Network Effect

One wore a blue jacket but the way he was curled against the wall I couldn’t see if it had the right logo. The other two were in casual clothing, one in the loose pants and T-shirt humans wore to exercise. They didn’t look like corporate employees on the job. They looked like the crew of a ship that did deep space mapping and teaching with the occasional cargo run and/or corporate colony liberation on the side, like they hadn’t expected to leave their ship and had been caught by surprise. I collected what data I could and ran a quick query in my stolen storage space, checking it against the identifying information I had for ART’s crew, trying to match weight/height/hair/skin combos.

Result: an 80 percent chance that I was looking at Martyn, Karime, and Turi.

But where were the others? I wasn’t finding any other non-dead humans on board.

The others might be in the piles of bodies where I couldn’t get good images for visual identification. But these three were non-dead and I was getting them back to ART no matter what I had to do.

Now I just had to figure out how.

I checked the corridor outside and realized I’d been so distracted by living humans that I had missed the SecUnit.

It was stationary, still in full armor, standing apparently frozen near the door to the lounge. I checked its status in what was left of the SecSystem and saw it had been ordered to stand down and not move. With clients still alive in the lounge cabin, its governor module hadn’t killed it. Yet.

It was strange to see a SecUnit from the outside. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen other SecUnits since Dr. Mensah bought me, but in this version of me, reality was raw and close to the surface, with no cushion between me and it. I remembered what it was like, standing like this. It was all in the excerpted personal archive files I had with me. How helpless it … I was. (Ugh, I really wanted to watch some media but there was just no time. Having access to the media files helped, though.)

The SecUnit was an obvious resource. SecUnits aren’t affected by most kinds of killware but I wasn’t most kinds of killware. I knew I could take it over if I wanted to.

I didn’t want to.

Right, so let’s try it this way.

From my spot in the SecSystem, I initiated a connection and put a freeze on the SecUnit’s governor module so nothing I did would accidentally trigger it. I could tell I had the Unit’s attention, that it knew somebody had initiated contact. I sent it an old company identifier:

System System: Unit Acknowledge.

This wasn’t a company SecUnit, its configuration was different, but I knew it would recognize the greeting as a protocol, and not one associated with hostile alien remnant entities. After four long seconds, it replied:

System Unit Acknowledge: Identify?

I could lie, say I was from Barish-Estranza. (Face it, considering how often I accuse ART of lying, I lie a lot. I mean, a lot.) But I didn’t want to lie right now. I said, I’m a rogue SecUnit, working with the armed transport who is pursuing this ship with the intention of retrieving endangered clients. I am currently present as killware inside the explorer’s SecSystem.

It didn’t reply. I can tell you as a SecUnit that under these circumstances this is just about the last thing you expect to hear. Also, SecUnits normally aren’t allowed to communicate with each other so it would be reluctant to drop protocol. I said, There’s no protocol for any of this. Just talk to me.

There was another three second pause. I don’t know what to say.

That was encouraging. (I’m actually not being sarcastic here—the last time I’d tried to talk a SecUnit into helping me, it had just gotten more determined to kill me. But it had been a CombatUnit and they’re assholes.)

I said, Three of my clients are inside the compartment nearest you. Have you seen these others? I showed it images of the unaccounted-for members of ART’s crew.