I tugged on Mensah’s hand and started to run. It was twenty meters to the next gate, and just beyond it were the shuttles. Mensah yanked up the skirt of her caftan and sprinted, keeping up with me. I considered picking her up so I could hit my top speed, but if I did that, the drones would ID us.
The gate was a bulkhead that arched down from the domed ceiling, with pylons forming multiple doorways, each wide and high enough for big hauler bots. As we ran toward it, an air wall shimmered into place between the pylons.
I had time to hope it was just a safety precaution. You can still push your way through an air wall; it’s designed to stop atmosphere loss in the event of a hull breach but still allow humans to get away from the place where the breach occurred.
We were four meters away when hard barriers flowed up from the deck and smoothly closed the gates as I slid to a halt. Mensah stumbled and caught herself. She was breathing hard and one of her shoes had come off.
Could I pry one of the barriers open? Hack it? They were security/safety barriers, not half-meter-thick-oh-no-we’re-about-to-lose-station-structural-integrity hatches. But they were on a separate network, LockControlSys, the safety/airlock control system, buried under several protective feed walls, and I didn’t have a path into it. I could find a path, but I needed to go through PortMaintSec and the security alert had taken it down along with the hauler bots and other cargo movers. I sent a command to reboot it.
More of my system alerts tripped and I checked my drone cams for views of the port booking area. Terrified crowds of humans parted in a confused wave for … three SecUnits, the Palisade brand. Their drones were in tight humming clouds above their helmets.
Oh, yeah, this is bad.
I shifted my bag off my shoulder and pulled my projectile weapon out, and transferred extra ammo to my jacket pockets. Mensah hadn’t asked me what we were going to do, probably thinking I was hacking the gate barriers. She toed off her other shoe and braced herself, ready to run again. Except PortMaintSec wasn’t going to be up in time and I couldn’t tunnel through all the layers of security before the hostiles reached us.
I was still in the StationSecAdmin and PortSec feeds. I thought about that human supervisor who had triggered the klaxon early, giving the humans on the embarkation floor extra time to flee. There were humans on those channels who could manually lift these barriers. To both, I sent: I am a contracted SecUnit with an endangered client. I am trying to reach the shuttle at dock in slot alt7A. They would know that was the company shuttle, waiting to return to the gunship that had been sent to retrieve a bonded client. I added, Please, they will kill her.
There was no reply. I didn’t have a solid ETA for the hostile SecUnits. They weren’t moving at top speed, with so many humans to dodge, but that would change once they hit the now nearly empty embarkation floor.
The cams were still operational in this section; whoever it was had to be able to see us. Let my client go through the gate and I’ll stay here. Please. They will kill her.
The lock lights flickered on the barrier directly in front of us and it slid up one meter, just far enough for a human to squeeze under. I handed my bag to Mensah, because I knew it would make her think I was going to follow her. “Run. Slot alt7A.”
She crouched and wiggled through the gap. And the barrier slid shut behind her.
Mensah called to me on my feed, It closed! SecUnit—
I told her, I can’t get through, I’ll take another ship. Go to the shuttle and get out of here. Then I backburnered her channel.
There was no way I could get to a ship. Seven transports in the public docks were still allowing fleeing humans to board, but all the locks in this area were sealed. I wasn’t going anywhere.
It sounds all self-sacrificing and dramatic, telling it this way. And I guess it was, maybe. What I was mostly thinking was that there wasn’t going to be one dead SecUnit on this embarkation floor, there were going to be four.
Sending SecUnits after me was one thing. But they sent SecUnits after my client. No one gets to walk away from that.
I turned my back on the gates and accessed the monitor hack I already had on the PortSec drones, took control of the whole fleet, and snapped their connection to PortSec. Then I blanked all the stationary cameras on the embarkation floor. Now Palisade or GrayCrisSec or whoever was running this show didn’t know my position but I knew theirs.
The hostiles ran along the walkway past the last few clumps of fleeing humans. A human StationSec squad in uniform had scrambled in the booking area, trying to direct the humans flooding out of the port area into the mall and cover their retreat. (Who knows what GrayCris told them was happening to get the Port Authority to allow a SecUnit deployment. It probably involved me, Rogue SecUnit on a rampage.) A second security squad in power suits with the Palisade logo moved onto the walkway. They were backup for the SecUnits.
Speaking of which, I ordered Section One of my drone fleet to deploy surveillance countermeasures and Section Two to attack the hostile SecUnits’ drones.
As they swooped down to engage, I thought GrayCris probably regretted buying all that extra station security in the port right about now.
Drone buzzing almost drowned out the alarm klaxon. The announcement instructed the humans trapped on the public embarkation floor to drop where they were and not move. The three SecUnits slowed, probably on orders from their supervisor, who might or might not be among the power-suited squad now positioned on the walkway just above the public docks, well out of my range. I updated my timeline.
The hostiles crossed the public docks toward the gates into this section, which were still open. PortMaintSec was finally back up and I told it to kill the main lights.
This caused shouts and screams from the humans still trapped. I could see via my scan, and so could the hostiles, and the humans in power suits would have dark vision filters. But it was scary and intimidating, and that’s what I was going for.
Somebody tried to restore the control feed connection to my drones, but couldn’t get past my wall. Somebody else, probably GrayCrisSec or Palisade, deployed killware. StationSecAdmin alerted to it and, probably terrified it was aimed at SafetyLockSys, deployed a killware countermeasure. It would have been hilarious if I wasn’t about to die.
It was still a little hilarious.
My projectile weapon was designed to pierce armor but I needed to be close, and I needed cover.
As the hostiles came through into the private docks, I activated the new code I had been working on. Code: Deploy&Delay.
Simultaneously, three things happened. The hauler bots that StationSecAdmin had deactivated all reactivated and charged into the open floor. The load lifters hovering up by the ceiling dropped to skim low along the deck. My reserve drones split into multiple task groups and dove down, took up altitudes at knee and head level, and zoomed around through the other roving bots. In the dark, with just the gleam of the emergency lighting floor strips, it was kind of impressive.
A fourth thing happened: I started to run toward the stationside wall.
I’d spent a lot of my time in the hotel room writing this code when I could have been watching media, so it was nice to see it hadn’t been a waste. Basically it suppressed the bots and lifters’ safety features except for their ability to avoid each other, restricted them to an area, and sped up and randomized their movements. I’d originally meant it for the entire port, as a last-ditch distraction, and had had to change the parameters on the fly to make the affected area the private docks. And I was glad I hadn’t panicked and dropped it earlier; as a surprise, it was working great.