“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 DROPPINGSHUTDOWN INITIATED
Chapter Five
I CAME BACK ONLINE to find I was inert, but slowly cycling into a wake-up phase. I was agitated, my levels were all off, and I had no idea why. I played back my personal log. Oh, right.
I shouldn’t be waking up. I hoped they hadn’t been stupid about it, too soft-hearted to kill me.
You notice I didn’t point the weapon at my head. I didn’t want to kill myself, but it was going to have to be done. I could have incapacitated myself some other way, but let’s face it, I didn’t want to sit around and listen to the part where they convinced each other that there was no other choice.
A diagnostic initiated and informed me the combat override module had been removed. For a second I didn’t believe it. I opened my security feed and found a camera for Medical. I was lying on the procedure table, my armor gone, just wearing what was left of my suit skin, the humans gathered around. That was a bit of a nightmare image. But my shoulder, hand, and hip had been repaired, so I’d been in my cubicle at some point. I ran the recording back a little and watched Pin-Lee and Overse use the surgical suite to deftly remove the combat module from the back of my head. It was such a relief, I played the recording twice, then ran a diagnostic. My logs were clear; nothing there except what I’d had before entering the DeltFall habitat.
My clients are the best clients.
Then hearing came online.
“I’ve had HubSystem immobilize it,” Gurathin said.
Huh. Well, that explained a lot. I still had control of SecSystem and I told it to freeze HubSystem’s access to its feed and implement my emergency routine. This was a function I’d built in that would substitute an hour or so of ambient habitat noise in place of the visual and audio recordings HubSystem made. To anyone listening to us through HubSystem, or trying to play back the recording, it would just sound like everybody had abruptly stopped talking.
What Gurathin had said had evidently been a surprise, because voices protested, Ratthi, Volescu, and Arada mostly. Pin-Lee was saying impatiently, “There’s no danger. When it shot itself, it froze the download. I was able to remove the few fragments of rogue code that had been copied over.”
Overse began, “Do you want to do your own diagnostic, because—”
I could hear them in the room and on the security feed, so I switched to just visual on the camera. Mensah had held up a hand for quiet. She said, “Gurathin, what’s wrong?”
Gurathin said, “With it offline, I was able to use HubSystem to get some access to its internal system and log. I wanted to explore some anomalies I’d noticed through the feed.” He gestured to me. “This unit was already a rogue. It has a hacked governor module.”
On the entertainment feed, this is what they call an “oh shit” moment.
Through the security cams, I watched them be confused, but not alarmed, not yet.
Pin-Lee, who had apparently just been digging around in my local system, folded her arms. Her expression was sharp and skeptical. “I find that difficult to believe.” She didn’t add “you asshole” but it was in her voice. She didn’t like anybody questioning her expertise.
“It doesn’t have to follow our commands; there is no control over its behavior,” Gurathin said, getting impatient. He didn’t like anybody questioning his expertise either, but he didn’t show it like Pin-Lee did. “I showed Volescu my evaluations and he agrees with me.”
I had a moment to feel betrayed, which was stupid. Volescu was my client, and I’d saved his life because that was my job, not because I liked him. But then Volescu said, “I don’t agree with you.”
“The governor module is working, then?” Mensah asked, frowning at all of them.
“No, it’s definitely hacked,” Volescu explained. When he wasn’t being attacked by giant fauna, he was a pretty calm guy. “The governor’s connection to the rest of the SecUnit’s system is partially severed. It can transmit commands, but can’t enforce them or control behavior or apply punishment. But I think the fact that the Unit has been acting to preserve our lives, to take care of us, while it was a free agent, gives us even more reason to trust it.”
Okay, so I did like him.
Gurathin insisted, “We’ve been sabotaged since we got here. The missing hazard report, the missing map sections. The SecUnit must be part of that. It’s acting for the company, they don’t want this planet surveyed for whatever reason. This is what must have happened to DeltFall.”
Ratthi had been waiting for a moment to lunge in and interrupt. “Something odd is definitely going on. There were only three SecUnits for DeltFall in their specs, but there were five units in their habitat. Someone is sabotaging us, but I don’t think our SecUnit is part of it.”
With finality, Bharadwaj said, “Volescu and Ratthi are right. If the company did order the SecUnit to kill us, we would all be dead.”
Overse sounded mad. “It told us about the combat module, it told us to kill it. Why the hell would it do that if it wanted to hurt us?”
I liked her, too. And even though being part of this conversation was the last thing I wanted to do, it was time to speak for myself.