All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)

We were operating on an assumption: that since They, whoever They were, didn’t know that we knew They were here, They would only send one ship. They would be expecting to catch us in the habitat, and would probably come in prepared to destroy the hoppers to keep us there, and then start on the people. So now that we knew They were coming from the south, we were free to pick a direction. The little hopper curved away to the west, and we followed.

I just hoped their hopper didn’t have a longer range on its scanners than ours did.

I could see most of my drones on the hopper’s feed, a bright dot forming on the three dimensions of the map. Group One was doing what I’d told them, gathering at a rendezvous point near the habitat. I had a calculation going, estimating the bogie’s time of arrival. Right before we passed out of range I told the drones to head northeast. Within moments, they dropped out of my range. They would follow their last instruction until they used up their power cells.

I was hoping the other survey team would pick them up and follow. As soon as they had a visual on our habitat they’d see the hoppers were gone and know we’d run away. They might stop to search the habitat, but they also might start looking for our escape route. It was impossible to guess which.

But as we flew, curving away to the distant mountains, nothing followed us.

Chapter Six

THE HUMANS HAD DEBATED where to go. Or debated it as much as possible, while frantically calculating how much of what they might need to survive they could stuff into the hoppers. We knew the group who Ratthi was now calling EvilSurvey had had access to HubSystem and knew all the places we’d been to on assessments. So we had to go somewhere new.

We went to a spot Overse and Ratthi had proposed after a quick look at the map. It was a series of rocky hills in a thick tropical jungle, heavily occupied by a large range of fauna, enough to confuse life-sign scans. Mensah and Pin-Lee lowered the hoppers down and eased them in among rocky cliffs. I sent up some drones so we could check the view from several angles and we adjusted the hoppers’ positions a few times. Then I set a perimeter.

It didn’t feel safe, and while there were a couple of survival hut kits in the hoppers, no one suggested putting them up. The humans would stay in the hoppers for now, communicating over the comm and the hoppers’ limited feed. It wasn’t going to be comfortable for the humans (sanitary and hygiene facilities were small and limited, for one thing) but it would be more secure. Large and small fauna moved within range of our scanners, curious and potentially as dangerous as the people who wanted to kill my clients.

I went out with some drones to do a little scouting and make sure there was no sign of anything big enough to, say, drag the little hopper off in the middle of the night. It gave me a chance to think, too.

They knew about the governor module, or the lack of it, and even though Mensah had sworn she wouldn’t report me, I had to think about what I wanted to do.

It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.

I could leave them to cope on their own, I guess. I pictured doing that, pictured Arada or Ratthi trapped by rogue SecUnits, and felt my insides twist. I hate having emotions about reality; I’d much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.

And what was I supposed to do? Go off on this empty planet and just live until my power cells died? If I was going to do that I should have planned better and downloaded more entertainment media. I don’t think I could store enough to last until my power cells wore out. My specs told me that would be hundreds of thousands of hours from now.

And even to me, that sounded like a stupid thing to do.

* * *

Overse had set up some remote sensing equipment that would help warn us if anything tried to scan the area. As the humans climbed back into the two hoppers, I did a quick headcount on the feed, making sure they were all still there. Mensah waited on the ramp, indicating she wanted to talk to me in private.

I muted my feed and the comm, and she said, “I know you’re more comfortable with keeping your helmet opaque, but the situation has changed. We need to see you.”

I didn’t want to do it. Now more than ever. They knew too much about me. But I needed them to trust me so I could keep them alive and keep doing my job. The good version of my job, not the half-assed version of my job that I’d been doing before things started trying to kill my clients. I still didn’t want to do it. “It’s usually better if humans think of me as a robot,” I said.