Network Effect

I’ve been hit by projectile and energy weapons a lot more times than I can remember (literally, because of the memory wipes) and it’s not that it doesn’t hurt. But I had tuned down my pain sensors earlier, so it was a surprise when I rolled over and saw the big smear of blood and fluid on the deck.

I could only last so long like this. I needed to move faster.

But at least this solved the problem of how I was going to get the hatch open. Target Four ran toward me because assholes love to see your face when they kill you. He stopped what he thought was far enough away and fired, but I rolled onto my side so the blast hit the deck next to me. I shoved with my feet, used my hip as a pivot, and spun myself around so I could grab his ankle. He shrieked and fell backward, and I climbed up him and snapped his neck.

Targets Five and Six were almost here and I only had three drones left in the corridor. As I shoved to my feet and took Four’s energy weapon, I ordered my surviving drones to run interference for me and take hits if they could. Between the stealth material helmets and the protective suits, the drones didn’t have much chance of kill strikes, but hopefully they’d provide a distraction.

Hefting the big square weapon was hard and I knew I’d lost a lot of muscle and underlying support structure in my back. With my free hand, I popped the panel beside the control area hatch and then fired a short burst at the mechanism inside. The blast of heat convinced the sensors that the ship was experiencing an emergency condition (the sensors weren’t wrong about that) and it reactivated the manual controls. I hit the manual release and the hatch slid open.

I stepped through and hit the close and seal sequence. One of my drones managed a shoulder hit on Target Five but the other contacts disappeared.

As the hatch slid closed, I knew I didn’t have long. I’d had no time to replace the outside hatch panel and while I had some strong evidence to suggest that what the Targets lacked in personality they also lacked in brains, they were sure to try shooting at the controls and sooner or later it would work.

I’d cut Amena’s visual access to my feed, but her drones told me that Arada and Thiago ran after her through the corridors, headed here. (Yeah, I probably should have cut Amena’s input before this. But I’d wanted her to know what my status was if I couldn’t respond.) Scout Two was still in the foyer on sentry so I sent its video to Amena’s feed, so she’d be able to see where the Targets were. I saw her slide to a stop and clutch her head, trying to focus on the new input. I was already stepping past the messily dead Targets One and Three and climbing the stairs to the upper control area and I didn’t have time to help her.

Scout One was there, still monitoring displays. It greeted me with a ping as I set the energy weapon down in the nearest station chair. I needed an interface with the ship’s data storage.

The bond company that used to own me made a lot of its gigantic piles of currency by datamining its customers. That’s recording everything everyone says and then going through it for information that could be sold. Part of my job had been to help record and parse and protect that information until it could be transferred back to the company, and if I didn’t do it in a timely manner indicating complete obedience I got punished by my governor module. (Which was like being shot by a high-grade energy weapon, only from the inside out.)

The raw audio and feed streams make for huge data files, and they had to be moved around a lot and often got saved to unused storage areas on other systems. (This is also a way to destroy data. If you don’t completely hate your clients or you’re feeling particularly disgusted at the company at any one particular moment or you’ve hacked your governor module and need to cover your tracks, you can move data into the buffer of the SecSystem right before it’s due for an update. The files are overwritten and it looks like an accident.)

But my point is, ART was a big transport with a lot of interactive processes and systems working in concert, which meant there were a lot of storage spaces that would not be obvious to human intruders. Or to hostile operating systems like targetControlSystem that seemed unable to use most of the architecture. Storage spaces where you could save a compressed backup copy of a kernel. Possibly your own kernel, if you were an advanced sentient control system who was very smart and very sneaky.