“People who get shot don’t get to argue about safety protocol,” Iris told it. I could see her face through her helmet plate and she was sweating though she was making her voice sound normal. “They said it looks like the colonists did maintenance on this thing at some point in the past forty years, so it’s not as bad as— Ah! Your hand!”
“It’s fine,” I said. While the upholstery was worn and cracked, the interior looked better than the outside. (It was going to look a lot worse the way I was leaking.) You could tell there had been repairs and even some updates. I leaned over to make sure ART-drone’s strap was secure and a couple of projectiles fell out of my suit. I could feel a few more rattling around in there. (Sometimes they pop out on their own.)
With no drones in the shuttle, I was relying on the bot pilot’s data feed and Ratthi’s verbal reports, but he was pretty good at those. They were in the air now, navigating back the way we originally came in, staying low to the ground and using the dust as cover. The shuttle had mapped the terrain along the way, so by retracing its path it was unlikely to run into anything, even in low visibility with impaired scan. Our remaining pathfinders had formed up around it, though without me or ART-drone to manage their inputs, I didn’t know how much that was going to help. Bot pilot could do it to a limited extent, but that was it. Ratthi said, “See you soon,” and I got a last ping from bot pilot as it vanished out of our feed range.
The bot pilot is also me, ART-drone said, testy.
Also sounding testy, Leonide said, “You said there’s an opening up there—”
“Your friends know where we are. By the time we get in the air, their shuttle will be out there and it’s faster than this jury-rigged bag of spare parts,” Tarik told her. “We’re taking the tunnel.”
“You’re out of your mind.” Leonide calmly brought up a terrain interface. It floated above the control board, parts of it blinking red. It was an old-fashioned layout and style that I’d only seen in retro dramas. “You people astound me.”
“Says the person whose fault this all is.” Tarik made some rapid adjustments and the engine humming got louder. “How do you think this thing has been getting in and out of here? Does it walk? Iris, strap in, we’re ready.”
Somehow Iris had shoved me into the seat next to ART-drone and strapped me in, too. She shifted over to a seat to strap herself in. “Let’s go.”
I couldn’t hear shouting but I did hear weapon fire as the pseudohopper slid forward and fell off the landing platform. It dipped down, pressing us forward against the acceleration straps, and shot into the tunnel.
Chapter Eleven
I DIDN’T FEEL GREAT but just sitting down helped me recover some power reserve. I couldn’t do a full recharge until we were clear. Not that I could do much to protect the humans now because the primary danger at the moment was one of them slamming the pseudohopper into a wall.
We were moving a lot faster than we had in the tunnel vehicle. (Yeah, I had thought the open compartment was unsafe but compared to this, not so much.) The pseudohopper didn’t have a bot pilot or anything like what we were used to with a modern aircraft, just a rudimentary self-navigator that helped keep it on course in the middle of the tunnel. Tarik and Leonide kept their hands on the controls, gazes locked on the interface.
In the team feed, I put up the map we had made on the way in and did a calculation of our current speed and projected time of arrival. Any navigation aids or warning systems this tunnel might have had were long offline. We were lucky to have the emergency lighting.
If we were right and Barish-Estranza didn’t know about the construction access, they would have no idea where we were going. They would have to follow us in the tunnel vehicle, if they could find where the two hostile SecUnits had moved it. Up top, their shuttle would be searching for our shuttle or looking for where the pseudohopper would come up to the surface. Or both. Probably both.
Iris rustled around in her bag and pulled out a medical kit. She said, “I know you don’t like physical contact, but that much bleeding can’t be good.”
“It’ll stop in a minute,” I told her. The reserve energy drain was worse, and moving around trying to get my suit off so she could patch leaks would use up more energy and be stressful, and I wasn’t up for stressful. What I wanted to do was sit here and watch Sanctuary Moon with ART-drone. Or, actually, ART-drone was in worse shape than I was. In our shared processing space, I started up its favorite episode of World Hoppers. I couldn’t tell if that helped, but I could tell it was watching.
“One question,” Leonide said, keeping her attention on the control interface. “Is that actually a SecUnit?”
“You know,” Iris said conversationally, taking a pad out of the medical kit and wiping bloodstains off ART-drone’s carapace. “You can mind your own damn business.”
“Oversensitive,” Leonide said, but she must have been too tired to hide the frustration in her voice. She was quiet for 5.3 seconds, then burst out, “Is someone actually watching entertainment in the feed right now?”
Oops, I guess there was a little bleedover, probably from ART-drone’s end. Deadpan, Tarik said, “I always watch entertainment when I fly.”
Leonide let out her breath in an exasperated hiss. “Fuck you all.”
“Right back at you,” I said.
We didn’t crash, but as Tarik and Leonide slowed for the end of the tunnel, they saw we couldn’t land in the bay. There was some kind of large obstruction in it.
It was an “oh shit” moment for all of us. Then as we got closer, we saw it was our shuttle. We just hadn’t recognized it because of the bad light and because it looked like it was wearing a hat.
Sounding amused and also exhausted, Iris said, “Ratthi, what did you do?”
“It’s the survival tent.” His voice came over the comm, normal and reassuring and wow, that’s a little spike in my performance reliability, I must have been more worried than I thought. “I was looking for something to help hide us. I didn’t want to close the big construction hatch and then not be able to get it open again. Dust collects fast here and from the pathfinders’ view it looks like the bay is a sand drift.”
“That’s just a little brilliant,” Tarik admitted, setting us down in the mouth of the tunnel. The pseudohopper thumped when it landed and some interfaces flashed red, but that seemed to be part of its normal operation. “I guess that’s why you’re a scientist.”
The shuttle’s hatch opened and Ratthi jumped out, waving at us. “We need to hurry. One of the pathfinders got an image of a B-E shuttle a little to the west about twenty minutes ago.”
Ratthi used the tent’s feed interface to collapse it down and he and Tarik shoved it back into the cargo hatch. Iris and I loaded ART-drone into the shuttle. Leonide climbed in first and moved the seat for us and pulled down the safety restraints so Iris could get them on its carapace. (Yeah, she went into the shuttle first. She didn’t make any attempt to leave without us. Which was good for her, since ART–bot pilot, while not vocal, is still an ART iteration and I could feel it watching her in the feed like a thoughtful predator.) (I think she was just impatient to get the show on the road and knew the only way to speed us up was to help.)
Ratthi and Tarik piled in and bot pilot shut the hatch and lifted off while they were still strapping down in the cockpit. In the team feed, Iris pulled up a navigation screen that showed what should be ART-prime’s current position, based on where it was when we entered the blackout zone. She said, “There’s no point in being stealthy. Let’s go straight home.”