Exit Strategy

SecSystem lost another wall and the main airlock started to cycle. I slipped into the ship’s control feed and caused a heat surge in all airlock hatches, fusing everything but the manual controls. I tried to cut all non-manual access to engineering but I was too late, the drive started to fail, our engines were cycling down. Sensors showed the Palisade ship on approach. On the flight deck the captain had given two orders to fire main weapons but the bot pilot no longer had access. Gravity ceased abruptly in a backbone tube, trapping the humans trying to get manual access to systems. The captain was trying to assemble the armed retrieval team to repel boarding, but half were augmented humans who were now incapacitated by the attack on their augments and the other half were fighting sealed doors to reach their defensive positions.

I flailed. I tried to help SecSystem but it was dissolving under my hands.

The bot pilot couldn’t speak in words like ART, but in my head I felt its terror. It sent Code: System System. Assistance. Endangered.

It was trying to ask me for help using the company codes, the way I’d asked for help for my clients.

Fuck this. GrayCris is not going to win.

I slipped all the way into the ship, into the pilot bot’s hardware. I’d seen ART do it.

(Yes, ART’s processing capacity is much larger than mine. I’ll address that issue when it comes up, which is real soon now.)

I suddenly had a different body, hard vacuum on a metal skin, I saw the approaching ship with my eyes, not just sensors. It had dispatched a boarding shuttle that was coming in fast, heading toward the gunship’s main docking lock. I pulled back in; there was no time for sightseeing. The bot pilot wanted to know what we should do. It was a good question.

Inhabiting the same hardware like this, the bot pilot and I could communicate almost instantaneously. I pulled SecSystem’s analysis of the attacker so we could both examine it. It wasn’t just a code sequence like malware or killware. It was a conscious bot, moving through the feed like I did, like ART, but with no physical structure to go back to; that was why it was so fast. It was like a disembodied combat bot.

The bot pilot asked if the Attacker was a construct created from human neural tissue, rather than a bot, and indicated points in the analysis that would confirm that theory.

I told it that was worse, and better. A disembodied construct would be more vicious, but it would also be easier to trick.

I had an idea I outlined for the bot pilot. If we could trap the Attacker’s code bundle in a contained area and destroy it, we could regain control of the affected systems. But to get the Attacker to go into a contained area, we needed bait. We needed to know what the Attacker wanted/had been sent to do.

Bot pilot said that it wanted to destroy the ship and crew.

I said there had to be a reason. There was no profit for GrayCris in killing us, and a lot of risk in antagonizing the bond company by destroying a ship this expensive.

I reactivated my body, standing rigid in the passenger seating area. Ratthi was out in the corridor, doing rescue breathing on an augmented human crew member who had collapsed due to the attack on her augments. Gurathin was out there, too, both hands in a panel access, holding a corridor hatch open so crew could bypass the backbone and get to the drive. Pin-Lee and Mensah both sat on the floor with two crew members. All four had portable manual interfaces open and were frantically entering code, shoring up SecSystem’s walls. They weren’t fast enough, but what was left of SecSystem probably appreciated the thought.

I said, “Dr. Mensah, why do you think GrayCris is doing this? What do they want?”

Everybody flinched. “What is it doing?” a crew member demanded. “It could have been taken over by the—”

“Shut up,” Dr. Mensah snapped at the crew member. To me, she said, “We think it’s Milu. They must think you have the data you took from Milu with you.”

“It’s got to be that,” Pin-Lee added, not looking up from her display surface. “They could have killed us as soon as we arrived on TranRollinHyfa, but they wanted the money. It’s only been since they realized you were here that things got violent.”

You know, I bet that’s it. And I bet it had something to do with the memory clip I took from Wilken and Gerth. CrayGris must know it existed, must believe I had it. They were too late, since it was in the Preservation system by now, but I doubt they were going to believe that. But it did give me something to work with. “I need someone to trigger a manual disengage of the shuttle we arrived in.”

Mensah dropped her interface and shoved to her feet. “We’ll do it. Pin-Lee—”

“Coming!”

“Thank you for your assistance,” my buffer said, as I shut down again and went back to the bot pilot.