All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)

I know I said SecUnits aren’t sentimental about each other, but I wished it wasn’t one of the DeltFall units. It was in there somewhere, trapped in its own head, maybe aware, maybe not. Not that it matters. None of us had a choice.

I stood up just as Mensah slammed through the brush, carrying the mining tool. I told her, “It’s gone wrong. You have to pretend to be my prisoner.”

She looked at me, then looked at the DeltFall unit. “How are you going to explain that?”

I started shedding armor, every piece that had a PreservationAux logo on it, and leaned over the DeltFall unit as the pieces dropped away. “I’m going to be it and it’s going to be me.”

Mensah dropped the mining tool and bent down to help me. We didn’t have time to switch all the armor. Moving fast, we replaced the arm and shoulder pieces on both sides, the leg pieces that had the armor’s inventory code, the chest and back piece with the logos. Mensah smeared my remaining armor pieces with dirt and blood and fluid from the dead unit, so if we had missed anything distinctive GrayCris might not notice. SecUnits are identical in height and build, the way we moved. This might work. I don’t know. If we ran away now the plan would fail, we had to get them off this plateau. As I resealed the helmet, I told Mensah, “We have to go—”

She nodded, breathing hard, more from nerves than exertion. “I’m ready.”

I took her arm, and pretended to drag her back toward the GrayCris group. She yelled and struggled convincingly the whole way.

When we reached the plateau, a GrayCris hopper was already landing.

As I pulled her toward Blue Leader, Mensah got in the first word. She said, “So this is the arrangement you offered?”

Blue Leader said, “You’re the planetary admin of Preservation?”

Mensah didn’t look at me. If they tried to hurt her, I’d try to stop them and everything would go horribly wrong. But Green was already getting into the hopper. Two other humans were in the pilot’s and copilot’s seats. Mensah said, “Yes.”

Yellow came toward me and touched the side of my helmet. It took a tremendous effort for me not to rip his arm off, and I’d like that noted for the record, please. He said, “Its comm is down.”

To Mensah, Blue Leader said, “We know one of your people is trying to manually trigger our beacon. If you come with us, we won’t harm him, and we can discuss our situation. This doesn’t have to go badly for either of us.” She was very convincing. She had probably been the one to talk to DeltFall on the comm, asking to be let into their habitat.

Mensah hesitated, and I knew she didn’t want it to look like she was giving in too quickly, but we had to get them out of there now. She said, “Very well.”

* * *

I hadn’t ridden in the cargo container for a while. It would have been comforting and homey, except it wasn’t my cargo container.

But this hopper was still a company product and I was able to access its feed. I had to stay very quiet, to keep them from noticing me, but all those hours of surreptitiously consuming media came in handy.

Their SecSystem was still recording. They must mean to delete all that before the pick-up transport showed up. Client groups had tried that before, to hide data from the company so it couldn’t be sold out from under them, and the company systems analysts would be on the alert for it, but I don’t know if these people realized that. The company might catch them even if we didn’t survive. That wasn’t a very comforting thought.

As I accessed the ongoing recording, I heard Mensah saying, “—know about the remnants in the unmapped areas. They were strong enough to confuse our mapping functions. Is that how you found them?”

Bharadwaj had figured that out last night. The unmapped sections weren’t an intentional hack, they were an error, caused by the remnants that were buried under the dirt and rock. This planet had been inhabited at some point in its past, which meant it would be placed under interdict, open only to archeological surveys. Even the company would abide by that.

You could make big, illegal money off of excavating and mining those remnants, and that was obviously what GrayCris wanted.

“That isn’t the conversation we should be having,” Blue Leader said. “I want to know what arrangement we can come to.”

“To keep you from killing us like you did DeltFall,” Mensah said, keeping her voice even. “Once we’re in contact with our home again, we can arrange for a transfer of funds. But how can we trust you to leave us alive?”

There was a little silence. Oh great, they don’t know either. Then Blue Leader said, “You have no option except to trust us.”