Network Effect

That’s why humans and augmented humans are so cautious around alien remnants that even corporations mostly try to be careful. Strange synthetics are usually harmless, emphasis on the “usually.” But organic elements can be really dangerous, where “really” means everyone dies horribly and nobody can ever go to the planet again.

Thiago’s mouth tightened. “If any of these people had been left alive, perhaps we could have asked them.”

I thought that was a shot at me, but ART apparently didn’t take it well. It said, If you’ll put that one on the medical platform, I can cut it open and see.

I was unimpressed, having heard ART’s “villain of a long-running mythic adventure serial” voice before, but all the humans got quiet. Amena shifted uncertainly and looked at me. Then Ratthi whispered, “Was that a subtle threat?”

I said, “No. It wasn’t subtle.”

Amena hugged herself, then said, “How did the gray people steal your crew?”

ART said, There was a catastrophic event when my crew and I first entered this system. My memory archive was disrupted and I’m still attempting to reconstruct it.

Oh, fantastic. I said, “Is your comm shut down?”

It was not an attack launched via the comm, because I’m not an idiot.

“And I’m not the one who got taken down by a viral malware attack, so maybe you are an idiot,” I said. Yeah, I was all over the place with that one.

ART said, It was not a viral malware attack, it was an unidentified event.

“That’s fucking reassuring.”

“Hey, hey!” Amena waved an arm, snapping her fingers. “Please don’t stop telling us what happened! So your crew were taken prisoner by these gray people, correct? And are the gray people from the lost colony that Eletra’s ship was looking for?”

Everybody turned to look at Eletra, who stared blearily back.

ART said, Those are logical assumptions, though I have no direct evidence to support them. I know that we arrived in this system in response to a distress call from a corporate reclamation expedition. At some point, I experienced a catastrophic system malfunction that caused me to reinitialize. After the reinitialization, I found the intruders aboard. They said they were holding my crew hostage, and demanded weapons. I offered a weapon.

Everybody looked at me again.

Arada did the lip-biting thing. “You brought them to SecUnit. Because you knew SecUnit would be able to handle the situation.”

I did.

“The attack on our baseship could have killed all of us,” Thiago said, some heat creeping into his voice.

No shit, Thiago, you think?

Ratthi hissed under his breath, but before he could tell Thiago to shut up, ART said, That was a chance I was willing to take.

Oh, okay. I was either having a processing error, or something that the shows I watch call a “rage blackout,” or another emotional collapse. So I pushed off the med platform, walked out of the sterile field and into the restroom, and slammed my hand on the hatch close control.

Chapter 9

After twenty-seven minutes and twelve seconds, Ratthi tapped on the hatch and sent me the feed message: Can I come in and talk to you?

I sent back, Do you have my jacket?

There was a pause. I was keyword-monitoring my inputs, the way I used to back when I was rented out on contracts, to make sure no one was screaming for help. But with ART back online, it was unlikely. Unless ART had decided to murder everybody in which case shit was going to get real. But that was also unlikely, because ART kept trying to contact me and I doubted it was planning a mass murder while also composing messages about how I was ungrateful and also wrong and being a sulky dumbass (not in those exact words but that’s what it meant) and why wouldn’t I fucking talk to it and you get the idea. Then Ratthi said, I’ve got it.

He meant the jacket. Then you can come in.

There was another pause. Then Ratthi asked, Can Amena come in, too?