Exit Strategy

I told her, I can’t get through, I’ll take another ship. Go to the shuttle and get out of here. Then I backburnered her channel.

There was no way I could get to a ship. Seven transports in the public docks were still allowing fleeing humans to board, but all the locks in this area were sealed. I wasn’t going anywhere.

It sounds all self-sacrificing and dramatic, telling it this way. And I guess it was, maybe. What I was mostly thinking was that there wasn’t going to be one dead SecUnit on this embarkation floor, there were going to be four.

Sending SecUnits after me was one thing. But they sent SecUnits after my client. No one gets to walk away from that.

I turned my back on the gates and accessed the monitor hack I already had on the PortSec drones, took control of the whole fleet, and snapped their connection to PortSec. Then I blanked all the stationary cameras on the embarkation floor. Now Palisade or GrayCrisSec or whoever was running this show didn’t know my position but I knew theirs.

The hostiles ran along the walkway past the last few clumps of fleeing humans. A human StationSec squad in uniform had scrambled in the booking area, trying to direct the humans flooding out of the port area into the mall and cover their retreat. (Who knows what GrayCris told them was happening to get the Port Authority to allow a SecUnit deployment. It probably involved me, Rogue SecUnit on a rampage.) A second security squad in power suits with the Palisade logo moved onto the walkway. They were backup for the SecUnits.

Speaking of which, I ordered Section One of my drone fleet to deploy surveillance countermeasures and Section Two to attack the hostile SecUnits’ drones.

As they swooped down to engage, I thought GrayCris probably regretted buying all that extra station security in the port right about now.

Drone buzzing almost drowned out the alarm klaxon. The announcement instructed the humans trapped on the public embarkation floor to drop where they were and not move. The three SecUnits slowed, probably on orders from their supervisor, who might or might not be among the power-suited squad now positioned on the walkway just above the public docks, well out of my range. I updated my timeline.

The hostiles crossed the public docks toward the gates into this section, which were still open. PortMaintSec was finally back up and I told it to kill the main lights.

This caused shouts and screams from the humans still trapped. I could see via my scan, and so could the hostiles, and the humans in power suits would have dark vision filters. But it was scary and intimidating, and that’s what I was going for.

Somebody tried to restore the control feed connection to my drones, but couldn’t get past my wall. Somebody else, probably GrayCrisSec or Palisade, deployed killware. StationSecAdmin alerted to it and, probably terrified it was aimed at SafetyLockSys, deployed a killware countermeasure. It would have been hilarious if I wasn’t about to die.

It was still a little hilarious.

My projectile weapon was designed to pierce armor but I needed to be close, and I needed cover.

As the hostiles came through into the private docks, I activated the new code I had been working on. Code: Deploy&Delay.

Simultaneously, three things happened. The hauler bots that StationSecAdmin had deactivated all reactivated and charged into the open floor. The load lifters hovering up by the ceiling dropped to skim low along the deck. My reserve drones split into multiple task groups and dove down, took up altitudes at knee and head level, and zoomed around through the other roving bots. In the dark, with just the gleam of the emergency lighting floor strips, it was kind of impressive.

A fourth thing happened: I started to run toward the stationside wall.

I’d spent a lot of my time in the hotel room writing this code when I could have been watching media, so it was nice to see it hadn’t been a waste. Basically it suppressed the bots and lifters’ safety features except for their ability to avoid each other, restricted them to an area, and sped up and randomized their movements. I’d originally meant it for the entire port, as a last-ditch distraction, and had had to change the parameters on the fly to make the affected area the private docks. And I was glad I hadn’t panicked and dropped it earlier; as a surprise, it was working great.

The first SecUnit to make it through the open gate from the public docks I designated Hostile One. It stopped abruptly to avoid a careening hauler bot, then dove sideways out of the path of a lifter. Hostile Two had a partial second of warning and cut to its right, toward stationside. Hostile Three was clever; it dove forward under the wild swing of a cargo lifter, came to its feet, and vaulted on top of a hauler bot. Random hostile drones, survivors of the fight, zipped in through the gate followed by my drones, still in attack mode.