All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)

I had cycled out of horrified that they wanted to talk to me about my feelings into grateful that she had ordered them not to. As she restarted the autopilot, I pulled the log and sent it into the feed to show her it had cut out due to a HubSystem glitch. She swore under her breath and shook her head.

* * *

The missing map section wasn’t that far outside our assessment range so we were there before I made a dent in the backlog of serials I’d saved to my internal storage. Mensah told the others, “We’re coming up on it.”

We had been traveling over heavy tropical forest, where it flowed over deep valleys. Suddenly it dropped away into a plain, spotted with lakes and smaller copses of trees. There was a lot of bare rock, in low ridges and tumbled boulders. It was dark and glassy, like volcanic glass.

The cabin was quiet as everybody studied the scans. Arada was looking at the seismic data, bouncing it to the others back in the habitat through her feed.

“I don’t see anything that would prevent the satellite from mapping this region,” Pin-Lee said, her voice distant as she sorted through the data the hopper was pulling in. “No strange readings. It’s weird.”

“Unless this rock has some sort of stealth property that prevented the satellites from imaging it,” Arada said. “The scanners are acting a little funny.”

“Because the scanners suck corporation balls,” Pin-Lee muttered.

“Should we land?” Mensah said. I realized she was asking me for a security assessment.

The scans were sort of working and marking some hazards, but they weren’t any different hazards from what we’d run into before. I said, “We could. But we know there’s at least one lifeform here that tunnels through rock.”

Arada bounced a little in her seat, like she was impatient to get going. “I know we have to be cautious, but I think we’d be safer if we knew whether these blank patches on the satellite scan were accidental or deliberate.”

That was when I realized they weren’t ignoring the possibility of sabotage. I should have realized it earlier, when Pin-Lee asked if HubSystem could be hacked. But humans had been looking at me and I had just wanted to get out of there.

Ratthi and Pin-Lee seconded her, and Mensah made her decision. “We’ll land and take samples.”

Over the comm from the habitat, Bharadwaj’s voice said, “Please be careful.” She still sounded shaky.

Mensah took us down gently, the hopper’s pads touching the ground with hardly a thump. I was already up and at the hatch.

The humans had their suit helmets on so I opened the hatch and let the ramp drop. Close up the rocky patches still looked like glass, mostly black, but with different colors running into each other. This near to the ground the hopper’s scan was able to confirm that seismic activity was null, but I walked out a little bit, as if giving anything out there a chance to attack me. If the humans see me actually doing my job, it helps keep suspicions from forming about faulty governor modules.

Mensah climbed down with Arada behind her. They moved around, taking more readings with their portable scanners. Then the others got the sample kit outs and started chipping off pieces of the rock glass, or glass rock, scooping up dirt and bits of plant matter. They were murmuring to each other a lot, and to the others back at the habitat. They were sending the data to the feed, but I wasn’t paying attention.

It was an odd spot. Quiet compared to the other places we’d surveyed, with not much bird-thing noise and no sign of animal movement. Maybe the rocky patches kept them away. I walked out a little way, past a couple of the lakes, almost expecting to see something under the surface. Dead bodies, maybe. I’d seen plenty of those (and caused plenty of those) on past contracts, but this one had been dead-body-lacking, so far. It made for a nice change.

Mensah had set a survey perimeter, marking all the areas the aerial scan had flagged as hazardous or potentially hazardous. I checked on everybody again and saw Arada and Ratthi heading directly for one of the hazard markers. I expected them to stop at the perimeter, since they’d been pretty consistently cautious on the other assessments. I started moving in that direction anyway. Then they passed the perimeter. I started to run. I sent Mensah my field camera feed and used the voice comm to say, “Dr. Arada, Dr. Ratthi, please stop. You’re past the perimeter and nearing a hazard marker.”

“We are?” Ratthi sounded completely baffled.

Fortunately, they both stopped. By the time I got there they both had their maps up in my feed. “I don’t understand what’s wrong,” Arada said, confused. “I don’t see the hazard marker.” She had tagged both their positions and on their maps they were well within the perimeter, heading toward a wetland area.

It took me a second to see what the problem was. Then I superimposed my map, the actual map, over theirs and sent that to Mensah. “Shit,” she said over the comm. “Ratthi, Arada, your map’s wrong. How did that happen?”