Network Effect

That … wasn’t a bad idea. I exited the platform and went back up through the gravity well, telling Scout One to do a sweep of any active display surfaces. As its input filled with images, I pulled my archived video of its previous survey and ran a comparison. I was able to isolate five displays with significant changes. I enlarged them and set the images up in our feed so we could page through them. This one, Amena said immediately, this is local navigation. There’s info on the star … it doesn’t say if we’re close to the station … or if there’s a station at all …

I reached the monitoring area with its poor dead repair drone. I could see the display Amena was interpreting, but I’d found another diagram of ART on a new display. An indicator showed something attached to the outside of ART’s hull, on its lab module. Looking at the specifications … For fuck’s sake, it couldn’t be.

I’d shut off our comm because I didn’t want the Targets using it to track us, plus it wasn’t like anybody could contact us while we were in the wormhole. I reactivated it and checked the channel our survey had used. It was active.

Yeah, this was happening. I pinged the channel and got an immediate response, and transferred it to our feed relay. Amena clapped a hand to her head in shock. “What—”

A familiar voice said, SecUnit, Amena, can you hear me?

It was Arada. Amena gasped, Oh, we’re here, we’re here! Where are you?

Arada said, We’re in the facility’s safepod, attached to the hull of the raider ship. You’re onboard, correct? We saw you pulled toward the airlock.

Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. They were supposed to be safe on the baseship, arriving at Preservation Station by now. I said, Who’s we?

SecUnit! Arada said, clearly happy to hear from me. Oh, Overse is here, and Thiago and Ratthi. We weren’t able to reach the baseship after jettison and were dragged into the wormhole with the attacker.

Should we try to get to you? Amena asked. She hopped off Eletra’s gurney and bounced on her toes. We’ve got an injured person with us.

Arada said hastily, No, no, the pod’s too damaged. We didn’t expect— Someone in the background, probably Overse, yelled something urgent, but it was muffled and I’d have to analyze the audio to understand it. Arada changed whatever she was about to say to, What’s your situation there?

Oh, there was a lot Arada wasn’t telling us. But I was estimating a 70 percent chance that if we hadn’t exited the wormhole so absurdly early, Arada and the others wouldn’t have survived much longer.

So now I had four more humans to worry about. Fantastic.

Amena was giving Arada a rapid but somewhat garbled report on all the fun we’d been having, and warning her about the Targets.

(The Targets couldn’t be alien, could they? No, that wasn’t possible. Aliens couldn’t look that much like humans.)

(Could they?)

I sent Arada a schematic of the outside of ART’s hull with the airlock in our safe zone highlighted. Arada, can you get to this lock?

There was a pause which told me that their situation was even worse than Arada was implying. I estimated the hesitation was just long enough for her to check the air reserves in the EVAC suits they were probably already wearing due to damage to the pod. Then Arada said firmly, Yes, we can make that. ETA, say, three minutes.

I’ll meet you there, I told her, and started out of the engineering monitoring area. I should have at least two point five spare minutes, so I went ahead with the hack of targetControlSystem.

The thing that had protected it so far was the fact that it didn’t interact with the feed or with interfaces the way every other system I’d ever encountered had. But Target Five had accessed targetControlSystem and been responded to, so that told me what channel to concentrate on and what kind of transmissions it would accept. And it also told me I was going to need to go old school to break this fucker.

I tossed together a code bundle that duplicated the signal sent by the Targets’ screen device, copied it a hundred times, made it self-replicating so all my copies were copying themselves, then sent the whole thing to targetControlSystem.