HostileSecUnit2 assumed that ART-drone was just a drone under the control of me or the humans, which, mistake. HostileSecUnit2 circled the platform at a run and reached the angle it needed to fire at the humans. But ART-drone had controlled its near freefall, pretended to limp like a wounded drone. Now it accelerated at the last second and slammed into HostileSecUnit2 from behind.
I knew ART-drone had at least two drill attachments and a cutting tool that could get through the armor, but it had some other things, too. HostileSecUnit2 had a moment when, if it had an actual separate projectile weapon instead of a built-in, it could have angled it back and blown ART-drone to pieces. But it didn’t. Instead the fucker tried to empty its onboard weapon into the humans, but ART-drone snaked a limb around and knocked its arm upright. Projectiles knocked fragments out of the platform’s stalk but no fragile bodies tumbled down the stairs.
I felt HostileSecUnit1 go into shutdown mode. It wasn’t dead, it was just catastrophically damaged. (I know, who isn’t?) Shutdown would conserve resources until it was retrieved. (If it was.) I wanted to shove it off me, but I had to pry what was left of my hand out of its neck first.
HostileSecUnit2 didn’t have a chance to shut down. When ART-drone let go, it fell into pieces.
I got my hand free and struggled upright, stepped away from HostileSecUnit1. ART-drone had shut down the comm so Barish-Estranza didn’t know what had happened here, but we had an unknown number of minutes before they caught up—
I caught simultaneous alerts from FinalDrone and ART-drone. I turned.
There was another SecUnit ten meters away, just standing there. That’s not good. With my pain sensors tuned so far down I wasn’t sure where I’d been shot. I was leaking through the holes in my suit, and I’d used so much power for my energy weapons that I was going to need to go down for a recharge cycle soon or I would risk involuntary shutdown. Immediately, if I had to use my weapons again. Oh, and my right hand was missing three fingers and had a hole in the palm. Performance reliability 68 percent and dropping. ART-drone was right, I couldn’t do two.
ART-drone hadn’t moved. It had sunk to slump on the pavement, like it had lost control of some vital systems, including the ability to hover. The humans had reached the top of the platform and taken cover behind the pseudohopper. Iris was talking to Ratthi on our feed, trying to figure out a rescue plan with the soft-drops, and Tarik and Leonide wanted me to lure the SecUnit toward the platform so they could push the aircraft off to land on it, what the hell, that won’t work.
Then the SecUnit said, “They’re coming. You have to go.”
This is one of the two you gave the code to, ART-drone said. It’s disabled its governor module. The SecUnit’s voice was different from Three’s. A different tissue batch, maybe. It didn’t trust me enough for a feed connection. That was mutual. Then I surprised the shit out of myself and said, “Come with us.”
It stepped back. “They don’t know.”
They didn’t know about it. It was going to do what I had done, pretend to keep doing its job.
It added, “You need to go. They’re two minutes out.”
We had to go. I stepped back, then turned and ran toward the landing platform. ART-drone hadn’t moved.
On the feed, Iris said, Are you all right? Can I come down and help you?
No, stay there, we have to go, we have two minutes, I said, and then realized our way to get to the overhead hatch and reach our shuttle was out of commission and needed to be rescued just as much as the rest of us, and that was why they were talking about the soft-drops. That would take way too long; they were too slow, it would take more than two minutes for Ratthi to send them down here, he’d have to get out of the shuttle to drop them through the gap and it would take more minutes of work to get them to go up again. Wait, why had Tarik and Leonide thought they could push the pseudohopper off the platform? Can that thing up there fly?
Tarik thinks so, Iris said. It’s not as old as it looks. Tarik thinks they can fly it out of here.
Get it started. I called in FinalDrone, set it to hover over my head, and leaned down to put an arm around ART-drone. It wrapped a couple of limbs around me, and I lifted it, grabbed the handrail, and started up. On our private channel, it said, I apologize. I can download this iteration to the surplus storage in the shuttle, but the tech in this drone cannot be allowed to be closely examined by corporate—
Shut up, I told it. On the team feed, I said, Ratthi, you need to get that shuttle in the air, now, they’re almost here. Meet us at the terraforming construction access.
ART-drone told me, Fuck off.
From the noise Ratthi made, I could tell he didn’t want to leave us. But he said, Right, going now. Just be careful! I heard the thumps on the comm as he dropped the armful of soft-drops and hurried for the pilot’s seat. The bot pilot sent an acknowledgment to ART-drone that it was beginning liftoff.
Near the top of the stairs, I looked back to see the SecUnit was gone. It would loop back around and pretend to be searching the other half of the hangar. At least that’s what I’d do. The augmented human controller I’d disrupted on the other shuttle had been relatively easy to fool from the inside. It must have been the first thing this SecUnit learned how to do when it hacked its governor module.
Focus, Murderbot.
Tarik and Leonide were in the pseudohopper and the engine was making cranky humming noises. I was climbing the last section of steps when Iris came down to meet me, her body language broadcasting anxious human. On the feed she said, Are you all right? Do you need help with Peri?
Barish-Estranza would be in the hangar by now and the pseudohopper was not quiet. “We need to go,” I said aloud. And I needed to stop just repeating that or they were going to think I was losing function, which I was, but. “They’re here.”
ART-drone reached out a limb to Iris. My function is impaired, Iris. So is SecUnit’s.
Will you shut the hell up? I said.
You shut up, it replied.
“Let’s everybody shut up and get in the flyer,” Iris said, and shouldered ART-drone’s limb, taking part of its weight.
ART-drone’s size was awkward and Iris had to help me heave it into the pseudohopper’s cabin. She shoved me in after it, climbed in, and pulled the hatch shut. There was a hiss of badly filtered artificial air. Tarik and Leonide were in the copilot’s and pilot’s seats, arguing about who knew more about flying semi-derelict aircraft jury-rigged from parts left behind by terraformers, but they were both working over the controls in the piloting interface. I have a module for piloting hoppers, which this seemed similar to, but I also had a low performance reliability and a yellow warning on my power reserve, so. I sent FinalDrone to take a position in front of the control board anyway. If we slammed into a wall, I’d get a good view, I guess.
“There’s no bot pilot,” Iris told me, helping me wrestle ART-drone into a seat so we could strap it in. The passenger compartment was small, with only four seats and a webbed cubby for supplies. Most of the cabin was meant for cargo. Somebody had left an old mask filter on the floor.
ART-drone said, This is unnecessary. I am capable of—