by Martha Wells
“I’ll apologize,” Ratthi was saying.
“No, just leave it alone,” Mensah told him.
“That would just make it worse,” Overse added.
I stood there until they all calmed down and got quiet again, then slid into a seat in the back, and resumed the serial I’d been watching.
* * *
It was the middle of the night when I felt the feed drop out.
I hadn’t been using it, but I had the SecSystem feeds from the drones and the interior cameras backburnered and was accessing them occasionally to make sure everything was okay. The humans left behind in the habitat were more active than they usually were at this time, probably anxious about what we were going to find at DeltFall. I was hearing Arada walk around occasionally, though Volescu was snoring off and on in his bunk. Bharadwaj had been able to move back to her own quarters, but was restless and going over her field notes through the feed. Gurathin was in the hub doing something on his personal system. I wondered what he was doing and had just started to carefully poke around through HubSystem to find out. When the feed dropped it was like someone slapped the organic part of my brain.
I sat up and said, “The satellite went down.”
The others, except for Pin-Lee who was piloting, all grabbed for their interfaces. I saw their expressions when they felt the silence. Mensah pushed out of her seat and came to the back. “Are you sure it was the satellite?”
“I’m sure,” I told her. “I’m pinging it and there’s no response.”
We still had our local feed, running on the hopper’s system, so we could communicate through it as well as the comm and share data with each other. We just didn’t have nearly as much data as we’d have had if we were still attached to HubSystem. We were far enough away that we needed the comm satellite as a relay. Ratthi switched his interface to the hopper’s feed and started checking the scans. There was nothing on them except empty sky; I had them backburnered but I’d set them to notify me if they encountered anything like an energy reading or a large life sign. He said, “I just felt a chill. Did anyone else feel a chill?”
“A little,” Overse admitted. “It’s a weird coincidence, isn’t it?”
“The damn satellite’s had periodic outages since we got here,” Pin-Lee pointed out from the cockpit. “We just don’t normally need it for comms.” She was right. I was supposed to check their personal logs periodically in case they were plotting to defraud the company or murder each other or something, and the last time I’d looked at Pin-Lee’s she had been tracking the satellite problems, trying to figure out if there was a pattern. It was one of the many things I didn’t care about because the entertainment feed was only updated occasionally, and I downloaded it for local storage.
Ratthi shook his head. “But this is the first time we’ve been far enough from the habitat to need it for comm contact. It just seems odd, and not in a good way.”
Mensah looked around at them. “Does anyone want to turn back?”
I did, but I didn’t get a vote. The others sat there for a quiet moment, then Overse said, “If it turns out the DeltFall group did need help, and we didn’t go, how would we feel?”
“If there’s a chance we can save lives, we have to take it,” Pin-Lee agreed.
Ratthi sighed. “No, you’re right. I’d feel terrible if anyone died because we were overcautious.”
“We’re agreed, then,” Mensah said. “We’ll keep going.”
I would have preferred they be overcautious. I had had contracts before where the company’s equipment glitched this badly, but there was just something about this that made me think it was more. But all I had was the feeling.
I had four hours to my next scheduled watch so I went into standby, and buried myself in the downloads I’d stored away.
* * *
It was dawn when we got there. DeltFall had established their camp in a wide valley surrounded by high mountains. A spiderweb of creek beds cut through the grass and stubby trees. They were a bigger operation than ours, with three linked habitats, and a shelter for surface vehicles, plus a landing area for two large hoppers, a cargo hauler, and three small hoppers. It was all company equipment though, per contract, and all subject to the same malfunctions as the crap they’d dumped on us.
There was no one outside, no movement. No sign of damage, no sign any hostile fauna had approached. The satellite was still dead, but Mensah had been trying to get the DeltFall habitat on the comm since we had come within range.
“Are they missing any transports?” Mensah asked.
Ratthi checked the record of what they were supposed to have which I’d copied from HubSystem before we left. “No, the hoppers are all there. Their ground vehicles are in that shelter, I think.”
I had moved up to the front as we got closer. Standing behind the pilot’s seat, I said, “Dr. Mensah, I recommend you land outside their perimeter.” Through the local feed I sent her all the info I had, which was that their automated systems were responding to the pings the hopper was sending, but that was it. We weren’t picking up their feed, which meant their HubSystem was in standby. There was nothing from their three SecUnits, not even pings.
Overse, in the copilot’s seat, glanced up at me. “Why?”
I had to answer the question so I said, “Security protocol,” which sounded good and didn’t commit me to anything. No one outside, no one answering the comm. Unless they had all jumped in their surface vehicles and gone off on vacation, leaving their Hub and SecUnits shut down, they were dead. Pessimism confirmed.
But we couldn’t be sure without looking. The hopper’s scanners can’t see inside the habitats because of the shielding that’s really only there to protect proprietary data, so we couldn’t get any life signs or energy readings.
This is why I didn’t want to come. I’ve got four perfectly good humans here and I didn’t want them to get killed by whatever took out DeltFall. It’s not like I cared about them personally, but it would look bad on my record, and my record was already pretty terrible.
“We’re just being cautious,” Mensah said, answering Overse. She took the hopper down at the edge of the valley, on the far side of the streams.
I gave Mensah a few hints through the feed, that they should break out the handweapons in the survival gear, that Ratthi should stay behind inside the hopper with the hatch sealed and locked since he’d never done the weapon-training course, and that, most important, I should go first. They were quiet, subdued. Up until now, I think they had all been looking at this as probably a natural disaster, that they were going to be digging survivors out of a collapsed habitat, or helping fight off a herd of Hostile Ones.
This was something else.
Mensah gave the orders and we started forward, me in front, the humans a few steps behind. They were in their full suits with helmets, which gave some protection but had been meant for environmental hazards, not some other heavily armed human (or angry malfunctioning rogue SecUnit) deliberately trying to kill them. I was more nervous than Ratthi, who was jittery on our comms, monitoring the scans, and basically telling us to be careful every other step.
I had my built-in energy weapons and the big projectile weapon I was cradling. I also had six drones, pulled from the hopper’s supply and under my control through its feed. They were the small kind, barely a centimeter across; no weapons, just cameras. (They make some which aren’t much bigger and have a small pulse weapon, but you have to get one of the upper-tier company packages mostly designed for much larger contracts.) I told the drones to get in the air and gave them a scouting pattern.
I did that because it seemed sensible, not because I knew what I was doing. I am not a combat murderbot, I’m Security. I keep things from attacking the clients and try to gently discourage the clients from attacking each other. I was way out of my depth here, which was another reason I hadn’t wanted the humans to come here.
We crossed the shallow streams, sending a group of water invertebrates scattering a
way from our boots. The trees were short and sparse enough that I had a good view of the camp from this angle. I couldn’t detect any DeltFall security drones, by eye or with the scanners on my drones. Ratthi in the hopper wasn’t picking up anything either. I really, really wished I could pinpoint the location of those three SecUnits, but I wasn’t getting anything from them.
SecUnits aren’t sentimental about each other. We aren’t friends, the way the characters on the serials are, or the way my humans were. We can’t trust each other, even if we work together. Even if you don’t have clients who decide to entertain themselves by ordering their SecUnits to fight each other.
The scans read the perimeter sensors as dead and the drones weren’t picking up any warning indicators. The DeltFall HubSystem was down, and without it, no one inside could access our feed or comms, theoretically. We crossed over and into the landing area for their hoppers. They were between us and the first habitat, the vehicle storage to one side. I was leading us in at an angle, trying to get a visual on the main habitat door, but I was also checking the ground. It was mostly bare of grass from all the foot traffic and hopper landings. From the weather report we’d gotten before the satellite quit, it had rained here last night, and the mud had hardened. No activity since then.
I passed that info to Mensah through the feed and she told the others. Keeping her voice low, Pin-Lee said, “So whatever happened, it wasn’t long after we spoke to them on the comm.”
“They couldn’t have been attacked by someone,” Overse whispered. There was no reason to whisper, but I understood the impulse. “There’s no one else on this planet.”
“There’s not supposed to be anyone else on this planet,” Ratthi said, darkly, over the comm from our hopper.
There were three SecUnits who were not me on this planet, and that was dangerous enough. I got my visual on the main habitat hatch and saw it was shut, no sign of anything forcing its way inside. The drones had circled the whole structure by now, and showed me the other entrances were the same. That was that. Hostile Fauna don’t come to the door and ask to be let inside. I sent the images to Mensah’s feed and said aloud, “Dr. Mensah, it would be better if I went ahead.”
She hesitated, reviewing what I’d just sent her. I saw her shoulders tense. I think she had just come to the same conclusion I had. Or at least admitted to herself that it was the strongest possibility. She said, “All right. We’ll wait here. Make sure we can monitor.”
She’d said “we” and she wouldn’t have said that if she didn’t mean it, unlike some clients I’d had. I sent my field camera’s feed to all four of them and started forward.
I called four of the drones back, leaving two to keep circling the perimeter. I checked the vehicle shed as I moved past it. It was open on one side, with some sealed lockers in the back for storage. All four of their surface vehicles were there, powered down, no sign of recent tracks, so I didn’t go in. I wouldn’t bother searching the small storage spaces until we got down to the looking-for-all-the-body-parts phase.
I walked up to the hatch of the first habitat. We didn’t have an entry code, so I was expecting to have to blow the door, but when I tapped the button it slid open for me. I told Mensah through the feed that I wouldn’t speak aloud on the comm anymore.
She tapped back an acknowledgment on the feed, and I heard her telling the others to get off my feed and my comm, that she was going to be the only one speaking to me so I wasn’t distracted. Mensah underestimated my ability to ignore humans but I appreciated the thought. Ratthi whispered, “Be careful,” and signed off.
I had the weapon up going in, through the suit locker area and into the first corridor. “No suits missing,” Mensah said in my ear, watching the field camera. I sent my four drones ahead, maintaining an interior scouting pattern. This was a nicer habitat than ours, wider halls, newer. Also empty, silent, the smell of decaying flesh drifting through my helmet filters. I headed toward the hub, where their main crew area should be.
The lights were still on and air whispered through the vents, but I couldn’t get into their SecSystem with their feed down. I missed my cameras.
At the door to the hub, I found their first SecUnit. It was sprawled on its back on the floor, the armor over its chest pierced by something that made a hole approximately ten centimeters wide and a little deeper. We’re hard to kill, but that’ll do it. I did a brief scan to make sure it was inert, then stepped over it and went through into the crew area.
There were eleven messily dead humans in the hub, sprawled on the floor, in chairs, the monitoring stations and projection surfaces behind them showing impact damage from projectile and energy weapon fire. I tapped the feed and asked Mensah to fall back to the hopper. She acknowledged me and I got confirmation from my outside drones that the humans were retreating.
I went out the opposite door to a corridor that led toward the mess hall, Medical, and cabins. The drones were telling me the layout was very similar to our habitat, except for the occasional dead person sprawled in the corridors. The weapon that had taken out the dead SecUnit wasn’t in the hub, and it had died with its back to the door. The DeltFall humans had had some warning, enough to start getting up and heading for the other exits, but something else had come in from this direction and trapped them. I thought that SecUnit had been killed trying to protect the hub.
Which meant I was looking for the other two SecUnits.
Maybe these clients had been terrible and abusive, maybe they had deserved it. I didn’t care. Nobody was touching my humans. To make sure of that I had to kill these two rogue Units. I could have pulled out at this point, sabotaged the hoppers, and got my humans out of there, leaving the rogue Units stuck on the other side of an ocean; that would have been the smart thing to do.
But I wanted to kill them.
One of my drones found two humans dead in the mess, no warning. They had been taking food pacs out of the heating cubby, getting the tables ready for a meal.
While I moved through the corridors and rooms, I was doing an image search against the hopper’s equipment database. The dead unit had probably been killed by a mineral survey tool, like a pressure or sonic drill. We had one on the hopper, part of the standard equipment. You would have to get close to use it with enough force to pierce armor, maybe a little more than a meter.
Because you can’t walk up to another murderbot with an armor-piercing projectile or energy weapon inside the habitat and not be looked at with suspicion. You can walk up to a fellow murderbot with a tool that a human might have asked you to get.
By the time I reached the other side of the structure, the drones had cleared the first habitat. I stood in the hatchway at the top of the narrow corridor that led into the second. A human lay at the opposite end, half in and half out of the open hatch. To get into the next habitat, I’d have to step over her to push the door all the way open. I could tell already that something was wrong about the body position. I used the magnification on the field camera to get a closer view of the skin on the outstretched arm. The lividity was wrong; she had been shot in the chest or face and lay on her back for some time, then had been moved here recently. Probably as soon as they picked up our hopper on the way here.
On the feed I told Mensah what I needed her to do. She didn’t ask questions. She’d been watching my field camera, and she knew by now what we were dealing with. She tapped back to acknowledge me, then said aloud on the comm, “SecUnit, I want you to hold your position until I get there.”
I said, “Yes, Dr. Mensah,” and eased back out of the hatch. I moved fast, back to the security ready room.
It was nice having a human smart enough to work with like this.
Our model of habitat didn’t have it but on these bigger ones there’s a roof access and my outside drones had a good view of it.
I climbed the ladder up to the roof hatch and popped it. The armor’s boots have magnetized climbing clamps, and I used them to cross over the curving roofs to the third habitat and then
around to the second, coming up on them from behind. Even these two rogues wouldn’t be dumb enough to ignore the creaks if I took the quick route and walked over to their position.
(They were not the sharpest murderbots, having cleaned the floor of the between-habitat corridor to cover the prints they had left when staging that body. It would have fooled somebody who hadn’t noticed all the other floors were covered with tracked-in dust.)
I opened the roof access for the second habitat and sent my drones ahead down into the Security ready room. Once they checked the unit cubicles and made sure nobody was home, I dropped down the ladder. A lot of their equipment was still there, including their drones. There was a nice box of new ones, but they were useless without the DeltFall HubSystem. Either it was really dead or doing a good imitation of it. I still kept part of my attention on it; if it came up suddenly and reactivated the security cameras, the rules of the game would change abruptly.
Keeping my drones with me, I took the inner corridor and moved silently past Medical’s blasted hatch. Three bodies were piled inside where the humans had tried to secure it and been trapped when their own SecUnits blew it open to slaughter them.
When I was close to the corridor with the hatch where both units were waiting for me and Dr. Mensah to come wandering in, I sent the drones around for a careful look. Oh yeah, there they were.
With no weapons on my drones, the only way to do this was to move fast. So I threw myself around the last corner, hit the opposite wall, crossed back and kept going, firing at their positions.
I hit the first one with three explosive bolts in the back and one in the faceplate as it turned toward me. It dropped. The other one I nicked in the arm, taking out the joint, and it made the mistake of switching its main weapon to its other hand, which gave me a couple of seconds. I switched to rapid fire to keep it off balance, then back to the explosive bolt. That dropped it.
I hit the floor, needing a minute to recover.
I had taken at least a dozen hits from both of their energy weapons while I was taking out the first one, but the explosive bolts had missed me, going past to tear up the corridor. Even with the armor, bits of me were going numb, but I had only taken three projectiles to the right shoulder, four to the left hip. This is how we fight: throw ourselves at each other and see whose parts give out first.
