Exit Strategy

Back in accelerated time, I explained to the bot pilot what I wanted to try. It was fighting for control of its weapon systems, trying to follow the captain’s order to fire. It showed me an intel fragment from the boarding shuttle: manifest suggested a Combat SecUnit was aboard, along with an augmented human boarding team.

Yeah, we couldn’t let that shuttle lock on.

I hadn’t made a copy of the memory clip, but I still had all that data I had recorded on the trip to Milu, all those cycles of Wilken and Gerth talking about not much of anything. It had been analyzed and compressed, but it might resemble the parameters of what Attacker was searching for long enough to make this work.

I couldn’t risk cameras or feed, so I walked my body out of the passenger area and into the shuttle access corridor. I’d fused that hatch, too, but Mensah and Pin-Lee had the panel open for the emergency disengage. “Wait for my signal,” I said.

I told bot pilot we were going to have to make this good. It agreed, and we worked out what we were going to do.

Then bot pilot disengaged SecSystem.

I knew we had to do it but it was terrifying to be so vulnerable. I could feel Attacker bearing down on bot pilot, on me. I told bot pilot we needed to protect this important information so the company could retrieve it later and that I would hide it in the shuttle. Bot pilot ripped the confused ShuttleBotPilot out of its memory core and I dumped the data bundle into its place.

And Attacker transferred itself into the shuttle’s system.

Three things happened at once: (1) ShuttleSecSystem walled the shuttle’s comm system. (2) Bot pilot deleted its own comm system codes and I overloaded and fused its hardware. (3) My body told Dr. Mensah and Pin-Lee, “Now.”

Pin-Lee’s hands moved in the panel and Dr. Mensah worked the controls. The shuttle disengaged.

The gunship was moving slowly at that point, so the shuttle didn’t drop very far away, but with our comms fried it might as well have been on the other side of the wormhole. Attacker was gone, trapped in the shuttle.

Hah, I thought. Take that, you fucker.

Ship’s feed and system codes were trashed, but bot pilot was already reasserting control. SecSystem did the system equivalent of staggering drunkenly to its feet. Someone on the flight deck said, “Oh, mothergods, we’re clear!”

Bot pilot regained control of its weapon system and queried the captain. The captain said, “Confirm, fire.”

I stayed long enough to enjoy the boarding shuttle disappearing in one explosive burst, and the multiple impacts breaching the Palisade ship’s hull, then pulled my scattered code together and dropped back into my body. It felt weird.

Mensah and Pin-Lee still stood in the corridor, watching me worriedly. “We’re clear,” I told them.

Pin-Lee made an excited whooping noise and Mensah grabbed her and swung her around.

I felt weird. Very weird. Very bad.

Performance reliability at 45 percent and dropping. Catastrophic failure—

I felt my body crumple, but I didn’t feel myself hit the deck.

Chapter Eight

MY MEMORY WAS IN fragments. I didn’t feel great about it, but it wasn’t the disaster it would have been for a full bot. My human neural tissue, normally the weak link in my whole data storage system, couldn’t be wiped. I had to rely on it to put the fragments back in order and unfortunately its access speed was terrible.

It was taking fucking forever.

I wandered through random images, bursts of pain, landscapes, corridors, walls. Wow, that was a lot of walls.

(Unidentified voices on audio: “Any change?”

“Not yet.” A hesitation. “Do you think we should have let them put it in the cubicle? If it can’t—”

“No. No, absolutely not. They’ve got to want to know how it beat its governor module. If they had the opportunity … We can’t trust them.”)

The worst part was that I couldn’t remember (hah) how long I had been in this state. What little diagnostic info I had suggested a catastrophic failure of some sort.

Maybe that was obvious without the diagnostic data.

A complex series of neural connections, all positive, led me to a large intact section of protected storage … What the hell was this? The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon? I started to review it.

And boom, hundreds of thousands of connections blossomed. I had control over my processes again and initiated a diagnostic and data repair sequence. Memories started to sort and order at a higher rate.

(Voice on audio: “Good news! Diagnostics are showing greatly accelerated activity. It’s putting itself back together.”)

(Partial identification: client?)