Still smiling, Dellcourt said, “Can I ask what you are doing here? Besides antagonizing the local inventory?”
Inventory = the ag-bot. The explosive had destroyed its processor, so it was no longer a contamination hazard to humans, which was not a coincidence.
Iris said, “Only if I can ask you what you’re doing here.”
This was some kind of human posturing thing. It was pretty obvious Iris’s task group had been fixing the routers; if the B-E humans had been oblivious, their SecUnit would have called their attention to it. It was also pretty obvious that, considering the specific explosive bolts their SecUnit had been armed with, they had been out looking for contaminated bots.
That’s not encouraging, ART said, which was understating the case dramatically. We were collecting depressing datapoints indicating Barish-Estranza’s intentions all the time.
The first thing the new Barish-Estranza explorer had done was power up to ART and try to intimidate it/us. (I know. I was below 66 percent operating capacity at the time and I thought it was a bad idea.
ART had dropped its main weapon port and transmitted, Targeting lock acquired.
The explorer had replied something to the effect that they didn’t mean to be intimidating and was the widdle academic transport crew scared, but in corporate speak, and ART had replied, It’s so easy for ships to disappear out here.
There was a pause, indicating a scramble to adjust operational parameters, then they made the mistake of trying to intimidate back with something like Oh yeah well you’ll get damaged, too, and I am not exactly an expert on nonfictional human interactions but that just obviously wasn’t going to cut it.
ART transmitted, You can make this complicated situation simple for me. Which I can tell you was not any kind of posturing, it 100 percent meant that.
Barish-Estranza must have picked up on that subtext because they backed down and now they think ART is a human commanding officer who’s a giant asshole.)
(ART is a secret from everyone except for the upper level departments at the University of Mihira and New Tideland. Barish-Estranza had no idea what it was dealing with.)
The rest of the B-E group was staring at me and the humans. Overse had said that the B-E corporates always look like they’re trying to figure out how much to sell you for, and she wasn’t wrong. I was glad I had refined my move-like-a-human code because if I had to wing it on my own, I wouldn’t have known what to do with my hands. Iris was doing a good job of trying to keep most of the B-E humans’ attention, but I could tell the SecUnit was looking at me.
I don’t know if Iris had noticed this or not, but she turned in the SecUnit’s direction and said, “Thank you for your help.”
Dellcourt’s expression was startled. “It’s a SecUnit.”
Iris ignored him, and we collected our remaining transponder and the launcher and left.
Chapter Two
ONCE WE WERE OUT of sight behind an outcrop, I did a quick scan for stealth drones, then took my weight off Ratthi and straightened up. He said, “Are you all right?”
I said, “Sure.”
Iris was watching me worriedly and pretending not to. She said, “Why don’t you stay with us? We’ve only got one more router to do.”
I said, “Sure.”
We climbed a rough trail back up to their shuttle, which was set down on the small flat plateau above the router site. Since I was staying with the humans, ART recalled my shuttle. It would hopefully make the lurking B-E team think we had left.
The original Barish-Estranza task force had told us the new arrivals were a scheduled reinforcement, not a response to the distress beacon they had sent. But Seth had said they were probably lying about that. And if they were lying, it meant B-E had more backup waiting at a wormhole somewhere relatively close to this system. Which made sense, if they had been sending multiple explorer groups to systems in this general area.
But the real problem was that now B-E had a supply ship and an armed explorer, and there was still no sign of a support ship from the University of Mihira and New Tideland. And we really needed one.
Phase I of Plan A: Get the Hell Out of Here had involved trying to get a specialized decontamination update to the colonists’ MedUnits so they could run the alien decontamination protocol on each other. That took longer than it should have because all the medical equipment in the colony was proprietary-branded corporate designs from thirty-seven-plus corporate standard years ago.
Thiago and Karime had talked one faction of the colonists into sending us a copy of the software on their main medical unit, and ART had removed any traces of contaminated code and modified its own decontam package to run on old shitty equipment. Then each unit had to be individually accessed and reloaded with the cleaned and enhanced operating systems via elaborately overcautious procedures to eliminate cross contamination or recontamination. Mostly in case we had fucked up massively and there were dormant virus fragments in play somewhere in the medical systems whose behavior didn’t match the human-machine-human transmission pattern we had previously noted.
Fortunately, between ART, me, our humans, and the colonists, the level of paranoia about virus contamination on this planet was more than adequate, even by my standards.
Phase II of Plan A was the legal case to keep Barish-Estranza from asserting salvage-right ownership of the colony’s humans, which Pin-Lee was still working on. ART’s crew had also started a planetary alien contamination assessment, and things were looking iffy. There was a lot of technical detail I didn’t care about, but basically if they couldn’t make a good case to certify the contaminated site as sealable, then the planet would be placed under interdict and the colonists would have to leave anyway and Barish-Estranza could make yet another case for claiming them as salvage.
The first subsection of Phase II involved asking the colonists what they wanted to do. I know, it seemed simple. (And I am aware of the irony, since I know exactly how hard the question “what do you want” can be when you don’t have a fucking clue what you want. But we weren’t talking existential questions of existence here, just the basic: Do you want to be salvaged by Barish-Estranza as corporate contract labor for the rest of your lives? Select (1) yes (2) no.)
The problem was who to ask.
(“They’re split into even more factions than they were when we arrived,” Thiago had said, after collating early intelligence received via survey drones deployed by ART and by some comm conversations with different colonists. “They’ve divided their compound up into at least two different areas, and other groups have scattered out to camps on the far side of the inhabited plateau.”
Karime, who was the primary negotiator on ART’s crew, said, “They’ve done things to each other that can’t be easily forgiven. We know—and they know—it was caused by the alien contamination, but I think it’s going to take time for them to come to terms with that.”
“Time we’re running out of,” Mensah said.
Which, it’s not like I don’t understand the whole idea of not forgiving stuff that happens to you. But it seems like they could not-hate each other long enough to avoid getting turned into corporate slave labor, and then start hating each other again after the threat assessment percentage went down.)
We took the shuttle over to the next router, which was on a small rocky hill west of the main colony site, surrounded by sparse clumps of gray-greenish spindly tree-fern things.