Network Effect

I wanted to find a bunch more algae-smelling gray snotty assholes and kill the shit out of every single one.

A sudden 5 percent dip in performance reliability made my knees go shaky and I leaned on the cabin hatch. For twelve seconds it seemed like a good idea to slide all the way down to the deck and just stay there.

But I should get back to Amena.

Also, after the Targets had rampaged through here, the deck was pretty disgusting.

In the medical suite, the conversation had moved back to me. (Oh goody.) Eletra was saying, “You really have to be careful. That SecUnit seems to have been altered to make it look less like a bot, but that doesn’t change their programming.”

“Hmm,” Amena said, not looking at her, still picking at the wound pack on her leg.

Ras put in, “I know you think it’s trying to protect you—”

“It’s not trying.” Amena’s tone was clipped. “It’s protecting me.”

“But they’re not reliable,” Ras persisted. “It’s because of the human neural tissue.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

Ras added, “They go rogue and attack their contract holders and support staff.”

Amena bit her lip and squinched up her eyes in a way that said she was suppressing an emotion, but I couldn’t tell what. “I wonder why that is,” she said in a flat voice.

On the way to medical, I walked through the galley and the classroom compartments, and swung by a supply locker and grabbed a pre-packed emergency ration bag. They had an awful lot of supplies in here for planetary exploration, not what you’d expect on a ship whose jobs were mapping and teaching and cargo.

As I turned down the corridor, I tapped Amena’s feed to tell her I was coming back and started reviewing my archive, comparing the time I had been aboard ART before with what I saw now. Did I actually know what ART and its crew did? I had never bothered to ask; Deep Space Research sounded boring. Almost as boring as guarding mining equipment.

In the medbay, Eletra was saying, “You’re very lucky it didn’t turn on you while you were being held on this ship. You must have been locked up here with it for days and days.”

Wait, what? Great, were the humans having problems perceiving reality? Even more than the usual problems humans have perceiving reality? That was all I needed. Amena was just going to have to deal with it, because I was busy.

Amena was baffled. “No, no, we just got here. Just a little while ago. Right before the gray people dragged me into that room.”

Ras rubbed his face, either concealing his expression or just genuinely unwell. Eletra looked pitying. “I think you’re confused.”

Amena’s expression scrunched up again, but she shook her head. “Look, SecUnit’s coming back, so you need to stop saying all this stuff about it. I know you believe it, but you’re wrong, and I don’t want to hear it. And I think maybe we’re both confused because—”

Maybe staring at space and teaching young humans to stare at space wasn’t all ART’s crew did. Maybe ART had let me think that.

Right, so I had drone input from the medical bay but I wasn’t paying attention to it. I was searching for images of stored supplies to compare and look for anomalies, missing items, other clues. So I only had a 1.4-second warning when I stepped through the hatch and Ras fired a weapon at me.

For a human, his aim was great.

Chapter 6

Fortunately it was an energy weapon and not a SecUnit-head-busting projectile.

It still fucking hurt. I flinched and rammed into the side of the hatch (ow) and dove sideways to avoid the second blast. Except there wasn’t one, because Ras was flailing instead of aiming. Amena had jumped on his back and was trying to choke him out. (It was a good effort but she didn’t have the leverage to really clamp down with her forearm.)

Eletra stood nearby, waving her arms and yelling, “Stop! What are you doing? Stop!” which was frankly the most sensible thing I had heard a human say in hours. It also told me this wasn’t a planned attack, which is what stopped me from putting a drone through Ras’s face. (Also, I was running out of drones.)

If I sound calm, I was actually not calm. I thought I’d had control of the situation (sort of control, okay? don’t laugh) and then it had unraveled rapidly.

I pushed off the hatch and walked over to pick up the weapon Ras had dropped. It was like or possibly identical to or possibly actually was the tube-like energy weapon Target Two had used on me. Ras must have picked it up while I was distracted by having an emotional breakdown. (Yeah, that was a huge mistake.) It had caused pain in my organic tissue but it hadn’t disrupted any processes so I knew it would be no use on the targetDrones. But at least it should work on the Targets. I put it in my jacket pocket. Then I stepped in, kicked Ras in the back of the kneecap, and caught Amena around the waist. He hit the floor and I set her on her feet.