Network Effect

The humans all paused to read it. Amena, listening to Eletra talk about her family, covered her moment of distraction with a cough. (Eletra’s family was in a hereditary indenture to Barish-Estranza and was trying to build up enough employment credit to get her and her siblings and cousins transferred into management training. I knew Amena well enough by now to recognize she was feigning polite interest to disguise horrified interest.)

My queries on ART’s status data started returning results, and I backburnered everything to check them.

Huh.

ART had said it had one forced shutdown and reinitialize, when its crew disappeared and the Targets showed up. Then a second forced shutdown when the targetControlSystem had deleted it. So when had targetControlSystem been loaded into ART’s systems? Presumably its invasion of ART’s systems had caused that first forced shutdown.

Except there were more gaps than that.

I wished Pin-Lee was here. And, though I hated to admit it, I wished Gurathin was here, too. Both were analysts, and while I was way better at it than they were, at least I could have shown them what I was looking at.

I said, ART, look at this.

I was aware enough of ART to know that it was doing several things at once: helping Arada and Overse collect scans from what was left of the alien remnant on its drive, directing the MedSystem’s pathology unit for Ratthi, working on the translation of the Targets’ language with Thiago, guiding the reinitialization and diagnostics of its damaged propulsion systems, plus monitoring all its other ongoing processes. But I suddenly had 86.3 percent of its attention. (For ART, that was a lot.)

It examined my query results. A human in this situation would have said, “That’s not possible.”

ART said, Intriguing.

I needed to put these in a timeline. I looked for major events like wormhole entrances and exits and navigation changes so I would know what they looked like in the status data. ART pulled generic examples for me and I started another query set.

In the bunkroom, Amena had been cautiously working around to the subject of the colony. With a serious expression, she said slowly, “Look, I know you don’t want to reveal things that your … corporate supervisors or whoever don’t want you to, but we really need to know about this lost colony.”

Eletra bit her lip. “It’s proprietary information.”

For fuck’s sake. On our private feed connection, Amena sent, I’m not sure what she means by this. Somebody owns the information?

Yes, I told her. She’s afraid of her salvage corporation. She needs to be more afraid of being recaptured by the Targets.

Amena said, “I understand that but the Targets—those gray people—they could show up again. Especially because no one knows how they got on this transport in the first place, or what happened to the crew.” She lifted her hands helplessly. “Whatever happened to them could happen to us. And it’s more likely the longer we’re stuck here.”

Eletra put her hand on her own shoulder, as if trying to reach for the place where her implant had been. “I thought the new people were the crew?”

ART butted in with, Tell her they are.

Amena nodded earnestly. “Sure, yes, they are, but we’re—they’re missing the crew members who were here when the Targets took over the ship.”

Eletra’s frown deepened. “Why can’t we leave the system?”

“The normal space engines aren’t working yet. But even if we could get to the wormhole, the transport won’t let us go. You heard it. It’s programmed not to leave without its crew, the rest of the crew. And it’s really mean, and determined.” On the feed, Amena said, Sorry, ART.

Apology accepted, ART said. I felt its attention shift in the feed. (Imagine it staring meaningfully at me.) (It could stare all it wanted, I’m not apologizing.)

Amena added, “And we already know about some things, like the alien remnants around the Pre–Corporation Rim colony.”

Both ART and I shut up (I know, I was surprised, too) and waited to see if that would work.