Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  I’ll meet you there, I told her, and started out of the engineering monitoring area. I should have at least two point five spare minutes, so I went ahead with the hack of targetControlSystem.

  The thing that had protected it so far was the fact that it didn’t interact with the feed or with interfaces the way every other system I’d ever encountered had. But Target Five had accessed targetControlSystem and been responded to, so that told me what channel to concentrate on and what kind of transmissions it would accept. And it also told me I was going to need to go old school to break this fucker.

  I tossed together a code bundle that duplicated the signal sent by the Targets’ screen device, copied it a hundred times, made it self-replicating so all my copies were copying themselves, then sent the whole thing to targetControlSystem.

  ART would have laughed at an attack like that. (Actually, ART would have laughed at the part where it sent back a code bundle that would have eaten my face.) But I had a theory that the reason the Targets weren’t trying to access most of ART’s systems was that their targetControlSystem lacked the ability to effectively use ART’s architecture.

  Then I got an alert from a sentry drone. It was on the hatch into the quarters module, the first hatch I’d sealed to create our safe zone. It couldn’t get a visual of any targetDrones, but an energy build-up near the hatch indicated a weapon or tool was being used on the controls. Uh-oh.

  I started to run, following the curving corridor back out of the engineering module. I checked Scout Two in the control area foyer, just in time to see Targets Five and Six race out of its camera range.

  When I said everything kept happening at once, it had mostly been an exaggeration, but now everything was actually happening at once. Something must have alerted them to the safepod on the hull.

  I had an option, but it was a terrible idea. But it was also the only way to get Arada and the others inside in time. Amena, our safe zone is about to be compromised and I need to deal with it. Can you get to the airlock to cycle Arada and the others in? I was assuming targetControlSystem wasn’t going to be cooperative about admitting visitors. Plus, it was a little busy right now.

  Amena had been pacing Medical, anxiously listening in on the hurried conversation in the safepod as they prepared to abandon it. She stopped, muted her comm, and said, Yes, can you give me a map?

  I sent her our safe zone map with the fastest route to the airlock highlighted. You’ll have your squad of drones ahead of you. I’ll send an alert and another route if they encounter anything.

  Understood. She started for the door, then stopped to pick up the Targets’ energy weapon and tuck it into her jacket pocket. Then she dodged sideways and grabbed a container out of the pile of supplies on the bench.

  I meant to enlarge the image to see what she’d taken but I had intel coming in from the sentry drone that the safe zone hatch had just been breached. At the engineering module exit, I took a different route, through the hatchway into the cargo handling station and out to the corridor that ran down the outside of the central module toward the quarters hatch. If I couldn’t get in front of them, I had to come up from behind.

  There were three possible reasons the Targets might have acted now: (1) they had received intel from targetControlSystem that the safepod was on the outside of the hull and interpreted its presence as an attack, (2) now that we’d left the wormhole and were presumably at our destination they knew their reinforcements would be coming soon and felt it was now relatively safe to attack us, or (3) they were expecting a supervisor to arrive at any moment and wanted to look proactive. With my luck, it was a combination of all three.

  My drones zipping ahead of me, I reached the far end of the central module and ducked through two connecting corridors. I lost three drone contacts as they reached the passage to the quarters hatch but I didn’t slow down. I’d gone low in the last two encounters, and with combat drones, even weird unfamiliar ones, it was best to assume there was an active learning component. So I accelerated and as I rounded the corner I ran up the bulkhead.

  Two targetDrones waited for me near the deck and I landed on one before it could change position. I smashed the second as it jolted toward my head. The hatch had been cut open, the locks drilled and partially melted. I ordered my drones to drop back; I hadn’t had time to work on countermeasures for the Targets’ protective suits and I knew I was going to regret that.

  I lost one of Amena’s drone contacts and sent her an alert. She was in a corridor near a junction she would have to cross to get to the airlock and there was no alternate route. I told her, Go back to Medical.

  No time, Amena said, and stepped back to press herself against the bulkhead. I think something’s wrong with the safepod.

  I could have argued about that but there wasn’t time and she was right. And I’d finally gotten a view of the container she’d taken from the emergency supplies, the one she was currently holding clutched to her chest. It was the fire suppresser Ras had pointed out.

  I slammed through the connecting passage and out into the next corridor.

  Targets Five and Six spun to face me, pointed their clunky square energy weapons at me. Four targetDrones hovered beside them.

  Two turns beyond was the junction Amena needed to pass through, so I needed to a) keep them here or b) kill them.

  Let’s go with option b.

  Amena’s drones clustered protectively around her as she hit the release on the fire suppresser. The chemical blast shot out and Amena hit what she aimed at because suddenly my drones could see the approaching targetDrone. The burst of chemical wash had coated the targetDrone’s casing and disrupted the camouflage. (File under save-for-later: this confirms the camouflage is a physical effect, something in the design visible on their casing, not an unknown type of transmitted interference.) The targetDrone wavered sideways, then lurched down the corridor, probably with its propulsion and sensors damaged. Amena ducked around the corner and sprinted toward the junction.

  Staring at me, Target Five said something in that language with no translation. Target Six made a dismissive gesture and started to turn back toward the foyer I absolutely had to keep them away from. As Target Five lifted his weapon and the targetDrones shot forward, I moved.

  My drones couldn’t see the targetDrones due to the stealth material, but I could. I pulled an estimate of the coordinates from my scan and sent a drone toward each targetDrone with orders to make surface contact. One overshot and had to loop back but all four managed a landing. With the contact drones for a reference, the rest of my drones could approximate the targetDrones’ positions. As the targetDrones reached me, I told my drones to attack at will.

  While this was going on, and Target Five was lifting his weapon, I ducked and dove forward. The first blast went over my head, then a targetDrone banged into my shoulder and knocked me into the bulkhead.

  Then a thing happened. The comm hidden in the pocket under my ribs, the comm ART had given me when I left it on RaviHyral’s transit ring, pinged my internal feed with a message. It was a compressed packet, a type meant to be sent in-system, not carried via transports through wormholes. Which meant it had originated with ART’s internal comm array. It was tagged with the name “Eden.”

  My drones hulled two targetDrones but the third already had a fix on me. It tried to slam me in the head but it had to back up first to build up speed, which gave me a chance to grab it. I shoved it sideways in time to block a blast from Target Five’s energy weapon. Heat blasted over the targetDrone, which was a factor I hadn’t anticipated. This was different from the weapon dead Target Two had used on me; instead of just being a pain-causing annoyance, this blast was meant to destroy tissue and incapacitate permanently. Even with the targetDrone between us, my hands took damage. Three of my drones got caught in the blast and dropped to the deck.

  Eden. Eden was the name I used on RaviHyral, when ART had helped me. This had to be a trick, except that targetControlSystem was drowning in the code bundles
I’d sent; it shouldn’t have the ability to send me a packet now.

  But something on board ART had sent it. I started an analysis of the transmission.

  I kept hold of the targetDrone and used my feet to shove off the wall, swung my body around on the deck and hit Target Five’s legs with my legs. He fell sideways into the bulkhead, then down to the deck. I couldn’t get up yet but at least we were both down here now.

  On the channel where I’d been following Amena’s progress, I saw she had passed through the foyer and on into the corridor beyond, and found the airlock. She was breathing hard and sweating as she tapped the cycle command on the pad. “I hope this is right,” she muttered to my drones hovering around her. Then the warning lights flashed, a sign that the outer lock had received the command and was preparing to open. “Yes!” Amena waved her arms and did a little dance.

  My analysis of the packet finished and I checked the results: no killware or malware detected and the file type indicated it was a video clip. It also indicated that it was a delayed message, sent sometime earlier but trapped when ART’s feed and comm had gone down. The fact that a message stuck in the comm’s store and forward buffer had finally been delivered meant that as targetControlSystem failed, some of ART’s more complex systems were beginning to restart.

  It could still be a trick. It was exactly the kind of tricky shit SecUnits could do. And I knew so many ways someone could use an intense visual stimulus to temporarily trash my scan, visual sensors, neural tissue, etc., but. I had to play it. Maybe I was desperate for some sign ART was still here somewhere, but the fact that it was a video clip felt like a communication method only someone who knew me would choose. I played it.

  Target Six ran up and aimed his energy weapon at me, but I let go of the targetDrone and pulled Target Five on top of me. With all the flailing and screaming going on (Target Five, not me) Target Six couldn’t get a clear shot. I was firing both the energy weapons in my arms but the Targets’ protective suits seemed to be deflecting the bolts, at least to some extent. (With all the screaming, it was hard to tell.) Another targetDrone swung in but my surviving drones slammed it sideways and it hit Target Six’s helmet. There was a lot going on, but I really needed to get off the floor.

  Amena and her drones scrambled back as the airlock cycled open and Arada, Overse, Ratthi, and Thiago stumbled out. Ratthi went down in a heap of singed EVAC suit; I couldn’t tell if he’d been hurt or had just tripped on the lock’s raised seal. Then Thiago staggered sideways and Overse caught his arm, and I knew my first theory had been correct and that the safepod had taken extensive damage.

  The compressed video clip in the packet was from the serial World Hoppers, from a story arc climax episode, when a secondary main character’s mind had been taken over by a sentient brain-virus (I know) and the story was really much better than it sounds but it was the moment when the character said, I am trapped in my own body.

  I really needed to get up to ART’s bridge.

  I really needed to keep Targets Five and Six and their drones away from my humans who were unhelpfully still wandering around in the airlock foyer exclaiming at each other.

  And I had to do both at once.

  I got my knees up, lifted, and threw Target Five at Target Six. They both fell backward and I rolled to my feet. A damaged targetDrone slammed through what was left of my drone cloud. It clipped my shoulder as I threw myself back toward the quarters module hatch. I needed to make sure both Targets followed me, so I yelled, “I’m going to blow up the transport and kill all of you, you pieces of shit!”

  It was lame, but I was in a hurry.

  As I ran, the Targets yelled in response, high-pitched, furious, and incomprehensible. A damaged drone managed a last set of images, verifying that both Targets charged after me. I headed up the corridor toward the control area.

  That was the point where I realized I hadn’t discontinued the channel I was using to send my visual input to Amena. She probably hadn’t been able to pay attention to it since she had left Medical (humans, even augmented humans, can’t process multiple inputs like I can) but it was still playing in her feed. Her drone escort showed her standing in the airlock foyer (still? what the hell?) with Arada while Overse and Thiago dragged Ratthi out of his damaged EVAC suit. Arada had her suit half off and looked frazzled and to put it mildly, concerned. On my feed, Amena shouted repeatedly, Where are you going? What is happening?

  Under the circumstances, they were reasonable questions. Get to Medical, I told her. I didn’t want to answer any reasonable questions. If I was wrong, I’d probably be dead, and that was bad enough. Being stupid and dead would just be that much worse.

  But what— Amena began, and I backburnered the channel.

  8

  Running through ART’s corridors, I didn’t have a lot of time to plan. The way the MedSystem’s platform had activated in response to Eletra’s medical emergency told me the ship’s operational code, or at least large fragments of it, was still intact. And targetControlSystem was going down under my barrage of contacts, allowing more of ART’s systems to come back online. This was technically a good time to try to breach the control area, but I’d be doing it even if I had to fight through an entire task group of Targets and their stupid semi-invisible drones.

  I took the corridor up through the central module and passed a targetDrone bobbing in midair and one bumping along the lower bulkhead. As targetControlSystem went down, it was flooding them with garbage code.

  Back in the quarters module, Amena and the others were finally clumping down the corridor toward Medical. They encountered the targetDrone that Amena had disabled with fire suppressant, still floating aimlessly, and Overse bashed it with a cutting tool brought from the safepod.

  Scout Two showed me the control area foyer, barely three meters ahead, was empty which meant I’d lost track of Target Four. I just had time to run back its video to see Target Four leave through the forward doorway. Then an energy/heat blast hit me from behind. It struck me in the lower back and I lost traction and fell forward and slid halfway across the deck toward the control area hatch.

  My performance reliability dropped to 80 percent.

  In the corridor outside Medical, Amena jerked to a halt and yelled, “No, no!”

  “What?” Arada demanded.

  “They got—They shot—” Amena waved wildly at the Medical hatch. “Stay here with them!” and bolted away. Her drone squad careened after her.

  I’ve been hit by projectile and energy weapons a lot more times than I can remember (literally, because of the memory wipes) and it’s not that it doesn’t hurt. But I had tuned down my pain sensors earlier, so it was a surprise when I rolled over and saw the big smear of blood and fluid on the deck.

  I could only last so long like this. I needed to move faster.

  But at least this solved the problem of how I was going to get the hatch open. Target Four ran toward me because assholes love to see your face when they kill you. He stopped what he thought was far enough away and fired, but I rolled onto my side so the blast hit the deck next to me. I shoved with my feet, used my hip as a pivot, and spun myself around so I could grab his ankle. He shrieked and fell backward, and I climbed up him and snapped his neck.

  Targets Five and Six were almost here and I only had three drones left in the corridor. As I shoved to my feet and took Four’s energy weapon, I ordered my surviving drones to run interference for me and take hits if they could. Between the stealth material helmets and the protective suits, the drones didn’t have much chance of kill strikes, but hopefully they’d provide a distraction.

  Hefting the big square weapon was hard and I knew I’d lost a lot of muscle and underlying support structure in my back. With my free hand, I popped the panel beside the control area hatch and then fired a short burst at the mechanism inside. The blast of heat convinced the sensors that the ship was experiencing an emergency condition (the sensors weren’t wrong about that) and it reactivated the manual controls
. I hit the manual release and the hatch slid open.

  I stepped through and hit the close and seal sequence. One of my drones managed a shoulder hit on Target Five but the other contacts disappeared.

  As the hatch slid closed, I knew I didn’t have long. I’d had no time to replace the outside hatch panel and while I had some strong evidence to suggest that what the Targets lacked in personality they also lacked in brains, they were sure to try shooting at the controls and sooner or later it would work.

  I’d cut Amena’s visual access to my feed, but her drones told me that Arada and Thiago ran after her through the corridors, headed here. (Yeah, I probably should have cut Amena’s input before this. But I’d wanted her to know what my status was if I couldn’t respond.) Scout Two was still in the foyer on sentry so I sent its video to Amena’s feed, so she’d be able to see where the Targets were. I saw her slide to a stop and clutch her head, trying to focus on the new input. I was already stepping past the messily dead Targets One and Three and climbing the stairs to the upper control area and I didn’t have time to help her.

  Scout One was there, still monitoring displays. It greeted me with a ping as I set the energy weapon down in the nearest station chair. I needed an interface with the ship’s data storage.

  The bond company that used to own me made a lot of its gigantic piles of currency by datamining its customers. That’s recording everything everyone says and then going through it for information that could be sold. Part of my job had been to help record and parse and protect that information until it could be transferred back to the company, and if I didn’t do it in a timely manner indicating complete obedience I got punished by my governor module. (Which was like being shot by a high-grade energy weapon, only from the inside out.)

  The raw audio and feed streams make for huge data files, and they had to be moved around a lot and often got saved to unused storage areas on other systems. (This is also a way to destroy data. If you don’t completely hate your clients or you’re feeling particularly disgusted at the company at any one particular moment or you’ve hacked your governor module and need to cover your tracks, you can move data into the buffer of the SecSystem right before it’s due for an update. The files are overwritten and it looks like an accident.)