Rogue Protocol

by Martha Wells

  Miki said, “The combat bots could have been in standby and received instructions to activate once anyone arrived at the facility.” Hirune stirred and murmured and Miki responded, “There, there, Hirune. It’s all right.”

  Well, yeah, I thought of that already.

  Abene was saying, “I don’t understand this. If Wilken and Gerth were sent to kill us, why were the combat bots sent here? Obviously GrayCris wants to stop the assessment, but that’s—”

  I said, “Hold it,” and stopped. I needed to do a quick review of my video and prove or disprove this theory and there’s only so many things I can do while walking and scanning for hostiles without a Sec-or HubSystem to help. I let Miki view my feed as I started my analysis, and I was distantly aware of Miki explaining to Abene what I was doing.

  I pinged my drone and told it to open its log and query its records and build a list of activations, standbys, and sleep phases. Then I pulled my copy of Miki’s video of the first attack when Hirune had been taken, and did a quick review of it and my video of the second attack, when the combat bot had gone after Wilken. I finished and then checked the log digest the drone had ready for me. (It was really nice to work with such an advanced drone.)

  “The combat bots and drones weren’t sent here for you,” I reported to Abene. “They were part of the facility’s manifest from the start. The transit station was still in construction at that point, and wouldn’t have been much help in driving off potential raiders. And GrayCris wouldn’t have wanted to call on any outside agency for help, since they were trying to conceal the fact that they were building an illegal mining platform disguised as a terraforming facility.” And the bots probably weren’t here just for protection from raiders, but also to keep any human workers in line. “The combat bots and drones have been in sleep mode since the facility was abandoned. They were activated when your shuttle docked here. Analysis suggests Wilken and Gerth were surprised by their existence.” A bot analysis would have missed that entirely, but I’m better at reading human faces and voices. (The organic parts in my head do come in handy for that, and of course it was much easier on recorded video, when I could do freezes and zoom-ins, and not in anxiety-causing realtime.) “I think Wilken did believe it was raiders who staged the attack and took Hirune, up until the second attack when she saw the combat bot. There’s a good chance GrayCris didn’t tell her and Gerth about the combat bots, hoping that the bots would eliminate them.” And helpfully tie up any loose ends.

  I wondered how Wilken felt about that. It sure hadn’t made her hesitate to finish her mission. She had expected me to be destroyed by the combat bots; she meant to kill Abene and Miki. She had counted on getting out of this and collecting her fee.

  Abene let out a breath in frustration and anger. But she said, “Can we use that on Gerth, do you think? Tell her that GrayCris tried to kill her and Wilken as well, that they should testify to what happened. Or use Wilken as a hostage…” She shook her head, biting her lip.

  She was thinking strategically, which is always a relief, and asking me questions instead of giving me stupid orders. I didn’t have to obey orders anymore, but that doesn’t make them any less annoying. I said, “Our only advantage right now is that Gerth doesn’t know Wilken was compromised.”

  The drone was still reporting no activity from the hatches, which meant the bots had gone the other direction, or were working on the lifts. I told it to come to my position. (When it reached Wilken, I had it stop and hover in front of her face for twenty-six seconds. Okay, so I was a little angry.)

  Abene was looking at me again. I could see her doing it from the view through Miki’s camera. She said, “Gerth must be waiting for a sign from Wilken before she acts against the others on the shuttle, surely. I should try to contact Kader. I can get a tight feed connection with him.”

  “Are you sure he won’t say aloud, ‘Hey everybody, Don Abene’s just signaled me on the feed’ before you can tell him not to?” That’s a problem with humans.

  Abene started to speak, hesitated, and then shook her head once. “He might, he might. But we must find out what is happening aboard the shuttle.”

  Miki said, “Vibol doesn’t speak very fast. Maybe we should call her.”

  I sent Abene and Miki a warning in the feed right before the drone passed us in silent mode; I was sending it ahead to scout. Abene still flinched, then stared after it. But she was right about the shuttle. If we could get a report from onboard, it would help us plan. Also, Abene and Miki would stop asking me about it, which would be a very big bonus right now. (I’d forgotten how stressful being a SecUnit was.) I said, “You don’t have any security monitoring aboard your shuttle? No cameras? No other bots, even a currently inactive one?”

  “No.” Abene pushed her hair back, frustrated but thinking. “There’s no need. There are cameras in the evac suit helmets, but they’re inactive in the emergency lockers.”

  Miki said, “Don Abene, there are two evac suits on the flight deck. I have the hard addresses for their comms.”

  Abene turned to me. “Can you activate their comms from here?”

  I probably could. But whether Gerth had killed the others yet, or was still waiting for a signal from Wilken, it didn’t matter. We still needed to get Gerth off the shuttle.

  We needed to get everyone off the shuttle.

  I was getting an idea. It was probably a bad idea. (When most of your training in tactical thinking comes from adventure shows, that does tend to happen.) I said, “We need to get back to the geo pod.”

  Chapter Six

  NOW THAT I KNEW where we were going, it was a lot easier to get there. We went to the next lift junction, and I spent a careful minute cutting my code-protected lift out of the system and making its actions invisible to the rest of the lifts. (That sounds like an obvious thing to do, but the problem is, if the other lifts can’t see your lift, they can attempt to occupy the space your lift is already in. This is just as catastrophic for the occupants as it sounds.)

  I sent my drone on the lift first, just to make sure there was nobody waiting for us outside the geo pod, then I took Miki, Abene, and Hirune through. We reached the geo pod hub, walking in under the transparent dome with the shifting storm clouds overhead. I sealed and code-locked the hatches, which admittedly was just to make the humans feel better. The combat bots could blast their way through if they tried hard enough, especially with three of them concentrating on one hatch. I was hoping they were planning to trap us on the route to the shuttle, which was not a great scenario either, but would at least buy us some time. I sent the drone to scout the access corridors that led to the shuttle to see if it could locate the bots’ ambush point.

  (I didn’t think the bots would use the lifts even if they got control of the system again, since they would be alert for the kinds of things SecUnits can do. But I told my invisible lift pod to careen randomly around the facility anyway. It was worth a shot.)

  Anyway, Step One to getting us back in the shuttle was getting Gerth out of it.

  It occurred to me I could do this faster if I had help. Miki had put a semi-conscious Hirune down in one of the padded console chairs while Abene pulled the emergency kit off her harness and rifled through it. I said, “I’m going to try to get a feed connection to your shuttle via the suit comms on the flight deck, but I need to get this control station active. There are diggers still attached to the facility that we might be able to use against the combat bots.” That wasn’t exactly what I was going to do with the diggers, but I didn’t want to argue about it.

  Abene nodded understanding and put the med tabs for concussion and shock into Miki’s good hand. “Miki, please take care of Hirune while I work on the control station.” Then she frowned at me and said, “You’re bleeding.”

  I looked down. I was dripping onto the floor, a mix of blood and fluid. I hate it when I leak. My veins seal automatically and some of the shrapnel had popped out, but the projectile in my side had moved around, reopening that woun
d. I cautiously dialed up my pain sensors to check; oh yeah, that’s what had happened. Ouch.

  Abene said, “Were you hit?” She stepped toward me, reaching to push my jacket aside.

  I jerked back a step. She stopped, startled. Miki turned, its visual sensors focusing in on me. I checked its camera and got a view of my face. I thought I had gotten good at controlling my expression, but apparently only when I wasn’t feeling actual emotions. In our feed connection, Miki said, Abene won’t hurt you, SecUnit.

  Abene held up her empty hand, palm out in a gesture that usually meant “don’t shoot me,” except she wasn’t afraid. She was matter-of-fact. She said, “I’m sorry, but you need treatment. Will it be better if Miki helps you?”

  I said, “I don’t—” and stopped there because I didn’t have any way to finish that sentence. I needed help, I didn’t want anyone to touch me. These were two mutually exclusive states.

  Abene waited, watching me. Then she said, “Miki, can you leave Hirune?”

  “I’m okay,” Hirune rasped. She was blinking and clutching a bulb of hydrating solution from the emergency kit. “I’m fine.”

  Abene said, “Good. I’ll work on the console and Miki, you come here and help Rin.” Still watching me, she held out the emergency kit and Miki came to take it.

  As Abene went to the console, Miki said, “Please lift your left arm and pull your shirt up, SecUnit.”

  I had to set down Wilken’s projectile weapon and harness to do that. I did, putting them on the station chair behind me, because it would look like a normal SecUnit thing to do, because I needed to look normal now. I was devoting a lot of attention to the response I needed to make to Abene. I decided a simple error correcting statement was best. “I’m not Rin. Rin is—”

  Abene was powering up the digger control station. Not looking at me, studying the console’s interface in the feed, she said, “Consultant Rin is your supervisor, yes, I’m sorry.”

  Miki scanned me and sent the results to my feed. Wow, those were kind of big chunks of metal stuck in me. Miki extended a secondary clamp out of its chest and used that to hold the emergency kit as it got the extractor probe out with its good hand. I don’t need the nerve-block, I told Miki on the feed. I can turn my pain sensors down.

  That must be handy. Miki poked the probe into the wound in my side. I don’t have pain sensors, but then, I don’t have pain.

  Yeah, one of the differences between bots and SecUnits. I had talked to ART about the other differences, once. How we couldn’t trust each other, because of the orders humans could give. And ART had said, There are no humans here.

  Well, there were humans here. I said, Miki, did you tell Don Abene that there is no Consultant Rin, there’s just me?

  Yes, Miki said. It found the projectile and carefully eased it out. I told her when the first combat bot attacked Wilken, when she asked me if I knew if you were telling the truth. Then it added, I told her because I wanted to, not because I had to.

  I was sure Miki believed that. Why does she think I lied about it?

  She thinks it’s because it’s illegal in the jurisdictions that GoodNightLander Independent operates in to employ SecUnits. Miki finished applying the wound sealant patch and went for the second projectile. She said someone who works for GoodNightLander Independent must have sent you here but doesn’t want us to know who they are. She said it didn’t matter, since they sent you to help us.

  Abene was using the console to boot the interfaces for each digger. I needed to start trying to get intel on the shuttle.

  It was tricky since I wanted to keep Abene and Miki’s comm and feed connections cut off so Gerth or anything else that might be wandering the facility with murderous intent couldn’t use them to trace us. But it helped that Miki had the hard addresses for the two suits on the flight deck. The shuttle’s feed was still active, and I was able to sneak in and ping the first suit. After some poking, I got it to activate its comm.

  I heard Kader first, asking for a report on Ejiro’s condition. Brais answered, saying the MedSystem had put Ejiro into recovery. Vibol said something in the background that the audio couldn’t quite pick up. Then I heard Gerth say, “Any response from the station yet?”

  Sounding frustrated, Kader replied, “Not yet. It’s got to be interference from that storm.”

  Vibol spoke again, still too muffled. Gerth answered, “No, we need to sit tight until we hear from them.”

  Uh-huh. She sounded calm and confident and reassuring, though I was pretty sure a voice analysis would show the tension underneath.

  I pulled out of the connection and backburnered it. Abene had the station display set to visible, floating above the console’s surface, showing the control screens for the diggers. She muttered, “There. All the diggers are powering up. It’s going to take a few minutes. I hope you can control them, it looks like their procedures have all been deleted.”

  Miki was picking shrapnel out of my back now. I said, “The rest of the team hasn’t been injured and Gerth is still acting as their security. She won’t let them leave the shuttle to look for you. They’re having trouble contacting the station for help.”

  Abene looked up, frowning. “What trouble? We were in contact with the station when we arrived. It shouldn’t—”

  I actually lost the rest of it because my drone pinged me with a report. It had reached the decontam room and had the hatch of the shuttle in scan range, and it hadn’t found any sign of the combat bots. I said aloud, “They aren’t there.”

  “What?” Abene stood up from the console, alarmed. “Who?”

  “The combat bots. The drone didn’t find them on the route to the shuttle.” I was skimming through everything it was sending me, the scans, the visual data, audio. The drone’s scan was a lot better than mine, and it had been actively searching the route, checking spots for potential ambush. Comparing it to the schematic, I couldn’t see anything it had missed. “They aren’t there.” I sent the drone’s visual into our closed feed connection.

  Miki’s head cocked as it reviewed the video. Abene threw a worried look at Hirune. She said, “Then they must be here, near this pod, trying to trap us.”

  Maybe. I found my careening invisible lift pod, told it to go to the nearest lift junction to the drone, and ordered the drone to take the lift to the junction outside the geo pod. Within a minute the drone was in the access corridors outside the hatches I had sealed, scanning. I watched it record empty corridors and junctions. Nothing. The bots weren’t setting up an ambush for us on the way to the shuttle and they weren’t outside the geo pod.

  My potential strategy hadn’t experienced a catastrophic failure or anything, but I was missing something.

  Right, this wasn’t a good time to panic. I went back to my first contact with the drone, the intel I’d gotten before it had been locked out of the combat bots’ network. There was the entry for that third active combat bot. It was marked “active out of range.”

  I had assumed it was out of range because it was headed toward where the shuttle was docked, to set up a trap for us when we tried to retreat, but I didn’t know that.

  Go back further. Wilken and Gerth had been sent here in place of the contracted GI security to stop/kill the assessment team. So why hadn’t they acted as soon as they arrived on the transit station? With so few people there, it wouldn’t have been difficult. They would have needed an exit scenario if they had acted on the station, but they needed an exit scenario even more here on the facility. The team’s shuttle wasn’t wormhole capable. They would have to return to the transit station, kill the PA staff who would possibly be asking a lot of questions about what had happened to the rest of the assessment team, and steal a wormhole capable ship. (Preferably a ship without a bot pilot who would vigorously resist being stolen.) That sounded like a lot of work, especially considering the fact that there were combat bots on the facility, ready to destroy intruders, so why had GrayCris hired someone else?

  The obvious answer was th
at Wilken and Gerth weren’t here to kill the team, but wanted to get into the terraforming facility because there was something, either data or a physical object, that they intended to retrieve. But they had made no move to retrieve anything. I was certain Wilken had been surprised by the combat bot attack, my analysis there was not faulty. Had Wilken and Gerth even been sent by GrayCris, or was there another corporate or political entity in play?

  I needed help. I was rattled, I was still leaking a little, and I hadn’t been able to watch any media in what felt like forever. In desperation, I copied all my possibilities into a potential strategy/decision tree diagram and threw it into the feed for Abene and Miki.

  Abene winced, startled at the sudden large image in her feed. Then her face went still as she studied the diagram. Miki wiped wound sealant onto the last shrapnel laceration in my back and shifted into analysis mode. Hirune, still half conscious, watched us with a confused expression.

  In the feed, Abene detached one of the assumption squares and moved it away from the tree. She said, If we assume Wilken and Gerth were sent by GrayCris, then they aren’t here to retrieve anything. GrayCris had ample opportunity to remove anything they wanted when they abandoned the facility. She hesitated, her attention moving from one assumption square to another. I think we have to ask ourselves, what does GrayCris want?

  That was easy. I said, To destroy the facility. If GoodNightLander Independent hadn’t installed the tractor array, the facility would have collapsed into the planet by now.

  Abene’s brow furrowed as she looked at the squares listing possible exit scenarios and the problems with each one. So why weren’t Wilken and Gerth sent to destroy the tractor array? Actually, perhaps they were.

  Miki said, aloud, “Wilken altered the flat display on her right forearm armor to show local facility time.” It sent us an image in the feed: Wilken adjusting the display on her armor. The image had been captured when I asked Miki to look at the two security consultants as they stowed their equipment when the shuttle was getting ready to undock from the transit station. “She checked that display approximately fifty-seven times during our walk through the facility, until she attempted to hurt Don Abene.”