I rolled to my feet, dove again, and landed next to Hirune. Her body looked intact and I didn’t see any blood pools, but I didn’t have time to check if she was alive. (It didn’t matter. In a retrieval like this, humans wouldn’t believe the hostage was dead unless I brought the body back.) I scooped her up and here came the hard part, I had to run out of the foyer.
The bots had had time to figure out (a) the SecUnit was here (b) what the SecUnit had done to take over their drones and consequently (c) they were really pissed off at that SecUnit. I bolted across the room toward the door.
The two bots had taken out twenty-three of the drones, each one a light, a connection, blinking out of my awareness. But the drones had done a lot of damage, targeting joints, weapons ports, and hands. A camera view from a surviving drone told me the bot behind me had lunged for my retreating back but crashed to its knees; drones had been concentrating fire on its ankle joints while others distracted it.
The bot in front of me threw itself forward to block the door. And I turned right and ran straight for the lift junction.
The combat bots had taken over the lift system like I’d warned Brais, but combat bots can’t hack like a SecUnit. I hadn’t tried for control of the whole system, just this one lift, telling it to wait here for me. The door slid obediently open as I reached it. I ordered it to take me to the production pod. The door slammed on a set of sharp metal fingers and the pod whisked me away.
Drone One was still waiting in the corridor, and I ordered it to close the junction hatches between the engineering pod and the production pod, drill through the walls, and fuse the controls. It whizzed into action as the lift stopped and opened its doors.
I stepped out into an empty junction in the production pod, and sent the code I’d prepared into the lift system. It shut the system down and set a password lock. The combat bots could get past it if they had the right code modules, and if they devoted resources to it that they could be using for other things. It would still buy me the time I needed. I hoped.
Now that I had time to evaluate my own condition, I eased up my pain sensors a little. The impacts I’d felt turned from dull aches to sharp burning, like little explosions under my skin. Ow, ow, okay, ow. I locked my knee joints to stay upright and upped my air intake.
I had taken multiple shrapnel hits from the drones being shredded all around me. I had two hits from projectile weapons, one in my lower left side and one in my left shoulder. I was pretty certain I had been hit by stray shots meant for drones. If the bots had been able to target me, I would be in pieces. I tuned down my pain sensors and the impact sites faded from explosions down to embers. (I know that’s actually not a permanent solution and pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy in the long run, but there was nothing I could do about it now.) The arm where I was storing my memory clips was undamaged, which was a relief.
I started down the corridor toward the production pod foyer, where the others should be.
I tapped Miki’s feed for a report because neither it nor Abene were saying anything and I wasn’t sure what they had been able to see through my visual feed. At that point, Hirune’s gloved hand squeezed my shoulder.
Fortunately I remembered I was carrying a possibly living human and didn’t scream or drop her or anything. Her helmet with its comm mic had been ripped off, and her head rested on my shoulder. She slurred the words, “Who are you?”
I was distracted, and what came out of my buffer was the standard, “I’m your contracted SecUnit.” I was distracted because confused noise was coming from the connection with Miki and Abene. It wasn’t communication from a feed interface, it was audio; Miki was sending me open comm audio over the feed.
Her voice rough and deep with fury, Abene shouted, “Who sent you? GrayCris?”
On my shoulder, Hirune made a confused “huh?” sound.
The other comm audio I could hear was too faint even for me to tell what it was. I had to waste four seconds converting it to a spectrogram before I recognized it. It was two noises, the low pitch of Miki’s joints and the higher pitch of powered armor, bracing against each other.
Well, shit.
I do make mistakes (I keep a running tally in a special file) and it looked like I had made a big one. I had interpreted all of Wilken’s behavior as being about me, about the discomfort and paranoia associated with a SecUnit suddenly appearing out of nowhere, supposedly sent by another security consultant whose existence implied that the clients didn’t trust her and Gerth. (I know, the “it’s all about me” bit is usually a human thing.) But now it seemed she had been uneasy for a whole other reason.
The good thing about getting your security through a bond company like the one that had owned me is that for small contracts you take delivery at a company office, and for big ones it arrives in a company transport. This greatly reduces opportunities for somebody to show up pretending to be your security team when they’ve really been contracted to kill you.
Wilken and Gerth were good. I had listened in on and analyzed their conversations aboard Ship and not picked up any hint of it. But then, if they worked for GrayCris, they would be alert for the kind of bond company security surveillance in use throughout the Corporation Rim.
By this point my drone had reached the hatch junction where Wilken was supposed to be waiting. She wasn’t there, obviously, being busy betraying her clients. (When I said I didn’t like humans working security you thought I was just being an asshole, right?)
I used my connection to Miki’s feed and accessed its camera view. Oh yeah, not good. The image was shaky but I could see Miki had Wilken backed up against a pillar. Miki had one arm pinning Wilken’s right wrist against the pillar, as Wilken tried to bring her projectile weapon down to bear on Abene. Something was wrong with Miki’s hand but I didn’t have a clear view, and I didn’t want to distract Miki at the moment by pulling a damage report. Wilken had her other forearm braced against Miki’s face, like she was trying to shove it away, but that wasn’t what she was doing. She had energy weapons built into the forearms of her armor and she was trying to slide one into position to blow Miki’s head off.
(Miki could operate without its head, but its sensory inputs and cameras were there, and it would be really awkward.)
Wilken had cut me out of her feed connection, but I used Abene’s to bypass the block: This is SecUnit. We can talk about this. Consultant Rin can offer you immunity from prosecution if you testify. I hoped that made sense (it was a line from Sanctuary Moon) and I’m sure it sounded like I was stalling. I wasn’t stalling and I didn’t need her to answer me, I just needed her distracted enough to not think about what I was doing in her feed. Your bosses are going down. Whatever they paid you, it won’t make up for a stint in prison. (Yeah, that was from Sanctuary Moon, too.) In the meantime, I was frantically looking for the right code. The companies that make powered armor are different from the ones that make SecSystems, intel drones, cameras, and so on, and their system architectures were different and it made everything harder.
Abene had a grip on Wilken’s projectile weapon, trying to help Miki wrench it away, but couldn’t do much against the powered armor. I could tell she had no idea about the forearm energy weapon, which was in a much more dangerous position. In the feed, I could hear Abene telling Miki to let go and run, and Miki refusing on the basis that Wilken would then shoot Abene. Who should be running, frankly, but wasn’t going without Miki, obviously.