I said, “Sure.” Because they were going anyway. It was a bad idea to let them go alone.
Iris and Tarik turned to Ratthi, who did a good job of pretending this didn’t worry him, and said, “Great! Let’s go.”
I caught a private message Seth sent to Iris, a quick Be careful, honey. And from Martyn, And keep us updated as best you can! And watch out for the weather up there!
She replied to both, Yes, Dad. Of course, Dad and added a smile image.
I called in ScoutDrones 1, 2, and 3 from where they were patrolling our perimeter as we headed down the rocky hillside and back through the tree-flora to the shuttle.
(Okay, the drones. Another thing I hate about this planet is that I lost all but five of my drones. I was already operating with a reduced number because they got left behind when ART kidnapped me and Amena, and everything that happened here had left me with only five. One I had sent to keep an eye on Three before I knew I needed to come down here, one I had left onboard ART because I needed to keep one safe, I didn’t want to lose them all. So I only had three drones with me, and try making a perimeter with that, that’s why the stupid Barish-Estranza team and their stupid SecUnit had walked right up on me and I had no fucking idea.)
Mensah tapped my private feed and said, If you’re not all right with this, you don’t have to go. Tarik has a security specialty, or we could send Three if you think it’s ready.
Tarik is a human, and a first contact with isolated colonists is not the way I want to find out that Three is not ready to interact unsupervised with humans I give a shit about. I replied, I’m fine.
Because privacy is just a hypothetical concept to ART, it broke in and said, I’m downloading to my ops drone stored in the shuttle.
Good, Mensah said, thank you, Perihelion. And it was good. If the mission turned out to be boring, we could watch media together.
I saw I had four private messages waiting from Arada, Amena, Overse, and Pin-Lee. I can’t do that right now. Pretending I’m fine for Mensah was hard enough. I forwarded the messages to her and said, Can you tell them I’m fine? I hate this. It’s not like I permanently lost an appendage or something.
There was a pause while she checked her queue. I’ll tell them you’re fine and that you just need a little space. Good luck.
In the team feed, ART said, ETA is 1.03 minutes. Comm/feed blackout point approaching.
I stopped the episode and sat up. I had been watching a lot of Sanctuary Moon lately, but ART had wanted to go back to a show that we had watched that was popular with the humans on Mihira. It was semi-historical, about early humans leaving their original system for the first time. I’d seen documentary-style series about this before, but this one mixed parts that were realistic with fun stuff like space battles and rescuing people and space monsters and throwing asteroids at planets. (That last part is actually realistic, too, but if you try they will send a bunch of gunships to fuck you up.) Anyway, it was a good show, though I hadn’t told ART that.
We had been flying over a mountain range with lots of craggy peaks and cliffs and it would be a relief to get past it. Even though this was one of ART’s long-range shuttles, not a company hopper constructed and maintained by the lowest bidder. It had actual working safety/emergency equipment (besides me) and behind the seating compartment were tiny secondary cabins with bunks, a small MedUnit, a small galley, plus cargo and lab sample storage space. It also had an actual shower in the restroom unit. But still, a small metal container filled with mushy humans hurtling over spiky rocks for long periods agitates my threat assessment module. There were so many ways to crash and die in mountain ranges, it was also making my stupid risk assessment randomly alert.
“Acknowledged, Peri,” Tarik said. He and Iris were up in the cockpit, which could be sealed off from the rest of the compartment by a hatch, but it was open now so they could talk to Ratthi, who was sitting up in the front row. They still had their environmental suits on as per safety protocol but had let the helmets fold back. Iris had her curly puff of hair tied up in a headband/scarf thing.
Tarik was in the pilot’s seat even though ART had a bot pilot active in the guidance system right now. Even under bot pilot control, there should always be a human or SecUnit at the controls. Preferably a human or SecUnit who actually knows how to use the controls. (Considering how many contracts I had been on where this was not the case, it’s amazing I’m still here in (mostly) one piece.)
I don’t have a module for flying a shuttle, so it’s not like I could do anything if the humans and ART suddenly lost control or there was a catastrophic mechanical failure. (And that just pissed me off. I should have a fucking shuttle piloting module for emergencies. What if all the humans are incapacitated and the SecUnit is the only one who can get them back to the baseship/station/whatever in a shuttle? It’s a more likely scenario than a rogue SecUnit using one to crash into a transport or a mining installation. Believe me, there are a lot more efficient ways of taking out both.)
Iris had gotten up and was looking out the port next to Ratthi’s seat. They were chatting and pointing out evidence of groundwater and vegetation, signs that the terraforming was working. It was one of the things that really sucked about the alien contamination.
From the previous assessments that ART’s crew had done via pathfinder, Adamantine had at least paid for a process that wouldn’t leave the planet trashed if the terraforming engines had to be shut down, unlike GrayCris at Milu. Back on Preservation, the last newsfeed report I had seen about that clusterfuck said that GoodNightLander Independent had taken the planet over as salvage and was trying to untrash it.
Of course I hadn’t seen any newsfeeds since we left for our survey. Huh, I wonder if there had been a news report about our kidnapping. Mensah hadn’t been as interesting to journalists since she ended her term as planetary leader, but Amena was one of her kids and having a kid be dramatically kidnapped during a space battle was probably a big deal, at least on Preservation. (It wasn’t infrequent in my media, but it was one of those things where real life didn’t live up to expectations raised by fiction.) Especially if the journalists realized Mensah’s rogue SecUnit had been involved. If the newsfeeds got interested, was there a way for them to find out that ART was the kidnapper? If they started investigating the University’s lost colony operations, that could be really bad in a lot of really bad ways for a lot of humans, augmented humans, bots, heavily armed judgmental machine intelligences pretending to be ordinary transports, and whatever and whoever else the University had working for it.
Great, something else to worry about. Getting attached to an additional group of humans was always going to be complicated, but. Ugh, I wish I felt like I was prepared for complication. Or prepared for anything.
Redacted
Mensah and the responder had left Preservation Station within an hour of the attack on our survey vessel, as soon as they had found the location data buoy ART had deployed on the way into the wormhole, so she and the crew wouldn’t have any updated newsfeed data. Depending on where the newly arrived Barish-Estranza explorer had embarked from, they might have missed any recent news, too. (The as-yet-hypothetical report would originate from Preservation and take multiple cycles to circulate from station to station, planet to planet—unless we were lucky and Senior Indah had been able to keep it quiet under the Ongoing Investigations rule. Which I absolutely was not counting on.)