(Right, okay, Preservation Station Security is not as shitty at what they do as I originally thought when I first ended up there, but what they do is still mostly accident first response and maintaining safety systems and checking for hazardous cargo violations, and I could think of at least five of them who would blab to everyone in range about the kidnapping with no clue it might make things worse before Senior Indah had a chance to tell them to shut the fuck up. No, six.)
Whatever, we wouldn’t have hard data until the University sent their response vessel, if then. I would just factor the possibility into the projected long-term threat assessment and increase my anxiety levels by the commensurate amount. ART, define commensurate.
It’s a synonym of proportionate. ART’s drone rose up out of the back row behind me and unfolded a lot of spiny arm extensions. The handoff hadn’t occurred yet, but we were almost to the blackout point, forty-two seconds to go.
The drone was a thin oval platform fifteen centimeters in width with a lot of folded-up armatures tucked up against it that were supposed to be helpful in planetary exploration or contact missions and, knowing ART, who knew what they actually did. It added, That was a mission-critical query?
That wasn’t actually a question, so I didn’t answer it. Yes, that’s ART in the drone, and ART flying the shuttle as a bot pilot, and ART monitoring operations with Three back at the colony site, and ART working on repairing its drive, and ART maintaining standard transport functions, and ART following the Barish-Estranza ships with its sensors hoping they’ll do something to justify fucking with them (they started it, as it would point out), and ART currently arguing with Seth about his selection of a high-carb protein for his meal break and threatening to inform Martyn and Iris about it. Most transport bots have to be able to distribute their awareness to some extent, but ART is more complicated than that.
(I had uploaded myself into a bot pilot’s control interface once during a viral attack, and had consequently hard-crashed myself and had to rebuild my memory table from scratch. If I didn’t have human neural tissue also storing archival data, I would have been fucked. (So it did one thing right for once.) If I were uploaded to the entirety of ART’s architecture, I would probably last a few painful seconds at most.)
(That’s why we had to code 2.0 for the viral attack on the contaminated Barish-Estranza explorer.)
(If 2.0 were still here, I probably wouldn’t redacted.)
Each one of ART’s partitions is a little different, depending on its function. For example, ART-drone is not currently protecting a shipful of its important humans, so it’s less likely to blow things up and ask questions later.
Tarik was counting aloud to the blackout point. On the team feed, ART said, Handoff initiated. Good luck.
“Acknowledged. Thanks, Peri,” Iris said, smiling. “Be careful up there. See you soon.”
On my private feed, ART said, Take care of them. And yourself. Before I could come up with a reply, my awareness of ART, its cameras, its feed and comm, the humans working and talking to each other on ART, or using the comm to talk to Mensah and the other humans on the Preservation responder, dropped away. I had expected it to be immediate, but the voices and signals gradually lost volume, fading into an echo, then into nothing.
Threat assessment spiked hard, then dropped back, and for once risk assessment was actually right. Even though it was planned and expected and we had resources like the pathfinders, losing comm and feed contact with your baseship is never going to be a zero-consequence operation.
I still had our shuttle feed, but even with three humans and my three whole drones and our pathfinder escort, it was weirdly isolated. ART-drone was already active, but the sense of it in the feed was much smaller. It said, This process is unnecessarily dramatic.
Absently poking the planetary data in her feed, Iris said, “Honey, you’re the one who comes up with the processes.”
“Is that … weird, that Perihelion does this?” Ratthi asked. He had turned around in his seat to look at ART-drone.
“Everything about this job is weird,” Tarik told him from the cockpit.
Especially Perihelion’s high tolerance for certain members of its crew, ART-drone said. It added, Iris, put your safety restraint on, no one wants to scrape you off the interior port.
Yes, ART-drone is still ART, even though it’s talking about itself in the third person.
Its download was up to date so I didn’t have to restart the episode we had been watching. I restarted where we left off as the shuttle flew farther into the blackout zone.
When the terraforming engines came into visual range, the shuttle started a slow descent. I pulled the camera views. I caught pings from ART’s pathfinders that had followed us in. These weren’t the armed ones, these were the ones that had actually been doing their real jobs, wandering around making terrain and signal maps of various parts of the planet, concentrating on the areas around the colony sites, until now. They had been dropping on and off the feed since we entered the blackout zone, but were close enough to the shuttle at this point to resume limited contact. That was good, since we knew the terraforming engines were interfering with comm into and out of the blackout zone, but had speculated that at close enough range, our team comm and feed traffic would still work. Unfortunately, from what I was picking up from the shuttle, its scans and the pathfinders’ scans were still borked.
ART-drone told the pathfinders to drop into formation behind us, since they couldn’t do any mapping at the moment.
As the mountains fell away, we flew over a plain that might have been tundra, but without the terrain scans there was no annotated map data showing up in the feed. The shuttle’s forward cameras were focused on the terraforming engines, which were a pretty big thing to focus on.
The structure was partially buried in the plain and formed a giant mound with skeletal metal towers, round things, and big tubes and whatever along its top ridge. And when I say it was big, I mean really big. Like the size of the Preservation colony ship big, if it had a lot more pointy parts and tubes and was embedded in the dirt on a planet.
The terraforming engines would have been built by the initial Adamantine team, long before the colonists arrived. The individual parts would be sort of like a transport module, with each one capable of subspace propulsion. They had been towed here through the wormhole, then released into the system where they would have flown the rest of the way to the planet and landed under their own power. Traveling with the engine modules would be a human and bot crew that specialized in terraforming assembly and installation, who would have connected everything up and gotten it started. At least, that’s what the Adamantine brochure I’d downloaded from the drop box control station had said.
(That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. You can imagine what happens when you get your terraforming engines built and assembled by the lowest bidder.)
The shuttle slowed and moved into a circular pattern around the engine mound, keeping out of the danger zone, which was cordoned off by floating marker buoys beeping staticky warnings to our comm and feed. There were a lot of blank spots in their cordon where they must have broken down over the years. Or been hit by meteors, taken out by extreme weather incidents, or accidentally winged by aircraft. There’s a lot of things that can happen in forty planetary years.
I didn’t know what any of the terraforming equipment did, except it affected the atmosphere, so it would have to be a safe distance from any air bubble the colonists might have established for habitation in this area. Except that the pathfinders still couldn’t find any sign of an air bubble on visual search.