Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  It didn’t reply. I can tell you as a SecUnit that under these circumstances this is just about the last thing you expect to hear. Also, SecUnits normally aren’t allowed to communicate with each other so it would be reluctant to drop protocol. I said, There’s no protocol for any of this. Just talk to me.

  There was another three second pause. I don’t know what to say.

  That was encouraging. (I’m actually not being sarcastic here—the last time I’d tried to talk a SecUnit into helping me, it had just gotten more determined to kill me. But it had been a CombatUnit and they’re assholes.)

  I said, Three of my clients are inside the compartment nearest you. Have you seen these others? I showed it images of the unaccounted-for members of ART’s crew.

  It said, At this time SecSystem is nonfunctional but I have video in my archive. It was way more comfortable giving information than figuring out what to say to a rogue SecUnit killware. It sent me two clips, and then summarized them for me because it was used to reporting to humans who never understood what they were looking at. Eight unidentified humans were forcibly brought aboard by the Hostiles but five disembarked at approximately 2260 ship’s time when we reconnected to the space dock.

  In the first clip I watched ART’s crew, all eight of them, being dragged aboard through the airlock, most semi-conscious. The second clip was of a group of five being prodded off the ship into an airlock and yeah I had a bad moment there but the ship’s status in the metadata showed the SecUnit was right, the ship was connected to the dock at that point. Also, four Targets followed them. I asked, Do you know where they were taken?

  This time it had an audio clip of two Targets talking as they walked down the corridor past it. They were using that mix of Pre–Corporation Rim languages that Thiago had identified, but a translation had been loaded to HubSystem and the SecUnit had pulled it into its own archives. It summarized, The Hostiles implant humans with devices similar to our governor modules. They ran out of unused devices and returned to the space dock to send all humans without implants to the surface.

  I guess running out of implants made sense, if you were a Target/idiot and hadn’t been expecting to encounter ART or its crew. I said, So all the humans in that cabin have implants, which are holding them immobile.

  Correct.

  That was not great news, but it was helpful to know. What other intel do you have about the Hostiles?

  It sent me another set of audio clips and explained, They had difficulty installing an unidentified object to the explorer’s drive. The bot pilot was deleted and could not assist. Something disastrous happened and it has confused their plans. They needed a weapon to fight against future incursions to this system but the attempt to obtain one failed badly.

  I played the clips to confirm the SecUnit’s conclusions, and checked the camera views of the ship’s drive just to make sure. Oh yeah, that looked bad. They had the same sort of alien remnant that had burned itself off ART’s drive and melted, only this one was hanging to the side and looked puffy. The engine casings were discolored on top and the monitoring stations threw a steady stream of error codes into the engineering feed.

  So to summarize, the Targets had botched the install of their alien remnant drive onto the explorer’s engines, leaving the explorer no longer wormhole-capable. Also the group assigned to ART had lost control of it and now a giant armed transport was roaming the system implacably searching for vengeance.

  The SecUnit continued, Note: Hostiles have fought among themselves while onboard, suggesting they are split into at least two factions, a situation that can be exploited in order to retrieve clients.

  It fed me more info, mostly conversations picked up in corridors and the bridge via SecSystem’s cameras. I agreed with the analysis, it looked like there were different factions in the Targets’ leadership with different goals. One group didn’t know what to do, how to follow their plan, until they got ART back. Another group, possibly still on the surface, wanted to cut their losses and do something else. I said, They keep talking about spreading something to other humans? Are they referencing the alien remnant contamination?

  The SecUnit said, I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.

  Huh. We had always thought that somehow the implants, even though they seemed like boring old human tech, were connected to alien remnant contamination. This sure didn’t disprove that theory but I still needed more intel.

  The SecUnit said, Query: do you have intel on SecUnit 2’s position/situation?

  I had a bad feeling I knew the answer to that question. What was SecUnit 2’s last contact?

  Last contact was on space dock with the client tactical squad. Contact was lost. SecUnit 1 was destroyed when the Hostiles breached the hatch. It hesitated 1.2 seconds and added, I am SecUnit 3.

  I really wanted to lie. I’d seen that SecUnit in ART’s status update before I deployed. But I wanted it to trust me, so I had to tell it the truth. I said, The Targets left SecUnit 2 on the space dock after forcing one of your clients to order a stand down and freeze. It was killed by its governor module.

  It didn’t respond. Then it said, Thank you for that information.

  I had one of the mostly dead SecSystem’s inputs monitoring the bridge and had picked up a brief conversation. Running it through the translation module told me it was a discussion about how to make engine failure look convincing. The Targets couldn’t contact ART to tell it about the hostages, so they wanted ART to catch the explorer and dock with it. That way they could use its crew to force it to surrender.

  I asked SecUnit 3, Is the shuttle’s bot pilot still active? I hadn’t been able to find it but maybe it was hiding.

  It was destroyed. But … I have a piloting module. It added, It’s not very good.

  That it was willing to admit that to me was a good sign. If I can free the humans, can you get them into the shuttle and away? The transport following us will pick you up. This was hard to ask. Trusting other SecUnits was impossible, when you knew humans could order them to do anything. Trusting a SecUnit another rogue SecUnit was trying to make into a rogue was worse, even if you were one of the rogues involved. I was glad my threat assessment module was back in my body, because it would have metaphorically shit itself.

  It didn’t respond and I said, Will you help me retrieve the humans?

  My governor module is holding me in stand-down-and-freeze mode, it said, still polite and not pointing out the fact that I should know it would move if it could, and how teeth-grittingly obvious that was.

  I’d been investigating possibilities with the SecSystem, trying to see if I could make it override the governor module and rescind the order. I’d have to do a restart and reload first, and there was no way to do that surreptitiously; targetControlSystem would know something/somebody was in the system. Also, taking orders from/making friends with a rogue SecUnit killware definitely fell under the category of “stuff SecUnits are not allowed to do” and the governor module might fry it anyway. That left only one option and me trying to gently hint about it wasn’t working.

  I can disable your governor module, I said. I am not good at this kind of thing. Even Mensah was not good at this kind of thing, considering what happened when she bought me. I just knew it had to be SecUnit 3’s decision. I’ll do that whether you help me or not.

  But that was too much, too soon, and I knew that as soon as I said it. It gave me a stock answer from its buffer: I don’t have that information.

  Right, I wouldn’t have been eager to believe me, either. I needed a different approach.

  We didn’t have time for me to show it 35,000 hours of media and I didn’t have access to my longterm storage anyway. And that had worked on me, but I knew I was weird even for a SecUnit. Maybe it would trust me more if it knew me better. I pulled some recent memories from the files I’d brought with me, edited them together, and added one helpful code bundle at the end.

  :send helpme.file: Read this.

  It accepted the file b
ut didn’t respond. I switched my awareness back to the unfamiliar channels woven through the ship’s systems. Most of the standard architecture had been overwritten. I was cautious, because as far as I could tell targetControlSystem didn’t know I was here, yet. I left a few code bundles in strategic places, including in the set of twelve targetDrones waiting in standby near the main hatch. I checked the bridge control systems and found the code they had used to mask their approach from ART’s scans; ART was right, it was similar to the code that had protected the Targets from my drones. And not nearly as effective as the physical shielding the targetDrones used. I altered a few key parameters to keep the Targets from using it on the ship again.

  I knew/had strong evidence for the fact that the Targets had activated Eletra’s and Ras’s implants via the solid-state screen that was similar to the one in use in the explorer’s bridge. If it was using the implants to keep the humans immobile, there should be an active connection. But I was going to have to get uncomfortably close to targetControlSystem whose existence on this explorer was so far mostly theoretical. If mostly theoretical meant tripping over the huge path of destruction where it had slammed through the ship’s systems.

  I knew which channel the solid-state screen had used onboard ART and checked it first. There they were, seven connections. Now I had to do this without killing any of the humans. I separated out the individual pathways, and gave one a gentle tweak. In the lounge, one of the humans twitched.

  So far so good. If I cut the implant connections before a Target could send a command through the screen, would they wake up? The one thing I knew was that if I didn’t do it fast enough, the Target could hit a killswitch and send them into cardiac arrest, like what had happened with Ras. Losing one human like that had been frustrating enough; losing seven including what might be all that was left of ART’s crew was … just not going to happen.

  I reconnected with the SecUnit and said, I found the connection to the implants that are holding the humans immobile. If you could help me, we could retrieve all the clients.

  Something was coming and I broke the connection. Just in time, because .05 seconds later, targetControlSystem found me.

  15

  I stopped my show and woke my drones as the drop box maintenance capsule sent an arrival alert through its local feed. It had been decelerating already but now it was braking to enter the surface docking structure. I’d been checking feed and comm for any kind of signal contacts but I couldn’t pick up anything but what was coming from the capsule itself. The downside of that was no information; the upside was that if the surface dock’s feed and arrival notification system were down, maybe nobody knew we were coming.

  And it was uncomfortably similar to when Amena and I had first come aboard ART, to an apparently dead feed. And yes, I was scanning the ranges associated with targetControlSystem, but nothing was there, either.

  “We’re here.” Overse shifted in her seat, edgy with nervous energy.

  Thiago sat up and said, “Good timing, I just finished the preliminary module.”

  Overse snorted. “I don’t know how you can work under these conditions.”

  “It gives me something else to think about.” Thiago made a move to rub his face and bonked his glove on his helmet. “I used to work on language puzzles before my exams at FirstLanding. Tano thought I was out of my mind.”

  “Considering what we’re doing at the moment, I don’t think Tano was wrong,” Overse told him.

  Thiago said, “SecUnit—” and I thought oh great, what now. Then he finished, “I’ve been assembling a working vocabulary module of the languages the Targets are using. Without Perihelion to translate for us, it could come in handy.”

  Well, now I feel like an asshole.

  I pulled the module out of his feed and stored it as the capsule braked, jerked twice, then clanked as it dropped into its docking slot. Its local feed signaled arrival and Overse hurriedly used the manual controls to switch it over to standby. I was already unstrapping and pushing out of the seat. I stepped over to the hatch and stopped it as it was about to slide open. The capsule was showing a good environment outside and a gravity within acceptable parameters but I was glad we had the environmental suits. I let the hatch open just a notch and sent a drone out.

  Outside was a corridor, walls, floor, and ceiling made of sandy stone, with metal support girders. (Not actual stone, but an artificial building material that looked like it.) Round light sources studded the girders at intervals but there was no power. The drone followed it out to a foyer with a taller ceiling, with round windows set high in what had to be an outside wall, letting in gray daylight. Racks and cabinets and an unused workbench lined the other walls. A thin layer of dust on the floor said this area hadn’t been disturbed in a long time, and also indicated that somewhere in this structure was an opening to the outside where there was actual dirt. The door wasn’t a pressure hatch, it was a manually operated metal sliding door.

  Overse and Thiago had gotten to their feet, watching me. I sent the drone’s video to their interfaces and said, “Stay here. I’m going to take a look around. Don’t use the suit comms.” I was setting up a feed relay through my drones, which should be secure, but I didn’t want to press my luck. “Even though there’s no signal traffic, they might still have a way to monitor comms.”

  Overse pressed her lips together. She clearly didn’t like the idea of separating the group but didn’t argue. “Be careful. Don’t go too far without us.”

  “Are you sure you should go alone?” Thiago didn’t look happy either. All the concern was annoying, which was me being complacent or unfair or something, considering how humans being worried about me possibly going off alone to die was such a recent development in my life.

  I just said, “I won’t be long,” and let the hatch open the rest of the way.

  I left two drones with the humans and brought the rest with me down the corridor into the foyer to catch up with the scout drone. The absence of any kind of feed signal was still eerie, but if the surface dock wasn’t being used, it sort of made sense. A quick check showed lots of tools and maintenance supplies stored in the cabinets, neatly put away and barely used. I couldn’t pick up anything on audio except the low grumbling of the capsule’s power train in its deactivation cycle. I eased the door open along its track, which thankfully did not screech, and let a squad of five drones out.

  I got views of wide, high-ceiling corridors made of the manufactured stone. A few of the flat light pads on the girders were lit, so there must be emergency power somewhere. The drones’ scan found marker paint exit signs on the walls and nothing nearby on audio, no machine or human movement, no voices. I slipped out the door and followed the drones.

  Two more turns and the drones found a wide exterior sliding door that was partially open. I got drone video of what was outside but I wanted to see it myself, so I sent them back into the interior corridors to keep scouting and went outside.

  From the map I’d pulled up on the space dock, the surface dock was a big oval structure, built around the shaft. I walked out onto a long stone balcony, sand grating under my boots, about three stories off the ground looking out to the west. The sky was overcast with puffy gray clouds but the view was clear. I was looking at a lake, shallow and glassy, curving away from the looming wall of the dock. A wide causeway led off from the far side of the building, crossing the lake toward another set of three large structures maybe two kilometers away, a complex big enough to dwarf the dock.

  The buildings were multistory, trapezoidal, made out of a gray material, and arranged in a half circle around a raised plaza in the center where the causeway ended. They had rib-like supports curving up from their bases that might be decorative, or maybe for power-generating, I had no idea. To the east around the front of the surface dock was a sea of green plants, fronds waving in the breeze. Increasing magnification as much as I could, I saw a structure under the greenery, probably growing racks supporting the growth medium off the
ground, full of water and whatever else plants needed.

  What the hell kind of colony was this?

  A figure stood up out of the plants suddenly, almost ten meters tall and covered with spikes. It’s a good thing I don’t have a full human digestive system because I was so startled something would have popped out of it involuntarily. Before I could fling myself back through the doors I realized it was an agricultural bot. Its lower body had ten long spidery limbs for moving around without crushing anything, and its upper part was a long curving “neck” with a long head and like I said, covered with spikes.

  (Agricultural bots have the statistically lowest chance of accidental injuries but are physically the most terrifying. It’s weird how something designed to take care of delicate lifeforms looks the most like it wants to tear you apart and eat your humans.)

  Anyway, back to what I was saying, what the hell kind of colony was this.

  It wasn’t the plants or the ag-bots—that was normal. Plants could be engineered to do a lot of things for colonies, like produce gases or other chemicals. But for one thing the complex didn’t resemble the Adamantine colony plans, not at all. And you would expect everything to be more messy and human, with things under construction, piles of materials, temporary habitat structures, or the remains of temporary habitat structures that had been stripped to build permanent structures. No air or ground vehicles were visible, no boats or docks on the lake. No trash. This place looked simultaneously abandoned but well cared for. Like whatever it was being used for, it wasn’t meant for humans to live in.

  I sent images to Overse and Thiago, and there were stunned exclamations. Indicating the complex with the weird ribs, I asked, Is that an alien structure? (It was the obvious question.)

  No, it couldn’t be, Overse said, but she sounded like she wasn’t certain.