My first thought was What the hell is Three doing here? but less accusatory and more relieved. It would be embarrassing to be rescued by Three, but it wasn’t anything that hadn’t happened before. The next thought was: That can’t be Three. I knew its location as of 5.4 minutes ago, there was no time for it to get here.
Then: Oh shit, it’s Barish-Estranza.
That was why Karime’s meeting was too important to put off, why she needed Three with her, why ART couldn’t/shouldn’t use its weaponized pathfinders or try to arm a shuttle or anything else that might seem out of capacity for a university’s deep-space mapping transport.
Four corporate standard day cycles after the Preservation responder had shown up with Dr. Mensah to look for us, another Barish-Estranza explorer had arrived, complete with a new complement of at least three SecUnits that we knew of. Since then the B-E task group had been much more active, sending teams to the planet to “evaluate” the situation and talk to the colonists. There was no legal way to keep them from doing it and killing them all was problematic, though don’t think ART hadn’t run those numbers a few times.
The ag-bot plummeted toward me in a controlled fall, and I was about to hit the triggering sequence. Then a quick scatter of large explosive projectiles from off toward the right hit the central part of the bot’s body. Right where its processor would be.
The bot made a clunking noise. Metal shrapnel sprayed out and a couple of limbs flew off. I scrambled out of the way as the torso broke loose and slammed into the ground. Oh, great save, B-E SecUnit, most humans wouldn’t have been able to evade that. What the hell kind of retrieval was that supposed to be?
ART, watching my visual data, said, That was .2 degrees away from a murder attempt.
Important question you might have: Did this SecUnit know I was a SecUnit?
Answer: I fucking hope not.
On the secure team feed, I said, Use the feed for anything you don’t want them to know. Their SecUnit can pick you up on audible from over there. ScoutDrone1 was already in stealth mode and I told it and ScoutDrone2 to head for the nearest shuttle, which was the one the router team had left up on the plateau. The shuttle ART had landed for me was farther out, past the field, out of the ex-ag-bot’s sensor range. I had one backup drone in the pocket of my environmental suit and I told it to go dormant. I had already let go of the launcher and made sure it rolled out of my reach. I was running all my move-like-a-human code, and I had improved it substantially from the first version I’d written. My feed, the team feed, and my connection with ART were all locked down tight, though SecUnits with intact governor modules aren’t free to detect and hack systems like I am. They have to receive a specific order to do it, and most employers are too paranoid to allow that. But this SecUnit (designate: B-E Unit1) was only about four meters away; it might just look at me, know what I was, and report it.
The only thing I could do was confuse it as much as possible. I rolled over and groaned like a human (potentially not a great idea, it sounded embarrassingly fake) and pulled a few clips from Sanctuary Moon of the various scenes where the colony solicitor’s bodyguard had been injured and had to stand up again. On the team feed, ART was talking to Iris. She leaned out of the installation and called out, “Can you ask your SecUnit to fall back, please.”
Without drones, I couldn’t see what it was doing. ART had switched over to Iris’s feed, using her enviro suit camera, and the resolution at this distance wasn’t good. ART needed a field equipment upgrade. Wait, a human would look at it, right?
ART said, Look at it. It’s obvious you’re avoiding it.
Maybe I’m a nervous human who’s afraid of bots, I told ART, but I looked at it anyway.
The SecUnit was walking away, and five humans in the red-brown Barish-Estranza-branded environmental suits were coming toward me/us. They would have a shuttle nearby somewhere, with probably two more humans and possibly one additional SecUnit inside. They weren’t obviously armed, but intel suggested that at least some members of the B-E scout teams regularly carried sidearms while on planet. The Targets/infected colonists had taken weapons off the previous/posthumous B-E explorer scout team.
And they had brought a SecUnit armed with a nonstandard medium-distance bot-busting weapon, better than anything ART currently had on board.
Ratthi ran to me and on our secured team feed I told him, Pretend to help me up.
“Are you okay?” he demanded. I’d restricted my camera views to ART to keep the humans from getting more agitated, but once it was clear I had survived, ART had shared a clip of my close call. Probably so it had someone to be angry about it with. I let Ratthi grab my arm and made it look like he was taking most of my weight as I pushed upright. “That was too close!” He threw a glare toward the Barish-Estranza party. He added on the feed, Was that intentional, do you think?
Maybe. Maybe it’s just a shitty SecUnit, I replied. I was not in a good mood.
Okay, I’m not perfect, I think we all know that by now, but B-E Unit1 should have understood the trajectory situation and used the explosive bolts a beat earlier and then accelerated in to roll me away and shield me from shrapnel. That was what I would have done. Tried to do. There was no way a client-supervisor would have had time to countermand that save. Fucking assholes.
(Obviously this is not actually what I’m upset about, it’s just easier to be angry about B-E Unit1’s fuckup and/or disregard for minimum client safety.)
Safer to be angry about it, ART said on our private connection.
I was not even going to respond to that. ART had told Mensah it wouldn’t push me. Just because its MedSystem was certified for emotional support and trauma recovery it thought it knew everything.
I was on my feet, pretending to have an injured ankle and leaning on Ratthi. Iris had come out and moved forward to meet the lead Barish-Estranza human, and Tarik had stayed with her, which was good. He had also dropped his enviro suit helmet visor before he came out, so it wouldn’t look strange that I still had mine down, which was also good. Just us humans here, some of us like to wear our visors down when we don’t need them to breathe and some don’t, we just like to mix it up.
The B-E humans had their visors up, and we’d seen the lead human before. He was Sub-Supervisor Dellcourt (male/demi) and he was one of the smart ones, which was just how this day was going.
“Thank you for your help,” Iris said, in a way that could be mistaken for politeness by a bot but a human would definitely know there was an undercurrent of fuck you. “Are you going to bill us later?”
Martyn told me that Iris and ART have been interacting since Iris was a new human baby and ART was a new whatever the hell it is and sometimes that is not surprising at all.
Dellcourt said, “We’ll put it on your creditor’s statement,” and chuckled. Iris smiled with a tension in her jaw that indicated gritting teeth.
The billing thing is not actually a joke; Pin-Lee and Turi, who does the accounting for ART, were preparing a counter-bill to present to Barish-Estranza after this was over. (If this was ever over.) These money fights between/with corporations were very common and incredibly boring.
(According to Martyn, ART is of course capable of doing its own accounting, but it always ends up with extra numbers that no one can trace. So now Turi does it and has to keep a hardcopy ledger because otherwise ART would alter their data. No one knew if ART was making up numbers for the hell of it or if these numbers represented actual credit balances that ART was hiding somewhere.)