Network Effect

Contacting them now? If the safepod had launched it should be on the baseship by now. But I couldn’t do anything about it, I had to get Amena to the baseship first.

Amena said, What does that mean? Is Overse and everyone okay?

I was about to trigger the suits’ maneuvering system when scan picked up an energy surge. My suit’s imaging went down and the helmet plate went dark, protecting my eyes against a flash. (I didn’t need the protection, but the EVAC suit didn’t know that.)

Amena made a startled noise. Static blotted out the feed connection, then Mihail said, That was a miss, repeat, attacker fired and missed—

Rajpreet’s fainter voice said, Are they aiming at the safepod?

The rest was lost in static. I ordered my suit to clear the visor and swung around so I could see the hostile. I don’t know why—my suit wasn’t armed. I just wanted to see what was after us as something other than a sensor blot. It was almost as dumb an impulse as some things I’ve seen humans do.

I saw a big dark hull, reflecting light from Preservation’s distant primary. There was still nothing coming from it, no feed, no comm, no beacons, so it was like a giant inert object. (A giant inert object dragging us toward the wormhole.) The EVAC imaging system came back online to add in sensor data and give me a more accurate outline, making the hostile show up as part dark shape, part schematic. It was odd, since the configuration looked just like—

The EVAC scans found a registry designation embossed on the ship’s hull and rendered it for me. And I recognized it. I didn’t even have to search my archive. I recognized it from a transport embarkation schedule on the station I had gone to after leaving Port FreeCommerce.

“That’s—” That’s ART, I almost said on the feed, like an idiot.

It was so shocking and so weird, my performance reliability dropped and I lost circulation to my organic parts. And not weird = violating norms in an annoying way but weird = eerie, like in Farland Star Roads, the story arc with the haunted station with ghosts and time-shifting.

Or weird like I was having memory failure again, mixing up archival memory with current data collection.

That was a terrifying thought.

That’s what? Amena asked, then the ship—the hostile—ART fired again.

The EVAC suit tracked it this time as a spark across my scanner. It went wide, so wide I thought it must be aimed at the station responder but it was so far away, what would be the point? I pulled the data the suit had collected about the first shot and saw it had gone wide, too.

On our feed, Roa said, It’s another miss! No damage.

Mihail said, The vector was way off, I don’t even think— Maybe a warning shot.

Maybe I wasn’t having memory failure.

I said, Baseship, are you still ready to catch us?

Roa said, Mihail, are you— Then, Yes, yes, SecUnit, go, we’re ready!

The trajectory Mihail had sent was still good, we just had a little longer to go. With Amena’s suit in tandem with mine, I launched us off the facility’s hull.

Twenty seconds later, something grabbed my suit and tugged it. It was fairly gentle and wouldn’t have seemed like a disaster at all except for my suit’s emergency alarms and Mihail cursing frantically on the baseship feed.

The ship—the hostile—ART had us in a tractor and pulled us toward its hull. I was facing the wrong way and my suit gave me a sensor view. It was bringing us toward a large lock in the port hull, not that I could do anything about it. I saw ART’s lab module was in place, which meant it wasn’t acting as a cargo transport, but as a research vessel.

Her voice high with distress, Amena said, They’ve got the facility, why do they want us?

I said, I don’t know.

I don’t know anything.

As the tractor pulled us into the large airlock, Roa’s voice yelled over the feed, It’s accelerating toward the wormhole! We’re losing it—as the hatch slid shut. The baseship feed dropped. I made an attempt to reconnect, but hit a wall as solid as … I don’t know, but it was solid.

I hadn’t been in this lock before but it still had the clean, well-kept ship look that matched my memories. If I could trust my memories. If this was real.

I really needed to run a diagnostic but there was no time.

The lock cycled, air whooshing in, and the hatch slid open. It sure looked real and my EVAC suit scan matched what I was seeing/scanning. No feed, no comm activity.