Network Effect

I wanted to pick it up and have an emotion over it like a stupid human. But I smelled growth medium again.

Amena said, This is such a different set-up from the ships I’ve seen. Can you look for a display somewhere with—

Oh, I had a bad feeling about this. I followed the smell. It led me through the next hatch and down a short gravity well where blinking caution markers floated in the air. (The gist was that various component manufactories and shipwrights and the University of Mihira and New Tideland did not want you to come down here without a Class Master Engineering License or Local Jurisdictional Equivalent and if you felt you just had to then really don’t fucking touch anything.) Amena had stopped talking, and her assigned drone camera showed her squinting in concentration as she watched the scene through my eyes.

At the bottom of the gravity well, there was a platform where I could look down through the transparent shielding bubble over the engines.

Confession: I didn’t know what the engines were supposed to look like, exactly. I’d never had to guard a transport’s engines and they were usually too boring to show on the entertainment media. But I knew whatever was down there wasn’t supposed to have a large organic mass on top of it that smelled of algae and growth medium.

Amena said softly, What … What the … What is that?

Believe me, it was the question occupying 92 percent of my attention right now.

Organic neural tissue can be melded with inorganic systems (Example A: the squishy bits inside my skull) so there was an outside chance (it was so outside I couldn’t estimate a percentage) that this organic mass was a normal part of ART’s systems, maybe something unique and proprietary.

But then why did it smell like the Targets?

I got an alert from Scout Two in the control area foyer. I checked its input and saw Target Five stride over and pick up the screen device where it lay on a chair. (Why the hell does everything have to happen at once? But at least the freaky thing on ART’s engines wasn’t trying to crawl up here and kill us yet.) As Target Five tapped his fingers on the solid-state screen, I widened my input range to pick up any active channel. In 2.3 seconds, I caught a data transmission.

More importantly, .2 seconds later, I caught targetControlSystem’s response.

Got you, you piece of shit.

But something about the view from Scout Two bothered me. It had been bothering me for a while, but I had been too agitated to pay attention.

A lot of my ability to do threat assessment (like pick potential hostiles out of crowds or tell which stupid boat is full of raiders instead of curious locals) is based on pattern matching off a database of human behaviors. The Targets were anomalous, but they weren’t so anomalous they didn’t exhibit the same basic types of behaviors as other humans. And something was off about their behavior in the control area foyer, something that couldn’t be accounted for by their overconfidence or the fact that they were all assholes.

Scout Two watched the Targets waiting impatiently, standing around the control area foyer as Target Five tapped at the screen. Standing. Even after they had apparently realized that the noise from the sealed control area was a decoy, after their security update made them much less vulnerable to drone attacks, they had stood around and waited. (SecUnits weren’t allowed to sit down, ever, but humans and augmented humans did it every chance they had.)

They hadn’t tried to search for us, they had stayed in the foyer, sending their targetDrones into the surrounding corridors but no further. We were hostiles trapped in an enclosed space with them, moving through it at will as far as they knew. Why weren’t they trying to protect themselves by making their own safe zone? Why hadn’t they at least found a compartment to lock themselves in? Were they relying completely on the targetDrones? Or were they waiting for outside help, because they knew they hadn’t long to wait?

They hadn’t even bothered to sit down.

It’s not like I didn’t already think this situation was really fucking bad, but I was beginning to think it was way fucking worse. Wormhole travel takes multiple cycles. The trip from our survey site back to Preservation had taken four Preservation Standard cycles (which were defined as twenty-eight Preservation Standard hours each) and it was considered a short trip, just to the edge of Preservation territory. There was no way we could be at our destination yet. Or any destination yet.

I tapped Scout One, locked up in ART’s control area, and told it to look again at that display that showed ART’s hull, the wave patterns, and the time countdown.

Scout One zipped back up to that console. The countdown was at two minutes fourteen seconds.

Oh yeah, this … is an issue. I forwarded the input to Amena.