ART-drone, flying a shuttle through a poorly mapped dark corridor that had originally been meant for slightly smaller aircraft and hadn’t been used in probably a century at least and held who knew what kind of obstruction now, said, Was it a good idea to go in there?
We were on teamFeed+Leonide, but you know what, who cared. I said, Fuck you, ART.
You haven’t spoken to me that way in weeks. I’ve missed it. ART-drone rocked the shuttle sideways to miss a mass of cabling hanging from the ceiling. Ratthi made an eek noise.
I’d definitely told ART to fuck off since the thing that happened. I’d told it to fuck off a lot. But I knew what it meant. This was the first time in weeks when I wasn’t using it to mean leave me alone.
Leonide threw Iris a glare and said, “Tell your employees to shut up and get us out of here.” I think she thought ART-drone was a weird human who liked SecUnits.
Distracted, thinking hard, Iris said, “You can fuck yourself. They are getting us out of here.” She pressed her lips together and asked me, “What if I call them and try to arrange a surrender? It would buy us some time.”
The door dented again. Scan indicated we had two minutes left before the seals gave way. “Try it,” I said. It was a good idea, corporates liked to talk and gloat, generally (internal screaming). Surrender was not good, surrender meant ART would never get Iris back.
Ratthi, still with a white-knuckle grip on the chair, said, You can beat it, SecUnit, we know you can.
On the team feed, Tarik was whisper-swearing a lot. He said, I’m going to find the colonists, they must have weapons.
They probably had a bunch, considering how the rest of the humans on the planet had been using them on each other. Hold your position, I told him. Tarik made a frustrated noise but stopped where he was. From his helmet cam view, it was a cubby where some machinery had been removed, next to a tube lift with the door welded shut. He was too close to us now, and I didn’t want HostileSecUnit2 to hear him. It would report to its supervisor and the B-E assholes would be coming toward us, plus any that might have been held in reserve on the shuttle that had been about to land outside the now-blocked hangar.
Iris and Leonide both had small sidearms, suitable for intimidating other humans and murdering supervisors, and unlikely to injure a SecUnit in any important places. HostileSecUnit2 wouldn’t notice the projectiles until it went in for repairs. And if they tried to shoot while I was fighting it, the chances of accidentally hitting me were high.
I would have liked to have an “oh shit” moment but I literally couldn’t let myself or I was terrified I’d go into involuntary shutdown again. (I’m more afraid of that than anything else right now. Of restarting to find all the humans and ART-drone dead.)
Then the lights blinked three times, the hiss of the air exchange above us made a burp noise. Then it surged, like the power had cut in and out. Oh, wait. That was a restart, ART-drone said conversationally. It was slowing the shuttle down as the cameras picked up a patch of light ahead. It was in the oblong shape of the large entrance to the north-side hangar, the one the Barish-Estranza shuttle had originally been docked in.
If AdaCol2 had been down, it made terrible sense. Barish-Estranza had decided they might as well forcibly take the colonists as long as they were killing their own supervisor, so taking down the local system was a great first step.
In late-breaking Tarik news, he had just jumped two Barish-Estranza employees who had been approaching his position, knocking one unconscious and choking the other out, and now he also had two tiny sidearms that wouldn’t take out a SecUnit plus the sidearm from our shuttle’s supplies that he had started out with. He obviously knew his new guns were pointless because he was snarling to himself in a language I didn’t have a good translation module for. It sounded sweary with religious overtones.
In the shuttle, as Ratthi saw the light, he gasped in relief. “Oh, thank—” He stopped as ART-drone slowed the shuttle to a halt. It focused the forward camera on the hangar ahead. There was still a shuttle docked on the landing platform.
Wow, you don’t think it can get any worse, and it always does.
“What? That’s—” As realization hit, Ratthi groaned. “There’s two Barish-Estranza shuttles! The armed one is new!”
Tarik said, That explains why there’s so many of these <untranslatable>.
Yeah, as the humans had realized, it was a second shuttle that had arrived, probably in response to a message drone the first group had sent to their baseship. So we were dealing with possibly at least twice as many B-E humans. And potentially more SecUnits.
Iris was in the corner talking to someone on the comm, her voice calm and her face set in a grimace. From Leonide’s expression of despair, it was not going well. There were a lot of fist shapes in the door now and the seals were strained. Gaps showed with every hit.
Ratthi is correct, ART-drone told the humans. In private, it added to me, You did not make a mistake in identifying the shuttle as unarmed.
Technically I had made a mistake, I had assumed the second shuttle was the first one. But I knew what it was trying to say.
The lights and air pressure had stabilized. Because I am a stupid optimist, I sent to AdaCol2, query: assistance.
AdaCol2 replied, assistance, and suddenly I had cameras, so many cameras, it actually made me dizzy. Or maybe that was relief.
I asked, query: attempted breach?
Detected weapons activation. Lockdown initiated. Breach attempted via network bridge. Failover: secondary processors. Lockdown failure. Breach confined, primary down.
It had tried to lock down the installation when it detected the weapon fire, which would have wrecked Barish-Estranza’s plan and rendered the two hostile SecUnits useless for intimidation and murdering purposes. But B-E had been ready with an attempted hack. AdaCol2 had stopped it by shutting down its breached primary unit and shifting to a secondary. Not bad, and confirmation that it was packing a substantial amount of processing heat.
I said, query: network bridge location.
Humans forget these things work both ways.
Network bridge active at 82734202q345.222.
I hadn’t been able to get to Barish-Estranza’s systems before with AdaCol2 keeping its network locked down. Now it had given me access. Give me a minute, I said.
AdaCol2 said, clock set. Mark.
Their SecSystem was a proprietary brand but not different enough to slow me down. I made sure it thought I was just another component and started to search around for what I needed. It was resident on their original shuttle, the one that had just noticed our shuttle hovering in the interior hatch corridor. I checked for links to the security system that would be on the second shuttle, the armed one, but there was nothing, just some empty addresses. That didn’t make sense. Oh wait, the stupid B-E humans hadn’t synced their feeds yet. Well, that’s great.
I gave up on that and pulled their original shuttle’s exterior camera feed. The B-E humans on watch in their cockpit and Ratthi in our cockpit were currently staring at each other in consternation.
I found a view from one of their interior security cameras. (Yes, one of. This was a shuttle from a corporate ship, everybody had to be on camera all the time because they might steal a paper napkin.) A B-E employee, an augmented human with multiple interfaces embedded into their temples, forehead, and the back of their skull, sat in an acceleration chair behind the pilot’s seat, their head wreathed in a visual feed display. They were monitoring via the feed and with their eyes at the same time. So they were like an augmented human HubSystem? Weird, and fucking inconvenient. It was a system I’d never seen before, I wasn’t sure how to handle it, what the augmented human would be able to do, and I didn’t have time to figure it out. I could just burn their interfaces and probably destroy part of their brain, but that seemed mean … ugh, there had to be another way.