Chapter Text
It is 22:47:11 by Corporation Rim standard time. Initial security alert was triggered at 21:06:57. Following standard preservation-of-life protocols, I have evacuated the greatest possible number of clients to a shuttle and activated the autopilot in emergency mode. We have entered the wormhole and are currently 22 Corporate standard days from exit at Malbona-Fino Station.
...Fuck this.
(Ow.)
I muted my aural input as soon as the alarms blared to life. I was already being fed data by ShipSecSystem, and the alarms weren't for my benefit, anyway. They mostly existed to force the humans to pay attention and understand that they were about to die.
I had been recharging in the cubicle when the raiders' ship arrived. Raiders are a serious threat to ships our size, but this route had suffered no reportable incidents previously, at least according to company records. It's possible that the records were incomplete, but I had been willing to assume that I had been given all of the necessary information to do my job. Maybe I had. Maybe we were just unlucky.
The other SecUnit sent me a security alert right after ShipSecSystem jolted me out of my recharge. It was on duty, standing guard in the hold as cargo was transferred to the shuttles, and had therefore not been aware of any security concerns outside of the ship. Not that there was much we could do when the raiders were still outside. We were a supply freighter, not a gunship. Once they had boarded, the other unit and I would be considerably more effective.
If they had boarded. The standard "let the SecUnits shoot the raiders" plan relied heavily on the raiders docking and entering the ship. We had no contingency in place if the raiders' ship simply opened fire. I was halfway between the ready room and the rear starboard airlock when the floor pitched and the alarms started up. ShipSecSystem informed me that there was now a new door in the hull, and that the atmosphere had been evacuated from the cargo hold. Apparently, rather than risk a fight, the raiders had decided to spill our supplies and then tractor in whatever they could gather from the debris.
This wasn't how I'd planned things. Somehow, I'd always pictured something more orderly. Something less deadly. Obviously my escape couldn't be bloodless, not if I were to stand any chance of getting away clean, but I had thought that the casualties might stay in the single digits. One or two dead humans to screen me, and then one more when I got what I wanted.
That "when" was starting to look more like an "if."
I didn't have time to be picky. Whoever I could grab would have to do. I was near the shuttle bay, and I had to get there before—
The engines blew. Deaf, I felt them rather than heard them. I didn't have to hear the screaming of the humans swarming the corridor, scrambling past each other with no regard for orderly evac procedures. There was definitely a lot of screaming, though. There always is, with humans. I shoved one aside and my governor module gave me a mild zap, which felt unfair. There was no way for me to navigate the narrow corridor without bumping into a few people going the opposite way. They were all going the opposite way now—I was still walking toward the shuttle bay, but that was also the direction of the engine room, and the humans mostly seemed to have decided that avoiding the acrid, semi-radioactive smoke was more pressing than escaping the compromised ship.
The crowd was thin when I made it to the bay doors. A few humans were huddled against the wall, but the doors were sealed. One had somehow pried a wall panel open and was elbow-deep in the ship's guts. They were working one-handed—their right arm was dangling at their side, drenched in blood. The other two humans beside them were saying something, which the injured human seemed to be ignoring, chewing on the inside of their cheek as they focused. I engaged the energy weapon on my arm and started counting down. If the human didn't get the door open in three seconds, I would push them aside and overload the mechanism. Three, two...
The doors started to slide open, then got stuck. The two uninjured humans rushed forward to try and pry the foot-thick metal doors apart, and the third slumped against the wall, clutching at their injured arm.
Judging by their gray-brown uniform coveralls they were an engineer of some sort, and judging by their slight size and unlined face they were young. Bottom of the ladder, minimal authority, if any at all. But it wasn't as if I had many other options. The governor shocked me again when I brought my armored fist down on their head, but I still managed to catch them and slung them over my shoulder. This was a nonstandard method of evacuating a client, but I was evacuating a client. Sort of.
The other two turned around. I couldn't tell if they started yelling at me, or were just gaping stupidly. I avoided looking at their faces, in case they said something and I accidentally read an order on their lips. They scrambled back out of my way when I carried the unconscious human over and braced myself. My armor boots are magnetized, and I activated them on full, fixing myself to the floor. With the extra leverage, it wasn't particularly difficult to force one of the doors, even while I was supporting the human with one arm. I strode through the gap, not caring whether the other humans followed. There would be a problem if they tried to board the same shuttle as me, but discouraging them wouldn't be difficult. I couldn't hurt them, not really, but that likely wouldn't occur to them now, considering the circumstances.
The mid-sized ship could host up to six shuttles, which would have been enough to carry the whole crew. In actuality, it only ever carried three. All three were still docked, airlock doors wide to facilitate an exodus. Priority was technically supposed to be given to supervisors, but there were no supervisors here. If there had been, I would have grabbed one of them instead. I carried the client into the first shuttle.
The shuttles are primarily used to taxi supplies between the ship and the NovaTero colony on Komenci. They're rated for emergency evacuations, but most of their interior is taken up by cargo storage space. The crew compartment can hold eight humans comfortably, sixteen humans uncomfortably, or one human and one SecUnit very uncomfortably. SecUnits aren't supposed to enter the crew area, but caring for an injured client gave me a pass. I dumped my pass onto the bench opposite the airlock and moved into the cabin to initiate deployment. There's no sentient bot pilot onboard the shuttles, so they're less like bots and more like drones. I pinged it, and when I got the response I issued it my emergency code. I don't have clearance, because I'm not a human, so I could only fix the shuttle autopilot on one of two courses; we could try to sprint for the colony, still fourteen hours away, or we could turn around and jump back into the wormhole that the ship had just exited. Neither route was ideal, but one boasted a 67% chance that we wouldn't be obliterated by raiders.
The shuttle systems began the boot sequence. It was an older model, and would take a minute. I checked the camera over the exterior airlock door and saw the other two humans. They looked like they were arguing. As I watched, they gripped each other's hands, then one turned and bolted back out of the bay, into the main structure. The other waited outside of my airlock. The first human had forgotten something, or was going to try and find someone, or possibly intended to stand in a corridor and yell to the entire crew that the SecUnit had gotten a shuttle started and everyone should come to the shuttle bay immediately.
Well, they could do that if they wanted. I didn't intend to let the entire crew in. But the second human was just standing there, right outside the doors. I had plenty of time to go and grab them, yank them inside. It wouldn't be practical; I only needed one for this to work, but they were right there.
The floor pitched again. I had deactivated the magnets in my boots, so I hit the ceiling. ShuttleSystem alerts screamed directly into my head through the feed, wiping out all other input. Atmosphere loss detected. Airlock doors sealing. Casting off.
I checked the camera again as we fell away from the ship. There was another huge hole in the side, and the shell of one of the other two shuttles was falling away with us. The raiders were trying to stop anyone from doing exactly what I was doing. I'd already given ShuttleSystem the priority emergency code, but I submitted it a second time. I got an error message in return. If the piloting software had been sentient, the error would have been equivalent to it rolling its eyes and saying yes, I know.
I checked the other exterior cameras and finally caught sight of the hostiles. Their ship was smaller than ours, and looked patchwork. The gun that had been mounted to the bottom of the hull had clearly been ripped off another ship and welded onto this one. It was incredible that they'd managed to fire it so many times without it—
The other ship shattered. There was no fire in the vacuum, but the jury-rigged weapons system blasted a hole in the hull, and the gun hurtled off into the void. A few seconds later, ShuttleSystem sent me another series of alerts as shrapnel pinged off us like hail. I sent another emergency code, but the sarcastic response was drowned in all the alerts. There was nothing I could do but grit my teeth and hope that nothing large enough to compromise our hull integrity hit us.
I shoved off the ceiling and reactivated my boots. The shuttle was too small to justify installing a local gravity generator, but that didn't mean I had to float around like an idiot. Prying my feet off the floor for every step was a little annoying, but not worse than hitting my helmet against the ceiling would be. I returned to the crew compartment to check on the client. I hadn't buckled them in, so they were floating at the ceiling, too. I grabbed their foot to pull them down and strapped them to the bench with the inbuilt lap belt. They were still unconscious. I was no longer connected to ShipMedSystem, but the client had a NovaTero implant which both marked them as an employee and kept track of their vitals. I couldn't get a MedSystem's opinion on whether their pulse and respiration were normal, but their face hadn't turned any unusual colors. I scanned them for energy signatures and got a couple hits. I'd been anticipating the implant and the external feed interface in their ear, but they also had a large augment. Their left leg was artificial from just above the knee joint. According to my scan, it was low-output. They could use it more or less like they could use their organic leg—there were no hidden gun ports in it, or anything. I let them keep it, since it seemed pointless to try and figure out where it detached. I took their feed interface, though.
They moved when I touched them. I drew back quickly, yanking the interface free and crushing it between my fingers, and they moved again, shifting dazedly. Their vitals were increasing unsteadily as they fought to wake up. I needed to do something about that.
The restraining harnesses retract into the seats when not in use. I yanked the belt out of one of them and tore it at the base. It was wide and flat and clumsy to work with in my armor, but I could use it to bind the client's hands in front of them. They tried to pull away from me, and I looked up at their face. Their gaze was foggy, not fully aware, but judging by their spiking heartrate they had already figured out something was wrong. Their lips moved, probably to ask what I was doing. I looked away from their face before they said something I could read, but they started struggling, trying to keep their hands apart so I couldn't tie them. After a minute, I got exasperated and gripped their right wrist.
Please do not struggle, I said aloud, though I couldn't hear myself. You have been injured. Restraint is necessary to prevent further injury.
This was true, although that wasn't why I was doing it. They held still long enough for me to secure their bindings, but I think that it was less naïve compliance and more shock at the revelation that SecUnits can talk. It doesn't occur to most humans that we can speak outside of the feed. It's better if they don't know that about us.
Once the client was secure, I checked my interface with the shuttle again. We were one hundred and six seconds from entering the wormhole, and all systems were nominal in spite of the recent turbulence. The raider ship was showing no signs of life. Neither was the NovaTero ship, but that wasn't my problem anymore.
I sent out a ping, but we were already too far away to get a response.
On the camera, I could see the client as things clicked, at least enough for them to recognize that there was a serious problem. They started struggling in earnest, raising their hands to their mouth to try and loosen the belt with their teeth. Their wounded arm was still bleeding, but without gravity, the blood clung to their arm until the droplets had enough mass to break free and float like grim bubbles. The client didn't seem to notice their own injury, even as their blood floated around their face, clinging to their skin wherever contact was made. I couldn't assess the extent of the damage through the camera, but I thought that judging by the smell of the engine smoke which had followed them into the shuttle, they had likely received a glancing blow from a piece of shrapnel when the engines exploded. It was the sort of thing that could be patched up in minutes with a MedSystem, or could cause long-term problems without one.
I pinged the recycler with a request. It was a small one, meant primarily to generate emergency supplies, and it responded with a cheerful canned response about please waiting while it fulfilled my request. While it was working, I scanned the cabin for further energy signatures. It was difficult to squint through the static of the shuttle, but I was checking to see if there were any devices that had been left behind, unsecured. There were; I found the standard eight evac suits, six handheld energy weapons, and a portable feed interface screen registered to a client named 'Amir.' I thought I recognized that name, but I aborted the automatic recall because it didn't matter. The interface screen was floating loose directly beneath the client's bench. They flinched away from me when I approached. On the camera, I saw their lips move.
What's happening? they asked, slowly. Why are you doing this?
My governor module obligates me to answer direct questions from clients. I said, NovaTero Freighter 6 has been destroyed. You are being evacuated. Please don't panic. Again, I'd managed to avoid telling any lies, while still concealing the truth.
The problem with sentient bots is that we can do things like formulate plans, and harbor grudges.
I got the screen and took it to the weapons locker. The locker is sealed with a code that can be issued through the feed by anyone with a valid NovaTero access. I tossed the screen and the remains of the client's personal feed interface inside and ordered a lock, just in case they managed to get out of their restraints and decided to try something idiotic. The energy weapons would do negligible damage to me even without my armor, but that sort of obvious thing rarely seems to occur to humans under pressure, and I was already annoyed enough by this one just being here.
This wasn't what I'd wanted. This wasn't what I'd planned.
Checking the camera again, I could see that behind me the client was ignoring my advice not to panic. They were shouting at me, not speaking clearly enough for me to pick out more than a few words. I watched them for a few seconds as they struggled and screamed themself out.
I have a module for comforting clients in pressing situations. It's designed to help me move a client who has skipped over the fight or flight instincts and gone to the lesser-known but far more frequently applied instinct to freeze. It involves a gentle voice modulation and pointing out to the client that they will be more useful if they follow me away from whatever hazard has scared them into immobility. I've had to run this protocol a total of four times since I was activated, and it is generally effective in temporarily alleviating anxieties enough to make clients do what I want, provided that what I want is to protect them.
I don't want to protect this client. They could scream all they wanted, but they were only useful to me by proximity, and their being immobile was actually a favorable condition. I might have to keep my hearing muted for the entirety of this trip, which would be a little uncomfortable, but it would be a lot less uncomfortable than hearing the client when they ordered me to untie them and vent myself out the airlock.
They were glaring at my back, but I saw their expression change as something occurred to them. They looked away from me and started scanning the ceiling, until they found the camera. They stared directly at it, directly at me.
You can't hear me, they said, carefully. So read my lips. Let. Me—
I shut the camera off. I didn't just close the input, I turned it completely off. I needed to check the rest of the shuttle to make sure that everything that should have been secured before we took off was intact, or at least hadn't caused any serious problems when we lost the ship's gravity.
The cargo hold was familiar to me. When the shuttles were descending to the colony to deliver supplies, the other SecUnit and I would go down with the first shipment to stand guard and prevent the colonists from rushing the distributors. I had spent a lot of time standing in this hold—and the other two functionally identical ones—magnetized to the floor and watching the other unit through the cameras. I would stay here again, once the client was recovered enough that I wouldn't be able to justify my continued presence in the crew area. Not that I wanted to be in the crew area to begin with.
The process of loading the shuttles with supplies for the colony had begun shortly after we left the wormhole, but there hadn't been time to get very far. The space was largely empty, aside from a dozen or so crates stamped with the NovaTero logo and designation codes indicating what was contained in each. It looked like it was mostly textiles, and a couple crates of food. Seeding crops, and one crate of ration packs. The ration packs were always the first thing to be passed out, when deliveries were made. They were the thing that we prioritized guarding. The Komenci colony was less than a year old, and the colonists were still almost completely reliant on the deliveries to feed themselves.
I found a spot between a few crates where I would be enclosed from three sides, with a few inches of clearance. The dimensions were fairly close to that of an upright cubicle. I've never been comfortable for a single moment of my existence, but I could settle in here and work out what I wanted to do next.
The recycler pinged my feed to let me know that it had finished synthesizing my order. I couldn't hide yet. If I let the client bleed out, I'd be considerably worse off than I already was. I just had to repair the damage as best I could, and then I could spend the rest of the trip restructuring my plan to try and figure out how I could possibly fix this for myself before the deadline expired.
I shouldn't have disabled the camera. That was my first thought when the door to the crew compartment slid open and I saw that the client wasn't in their seat. They had managed to wiggle out from under the lap belt and were floating up near the ceiling, with one foot hooked awkwardly under the lap belt to anchor them more or less in place. Their wrists were still bound, but they were reaching up to the ceiling, concentrating hard, chewing the inside of their cheek. I disabled my boots to push myself across the room in one movement, catching them around the waist with one arm to stop them from doing whatever they were doing. Was there something up there that they had been trying to use to loosen their restraints? I looked up, and added another tiny action to the rapidly growing list of things I shouldn't have done.
Scrawled on the ceiling in glistening blood were three words.
LISTEN TO ME
The bottom bar of the last E trailed off into a smear. I had yanked the client away as they were putting the finishing touches on their order. There was nothing I could do to stop myself from reactivating my hearing.
"—hear me now?"
The client was panting, trying to recover the breath I had probably knocked out of them. They weren't struggling now. They weren't my prisoner anymore, and we both knew it. I gritted my teeth.
"Yes," I ground out. It wasn't a polite answer, but it wasn't rude enough to risk punishment. Punishment would be coming very shortly, and I didn't want to trigger any more than I was due.
"Good." They squirmed a little now, pushing off my shoulder. "Let me go. Untie me, and let me float on my own." They hesitated as I started to shift my grip on them to get to their hands. "...And then stand down and freeze. We need to talk."
They couldn't see my face through the visor of my helmet, so they didn't know that I was rolling my eyes. Sure. They wanted to "talk" to the SecUnit. We're famous for our conversation skills. I tore the belt off their wrists hard enough to tear it again. They flinched, and when their hands were free they gripped their wounded arm. The compartment was full of floating droplets of blood. They speckled my visor, unavoidable in their volume. It was urgent that the bleeding be stopped, not so much because there was a risk of exsanguination, but because there was a risk that the client might choke on the uncontained liquid. Not that there was anything I could do about that now. When I had them loose, I reactivated the magnets in my boots and allowed myself to be affixed back to the floor, where I assumed the standard resting position. The client floated above me, bumping their head awkwardly on the ceiling. They pretended not to notice as they glared down at me.
"What happened, really?" they demanded. "Was the ship really destroyed? Don't lie to me."
"I can't lie to clients," I said. If they knew the exact correct wording of the order they'd given to immobilize me, they were probably aware that I couldn't lie. "The ship was set upon by raiders. You were the only client I was able to evacuate before catastrophic damage was sustained and the shuttle deployed."
I got a shock for that one. I was frozen in place, so I couldn't even flinch. The client's eyes widened.
"I was the only one? What about Lor? And Reggie?"
They must have been talking about the humans who had been with them. I wasn't sure which was which. "They didn't board the shuttle with us. One of them ran back into the ship."
The client's face did something strange. It was like it crumpled. I've seen humans cry before, plenty of times, but this wasn't that. It was similar, but not quite. When humans cry, they usually do it because they're frustrated or scared or angry. The client was probably all of those right now, but I had only seen this expression on a few humans, in select circumstances. This was the face that humans made when some part of their lives had been irreparably broken, and they didn't bother with denial or bargaining on their way to despair.
I didn't care. Why should I care? Several dozen humans were dead and the one I had was grappling with the ruin of it all and I. Did. Not. Care.
I couldn't do anything to expedite their personal crisis. They weren't crying, so at least there was that. They were just sort of shaking, fighting with their face, and bleeding. The recycler pinged me a second time, to remind me that it was done with the basic medpack I'd asked it to make. I debated mentioning it for nearly a minute before my programming got the better of me.
"You are in danger of exacerbating your injury if it remains untreated," I said. "Please retrieve the medical supplies from the recycler."
Their surprise did the work of defeating their miserable expression. They looked down at me, blinking a few times.
"You weren't just going to let me bleed out?" they asked. There was an obvious bite to their tone. I wished that I could return it.
"If you died, I would be in violation of my governor module's distance limit," I admitted. "If you die, I die."
It clicked. There had been something about the situation that was confusing them, and I had said just a little too much. They spoke slowly, carefully, like they had when I had been deaf. "You needed me to get off the ship."
It wasn't a question, but I answered anyway. "That is correct."
"Had you intended to rescue more people than just me? Or did you only take the bare minimum to get away?"
"My intention was to leave NovaTero Freighter 6 with one human."
They scoffed. "I'm sure that I wasn't your first choice. Who was? Did one of the supervisors give you an order to disregard the rest of us and just save them?"
That barely made any sense. If I had been specifically ordered by a supervisor to save them, I wouldn't have been able to settle for an engineer. "A supervisor would have been ideal, but I was not under any orders to save anyone in particular."
They mouthed the words a supervisor would have been ideal back at me, processing them. "...You wanted someone who could give the order to suspend the distance limit." They waited, but when I didn't say anything, they added, "Was that your plan? You wanted to run away?"
I gritted my teeth again. "Yes."
"And you're S-O-L now. I can't give orders that override company protocols."
"Yes."
"So what's stopping me from ordering you to shut down so I can dismantle you?" They were trying to be intimidating, but it was obvious that they didn't have a lot of practice at it. Issuing threats wasn't something they did often.
I said, "Physically there is no barrier in place to prevent you killing me. But the fine for destruction of NovaTero property is steep." They flinched when I said "killing." Clearly the threat had been empty. I didn't have to keep talking, but I couldn't stop myself. I thought I had seen something else, when I mentioned NovaTero. A hitch in their respiration. "This shuttle has entered the wormhole under the power of its emergency evacuation protocols. In—" I checked the readout in the feed. "—five hundred and nineteen hours, we will be exiting at Malbona-Fino Station. At that point, we will be collected by the appropriate parties at NovaTero's home office. You will be reassigned, likely on one of the other colony freighters, and I will be debugged and either reprogrammed or decommissioned."
What I said should have been a relief to the client. They weren't at fault, and when they reported my anomalous behavior I would be "fixed" or disposed of. So why had their eyes gone wide and their heartrate ratcheted up?
"...Where's my feed interface?" they asked, their voice thin. "I can disable the emergency evac protocols."
Well. That's certainly not what I had expected them to say. "I destroyed it."
"You-!" It was their turn to grit their teeth. "Can you disable it if I give the order?"
"I don't know," I admitted.
"Do it. Change our course."
I opened up the control input and copied over the employee designation from the client's implant. I was shut out immediately. "You don't have clearance high enough to grant me that permission."
"Fuck." They paused, chewing the inside of their cheek. "Is there any way we can turn the shuttle around, or force it to exit the wormhole early?"
I wondered why they didn't want to go home. For nearly a full second, I considered asking them. Then I remembered that I don't care about them. I said, "There is nothing that I can do."
They stared at me, trying to make eye contact through my visor. "Like there was nothing you could do for Lor and Reggie?"
I didn't have to make eye contact, so I didn't. "There is nothing that I can do."
Their face contorted. It wasn't the same crumpling from before, but it was something similar. The despair was mixed with anger. I watched them squeeze their eyes shut and take deep breaths for three and a half minutes before they spoke again.
"Go."
The dismissal overrode the freeze command. I turned and exited the compartment, nearly overcome with relief. I'd been doomed from the start, had never managed to gain control of the situation, but at least now I didn't have to deal with the client.
I turned the camera back on as I left. It must have made a noise, because they were glaring at it when the image appeared in my feed. After a second, though, they pushed off from the ceiling, leaving behind a bloody handprint next to their order that I listen. I watched as they retrieved the medpack from the recycler and set about struggling to fix their arm. They had to strip partway out of their jumpsuit to get at the injury, but even with their arm bare I couldn't tell exactly how bad things were. They wiped at the wound with the cheap disinfectant and wrapped their arm with gauze, tying the bandage off with one end held in their teeth. I should have helped them with that. They'd done a slapdash job, which posed a moderate risk of infection. But they had told me to get lost.
I'm reminding myself now that I don't care what happens to them. While I watched them cleaning themself and the compartment up, it occurred to me that maybe it would have been better for both of us if we hadn't made it to the shuttle in the first place.