With the interface I was able to make copies of their storage without waking them. Somebody had thought to order them to dump their logs (which would void their warranties, but I guess since the facility was supposed to fall into the planet, nobody had cared). Unfortunately for that somebody, the diggers had dumped their logs into their buffers and then been shut down before the buffers timed out and deleted.
It was a lot of data, but I was able to construct a query to exclude the operation commands and other extraneous stuff. I had to make a direct connection to copy the data to the extra memory clips I’d implanted, which meant peeling back the skin around my right forearm weapon port again. Once I had that done, it went pretty quickly. I sat on the edge of the console, facing the door, and started up a favorite episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon in background to help pass the time, though I kept one channel on Miki and the team feed.
I had just finished when Miki said, Rin, is that you?
I was distracted, stopping the episode, untangling myself from the console and from the sleeping, mostly empty brains of the diggers. I knew the team was still over in the hub for the bio pod (they were doing a physical assessment of the equipment for the bio matrices, and trying to get the consoles rebooted), so the question didn’t make sense. Is that me what?
This. Miki sounded confused, worried. It sent me an audio clip. I heard the humans talking on the comms, Hirune and Ejiro, then Gerth made a comment.
The conversation? It was something about containment units not being where they were supposed to be, and I didn’t understand why Miki was confused. I’m still in the geo pod.
No, Rin, this. Miki replayed the clip and stripped out the comms audio, so the human voices were much fainter. It was ambient audio, I could hear the air system. I could also hear light thumps, fast like a heartbeat … Oh, oh shit.
I wasted .002 seconds throwing a code into Miki’s feed like I was responding to another SecUnit. I was at the hatch to the geo hub before I realized I needed to say it, or Miki wouldn’t understand what to do. I slammed around the corner and up the corridor toward the lift junction. Miki, you have an incoming unknown/potential hostile moving toward your position. Determine direction, then alert your clients, in that order.
Miki widened its scan, and the rest of its senses went dark as it shifted all its attention to audio. It was rotating, trying to get a wider field. I was still getting the comms on the humans’ feed, and Gerth said, “What’s the little bot doing?”
“What’s wrong, Miki?” Abene asked.
Rin— Miki stopped trying to sound like a human and sent me an urgent assistance request tied to the raw audio data. I should have realized, Miki wasn’t a security bot, it had no code to deal with this and no one had ever shown it what to do in an emergency involving active and probably sentient hostiles. I reached the lift junction but the stupid lift had returned to a neutral station somewhere.
While I stood there like an idiot during the wasted seconds while the stupid lift returned to this position, I ran a quick analysis and compared it to the facility’s schematic. I put markers up for Miki, the humans, and the incoming hostile, and shoved it back into Miki’s feed. Miki was already saying, “Don Abene, something is coming toward us. We need to take the outer corridor back to the shuttle.” It forwarded my active schematic to the humans.
I stepped into the lift as the doors opened. As I hit the destination sequence, I compared the ambient audio Miki was still processing with the projection on my schematic. This thing, whatever it was, was moving much faster than my first projection had indicated. I sent to Miki, No time to withdraw, tell client to shelter in place and try to lock down area.
Miki was saying to Abene, “Don Abene, it’s too close, we have to stay here and seal the door.”
But Wilken and Gerth had finally understood what was happening and I heard them shout at the assessment team to fall back down the corridor to the shuttle.
I didn’t need to look at my projections again. They weren’t going to make it to the end of the corridor. This is why humans shouldn’t work security; the situation changes too fast and they can’t keep up.
I had sent the lift to the bio pod, the nearest junction to the team’s position. The door slid open and I stepped into a wall of sound: screaming, energy weapon fire. I ran down the corridor and rounded the corner.
I’m going to describe this as I reconstructed it from my and Miki’s camera feeds later, since at the time even I was mostly thinking, Oh shit oh shit.
Wilken and Gerth had managed to get the group out of the bio hub, up the ramp, and into a junction with three other corridors, which was pretty much the most optimal point for being attacked in this area. I mean, if I was going to attack someone, I couldn’t have picked a better spot.
I didn’t have time to be too sarcastic about it because Wilken and Gerth were discharging their weapons down the corridor curving off to the left. Even the emergency power lights down there were off and I couldn’t immediately see what they were shooting at. Ejiro was against the far wall, just sliding to the floor like something had slammed him aside. The rightward corridor led to the next segment of the bio pod and there was a lock and heavy hatch that was in the process of sliding closed. Miki, trying to follow my instructions, had triggered it via the emergency access on the wall. Brais staggered as if she’d been hit by something, and Abene grabbed her by the arm and steadied her.
It looked like all the humans were intact and Wilken and Gerth were driving off whatever it was they had blundered out here to meet and try to feed their clients to, and I was about to fall back. Then in the closing gap between the hatch and the wall, something moved. It was too fast for me to make it out without rerunning my video and reviewing it. Almost before I could move, it reached past Miki, grabbed Don Abene by the helmet, and yanked her into the gap.
Almost before I could move.
I crossed the junction toward them, ducked past Miki and Brais, hit the wall, used my momentum to go up two meters so I was level with Don Abene’s body. I braced myself in the corner, planted one foot against the closing hatch and pushed. I felt the strain even in my inorganic parts; I couldn’t keep it open for long.
One of Abene’s flailing legs hit Brais and knocked her to the floor. Miki was the only one fast enough to act. It grabbed Don Abene’s torso, and its whole feed was one scream of an urgent assistance code. I got an arm around Abene’s waist, pinning one of her arms. The other was desperately scrabbling to hold onto Miki.
If she hadn’t been wearing the suit, she would have been torn in half. If the hatch hadn’t had a safety sensor that was giving us time to clear the obstruction, she would have been crushed. I wasted three seconds trying to pry at the spidery thing gripping her helmet. It was red and had eight multi-jointed fingers, that was all I could tell at the moment. Then I thought of the obvious solution. The air was breathable, and she could be treated for possible contamination as long as she still had her head.
I felt around her neck, slowed down by the unfamiliar suit design, then my fingers hit the little tab. (I would never have found it in time in my armor; the human skin overlay on my hands is much more sensitive.) I pressed the tab and twisted, and the emergency release unlocked her helmet. It was stuck in the door for almost a full second, enough time for me to push off and twist away. Then the thing on the other side snatched it out of the gap and the hatch snapped closed. I landed on my feet holding Don Abene, head still attached.