Rogue Protocol

by Martha Wells

  I was already down the passage to the work space, past the bio labs to the supply storage. There was a slot for an onboard hauler bot, but since the cargo space had been converted to labs, the bot had been offloaded. It was more roomy than the supply locker on Ship, and at least I could sit on the deck and lean against the wall, even if I couldn’t stretch my legs out. I didn’t actually need to stretch, but it was nice. It was also completely dark, but with a lively feed in my head, that wasn’t a problem.

  Miki asked, Are you okay, Consultant Rin?

  I checked again to make sure our connection was secure, that the humans couldn’t hear it and none of the augmented humans could pick up an echo. It was, because I had control of Miki’s feed, but I’d probably keep checking every time it talked to me because that was just the kind of cycle I was having. I’m fine. You can call me Rin. It was slightly less annoying than “Consultant Rin.” It hadn’t been annoying when Tapan, Rami, and Maro had called me Consultant, but … I don’t know, everything was annoying right now and I had no idea why.

  Okay, Rin! Miki said. We’re friends, and friends call each other by name.

  Maybe I did know why.

  I watched through Miki’s eyes as it helped the expedition bring the last few pieces of their equipment and testing supplies down. They loaded it all through the airlock and stowed it away. I listened to them talk on the feed, and they seemed excited to be finally on their way. There were four researchers and two shuttle crew, all long-term employees of GoodNightLander Independent who had worked together before, who had been waiting impatiently here for their security detail to show up. Don Abene grabbed Miki’s arms at one point and smiled into its camera. I was glad I hadn’t made any attempt to control Miki’s movements, because my recoil was so immediate and instinctive I whacked my head against the wall of my storage space.

  (Nobody grabs SecUnits. I hadn’t realized this was a perk until now.)

  I’m still not good at telling human ages just by looking. Don Abene’s warm brown skin was lined at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and her long dark hair had strands of white in it, but for all I knew it was a cosmetic choice. She laughed and her dark eyes crinkled. “We’re finally going, Miki!”

  “Hurray!” Miki said, and from inside its feed, I could see it was sincere.

  Miki helped Hirune stow the protective suits, then defaulted to randomly following its human friends around as they stowed their personal gear. I suggested Miki walk out of the lab space and go to the storage area where Wilken and Gerth were unpacking their equipment. Miki didn’t have a weapons scan nearly as sensitive as mine but its vision had magnification capabilities that mine didn’t. (This is one of the differences between a security unit and a bot designed to help with scientific research.)

  I asked it to take a good look at the cases the two security consultants were unpacking and it gave me a close-up view, breaking up the image into different angles as Gerth lifted her case into the storage locker. I’d wanted to do this aboard Ship, but they had stowed their gear too quickly, and asking a drone to inspect it would probably have drawn some unwanted attention. Gerth glanced at Miki, stowed the case, and said, “What are you looking at?”

  I told Miki, Say, “Don Abene wants me to ask you if you need any help stowing your gear.”

  Miki cocked its head and repeated it verbatim, with the kind of perfect innocence only a perfectly innocent bot could manage.

  Gerth smiled a little. “No, thanks, little bot,” she said. Wilken chuckled.

  “Little bot,” seriously? (Somewhere there had to be a happy medium between being treated as a terrifying murder machine and being infantilized.) I prompted Miki to go back to its friends. As it retreated down the passage, it asked, Rin, why did they not want us to see their cases?

  Not everybody wants a pet robot sticking its scanner into their business, but I was distracted and just said, I’m not sure. From the shapes, the cases held weapons, ammo, and a couple of high-end sets of self-adjusting armor, the kind I’d only seen in the media. The company had never given us armor that nice, though in its defense, our armor did get blasted off us at regular intervals. No drones, but then humans aren’t good with security drones; it takes multi-track processing to direct them and most humans just can’t do it without extensive augmentation. Even without drones, they looked like they were prepared for anything. Maybe no reason.

  I was trying to decide if I should take the opportunity to steal anything if said opportunity should occur. The self-adjusting armor was incredibly tempting, and would be even better once I made some modifications to the code. But it was enough work to just get myself past the weapons scanners; bringing anything that bulky along was just going to make it more likely that I’d be caught.

  Miki went up to the crew area below the control deck where Abene and Hirune sat with Brais and Ejiro. Kader and Vibol were just above us in the cockpit. The humans had turned a couple of the station chairs around to face the curved padded couch, and were watching the bubble of a floating display surface in the middle of the compartment. From the schematics on display, they were going over a proposed route through the facility. I was poking around carefully in their individual feeds, when Abene patted the seat next to her. “Sit down, Miki.”

  Miki sat next to her on the couch, and none of the other humans reacted. This was apparently perfectly normal.

  “Are you excited to see the inside of the facility, Miki?” Hirune asked it, as she turned the schematic to a new angle. “I’m tired of just looking at maps of it.”

  “I’m excited!” Miki echoed. “We will do a good assessment, and then we can have a new assignment.”

  Ejiro laughed. “I hope it’s that easy.”

  Brais said, “I don’t care if it’s easy or hard, at least we’re moving! Miki was probably getting tired of playing Mus with us.”

  “I like games. I would play games all the time if we could,” Miki said.

  I had to withdraw back to my dark cubicle. I was having an emotion again. An angry one.

  Before Dr. Mensah bought me, I could count the number of times I sat on a human chair and it was never in front of clients.

  I don’t even know why I was reacting this way. Was I jealous of a human-form bot? I didn’t want to be a pet robot, that’s why I’d left Dr. Mensah and the others. (Not that Mensah had said she wanted a pet SecUnit. I don’t think she wanted a SecUnit at all.) What did Miki have that I wanted? I had no idea. I didn’t know what I wanted.

  And yes, I know that was probably a big part of the problem right there.

  I stepped back into Miki’s feed. Don Abene was saying, “—keep in mind that your experience with humans is limited. We think of you as one of our family, but to others, you are a stranger. That’s probably why our security team didn’t want you to look at their things.”

  Uh-oh. I ran back Miki’s camera to pick up the part of the conversation I’d missed. Miki had asked Abene why Gerth had reacted that way when it had looked at her and Wilken’s cases. Fortunately, Abene had gotten distracted trying to answer the question while still looking over the facility’s schematic, and hadn’t asked why Miki had gone to see the security team. If she thought to ask about it, would Miki tell her about me? How would it answer that question?

  I could take Miki over the way I’d originally planned, except its interactions with Abene and the others were incredibly complicated. I didn’t think I could fake my way through that; my augmented human security consultant act had been hard enough to develop, and I wasn’t trying to fool people who knew me. Or who I was pretending to be. Or whatever.

  Trying not to sound nervous and/or enraged, I said, Miki, remember you said you wouldn’t tell Don Abene about me.

  I won’t, Rin. Miki was so calm and complacent, my performance reliability dropped by 2 percent. I promised.

  I managed to seethe silently. But part of Miki’s coded behavior must include going to Don Abene when it had questions. I was going to need to make sure I answer
ed its questions as thoroughly as possible; obviously “I don’t know” wasn’t going to cut it.

  Hirune was asking Abene, “What do you think of our security team so far?”

  Abene said, “I’m pleased, actually. They don’t seem to know much about terraforming facilities, but that shouldn’t matter.”

  It might, I thought. But SecUnit education modules were crap and all I knew about terraforming was what I had managed to absorb while completely not caring about it, so maybe I wasn’t the best authority.

  Through Miki’s eyes, I saw Hirune glance at the other two, who were talking about calibrating something. She lowered her voice. “I suppose. With only two of them, they’re not going to be much help against raiders.”

  Abene snorted. “If there are raiders, we’re pulling out and heading back for the transit station immediately.”

  By the time you see them, it’s too late for that.

  My reaction must have gotten into the feed, because Miki asked anxiously, You’ll keep them safe, Rin?

  Yes, Miki, I told it, because that was my story and I was sticking to it.

  Chapter Four

  IN MIKI’S FEED I had access to a scan of the terraforming facility, superimposed with a schematic from the original specs. Yeah, I think I knew where to look for the evidence I wanted.

  Through Miki’s camera I saw the visual approaching on the shuttle’s display. We had passed the tractor array already, still operating at optimal capacity according to the automated reports it was sending to the station.

  The facility was a huge platform in the upper atmosphere, far larger than the station, larger than a full-sized transit ring. Most of that space was for the pods that contained the enormous engines that would actually control the terraforming process. There was no visual of the planet itself; the facility hung in a layer of perpetual storm. Swirling, towering clouds, filled with electrical discharges, obscured any view of the surface.

  “We’re seeing good levels on all the environmentals,” Kader said from the cockpit, sharing an image of the readings through the feed. “Are you sure you want to go with full gear?”

  I tensed, certain it was going to be the wrong answer. Miki, tell her— But Abene replied, “Yes, we’ll go full safety protocol.” That meant full suits, with filtering and emergency air supply, and some protection for vulnerable human bodies. “We’ll keep to that until we can inspect the environmentals and take over facility control, then we’ll reevaluate.”

  I relaxed. Then I reminded myself yet again that these weren’t my clients.

  Miki said, It’s okay, Rin. Don Abene is always cautious.

  I’d seen lots of dead cautious humans, but I wasn’t going to say that to Miki.

  Through Miki’s eyes I watched Abene gear up for the first assessment walk-through. Kader and Vibol were staying on the ship, but Wilken and Gerth, plus Hirune and the two other researchers, Brais and Ejiro, were going with Abene and Miki.

  Wilken exited the lock first, and her helmet cam sent the video into the feed. We had locked onto a passenger-only dock in the habitation pod and the embarkation area wasn’t big enough to accommodate heavy equipment or standard hauler bots. Power was on but at minimal; emergency light bands glowed at the floor level, halfway up the wall, and at the top, but the larger overheads were off. It was enough light for the humans to see without the special filters in the helmet cameras.

  Was it a good idea to board the facility here? The schematic showed a larger multi-use embarkation space on the level above us. This smaller loading zone could make the approach to the shuttle easier to defend, but it could also make it more difficult to get the team back into the shuttle if something went wrong.

  It was hard to say if it was a bad judgment or not. There was always the fact that humans are lousy at security. I would have gone in first with a full deployment of drones, leaving the humans on the sealed shuttle. I would have evaluated the facility (i.e., made sure there weren’t any unwanted visitors, by walking around as bait waiting for something to attack me) and only then brought the humans in. But don’t mind me, it’s not like I know what I’m doing or anything.

  The camera in Wilken’s armor sent video into the team feed as Wilken moved forward. She went through the lock and into the corridor, and I noted no damage, just a few scuffs and scrapes on walls and floor, signs of normal use. Abene, Hirune, Miki, and then Brais and Ejiro followed, with Gerth bringing up the rear. I split my attention into seven streams, one for each human’s helmet camera plus Miki. I was listening in on the team feed and comm, but that was all coming through Miki, too. Abene said, “Miki, are you picking up anything?”

  “No, Don Abene,” Miki said. It was scanning for signal activity from any resident systems. Since this facility had been built by GrayCris, I was expecting the kind of HubSystem and SecSystem I was used to, or something compatible. There were lots of security cameras everywhere, they just weren’t active. Miki was right, there was nothing but dead air in here, no facility feed activity despite the power for lights and environmentals.

  Maybe they thought the systems would be lonely if they were left active, Rin, Miki said. What do you think?

  I wondered if ART had thought I was this stupid when it had been riding around in my head. Maybe, but the chances were good that if that had been the case, ART would have said so.

  That might be true, I said, because I knew now if I didn’t answer all Miki’s questions it might accidentally rat me out to the nearest human. But then I remembered this place had been meant to collapse and burn up in the atmosphere before GI had put in the claim on it. I added, GrayCris might have removed the central cores for the resident systems when they pulled out. They’d want to cut their losses. Sec- and HubSystems that could run a facility this complex would be hugely expensive. I didn’t know about GrayCris, but the company that owned me would never have left that much cash behind.

  And Miki said, “Don Abene, maybe GrayCris removed the central cores for the resident systems when they pulled out. They would want to cut their losses.”

  For fuck’s sake.

  “That makes sense,” Hirune said. She had been poking at her comm, and added, “There’s some interference, maybe shielding? I can’t pick up the station traffic anymore, though I can still hear Kader and Vibol on our shuttle’s feed.”

  Ejiro pulled a sample of the signal interference into his feed to study it. “Yes, we know the shielding’s pretty heavy, probably due to the disturbances in the atmosphere.” As if on cue, a burst of signal static blotted out the comm and feed for 1.3 seconds.

  Heavy weather, Vibol commented over the comm. Watch out for rain.

  The team chuckled, and Miki sent an amusement sigil into the team feed. Oh, a running joke, those aren’t annoying at all. Wilken and Gerth ignored the byplay.

  Ahead, Wilken stepped out of the corridor into a larger space, the scanner on her armor telling her it was empty of life signs. She paced around the circumference, clearing the room, then signaled the others to come in. This space wasn’t labeled on the schematic but had decontam cubicles and environmental suits stored in racks against the walls. Again, no damage visible as the humans flashed their cameras around. Brais said, “Was this a clean facility? I thought the bio pod was separated and sealed. That’s what it said in the schematic, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m sure that’s the case,” Hirune said. She checked a panel on the nearest decontam cubicle. It still had power, but the doors were all in the upright position. (Always a relief. Cubicles that something may be hiding in are no fun.) Hirune tried to get it to download a usage report to the feed, but its internal storage was empty.

  I checked Kader and Vibol, who were both glued to their feeds, though Kader still had a channel open to station. There was some interference, but he was still getting pings and answers from the station Port Authority. It probably was the atmospheric shielding that was blocking the team inside from contact with the station.

  Anyway, it was time to get movin
g. I slipped out of my storage cubby. I went down the corridor and cycled the lock, not allowing it to report the incident to its log. Kader had heard the lock open on the station when I boarded but this time was too occupied watching the team in the feed to notice.

  I stepped out into the cooler facility air and let the lock close and seal.

  The team had already moved out of the decontam room and headed toward the bio pod to check its status. I started down the corridor. I’d missed my armor off and on before this, usually when I was having to walk through large crowds of humans in transit rings. After being forced to do it to survive, plus traveling with Ayres and the others, I was sort of used to talking to humans and making eye contact, though I didn’t like it.

  This was the first time I missed my armor because I felt a physical threat.

  I moved silently through the decontam room and took the exit corridor, then turned down the branch that led away from the bio pod, toward the geo pod. This corridor was the same as what I was seeing on Miki’s camera and the team feed: no damage, no signs of hasty departure, just quiet corridors.

  (I don’t know why I expected to see damage and signs that the human staff had run for their lives; there was no indication that this was anything but a planned abandonment. Maybe I was thinking of RaviHyral again. You’d think once I’d seen the place, found out what had happened, the partial memories would fade. Not so much, it turned out.)

  It shouldn’t have been weird, but it was weird. I had Miki and the team backburnered, so I knew exactly where they were, and their voices filled the silence in the feed. But there was something about this place that made my human skin prickle under my clothes. I hated that.

  I couldn’t pin down what was bothering me. Scan was negative, and this far away from the team there was no ambient sound except the whisper through the air system. Maybe it was the lack of security camera access, but I’d been in worse places with no cameras. Maybe it was something subliminal. Actually, it felt pretty liminal. Pro-liminal. Up-liminal? Whatever, there was no knowledge base here to look it up.