Network Effect

I sent them a drone view of the confrontation and ART’s crew. There was some quiet but excited flailing. Then Thiago said, Can we get them out via the lift pod, get power to it somehow?

Overse said, That wouldn’t work—we’d have to find the power plant, restart it. But if we could get into the pod shaft just above them and open the doors on their level from the inside—

I didn’t like that plan. We didn’t know how long the fighting had been going on and it might stop at any moment, and whoever won would go after the trapped humans. I said, It would take too long, and the pods might be blocking the shaft. I’ve got a better idea.

At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

The hard part was fighting against thousands of hours of module-training and experience plus common sense that said never hand a weapon to a human and especially never tell them to do something with it. The weapons in question were just poppers, and the human was Overse who never panicked, but still.

Now she was following a drone up to the balcony I’d found. It was terrible as a sniper position, but it would work fine for this. I was with Thiago in the lower corridor that would hopefully be our escape route. With no feed except my drone relay, I’d had to send a drone to make a direct connection with Distraction01 and Distraction02. It had made contact seventeen seconds ago, so we were go to proceed as soon as Overse was in position. Just in time, because 1.4 minutes ago I had marked a lull in the second area of conflict, the corridors to the east of the arrival chamber, and the last thing I needed right now was for the Targets to declare a truce and stop shooting each other.

And Thiago, standing behind the corridor support girder with me, looked tense. Keeping my voice low, I said, “Are you sure you’re okay to do this?”

“Yes, I’m sure, and it doesn’t help to keep asking me over and over again,” he whispered back.

Well, he wasn’t wrong about that. The problem was mostly me, I felt guilty asking for help, though I’d tried to set things up so neither human would be exposed to fire.

My drones showed Overse just reaching the doorway to the balcony. She dropped to her knees and crawled up to the low wall. I switched to our joint feed and said, Clear to proceed.

Thiago braced himself.

As Overse armed the three poppers, I started to run. She flung them over the rail two seconds before I hit the archway into the arrival chamber. Still falling, the poppers popped. Lights flashed like lightning in a biozone and booms echoed off the chamber’s walls. I’d tuned my hearing down and filtered my vision but I could still see and hear the effects. Just not as dramatically as the Targets on either side of the chamber who yelled, screamed, fell down, and randomly fired their weapons. I sprinted the fifteen meters along the back wall of the chamber and ducked around the glass partition shielding the doorway of the lift pod lobby.

As I whipped around the wall, Iris scrambled backward and almost fell out of cover. I stopped and said, “Don’t get into the line of fire, Iris.” (I know, I’m bad at this part. On a contract, I could say, Please don’t be alarmed, I’m your contracted SecUnit. You are in a dangerous situation. Please stop doing:insert stupid thing here: immediately.) Out in the drop box chamber, Targets shot blindly at each other, each side convinced the other had set off the poppers as the prelude to a rush attack. The rest of ART’s crew, still in the back of the lobby and working on the pod control, had reacted to the noise but hadn’t heard me enter the foyer. I added, “There’s only five of you here—where are the others?”

“Who are you?” Breathing hard, Iris pushed away from the wall but didn’t panic. I saw the change in her expression as she started to recognize the enviro suit I was wearing. (It went from righteously pissed off and terrified to confused.) “How did you get that suit?”

Overse and her drone raced through the upper corridors, headed back to the maintenance capsule to get it ready for our escape. Thiago waited in the corridor, one knee bouncing impatiently. I said, “I borrowed it from your transport. It sent me to retrieve you. Where are the other three?”