Network Effect

It said, At this time SecSystem is nonfunctional but I have video in my archive. It was way more comfortable giving information than figuring out what to say to a rogue SecUnit killware. It sent me two clips, and then summarized them for me because it was used to reporting to humans who never understood what they were looking at. Eight unidentified humans were forcibly brought aboard by the Hostiles but five disembarked at approximately 2260 ship’s time when we reconnected to the space dock.

In the first clip I watched ART’s crew, all eight of them, being dragged aboard through the airlock, most semi-conscious. The second clip was of a group of five being prodded off the ship into an airlock and yeah I had a bad moment there but the ship’s status in the metadata showed the SecUnit was right, the ship was connected to the dock at that point. Also, four Targets followed them. I asked, Do you know where they were taken?

This time it had an audio clip of two Targets talking as they walked down the corridor past it. They were using that mix of Pre–Corporation Rim languages that Thiago had identified, but a translation had been loaded to HubSystem and the SecUnit had pulled it into its own archives. It summarized, The Hostiles implant humans with devices similar to our governor modules. They ran out of unused devices and returned to the space dock to send all humans without implants to the surface.

I guess running out of implants made sense, if you were a Target/idiot and hadn’t been expecting to encounter ART or its crew. I said, So all the humans in that cabin have implants, which are holding them immobile.

Correct.

That was not great news, but it was helpful to know. What other intel do you have about the Hostiles?

It sent me another set of audio clips and explained, They had difficulty installing an unidentified object to the explorer’s drive. The bot pilot was deleted and could not assist. Something disastrous happened and it has confused their plans. They needed a weapon to fight against future incursions to this system but the attempt to obtain one failed badly.

I played the clips to confirm the SecUnit’s conclusions, and checked the camera views of the ship’s drive just to make sure. Oh yeah, that looked bad. They had the same sort of alien remnant that had burned itself off ART’s drive and melted, only this one was hanging to the side and looked puffy. The engine casings were discolored on top and the monitoring stations threw a steady stream of error codes into the engineering feed.

So to summarize, the Targets had botched the install of their alien remnant drive onto the explorer’s engines, leaving the explorer no longer wormhole-capable. Also the group assigned to ART had lost control of it and now a giant armed transport was roaming the system implacably searching for vengeance.

The SecUnit continued, Note: Hostiles have fought among themselves while onboard, suggesting they are split into at least two factions, a situation that can be exploited in order to retrieve clients.

It fed me more info, mostly conversations picked up in corridors and the bridge via SecSystem’s cameras. I agreed with the analysis, it looked like there were different factions in the Targets’ leadership with different goals. One group didn’t know what to do, how to follow their plan, until they got ART back. Another group, possibly still on the surface, wanted to cut their losses and do something else. I said, They keep talking about spreading something to other humans? Are they referencing the alien remnant contamination?

The SecUnit said, I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.