Chapter Text
I kept thinking, after, that it should have been possible to prevent everything that happened -- if I had stayed on Preservation Station, if I had set up better security protocols. If, if, if.
But if I had stayed on the station, I wouldn't have been there on the planet to do anything when all of it happened.
My humans were on Preservation and had invited me down. I still didn't like planets, but I was starting to get used to this one, if only because most of my humans were there at least part of the time.
This time, we were on a part of Preservation where I hadn't been before, not that I was keeping careful track. It was higher up the same river that FirstLanding was located at the other end of (I think there are words for parts of a river, I've heard them on shows, but I don't care), a comparatively newer city called RiverCadence. It was located near a dam that provided most of the power to FirstLanding and outlying settlements that wasn't adequately supplied by the solar grid.
Or so I was informed by Ratthi enthusiastically in a long monologue while I was attempting to watch the new season of Astro Space Defenders NebulaTwelve on the hopper flight, so I'm surprised I retained that much of it.
RiverCadence was the site of a university I had never heard of because none of my humans were affiliated with it, but the place was hosting a scientific conference from all over the Preservation Alliance. My humans were there for it, and some of their associated humans (partners, small humans, whatever) were there for them. Some of them were getting awards. I had honestly tuned out all of this except that Dr. Mensah was getting an achievement award in terraforming logistics for a paper she had published through a joint association of Preservation and some of the other small polities. I didn't know that she published papers, though I guess I didn't ask. I also found out that she was the -- headline speaker? keynote speaker? Look, the kind of shows I watch are generally light on this sort of thing. I can tell you a lot more about space pirates and combat logistics, but no one asked me.
Anyway, with all these humans there, a bunch of associated cultural activities were taking place, including live theater shows and musical performances, and that was mainly what I was interested in. But I planned to be there for Mensah's speech, even if I didn't understand most of it and kept a minimized window with one of my shows running in the background.
(And yes, I downloaded and read her paper. And no, I didn't understand most of it. But I marked it up with terms to look up later, even though I'm not interested in either planets or terraforming.)
My humans and augmented human had their own activities going on during this time, together and separately. Ratthi was meeting up with university friends he hadn't seen since his own student days, Arada was interested in a large biology symposium, and so forth. They had been talking about it for weeks. Some of them were going to various shows, most of them had some sort of science thing to go to; it was a big deal. Also, the whole group of them hadn't been together in a while, so they had some activities planned to catch up. And Bharadwaj was going to consult with the dam's structural engineers on upgrades to accommodate the local geological activity. Busy time, happy science humans doing science, reasonably content SecUnit reviewing lists of entertainment activities and fretting about security arrangements ... you know. The usual.
Security was, as always, appalling, and as always, my humans explained to me that on Preservation, the worst that was likely to happen was drunken vandalism, petty theft, and maybe polite protesters at some of the science things, because Preservation allowed that sort of thing and Preservation humans were always arguing about various science things. (For example: some humans thought the dam shouldn't exist. Others thought it was better than other power sources that had been suggested, such as a huge solar array that would have put a strain on Preservation's manufacturing capabilities and affected the weather in that area. I knew all of this because Bharadwaj had told me about it while I was trying to watch Legend of the Sword Machines.) (It wasn't very good, but it also wasn't improved by people interrupting me every ten minutes to tell me about science things.)
Anyway, for all their reassurances about safety, once I got there I did notice a greater than usual security presence at the festival. There were more observation drones than I was used to seeing around, and quite a number of guards who were designated "guides" but did in fact have security vests and stun weapons.
I had arrived in RiverCadence with Ratthi, Arada, and Pin-Lee. We flew in by hopper from FirstLanding after Ratthi, Gurathin, and I came down on a shuttle. Gurathin had separated from us in FirstLanding and was getting a ride up to RiverCadence with some other analyst-type humans and augmented humans.
("You have friends?" I said to Gurathin as we parted at the shuttleport, Ratthi and I heading off to collect Ratthi's luggage and meet Arada and Pin-Lee, who kept a part-time residence on the planet and had access to a university hopper. "Other friends, that is. Besides Ratthi and the rest of these people who put up with you for some reason."
"I hear you do, too," he said, with one of those quick little smiles. "For some reason." Ratthi gave both of us an exasperated and slightly baffled look, punched him lightly in the shoulder, and we went off to find our ride.)
A few people had given me looks at the port and on the shuttle, because quite a lot of people on the station knew who I was, but in RiverCadence I was able to relax into the one thing I liked about crowds of humans: anonymity. I wore a dark hooded jacket and loose trousers and boots, all made of Preservation fabrics, and aside from being a little more drab than most people, I blended right in. No one here knew me except for my humans and their humans and a few random people who might have seen me on various broadcasts.
I had my drones with me, but I kept about half of them in my jacket, and the rest I deployed to various points around the city to settle into places and quietly keep tabs on things, with one assigned to each of my humans. I also made friends with what passed for a SecSystem in RiverCadence, though as with most of Preservation's planetside computer systems, it was woefully inadequate and large parts of the city were dark to its cameras. I also acquainted myself with the local feed and the various ins and outs of the uplink to Preservation Station and the satellite network. Compared to FirstLanding and even Mensah's farm, RiverCadence was relatively cut off due to its location (in the mountains, much nearer the pole than FirstLanding). Preservation's satellites were optimized for the relatively more populated equatorial area, and we had to use a relay to reach the station.
I didn't like any of that, but guess who they didn't consult before planning to have their conference here? That's right, the one person on Preservation who understands security.
However, this was only one of a number of times I had been down to the planet's surface before now, with various groups of my humans. It's not that I stopped thinking about things that could go wrong, because I never did, and I'm not going to say things couldn't go badly just because they hadn't before; hello, have you met my humans? But at least I had the security arrangements down by now. I had drones on my humans, I had the city map downloaded, and I knew where they were staying and who they were going to be with.
Most of us were staying in a hotel complex on the city's riverside edge, with an alarming -- from a security standpoint -- view into the river canyon. The exceptions were Ratthi, who was staying with his group of university friends on a farm across the canyon; and Arada and Pin-Lee, who had a place of their own up in the mountains, presumably for couple purposes that I preferred not to interrogate closely. So those of us in the hotel were me, Bharadwaj, Bharadwaj's parents, Gurathin, and Mensah and those of her family who had chosen to come with her -- Amena, Farai, and two of her middle offspring. There were a couple of other science friends of theirs, Overse and Volescu, staying there as well with family members of their own.
I wasn't going to admit it, but it was nice having my Preservation humans all in one place like this, and not just because it was easier to know what they were doing for security purposes. In spite of everyone being scattered, Arada and Pin-Lee spent more time in the hotel's communal lounge and garden spaces than at their own place, and Ratthi showed up with a half dozen or so friends and introduced everybody. It was way too many people for me, so I spent a lot of time in a corner, watching media with part of my attention and watching my humans with the rest of it. They were happy and relaxed. Even Gurathin looked like he was having fun.
All of this happy togetherness probably should have set off flashing warnings in my risk assessment module, but what does it know?
For the first two days, everything went according to plan. The humans did their science things, and got together and socialized in between. I saw four plays and two musical performances, and used my drones to record six more for later viewing, as well as watching the live filming of the latest episode of a low-budget serial that was made in RiverCadence. (I had mixed feelings about this. ART loves seeing clips of actors working out scenes, but I don't; it makes me uncomfortable. Still, it was interesting to see some of how it's done.) My humans enjoyed the company of their other humans.
And then, of course, things went to shit.
***
It started with a feed message from Preservation Station Security, priority, for Mensah and me. Because realtime communication with the station was difficult at best -- between the relays, the time difference, and interference from the stupid planetary magnetosphere -- the message came in as a recorded burst. Mensah and I watched it together in a room in the hotel complex which she had taken over as an office during her stay.
"This message is primarily for SecUnit, but I wanted to keep Dr. Mensah looped in," Senior Officer Indah said. She was sitting at her desk with her hands folded, and as usual around me, looked like she had bitten into something sour. "Accompanying this message you will find a data packet to analyze." Way ahead of you, Indah; I had already unpacked it, I was analyzing it now, and my threat assessment was headed into the red. "As you both know, since the kidnapping, we regularly scan for and monitor mentions of Dr. Mensah and the Preservation Alliance in the Corporation Rim."
So did I, and I couldn't believe they found something I didn't. I knew that the station's SecSystem, for all my frustration with it, had a lot more processing power than I did, but this was an appalling lapse of security on my part. I was going to need to put ART on it.
"There's a small polity among the CR-aligned worlds," Indah was saying, "that is run in part by a powerful family who are connected to the ousted GreyCris leadership. They've made a number of open statements in interviews threatening Dr. Mensah and the PreservationAux team. The most recent of those interviews is from a week ago and came in today on the latest wormhole packet. There's nothing new, but it's in your data burst." Thanks, Indah; I had already watched it. Multiple times. I was running it on a loop in the background while putting some other security measures into effect, including linking myself with the hotel's pathetically rudimentary and under-camera-enabled HubSys, and checking on all my humans. Due to planetary interference and distance, I was only getting telemetry from some of my drones. Gurathin, Bharadwaj, Arada, and Pin-Lee were all out of surveillance. (I should have set up an alert to deal with that, but I wasn't used to fucking planets.) Ratthi was at some kind of very insecure-looking eating place with several other humans at his table.
I linked into the PresAux open feed channel, which contained the usual casual chatter; the latest messages were from Ratthi and Arada, and were timestamped two minutes ago. Arada, Pin-Lee, Gurathin, Bharadwaj, I said into the feed. Sound off.
Arada: What?
Gurathin: It's doing some kind of security check.
Asshole.
Bharadwaj: We're fine, SecUnit!
Pin-Lee: [This user is set to AWAY]
Meanwhile Indah was still talking on the broadcast I had already sped through at 5x speed in my internal storage. "A routine check of port traffic found that a passenger liner from the same polity docked and refueled at Preservation Station three days ago. Two people debarked. We are currently searching for them. A check of their luggage manifest found a shipping container with size and specs that match those of SecUnit transportation containers. We think they may have a SecUnit with them, and that it's somewhere on the station or the planet."
Way to, as the humans say, bury the lead, Indah. Good thing I already watched your stupid broadcast as soon as I got it.
Three days. Three fucking days. It had taken Ratthi and myself less than a day to get from the station to RiverCadence, and that was with all the delays that humans inevitably got up to when traveling. (Eating, looking at sights, dealing with luggage, standing in lines.)
A SecUnit wouldn't bother with that shit. It would come straight to the planet, if that's where it was going. If it had come in a shipping container, it probably had its armor with it. It could still pass for a human out of its armor, if that was what it wanted to do. Think, Murderbot, think.
Mensah had finished watching the broadcast and her eyelids flickered as she presumably examined the data on the packet on her implant at her slow human speed. I didn't need to wait for it. My humans were asking questions in the feed, which I ignored. Pin-Lee often put their interface on AWAY when they were doing solicitor stuff, so that was probably all it was. I hoped.
"You're almost certainly the target," I told Mensah. "I need to get you to a secure location with your family and you need to stay there. Where are Amena and Farai and the, uh, the others?" Damn it, I needed to learn the names of all Mensah's kids. I also couldn't believe I didn't have a fucking dedicated drone on Amena or Farai. They had been with Mensah so much that I hadn't thought about it, which just goes to show how stupid and careless a murderbot can be.
"They're at a show with Volescu's grandkids," Mensah said. "I've already called Farai and she's bringing them back here. SecUnit, listen --"
Better than nothing. I opened a feed channel to Farai, got the information, and dispatched a drone to follow them.
Mensah was still saying something about we didn't even know if there was a SecUnit, let alone any reason to worry, but she broke off with the eyelid-flickering pause and slight subvocalization that meant she was responding to something in the feed. "Farai wants to know why you just snapped at her. She's worried that she's upset you."
I didn't care. Probably I would later. "I don't care. I want her back here. I want all of them back here."
"I'm not the only likely target of a CR assassination," Mensah pointed out. "Gurathin is the other one."
Shit, she was right. She was still the most likely one, though; her name was on all the conference information. I accessed the open PresAux feed link. We have an urgent situation. Dr. Gurathin, where are you?
I'm at the dam with Bharadwaj.
What the hell are you doing at the dam?
Looking at it, he said.
I'm giving him a tour, Bharadwaj said into the feed. What's the urgent situation, SecUnit? How serious is it?
There's a potential hostile SecUnit on the planet that is probably here for Dr. Mensah.
Oh, shit, Ratthi chimed in.
We don't know that it's after me, Mensah said.
Yeah, I said, it could be after Gurathin. I still wasn't over the security check comment. I'm trying to keep you alive, dipshit.
Meanwhile, I was pulling in telemetry from every drone I had available that was responding to me. A worrying number of them (34% to be precise) were giving me OUT OF RANGE errors. That was high, although I had already noticed they were even more unreliable than usual for a planetary setting in these mountains. It was a combination of interference from the rocks in the mountains and whatever the dam was made out of, I guess. After all of this was over, if any of us survived, I needed to do an analysis and find out if any of the interference might be from substances toxic to humans.
Arada, query, where are you? I asked. Where's Pin-Lee?
I'm at our chalet. I was taking a nap. Actually as the feed backread showed, she had been playing a feed game with Ratthi, but whatever. Pin-Lee is in the legal conference in Building Green all day.
That explained the away message. Either that, or they'd been solicitor-napped by an evil SecUnit, like a stupid plot from one of the shows I didn't like. Either that or they were -- okay, threat assessment, dial it back. I needed to be able to think.
What should I do? Arada asked.
I didn't like her being alone out there. Her and Pin-Lee's little retreat was way up in the mountains, also in the opposite direction from the dam, which was also way the hell out of town and even harder to get to. No wonder I was getting OUT OF RANGE on all of them. Pin-Lee was right in town, but (assuming they hadn't been solicitor-napped), their drone had probably been automatically deactivated when they went into the legal building to maintain confidentiality, which I also hadn't fucking thought of because what the hell is wrong with this stupid polity and its stupid privacy rules. I had been trying to find cameras showing me anything but the biggest plazas and major intersections for the last two and a half minutes.
However, I liked Arada coming down to the city by herself even less. Stay there. Lock the door and don't make it look like you're home. You should be fine. I'll send someone up to get you when I can. Whoever and whenever that was. I couldn't be in twelve places at once.
"SecUnit," Mensah said quietly, out of the feed. "Do you think it's time to alert the local security?"
"Just what I was thinking." I hadn't even thought of it. But she was right. I was too used to working alone. There was a whole entire human security apparatus here, or at least whatever Preservation had that passed for one.
Actually .... Indah might as well be good for something. I bounced a message back to her through the satellite relays, reading:
a) message received
b) thanks for telling us, asshole (more politely, but barely)
c) we're going to high alert here, so contact RiverCadence security and let them know about the situation. They'll be more likely to listen to you than me.
(And people say I don't know how to be diplomatic. That's like textbook diplomacy right there!)
Oh yeah, I sent an addendum:
d) tell them about me and let them know I've started my own security sweep.
"Indah's in touch with them," I told Mensah.
"Thank you, SecUnit."
With a sudden loud bang that made me power up my gun ports, the door of the nearest lounge area, outside Mensah's office, slammed open and Farai came in with about 400 offspring. Farai herded them off to the kitchen, probably for food or washing or whatever small sticky humans did after being out. Amena came into Mensah's office, hugged Mensah, and looked at me seriously.
"What's going on?" she asked me quietly.
"Stuff," I said. "Dr. Mensah, explain to her. I'm going to run a deep analysis and see if I can pick it up in the city."
With that, I tuned in to the various feeds I had been collecting from all over the city and unleashed my hastily slapped-together FindAMurderbot.exe code. Pulling together all of that data was a hell of a load even with the city's rudimentary camera network; I was not a SecSystem. But I was actually kind of impressed at how well I could handle the multiple inputs. I'd never have been able to do that in the first few months after I hacked my governor module.
My FindAMurderbot program was simply scanning for the inverse of my "act like a human" code. It was the quickest and easiest way I could think of to locate something moving like a SecUnit, without the little fidgets and tells of human behavior. It wasn't perfect, because other SecUnits might have their own "act like a human" modules; I couldn't be the only one. But since I had no idea what it looked like, I had nothing else to search for. I had added in the standard SecUnit height/weight/limb ratios/etc, but there were enough variations on the basic model that I wasn't confident I could find it on that alone. (Just because I was personally paranoid about it didn't mean it was a rational thing to be paranoid about. Also, if you were looking for one specific model of rogue anxiety-ridden SecUnit, this was a different situation from trying to find an unknown SecUnit in a city of tens of thousands of humans.)
And there was still the worrying possibility that if the SecUnit had come here in a shipping container, it might have its armor with it. On the other hand, a SecUnit in armor was difficult to miss, and would stand out on Preservation even more than most places. Just in case, I added a quick patch to my code having it look for armor as well.
Meanwhile, a feed message came in from Gurathin. SecUnit, what do you want us to do?
Oh, now you want my advice? Hold on one fucking minute.
Hey, it's all cool, nothing at all worrying about giving us the information that there's a SecUnit hunting us and then dropping out of contact. I can't think why we'd have any concerns about that.
Bharadwaj: We're fine so far, SecUnit! No problem. Just tell us when you know anything, please.
What I really needed to do was to fucking see what was going on. I felt horribly limited with a third of my drones offline and the whole city suffering from a camera drought. I could hardly pull in any telemetry from outside the city at all. Nothing from the dam, which suddenly occurred to me as another extremely plausible target. An explosion at a dam upstream of the river valley where half the planet's population (number pulled out of thin air, hell if I know but it's a lot) would distract everyone from even the most high-profile assassination attempt.
Gurathin, I said into his private feed. Do you have any recording devices on you?
Don't you have a camera drone following us around? As usual with his augments, I sensed some of his emotional overtones through the feed, in this case amusement.
I do, but I lost signal a while back. It's probably laying beside the road somewhere between there and the city.
Poor drone. No, I don't. I am my own recording device, you know.
I did know. There was only one other option. Ugh. But it wasn't like I had a choice.
I need your eyes, I said.
Now I felt mostly surprise through the feed from him. What? he said.
Keep up, augmented human. I need to see. Give me access to your vision augments.
Technically, I could have just tapped into his vision without asking; I had the processing power to push my way past his firewalls. But he would have noticed, and a) Mensah would be upset about it, and b) Gurathin would probably be upset about it too, and he'd have a point.
It took him a ridiculously slow 0.9 seconds to process my request, and I was mustering my arguments for why I needed to do this (I have superior processing power and could just do it anyway; everyone's going to die, asshole, including you) when he said Go ahead and suddenly I was getting his vision telemetry.
It was ... weird, doing this through a human. I had never done it quite like this before, though I knew ART and Iris sometimes did, and ART did it with me. But it wasn't what I was used to. With my drones, I controlled the camera interface completely. I'd read in visual data from other sources with independent control before, of course, but it was still unnerving to have my inputs bouncing around like this. And it also came with emotional metadata, which I tried hard to ignore. If I was capable of getting queasy, which I wasn't, this might be what it would feel like.
Stop moving your head so much.
I sensed amusement through the feed. I'll try. Anything in particular you want me to look at?
He turned his head. He was on some kind of open platform with Bharadwaj next to him, looking at him curiously. I hadn't realized he was outside.
This is not a defensible position! I snapped at him.
Sardonic amusement tempered with -- oh, was that a hint of actual worry? What's it going to do, come in from the air? I'd think being able to see would be a good thing.
I don't know what it's going to do! Actually, since you're here anyway, go forward and look down. And also look around. I need to know what I'm dealing with. Oh, and tell Bharadwaj to go inside. And any other nearby humans too.
I didn't quite hear him but I also sort of did, and I realized it was through the bones of his face -- wow, that was strange. Bharadwaj disappeared from my view, and Gurathin did a slow scan of the dam that I realized was too deliberate to be anything other than practiced. He'd done this kind of work before. Scanning things. Recording them. Of course he had. I shelved that thought to be dealt with later.
The dam was ... a dam. Wow. Shock. Big, complicated, looked like it was made of gray rock. Water thundered down from holes that probably had a specialized name but who cared.
Gurathin gave me a full sweep on the dam and then said, Satisfied?
Not really, augmented human, but I was distracted just then, because to my slightly impressed surprise, my code had found the enemy SecUnit.