Network Effect

Then the static cleared and I saw a glimpse of a blue uniform passing out of frame.

Overse said, “What is it, SecUnit?”

I realized I had abruptly stepped back from the station. Overse sounded worried and I knew how she felt about being out of contact with Arada. But I was almost completely focused on the video now and my buffer said, “Please stand by, I need to verify an alert.”

I slowed the video down, running it forward on one input while trying to pull coherent images from the static burst on the other. I cleaned up two images enough to get a recognizable view of four humans in blue clothing resembling ART’s crew uniform. They were blurry and I couldn’t increase the resolution, but one faced away from the drop box corridor. He had skin color in the dark brown range and a mostly hairless head, matching the images I had of one of ART’s crew members. It wasn’t an uncommon configuration for humans (some of the Barish-Estranza crew had it, too) but the chance that it was him was in the 80 percent range.

Then on my other input, the video’s static fuzzed into clarity just as a smaller human sprinted past the foyer. The face was obscured but the color and the logo on the uniform jacket were clear.

They were alive. All this time, I hadn’t believed it.

I’d been humoring ART, not really admitting it to myself. Not wanting to think about how I was going to handle it when we found evidence its crew was dead, or if we found nothing at all and it faced the choice of staying in this system forever looking for them, or returning to its base alone. But they were alive. Or at least five of them were and five were better than none. And from the desperate running, they were escaping.

I just hoped they’d made it out.

(Overse had folded her arms, which was awkward in the enviro suit, so she unfolded them. Thiago asked her, “Why did it sound like that?”

“That how it sounds when it uses a canned response, from the time it was working for—enslaved by—the company. It means it’s too busy to talk.” She added, “It never means anything good.”)

I said, “It might be good,” and sent them both the images. “We need to check the drop box.”

The drop box log file Overse had found confirmed that the main box had made two recent trips to the surface and back: one when the explorer had first arrived and the contact party had been taken over by the Targets, and then a second trip later, and if we were converting the time stamps right, that second trip had taken place around one hundred and thirty-five hours after ART had been attacked. We weren’t far behind them.

“The second time it returned automatically—it was only on the surface for about fifteen minutes,” Overse said. “I think whoever took it down didn’t have the right command code to keep it on the surface.”

“The maintenance capsule would have been easier to operate, surely,” Thiago said, looking up at the drop box’s hatch.

The foyer was huge, easily large enough for cargo modules, one wall the enormous sealed hatch over the box’s loading deck. The whole space was an airlock; when the box was ready to start its trip down the shaft, the hatch on the corridor behind us would close to protect the interior from a blow-out if anything went wrong with the undocking.

The schematic I’d pulled from the SecSystem showed the box had passenger space for eighty-two humans on top of racks for cargo, and it looked like the passenger loading area was inside the box itself. I had one camera view from DockSecSystem at the front of the box, above the main lock, looking into the passenger space where there were rows of acceleration chairs.

Overse told Thiago, “They didn’t know the maintenance capsule was here. I can’t even see the entrance and I know where it is.”

I could see it, a narrow gantry along the wall, leading to a small human-sized hatch, but I had dark vision filters in my eyes.

“You’re right,” Thiago said. “And you know, if it’s been up in the dock the whole time, the Targets might not realize it’s here, either.”

Hah, Thiago called them Targets.

The rudimentary launch system chimed and sent a graphic into the feed showing the pressure and life support level inside the drop box was now normal and the hatch was ready to open. “Get clear,” I told the humans and they headed for the doorway at the back of the chamber. Once they were there I told the launch system to open the box. The giant hatch started to slide up, the burp of released air not making it past the extra safety of the air barrier, another precaution against potential blowout. Wow, this thing was slow. And it had taken seven minutes to get the box ready to open. ART’s crew had either been able to hold the Targets off while they waited for the box to get ready for launch, or the box had already been pressurized and waiting to go. Which implied they had help from someone.

Or the Targets had caught them and killed them and they were all lying dead just inside the box where the camera view didn’t reach, but I really hoped not.