to have been altered to make it look less like a bot, but that doesn’t change their programming.”
“Hmm,” Amena said, not looking at her, still picking at the wound pack on her leg.
Ras put in, “I know you think it’s trying to protect you—”
“It’s not trying.” Amena’s tone was clipped. “It’s protecting me.”
“But they’re not reliable,” Ras persisted. “It’s because of the human neural tissue.”
Well, he wasn’t wrong.
Ras added, “They go rogue and attack their contract holders and support staff.”
Amena bit her lip and squinched up her eyes in a way that said she was suppressing an emotion, but I couldn’t tell what. “I wonder why that is,” she said in a flat voice.
On the way to medical, I walked through the galley and the classroom compartments, and swung by a supply locker and grabbed a pre-packed emergency ration bag. They had an awful lot of supplies in here for planetary exploration, not what you’d expect on a ship whose jobs were mapping and teaching and cargo.
As I turned down the corridor, I tapped Amena’s feed to tell her I was coming back and started reviewing my archive, comparing the time I had been aboard ART before with what I saw now. Did I actually know what ART and its crew did? I had never bothered to ask; Deep Space Research sounded boring. Almost as boring as guarding mining equipment.
In the medbay, Eletra was saying, “You’re very lucky it didn’t turn on you while you were being held on this ship. You must have been locked up here with it for days and days.”
Wait, what? Great, were the humans having problems perceiving reality? Even more than the usual problems humans have perceiving reality? That was all I needed. Amena was just going to have to deal with it, because I was busy.
Amena was baffled. “No, no, we just got here. Just a little while ago. Right before the gray people dragged me into that room.”
Ras rubbed his face, either concealing his expression or just genuinely unwell. Eletra looked pitying. “I think you’re confused.”
Amena’s expression scrunched up again, but she shook her head. “Look, SecUnit’s coming back, so you need to stop saying all this stuff about it. I know you believe it, but you’re wrong, and I don’t want to hear it. And I think maybe we’re both confused because—”
Maybe staring at space and teaching young humans to stare at space wasn’t all ART’s crew did. Maybe ART had let me think that.
Right, so I had drone input from the medical bay but I wasn’t paying attention to it. I was searching for images of stored supplies to compare and look for anomalies, missing items, other clues. So I only had a 1.4-second warning when I stepped through the hatch and Ras fired a weapon at me.
For a human, his aim was great.
6
Fortunately it was an energy weapon and not a SecUnit-head-busting projectile.
It still fucking hurt. I flinched and rammed into the side of the hatch (ow) and dove sideways to avoid the second blast. Except there wasn’t one, because Ras was flailing instead of aiming. Amena had jumped on his back and was trying to choke him out. (It was a good effort but she didn’t have the leverage to really clamp down with her forearm.)
Eletra stood nearby, waving her arms and yelling, “Stop! What are you doing? Stop!” which was frankly the most sensible thing I had heard a human say in hours. It also told me this wasn’t a planned attack, which is what stopped me from putting a drone through Ras’s face. (Also, I was running out of drones.)
If I sound calm, I was actually not calm. I thought I’d had control of the situation (sort of control, okay? don’t laugh) and then it had unraveled rapidly.
I pushed off the hatch and walked over to pick up the weapon Ras had dropped. It was like or possibly identical to or possibly actually was the tube-like energy weapon Target Two had used on me. Ras must have picked it up while I was distracted by having an emotional breakdown. (Yeah, that was a huge mistake.) It had caused pain in my organic tissue but it hadn’t disrupted any processes so I knew it would be no use on the targetDrones. But at least it should work on the Targets. I put it in my jacket pocket. Then I stepped in, kicked Ras in the back of the kneecap, and caught Amena around the waist. He hit the floor and I set her on her feet.
Amena was almost as angry as I was. “What’s wrong with you?” she shouted at Ras. She glared at Eletra, who made a helpless, baffled gesture. You know, if Ras was going to turn on me, he might have at least warned Eletra first so she wasn’t standing around wondering what the hell was going on.
Ras shoved to his feet and said, “You can’t trust—any of them! It could be any of them—They control them—” He staggered back away from us. His eyes were unfocussed. “You don’t—any of them—”
Amena’s furious expression turned confused. “Any of what?”
That was a good question. I’d seen humans do irrational things (a lot of irrational things) and encounter situations that made them act in ways that were counterproductive at best. (This was not the first time I’d been shot in the head by a human I was trying to protect, let’s put it that way.) But this was odd, even granting the fact that I’d physically intimidated Ras earlier.
Eletra winced and pressed a hand to her head. “Ras, that doesn’t make sense, what—” Then her eyes rolled up and she collapsed.
Amena made a grab for her, then flinched away when Ras folded up and hit the floor. Then Eletra started to convulse. Amena threw herself down on the deck, trying to support Eletra’s head. Ras lay in a tumble, completely limp.
Amena looked frantic. I was a little frantic, too. “They took some medication from the emergency kit,” she said. She jerked her head toward the open kit and the container beside it. “They’re supposed to be analgesics—could they be poisoned?”
It wasn’t a bad suggestion, but if this was something in the medication, I thought the reaction would involve bodily fluids and be way more disgusting. Amena wasn’t affected, so it wasn’t something spread by contact or transmitted through the
air system or the water containers. Eletra looked more like her nervous system was being jolted by a power source. Ras looked … Ras looked dead.
I stepped over to the emergency kit still sitting on the bench. It had some limited autonomous functions and had expanded and opened new compartments, responding to the humans’ distress. I took the small medical scanner it was trying to hand me and pointed it at Ras. It sent its report to my feed, with scan images of the inside of Ras’s body. A power source had jolted through the upper part of his chest, destroying the important parts there for pumping blood and breathing.
It looked, oddly, like what being punished by a governor module felt like—
Now there’s a thought.
I checked Scout Two in the control area foyer. The Targets had stopped listening at the sealed hatch and were gathered around Target Four, who now held a strange, bulky device. It was twelve centimeters across and a millimeter thick, with a flat old-fashioned solid-state screen. (I’d seen them on historical dramas.) All the Targets seemed excited about whatever it was showing them.
If it was something that made the Targets happy, it couldn’t be good.
My scan detected a tiny power source on both Eletra and Ras. It hadn’t been there earlier so something had activated it, most likely a signal from Target Four’s screen device. There was no time for finesse; I jammed the whole range.
Eletra slumped, limp and unconscious. If there’d been a last-ditch destroy-the-brain function, there was nothing I could do about it.
Scout Two now showed Target Four poking angrily at the screen as the others watched in obvious disappointment. Hah.
Amena, in the middle of yelling, “Will you stop just standing there and do something—” halted abruptly. The rest came out as a startled huff. She added, “Did you do that?”
“Yes.” I crouched down and lifted Eletra out of Amena’s lap. “This was caused by implants.”
I carried Eletra over to the nearest gurney and carefully set her down. Amena scrambled up and went to Ras. She reached for his arm and I said, “He’s dead.”
She jerked her hand back, then fumbled for the pulse in his neck. “What—How?”
I sent the medscanner’s images to her feed and she winced. “You said it was an implant? Is that like an augment?”
“No, it’s like an implant.” Augments were supposed to help humans do things they couldn’t otherwise do, like interface with the feed more completely or store memory archives. Augments that weren’t feed interfaces were meant to correct physical injuries or illnesses. Augments are helpful; implants are like governor modules.
I pointed the medscanner at Eletra. It found a raised temperature, increased heart rate, and increased respiration rate. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded bad. “When this happened, I had a drone view of the Targets in the central section using an unknown device.”
Amena pushed to her feet and stood beside Eletra’s gurney. She was accessing the medical scan data and her expression had that vague look that humans get when they’re reading in their feed. “That looks like an infection. Eletra said her back hurt.” Her face scrunching up with worry and fear, Amena carefully moved the dark hair away from Eletra’s neck, then half-turned her. She had to pull down the back of Eletra’s shirt to find it. Yeah, there was the implant.
Amena sucked in a breath. “That looks terrible.”
It was a metal ring, 1.1 centimeters wide, visible against the brown skin between Eletra’s shoulder blades. It sat in the middle of a rictus of swollen flesh that looked painful even to me, and that was saying something.
Normal external interfaces for humans were designed to look like all kinds of things, from carved natural wood to skin tones to jewels or stones or enamel art pieces to actual plain metal with a brand logo. And why would Eletra, who was an augmented human with an internal interface, need a second external one? And any remote chance that this was some kind of botched attempt at a medical or enhancement augment was outweighed by the fact that no human would put up with this when any MedSystem could fix it in a few minutes at most. And botched was putting it mildly; it looked like a bad human medic had jammed it in with their toes.
Amena was working the problem. “Why didn’t they tell us? We could have … Unless they didn’t know it was there. They said they were unconscious when they were brought aboard.” The consternation in her expression deepened. “Did Ras’s implant tell him to attack you? Or just make him so confused that he shot at the first person who walked in the door? These implants are obviously supposed to incapacitate them if they tried to escape, to keep them under control—”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” I told her. (One of the indispensable benefits of being a rogue SecUnit: not having to pretend to attentively listen to a human’s unnecessary explanations.) “I had one in my head.”
“Right.” She flicked a startled look at me. I love it when humans forget that SecUnits are not just guarding and killing things voluntarily, because we think it’s fun. “Then why did it take the gray people so long to activate the implants? Why didn’t they do it right after we escaped?”
Yeah, about that. I hadn’t kept her updated on my intel. “I don’t think the surviving Targets knew what happened when we were captured.”
Amena argued, “But that one Target got away.”
“I used my drones to kill that Target and a third one, after they locked themselves in the ship’s control area. The other Targets have been trying to get through the sealed hatch and seem to think we’re inside.” I sent Amena a section of my drone video from the control area foyer. “They may think Eletra and Ras are in there with us. Or they activated the implants to try to figure out where they are.”
Amena’s gaze went vague as she reviewed the clip on her feed. “Is that why they’re listening to the hatch?”
I checked the input. Yeah, they were back to that again. “My drone is playing a recording of a conversation.”
Amena lifted her brows. “Right, that’s really clever. Can you use the drones to threaten them and—”
I showed her the clip of the change to the Targets’ helmets. “No. This security update prevents that.”
Amena grimaced and rubbed her brow. “I see. So how do we get to the bridge?”
You know, it’s not like I’m half-assing this, I am actually trying my best despite the fuck-ups. I absolutely did not sound testy as I said, “I don’t know. I have a scout drone in the control area but it can’t access any of the systems.”
Amena stopped and looked at me with an incredulous expression. “So we’re locked out of the bridge and the bot pilot is gone and we don’t know what’s flying the ship.”
The good thing about being a construct is that you can’t reproduce and create children to argue with you. This time I did sound testy. “I’m working on it.” I turned the medical scanner’s image so I could see what was under Eletra’s implant. I really expected the shitty primitive governor module to have filaments extending directly into the human’s nervous system, like a normal augment. But there were no filaments; the images the scanner sent to our feed connection showed the implant was self-contained, narrowing to a blunt point.
Amena held up her hands. “Fine! Wow, you’re so touchy.” She added, “Okay, so if they knew these things were implanted, they would have asked us to help them. Even if they didn’t trust us…” Her brow furrowed again. “I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have.”
I agreed. They hadn’t even asked about the MedSystem, or the medical equipment in the emergency kit. If I was a human and I had this thing jammed in me and I happened to run into a fully stocked medical suite to hide, it would have been at the top of my to-do list.
“We have to get this thing out before it kills her, too.” Amena studied the diagrams and images the scanner sent into our feed. “It’s really primitive. It must have been causing the confusion and pain, but that wouldn’t make them forget it was there.”
I rotated the images so I could
make sure I was right about the depth. “No. Something else did that.”
“It’s not very good, for what it’s trying to do.” Amena made a violent jabbing motion at her own neck. “If you knew it was there, and you could get away from the person trying to zap you, you could pop it out with a knife.”
Note to self: Make sure Amena has no reason to jab at her own neck with a knife. “Not if you thought it was interwoven with your neural tissue.” At least when I dealt with my governor module, I’d had access to my own schematics and diagnostics.
Amena wasn’t listening. She went over to rummage in the emergency kit. “Her vital signs are getting worse.” She found a laser scalpel case and brandished it. “I’m going to try to take the implant out.”
“You have medic training.” It was worth asking.
“Basic training, sure.” I was making an expression again because she grimaced. “I know, I know! But you said we shouldn’t use the MedSystem and we have to do something.”
She wasn’t wrong. The kit was transmitting increasingly plaintive warnings. There was a lot of technical medical data to process but the conclusion was obvious that the activation had caused damage to Eletra, if not as much as it had to Ras. The kit was demanding we intervene soon.
Most of my medical knowledge came from watching MedCenter Argala, a historical drama series that had been popular twenty-seven corporate standard years ago and was still available for download on almost every media feed I had ever encountered. Even I knew it was inaccurate. I also found it kind of boring, so I’d only watched it once.
I held my hand out for the scalpel.
Amena hesitated. Did she think I was going to kill Eletra? I’d put up with way more annoying humans, including some that she was related to.
Then she handed the scalpel over, her expression a mix of relief and guilt. “I could do it if I had to.”
Huh. Amena wanted to help, maybe to prove herself. I said, “I know you could.” She hadn’t been bluffing about the neck-jabbing thing, I could tell.
