“What?” Wilken didn’t fall back into a firing position, but the way the armor shifted over her joints made me think that was her first impulse.
I said, “If I’m going in first, I’ll need a projectile weapon.” I just wanted to see what she’d do.
“No, I’m going to follow you in,” Wilken said, not so patiently. “I’ll be at the hatch junction between the production pod corridor and the tube, to give you cover.” She started up the corridor, telling Abene, “Wait here. If I send you a feed message to run, get back to the shuttle.” I followed her, like a good little SecUnit/killing machine.
Behind me, Miki moved to watch us head away up the corridor, sending its camera-view to Abene.
Once we were out of earshot, Wilken muted her comm and feed and said, “Any word from Consultant Rin?”
“No, the station feed isn’t accessible from here.” Which Wilken knew. “I may be able to reach her on comm if you need to speak to her.” I could fake that, but I’d need a little time to work on it.
Fortunately Wilken decided she didn’t want to invite another Security Consultant to give opinions on her strategy, especially since she was planning on getting that Security Consultant’s contracted SecUnit killed. I don’t know what bond companies charge clients when we get killed, but it’s probably a lot.
I figured Wilken’s plan was to send me in, seal the hatch, and when the combat bots killed me, she would tell Abene and Miki that she had tried and now they needed to go back to the shuttle and leave. Without a SecUnit on her side, Abene was unarmed and not wearing powered armor, and Wilken could drag her back if Abene resisted. Of course, if Wilken touched Abene, Miki would intervene, but I’m not sure Wilken realized that.
We reached the hatch junction and Wilken stopped. She said, “Good luck.”
Yeah, fuck you, I thought, and kept walking.
All right, so I wasn’t happy about this. It wasn’t like I had a repair cubicle waiting somewhere. I could repair with a MedSystem but I needed access to one, and the closest one I had any chance of getting to myself was onboard my cargo ship still docked at the station. But I knew I could do this.
(I hoped I could do this. I had been wondering a lot about my judgment lately.)
As I got further up the access tube, out of Wilken’s sight, I backburnered her channel and tapped my connection to Miki and Abene to give them a visual through my feed. (It’s not as good as a helmet camera would be; it uses my eyes to record so it jumps around a lot.) Miki was talking, more to Abene than to me, but I stopped listening. I was fishing for a drone.
I was broadcasting little spurts of static on an open channel. The drone should read it as signals from a vocal comm, like if some poor human was wandering through here, trying to call for help on their comm rather than on the secured interfaces Abene, Miki, and Wilken were using for our feed.
This could blow up in my face in that all the drones might decide to slam through here at once to get me, but I didn’t think that would happen. The bots hadn’t sent them after us yet because they didn’t want us to know they had them, probably because that’s how they intended to attack the shuttle. I was hoping the drones were set to protect the perimeter and a sentry would come to investigate.
I came to a spot where a connector in the tube had empty slots where equipment was supposed to be fitted. It formed shadowy cubbies and I stepped into one. My scan stretched as far as it would go, still sending my tempting intermittent signal. And I got a response. A staticky burst, like a comm trying to reply to me and being drowned out by interference.
A normal SecUnit (you know, one that still had its governor module, less anxious than me but probably more depressed) could do this part, but would be restricted to the canned responses available in the combat stealth module. A drone might be able to recognize those responses as coming from another combat unit and not a human. I didn’t have the combat stealth module anyway (I had never been upgraded with it, probably due to RaviHyral and the whole “killing all the clients” thing, go figure), so I used snippets of dialog from my media storage, extracted and processed to eliminate background noise and music and to remove any identifying code underlying the audio. I sent my prerecorded “Are you—can’t find—where—ship—” artistically obscured with static.
The drone sent another artistic burst of static in response. From its signal strength it was getting closer. I stayed where I was, waiting.
On the feed, Miki said, We’re worried about what you’re doing, SecUnit.
Nothing on scan yet, so I had time to chat. Why are you worried, Miki?
Because we don’t know what you’re doing. Wilken is telling Dr. Abene on her feed that you aren’t doing anything—
The drone had just come into my scan range, moving slowly so as not to alert the human it thought was here. Standing in the dark cubby, I had stopped breathing, stopped any activity it might pick up. I teased it with a little more comm audio. The schematic showed these slots as part of an atmospheric gas sampling station, so the drone had no idea there was room for something human-sized to hide. Confused at the apparently empty passage, it tried to trace the signal. And I pinged it with a compressed list of drone control keys.
(That’s not in the stealth module, and it’s not a function of company-supplied SecSystems. I got it from the proprietary data of a company client who worked on countermeasures for combat drones. I had managed to resist deleting it to fill that space up with new serials. I knew someday it would come in handy.)
One of the keys worked and the drone switched into neutral standby. I wandered around in its control code for a minute or two, making sure I knew how it worked. It, all the other drones (it was reading thirty active), and three combat bots were all operating on a secured feed. All the drones were in the engineering pod foyer with two of the combat bots. The third bot was reading as active in the facility, but there was no location for it. (I had a bad feeling it was heading toward the shuttle to cut us off.) The bots had more layers of security and even now, from within their own network, if I started trying to hack them they’d have time to run up here and kill me. But I could take control of all the drones.
In another twenty seconds, they were all my new drone friends.
Oh, I see, Miki said. Never mind.
But I was going to have to move fast. I told Drone One to remain in standby, and ordered the twenty-nine others to turn on the two combat bots in the engineering pod. Then I started to run.
I rounded a curve, went through two open hatch junctions. I was already hearing energy and projectile weapon fire, metal smashing against walls, and that funny high-pitched whine combat drones make when attacked. I wasn’t controlling them individually; once given the order, the drones knew what to do, and me trying to jumpseat pilot them would just slow them down.
I accelerated as the hatch entrance to the engineering pod came into sight. I reached the end of the corridor at top speed and threw myself forward into a dive.
The hub foyer was now a warzone. I hit the floor and slid out across it. The combat bot nearest the door flailed wildly at the cloud of drones firing and diving at it. It thrashed around like an irritated metal whirlwind, stray blasts from its weapons hitting the walls, the floor, the columns. It smacked a drone with its cutting hand and shrapnel sprayed the room. I’d tuned down my pain sensors in anticipation, but I still felt impacts all over my back and shoulders, little thumps that I knew meant something had cut through my clothes and pierced my skin. (Does that sound terrifying? Because it was terrifying.) The second bot tried to run forward but the drones made a wall and slammed into it, forcing it back with a haze of weapon fire and their own armored bodies.