Network Effect

I stopped at the top of the bunkroom corridor and let Amena go on alone. I didn’t want Eletra to see me or to realize I was lurking out here, since I thought that might impede Amena’s ability to get her to talk. Amena reached the hatch and sent Eletra a note on the feed: Hello, I brought you some spare clothes, can I come in?

While Eletra opened the hatch with the feed control and they sorted through the clothes, I checked my inputs for the others: Arada and Overse had stopped in the corridor that went toward the engineering module. Arada hugged Overse, and Overse kissed her and said into her ear, “You can do this, babe. You’re a bulkhead.”

“I’m a wibbly bulkhead,” Arada muttered.

(The wibbliness was why I trusted Arada. Overconfident humans who don’t listen to anybody else scare the hell out of me.)

Arada stepped back and smiled at Overse. “Got to get to work.”

ART had dispatched the medical gurney earlier and it had been moving methodically around the ship picking up messy dead Targets. Now it floated into Medical where Ratthi waited, Thiago following it in. There was a lot of congealing blood and fluids. “Oh, this is not going to be fun,” Ratthi muttered.

“No,” Thiago agreed grimly. “I’ll get the biohazard gear.”

ART added to its action list: Repair and reactivate drones. Collect targetDrones for examination and destruction.

In the bunkroom, Amena was asking, “How are you feeling?”

“Better.” Eletra folded a jacket in her lap. “I know you’re going to ask, but we didn’t know those implant things were in us. I don’t remember that at all.”

Interesting, ART said.

I was still mad, right? But it was interesting. I said, Because you have a gap in your memory archive?

Yes. It can’t be the same cause, of course, but it’s the same operational approach. Take a prisoner, cause a memory disruption.

I hate it when ART is right. It was the same operational approach and we really needed to find out if the Targets had used alien remnant tech to cause the memory disruptions or not. I said, The mix of outdated human technology and alien remnant could mean the stupid Pre–Corporation Rim humans established a colony on an interdicted alien remnant site.

Not necessarily, ART said. Before I could argue, it added, The site might have been undiscovered, not interdicted.

ART had a lot stricter standards about what constituted evidence than humans did. It was always wanting to prove things actually existed before it would make plans for what to do about them. (Yes, it was annoying.)

ART said, It’s possible to theorize that something from the original Pre-CR colony may have remained on the site when the Corporate colonists arrived. But it seems strange that the later colonists would preserve and use outdated tech.

I didn’t want to admit it, but ART wasn’t wrong about that, either. This tech wasn’t useless, but I’d taken targetControlSystem down with an attack that was practically from ancient history. (That’s how I’d known about it, from watching historical dramas.) So the facts we know are: that there was a human site in existence before the corporate colony. And that somebody found alien remnants at some point.

ART created a feed graphic (yes, another one) labeled Perihelion and SecUnit’s Initial Suppositions with an access list that included all the humans except Eletra. The first bullet point was: Fact (1) Corporate colony was established on an early Pre–Corporation Rim human occupation site. Questions: Are alien remnants present? If yes, were they original to the site or introduced later? Was the Pre-CR site established because of the presence of alien remnants? Was the corporate colony established because of the presence of alien remnants?