All Systems Red

Chapter Four

WE FLEW THROUGH THE NIGHT, the humans taking scans and discussing the new terrain past our assessment range. It was especially interesting for them to see what was there, now that we knew our map wasn’t exactly reliable.

Mensah gave everybody watch shifts, including me. This was new, but not unwelcome, as it meant I had blocks of time where I wasn’t supposed to be paying attention and didn’t have to fake it. Mensah, Pin-Lee, and Overse were all taking turns as pilot and copilot, so I didn’t have to worry so much about the autopilot trying to kill us, and I could go on standby and watch my stored supply of serials.

We’d been in the air awhile, and Mensah was piloting with Pin-Lee in the copilot’s seat, when Ratthi turned in his seat to face me and said, “We heard—we were given to understand, that Imitative Human Bot Units are . . . partially constructed from cloned material.”

Warily, I stopped the show I was watching. I didn’t like where this might go. All of that information is in the common knowledge database, plus in the brochure the company provides with the specifics of the types of units they use. Which he knew, being a scientist and whatever. And he wasn’t the kind of human who asked about things when he could look them up himself through a feed. “That’s true,” I said, very careful to make my voice sound just as neutral as always.

Ratthi’s expression was troubled. “But surely . . . It’s clear you have feelings—”

I flinched. I couldn’t help it.

Overse had been working in the feed, analyzing data from the assessments. She looked up, frowning. “Ratthi, what are you doing?”

Ratthi shifted guiltily. “I know Mensah asked us not to, but—” He waved a hand. “You saw it.”

Overse pulled her interface off. “You’re upsetting it,” she said, teeth gritted.

“That’s my point!” He gestured in frustration. “The practice is disgusting, it’s horrible, it’s slavery. This is no more a machine than Gurathin is—”

Exasperated, Overse said, “And you don’t think it knows that?”

I’m supposed to let the clients do and say whatever they want to me and with an intact governor module I wouldn’t have a choice. I’m also not supposed to snitch on clients to anybody except the company, but it was either that or jump out the hatch. I sent the conversation into the feed tagged for Mensah.

From the cockpit, she shouted, “Ratthi! We talked about this!”

I slid out of the seat and went to the back of the hopper, as far away as I could get, facing the supply lockers and the head. It was a mistake; it wasn’t a normal thing for a SecUnit with an intact governor module to do, but they didn’t notice.

“I’ll apologize,” Ratthi was saying.

“No, just leave it alone,” Mensah told him.

“That would just make it worse,” Overse added.

I stood there until they all calmed down and got quiet again, then slid into a seat in the back, and resumed the serial I’d been watching.

It was the middle of the night when I felt the feed drop out.

I hadn’t been using it, but I had the SecSystem feeds from the drones and the interior cameras backburnered and was accessing them occasionally to make sure everything was okay. The humans left behind in the habitat were more active than they usually were at this time, probably anxious about what we were going to find at DeltFall. I was hearing Arada walk around occasionally, though Volescu was snoring off and on in his bunk. Bharadwaj had been able to move back to her own quarters, but was restless and going over her field notes through the feed. Gurathin was in the hub doing something on his personal system. I wondered what he was doing and had just started to carefully poke around through HubSystem to find out. When the feed dropped it was like someone slapped the organic part of my brain.

I sat up and said, “The satellite went down.”

The others, except for Pin-Lee who was piloting, all grabbed for their interfaces. I saw their expressions when they felt the silence. Mensah pushed out of her seat and came to the back. “Are you sure it was the satellite?”

“I’m sure,” I told her. “I’m pinging it and there’s no response.”

We still had our local feed, running on the hopper’s system, so we could communicate through it as well as the comm and share data with each other. We just didn’t have nearly as much data as we’d have had if we were still attached to HubSystem. We were far enough away that we needed the comm satellite as a relay. Ratthi switched his interface to the hopper’s feed and started checking the scans. There was nothing on them except empty sky; I had them backburnered but I’d set them to notify me if they encountered anything like an energy reading or a large life sign. He said, “I just felt a chill. Did anyone else feel a chill?”

“A little,” Overse admitted. “It’s a weird coincidence, isn’t it?”

“The damn satellite’s had periodic outages since we got here,” Pin-Lee pointed out from the cockpit. “We just don’t normally need it for comms.” She was right. I was supposed to check their personal logs periodically in case they were plotting to defraud the company or murder each other or something, and the last time I’d looked at Pin-Lee’s she had been tracking the satellite problems, trying to figure out if there was a pattern. It was one of the many things I didn’t care about because the entertainment feed was only updated occasionally, and I downloaded it for local storage.

Ratthi shook his head. “But this is the first time we’ve been far enough from the habitat to need it for comm contact. It just seems odd, and not in a good way.”

Mensah looked around at them. “Does anyone want to turn back?”

I did, but I didn’t get a vote. The others sat there for a quiet moment, then Overse said, “If it turns out the DeltFall group did need help, and we didn’t go, how would we feel?”

“If there’s a chance we can save lives, we have to take it,” Pin-Lee agreed.

Ratthi sighed. “No, you’re right. I’d feel terrible if anyone died because we were overcautious.”

“We’re agreed, then,” Mensah said. “We’ll keep going.”

I would have preferred they be overcautious. I had had contracts before where the company’s equipment glitched this badly, but there was just something about this that made me think it was more. But all I had was the feeling.

I had four hours to my next scheduled watch so I went into standby, and buried myself in the downloads I’d stored away.

It was dawn when we got there. DeltFall had established their camp in a wide valley surrounded by high mountains. A spiderweb of creek beds cut through the grass and stubby trees. They were a bigger operation than ours, with three linked habitats, and a shelter for surface vehicles, plus a landing area for two large hoppers, a cargo hauler, and three small hoppers. It was all company equipment though, per contract, and all subject to the same malfunctions as the crap they’d dumped on us.

There was no one outside, no movement. No sign of damage, no sign any hostile fauna had approached. The satellite was still dead, but Mensah had been trying to get the DeltFall habitat on the comm since we had come within range.

“Are they missing any transports?” Mensah asked.

Ratthi checked the record of what they were supposed to have which I’d copied from HubSystem before we left. “No, the hoppers are all there. Their ground vehicles are in that shelter, I think.”

I had moved up to the front as we got closer. Standing behind the pilot’s seat, I said, “Dr. Mensah, I recommend you land outside their perimeter.” Through the local feed I sent her all the info I had, which was that their automated systems were responding to the pings the hopper was sending, but that was it. We weren’t picking up their feed, which meant their HubSystem was in standby. There was nothing from their three SecUnits, not even pings.

Overse, in the copilot’s seat, glanced up at me. “Why?”

I had to answer the question so I said, “Security protocol,” which sounded good and didn’t commit me to anything. No one outside, no one answering the comm. Unless they had all jumped in their surface vehicles and gone off on vacation, leaving their Hub and SecUnits shut down, they were dead. Pessimism confirmed.

But we couldn’t be sure without looking. The hopper’s scanners can’t see inside the habitats because of the shielding that’s really only there to protect proprietary data, so we couldn’t get any life signs or energy readings.

This is why I didn’t want to come. I’ve got four perfectly good humans here and I didn’t want them to get killed by whatever took out DeltFall. It’s not like I cared about them personally, but it would look bad on my record, and my record was already pretty terrible.

“We’re just being cautious,” Mensah said, answering Overse. She took the hopper down at the edge of the valley, on the far side of the streams.

I gave Mensah a few hints through the feed, that they should break out the handweapons in the survival gear, that Ratthi should stay behind inside the hopper with the hatch sealed and locked since he’d never done the weapon-training course, and that, most important, I should go first. They were quiet, subdued. Up until now, I think they had all been looking at this as probably a natural disaster, that they were going to be digging survivors out of a collapsed habitat, or helping fight off a herd of Hostile Ones.

This was something else.

Mensah gave the orders and we started forward, me in front, the humans a few steps behind. They were in their full suits with helmets, which gave some protection but had been meant for environmental hazards, not some other heavily armed human (or angry malfunctioning rogue SecUnit) deliberately trying to kill them. I was more nervous than Ratthi, who was jittery on our comms, monitoring the scans, and basically telling us to be careful every other step.

I had my built-in energy weapons and the big projectile weapon I was cradling. I also had six drones, pulled from the hopper’s supply and under my control through its feed. They were the small kind, barely a centimeter across; no weapons, just cameras. (They make some which aren’t much bigger and have a small pulse weapon, but you have to get one of the upper-tier company packages mostly designed for much larger contracts.) I told the drones to get in the air and gave them a scouting pattern.

I did that because it seemed sensible, not because I knew what I was doing. I am not a combat murderbot, I’m Security. I keep things from attacking the clients and try to gently discourage the clients from attacking each other. I was way out of my depth here, which was another reason I hadn’t wanted the humans to come here.

We crossed the shallow streams, sending a group of water invertebrates scattering away from our boots. The trees were short and sparse enough that I had a good view of the camp from this angle. I couldn’t detect any DeltFall security drones, by eye or with the scanners on my drones. Ratthi in the hopper wasn’t picking up anything either. I really, really wished I could pinpoint the location of those three SecUnits, but I wasn’t getting anything from them.

SecUnits aren’t sentimental about each other. We aren’t friends, the way the characters on the serials are, or the way my humans were. We can’t trust each other, even if we work together. Even if you don’t have clients who decide to entertain themselves by ordering their SecUnits to fight each other.

The scans read the perimeter sensors as dead and the drones weren’t picking up any warning indicators. The DeltFall HubSystem was down, and without it, no one inside could access our feed or comms, theoretically. We crossed over and into the landing area for their hoppers. They were between us and the first habitat, the vehicle storage to one side. I was leading us in at an angle, trying to get a visual on the main habitat door, but I was also checking the ground. It was mostly bare of grass from all the foot traffic and hopper landings. From the weather report we’d gotten before the satellite quit, it had rained here last night, and the mud had hardened. No activity since then.

I passed that info to Mensah through the feed and she told the others. Keeping her voice low, Pin-Lee said, “So whatever happened, it wasn’t long after we spoke to them on the comm.”

“They couldn’t have been attacked by someone,” Overse whispered. There was no reason to whisper, but I understood the impulse. “There’s no one else on this planet.”

“There’s not supposed to be anyone else on this planet,” Ratthi said, darkly, over the comm from our hopper.

There were three SecUnits who were not me on this planet, and that was dangerous enough. I got my visual on the main habitat hatch and saw it was shut, no sign of anything forcing its way inside. The drones had circled the whole structure by now, and showed me the other entrances were the same. That was that. Hostile Fauna don’t come to the door and ask to be let inside. I sent the images to Mensah’s feed and said aloud, “Dr. Mensah, it would be better if I went ahead.”

She hesitated, reviewing what I’d just sent her. I saw her shoulders tense. I think she had just come to the same conclusion I had. Or at least admitted to herself that it was the strongest possibility. She said, “All right. We’ll wait here. Make sure we can monitor.”

She’d said “we” and she wouldn’t have said that if she didn’t mean it, unlike some clients I’d had. I sent my field camera’s feed to all four of them and started forward.

I called four of the drones back, leaving two to keep circling the perimeter. I checked the vehicle shed as I moved past it. It was open on one side, with some sealed lockers in the back for storage. All four of their surface vehicles were there, powered down, no sign of recent tracks, so I didn’t go in. I wouldn’t bother searching the small storage spaces until we got down to the looking-for-all-the-body-parts phase.

I walked up to the hatch of the first habitat. We didn’t have an entry code, so I was expecting to have to blow the door, but when I tapped the button it slid open for me. I told Mensah through the feed that I wouldn’t speak aloud on the comm anymore.

She tapped back an acknowledgment on the feed, and I heard her telling the others to get off my feed and my comm, that she was going to be the only one speaking to me so I wasn’t distracted. Mensah underestimated my ability to ignore humans but I appreciated the thought. Ratthi whispered, “Be careful,” and signed off.

I had the weapon up going in, through the suit locker area and into the first corridor. “No suits missing,” Mensah said in my ear, watching the field camera. I sent my four drones ahead, maintaining an interior scouting pattern. This was a nicer habitat than ours, wider halls, newer. Also empty, silent, the smell of decaying flesh drifting through my helmet filters. I headed toward the hub, where their main crew area should be.

The lights were still on and air whispered through the vents, but I couldn’t get into their SecSystem with their feed down. I missed my cameras.

At the door to the hub, I found their first SecUnit. It was sprawled on its back on the floor, the armor over its chest pierced by something that made a hole approximately ten centimeters wide and a little deeper. We’re hard to kill, but that’ll do it. I did a brief scan to make sure it was inert, then stepped over it and went through into the crew area.

There were eleven messily dead humans in the hub, sprawled on the floor, in chairs, the monitoring stations and projection surfaces behind them showing impact damage from projectile and energy weapon fire. I tapped the feed and asked Mensah to fall back to the hopper. She acknowledged me and I got confirmation from my outside drones that the humans were retreating.

I went out the opposite door to a corridor that led toward the mess hall, Medical, and cabins. The drones were telling me the layout was very similar to our habitat, except for the occasional dead person sprawled in the corridors. The weapon that had taken out the dead SecUnit wasn’t in the hub, and it had died with its back to the door. The DeltFall humans had had some warning, enough to start getting up and heading for the other exits, but something else had come in from this direction and trapped them. I thought that SecUnit had been killed trying to protect the hub.

Which meant I was looking for the other two SecUnits.

Maybe these clients had been terrible and abusive, maybe they had deserved it. I didn’t care. Nobody was touching my humans. To make sure of that I had to kill these two rogue Units. I could have pulled out at this point, sabotaged the hoppers, and got my humans out of there, leaving the rogue Units stuck on the other side of an ocean; that would have been the smart thing to do.

But I wanted to kill them.

One of my drones found two humans dead in the mess, no warning. They had been taking food pacs out of the heating cubby, getting the tables ready for a meal.

While I moved through the corridors and rooms, I was doing an image search against the hopper’s equipment database. The dead unit had probably been killed by a mineral survey tool, like a pressure or sonic drill. We had one on the hopper, part of the standard equipment. You would have to get close to use it with enough force to pierce armor, maybe a little more than a meter.

Because you can’t walk up to another murderbot with an armor-piercing projectile or energy weapon inside the habitat and not be looked at with suspicion. You can walk up to a fellow murderbot with a tool that a human might have asked you to get.

By the time I reached the other side of the structure, the drones had cleared the first habitat. I stood in the hatchway at the top of the narrow corridor that led into the second. A human lay at the opposite end, half in and half out of the open hatch. To get into the next habitat, I’d have to step over her to push the door all the way open. I could tell already that something was wrong about the body position. I used the magnification on the field camera to get a closer view of the skin on the outstretched arm. The lividity was wrong; she had been shot in the chest or face and lay on her back for some time, then had been moved here recently. Probably as soon as they picked up our hopper on the way here.

On the feed I told Mensah what I needed her to do. She didn’t ask questions. She’d been watching my field camera, and she knew by now what we were dealing with. She tapped back to acknowledge me, then said aloud on the comm, “SecUnit, I want you to hold your position until I get there.”

I said, “Yes, Dr. Mensah,” and eased back out of the hatch. I moved fast, back to the security ready room.

It was nice having a human smart enough to work with like this.

Our model of habitat didn’t have it but on these bigger ones there’s a roof access and my outside drones had a good view of it.

I climbed the ladder up to the roof hatch and popped it. The armor’s boots have magnetized climbing clamps, and I used them to cross over the curving roofs to the third habitat and then around to the second, coming up on them from behind. Even these two rogues wouldn’t be dumb enough to ignore the creaks if I took the quick route and walked over to their position.

(They were not the sharpest murderbots, having cleaned the floor of the between-habitat corridor to cover the prints they had left when staging that body. It would have fooled somebody who hadn’t noticed all the other floors were covered with tracked-in dust.)

I opened the roof access for the second habitat and sent my drones ahead down into the Security ready room. Once they checked the unit cubicles and made sure nobody was home, I dropped down the ladder. A lot of their equipment was still there, including their drones. There was a nice box of new ones, but they were useless without the DeltFall HubSystem. Either it was really dead or doing a good imitation of it. I still kept part of my attention on it; if it came up suddenly and reactivated the security cameras, the rules of the game would change abruptly.

Keeping my drones with me, I took the inner corridor and moved silently past Medical’s blasted hatch. Three bodies were piled inside where the humans had tried to secure it and been trapped when their own SecUnits blew it open to slaughter them.

When I was close to the corridor with the hatch where both units were waiting for me and Dr. Mensah to come wandering in, I sent the drones around for a careful look. Oh yeah, there they were.

With no weapons on my drones, the only way to do this was to move fast. So I threw myself around the last corner, hit the opposite wall, crossed back and kept going, firing at their positions.

I hit the first one with three explosive bolts in the back and one in the faceplate as it turned toward me. It dropped. The other one I nicked in the arm, taking out the joint, and it made the mistake of switching its main weapon to its other hand, which gave me a couple of seconds. I switched to rapid fire to keep it off balance, then back to the explosive bolt. That dropped it.

I hit the floor, needing a minute to recover.

I had taken at least a dozen hits from both of their energy weapons while I was taking out the first one, but the explosive bolts had missed me, going past to tear up the corridor. Even with the armor, bits of me were going numb, but I had only taken three projectiles to the right shoulder, four to the left hip. This is how we fight: throw ourselves at each other and see whose parts give out first.

Neither unit was dead. But they were incapable of reaching their cubicles in the ready room, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to give them a hand.

Three of my drones were down, too; they had gone into combat mode and slammed in ahead of me to draw fire. One had gotten hit by a stray energy burst and was wandering around in the corridor behind me. I checked my two perimeter drones by habit, and opened my comm to Dr. Mensah to tell her I still needed to clear the rest of the habitat and do the formal check for survivors.

The drone behind me went out with a fizzle that I heard and saw on the feed. I think I realized immediately what that meant but there may have been a half second or so of delay. But I was on my feet when something hit me so hard I was suddenly on my back on the floor, systems failing.

I came back online to no vision, no hearing, no ability to move. I couldn’t reach the feed or the comm. Not good, Murderbot, not good.

I suddenly got some weird flashes of sensation, all from my organic parts. Air on my face, my arms, through rips in my suit. On the burning wound in my shoulder. Someone had taken off my helmet and the upper part of my armor. The sensations were only for seconds at a time. It was confusing and I wanted to scream. Maybe this was how murderbots died. You lose function, go offline, but parts of you keep working, organic pieces kept alive by the fading energy in your power cells.

Then I knew someone was moving me, and I really wanted to scream.

I fought back panic, and got a few more flashes of sensation. I wasn’t dead. I was in a lot of trouble.

I waited to get some kind of function back, frantic, disoriented, terrified, wondering why they hadn’t blown a hole in my chest. Sound came first, and I knew something leaned over me. Faint noises from the joints told me it was a SecUnit. But there’d only been three. I’d checked the DeltFall specs before we left. I do a half-assed job sometimes, okay, most of the time, but Pin-Lee had checked, too, and she was thorough.

Then my organic parts started to sting, the numbness wearing off. I was designed to work with both organic and machine parts, to balance that sensory input. Without the balance, I felt like a balloon floating in mid-air. But the organic part of my chest was in contact with a hard surface, and that abruptly brought my position into focus. I was lying face down, one arm dangling. They’d put me on a table?

This was definitely not good.

Pressure on my back, then on my head. The rest of me was coming back but slowly, slowly. I felt for the feed but couldn’t reach it. Then something stabbed me in the back of the neck.

That’s organic material and with the rest of me down there was nothing to control input from my nervous system. It felt like they were sawing my head off.

A shock went through me and suddenly the rest of me was back online. I popped the joint on my left arm so I could move it in a way not usually compatible with a human, augmented human, or murderbot body. I reached up to the pressure and pain on my neck, and grabbed an armored wrist. I twisted my whole body and took us both off the table.

We hit the floor and I clamped my legs around the other SecUnit as we rolled. It tried to trigger the weapons built into its forearm but my reaction speed was off the chart and I clamped a hand over the port so it couldn’t open fully. My vision was back and I could see its opaqued helmet inches away. My armor had been removed down to my waist, and that just made me more angry.

I shoved its hand up under its chin and took the pressure off its weapon. It had a split second to try to abort that fire command and it failed. The energy burst went through my hand and the join between its helmet and neck piece. Its head jerked and its body started to spasm. I let go of it long enough to kneel up, get my intact arm around its neck, and twist.

I let go as I felt the connections, mechanical and organic, snap.

I looked up and another SecUnit was in the doorway, lifting a large projectile weapon.

How many of these damn things were here? It didn’t matter, because I tried to shove myself upright but I couldn’t react fast enough. Then it jerked, dropped the weapon, and fell forward. I saw two things: the ten-centimeter hole in its back and Mensah standing behind it, holding something that looked a lot like the sonic mining drill from our hopper.

“Dr. Mensah,” I said, “this is a violation of security priority and I am contractually obligated to record this for report to the company—” It was in the buffer and the rest of my brain was empty.

She ignored me, talking to Pin-Lee on the comm, and strode forward to grab my arm and pull. I was too heavy for her so I shoved upright so she wouldn’t hurt herself. It was starting to occur to me that Dr. Mensah might actually be an intrepid galactic explorer, even if she didn’t look like the ones on the entertainment feed.

She kept pulling on me so I kept moving. Something was wrong with one of my hip joints. Oh, right, I got shot there. Blood ran down my torn suit skin and I reached up to my neck. I expected to feel a gaping hole, but there was something stuck there. “Dr. Mensah, there might be more rogue units, we don’t know—”

“That’s why we need to hurry,” she said, dragging me along. She had brought the last two drones with her from outside, but they were uselessly circling her head. Humans don’t have enough access to the feed to control them and do other things, like walk and talk. I tried to reach them but I still couldn’t get a clear link to the hopper’s feed.

We turned into another corridor and Overse waited in the outer hatch. She hit the open panel as soon as she saw us. She had her handweapon out and I had time to notice that Mensah had my weapon under her other arm. “Dr. Mensah, I need my weapon.”

“You’re missing a hand and part of your shoulder,” she snapped. Overse grabbed a handful of my suit skin and helped pull me out of the hatch. Dust swirled in the air as the hopper set down two meters away, barely clearing the habitat’s extendable roof.

“Yeah, I know, but—” The hatch opened and Ratthi ducked out, grabbed the collar of my suit skin, and pulled all three of us up into the cabin.

I collapsed on the deck as we lifted off. I needed to do something about the hip joint. I tried to check the scan to make sure nobody was on the ground shooting at us but even here my connection to the hopper’s system was twitchy, glitching so much I couldn’t see any reports from the instrumentation, like something was blocking the . . .

Uh-oh.

I felt the back of my neck again. The larger part of the obstruction was gone, but I could feel something in the port now. My data port.

The DeltFall SecUnits hadn’t been rogues, they had been inserted with combat override modules. The modules allow personal control over a SecUnit, turn it from a mostly autonomous construct into a gun puppet. The feed would be cut off, control would be over the comm, but functionality would depend on how complex the orders were. “Kill the humans” isn’t a complex order.

Mensah stood over me, Ratthi leaned across a seat to look out toward the DeltFall camp, Overse popped open one of the storage lockers. They were talking, but I couldn’t catch it. I sat up and said, “Mensah, you need to shut me down now.”

“What?” She looked down at me. “We’re getting—emergency repair—”

Sound was breaking up. It was the download flooding my system, and my organic parts weren’t used to processing that much information. “The unknown SecUnit inserted a data carrier, a combat-override module. It’s downloading instructions into me and will override my system. This is why the two DeltFall units turned rogue. You have to stop me.” I don’t know why I was dancing around the word. Maybe because I thought she didn’t want to hear it. She’d just shot a heavily armed SecUnit with a mining drill to get me back; presumably she wanted to keep me. “You have to kill me.”

It took forever for them to realize what I’d said, put it together with what they must have seen on my field camera feed, but my ability to measure time was glitching, too.

“No,” Ratthi said, looking down at me, horrified. “No, we can’t—”

Mensah said, “We won’t. Pin-Lee—”

Overse dropped the repair kit and climbed over two rows of seats, yelling for Pin-Lee. I knew she was going to the cockpit to take the controls so Pin-Lee could work on me. I knew she wouldn’t have time to fix me. I knew I could kill everyone on the hopper, even with a blown hip joint and one working arm.

So I grabbed the handweapon lying on the seat, turned it toward my chest, and pulled the trigger.

PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY AT 10% AND DROPPING SHUTDOWN INITIATED