The Haylien

Chapter One

Space was okay to look at but not super fun when you were out in it. And Three and I were definitely in it, clamped on to the outside hull of a small in-system shuttle. It was just as uncomfortable as it sounds.

Obviously, to make this plan work, we had needed a suit. And considering this was the distraction part of the plan that would be taking the brunt of the attention, it was better if it was an armored suit. But it couldn’t be Three’s actual SecUnit armor, it had to look like the kind made for humans.

We had ended up with an armored suit designed to look like one that Wilken and Gerth had used back on Milu. Because someone (ART) thought this part could use some more verisimilitude. (Like someone might have researched that incident, and think I’d been hauling around one of those shitty sets of armor all this time, or hiding it in my secret rogue SecUnit lair. (Otherwise known as the Port Hotel on Preservation Station, or ART’s aft module resident cabin, depending on where I was at the time.))

(I’m not saying using that armor design is not a good idea; I mean, that is some quality paranoid overthinking right there, we all have to agree on that.)

Anyway, even in an armored suit, traveling via clamping on to the outside of a shuttle moving through space was so inherently disturbing it was a relief when the black hull loomed out of the dark. We were coming up on our target/destination, which was a gigantic space dock attached to an even more gigantic planetary torus. There were multiple docks along the torus’s outer hull, but this one was closest to our primary target, which was why we had to go in here. Literally because the thing was so big, and because multiple intel sources suggested it would be difficult to move around in. (Yes, that sounds like the opposite of super fun. There were a lot of other things I would rather be doing.)

A station that encircled an entire planet had to be huge. (And it was huge. From this vantage point you would have no idea there was a whole planet on the other side of this thing, over there somewhere.) It was also very old, not a point in its favor. In the few spotlights along this part of the hull, you could see the metal had scrapes or impact marks that had been repaired over time. But what gave the age away were the engraved numbers stretching across the plates next to the various hatch accesses in the dock area. They had been put there for human pilots, before bot-pilots and the feed were common, as a failsafe for automated approach beacons. The numbers were in three different—number systems? Languages— What do you call numbers in different languages, characters or—

Numerals, Three said.

That didn’t sound right, but whatever.

Our shuttle started its maneuvers into a parking sync orbit above the dock. The torus feed was just a dull roar even this close, and its Port Authority comm channel was all commands and info, no obtrusive ads. If I hadn’t been so angry I would have been really intimidated at this point. Okay, I was still a little intimidated. But mostly angry. Not at Three.

(Emotion check: Angry. It’s never a good idea to try to do complicated things when you’re angry. Like coding. Coding is complicated. Especially when people are shooting at you. But I do that all the time.)

Three said, Target Null+1 on approach, and included the direction vectors. I didn’t need any direction vectors, because Three had a visual on the cargo bot, so I had a visual on it. There were other bots moving on the torus hull some distance away, where big modular transports were connected to larger locks. On our shuttle’s sensor feed I could see the lines of powered cargo modules traveling on their set routes, though that was too far into the dark to pick up with our scan or visual. But Target Null+1 bot was passing nearly beneath us. (At least it looked that way from our position on our shuttle. It could have actually been sideways or up or whatever, because space.)

The cargo bot climbed along a seam between hull plates, shifting in and out of shadow, an inert cargo container clamped under one arm, while the other three limbs guided its body along. It was one of the larger models, maybe seven meters tall from its splayed grippy feet to the flat top of its head/processor. Cargo bots are weirdly graceful in zero gravity, it was kind of cool to watch. (Unlike certain stations I could name (Preservation) which lets them wander around inside the port wherever they want and their giant metal asses are in the fucking way all the time.) (Yes, I’m mostly talking about JollyBaby.)

Three released the magnetic grips that were keeping us attached to the shuttle’s hull and said, Initiate in 3–2–1.

It pushed off from the shuttle and we fell through the dark, with a little help from a set of removable EVAC suit-maneuvering thrusters. Three was good at following the instructions from the suit’s feed, and we landed lightly on the cargo bot’s back, our grips engaging again to keep us in place.

You can just talk, I told Three. I pinged the shuttle to let it know we were in place, then tapped the cargo bot’s internal feed and slipped past its wall. Before the bot finished querying me as to what the hell we were doing on its back, I removed its memory of the proximity alert and told it everything was fine, just keep following its schedule. We aren’t pretending to be a SecUnit, I added to Three, we’re pretending not to be a SecUnit.

The cargo bot hauled itself toward our next target, an entrance to the main cargo sorting port for this dock. Three hesitated for .02 seconds while it parsed what I’d said. It likes using logic. Which not that I don’t; it’s stupid not to use logic when you’re constructing flow charts and databases, etc. But it’s not particularly helpful for threat and risk assessment. Priorities reorder too fast in high-threat percentage situations, humans exist, and so on.

(Save-for-later: Check wonky risk assessment module for excessive logic statements. That would explain a lot.) Three finally said, We are pretending to be space debris.

It had a point. And what Three was pretending or not pretending to do wouldn’t much matter in the next ten-plus minutes.

The problem with the mission— Okay, the problem with the mission is the mission itself. Missions in general often suck, but extractions that can turn into hostage situations are the worst.

The other worst was that this dock and the section of the torus it serviced was owned by Barish-Estranza and contained one of their second-level headquarters installations. And there was a chance in the high 70s that they knew we were coming.

(Emotion check: Again? It’s been like two seconds.)

Obviously, I did not want to do this. But Three was shit at pretending to be human. (I know, I should have been working with it more, “mentoring it,” as the humans insist on saying. But we also needed to let Three do what it wanted for a while, and what it wanted was to watch science documentaries and listen to freakishly advanced machine intelligences pretending to be bot-pilots talk at it. (Mostly Holism, but a few of the others had got in on it after discovering that there was a SecUnit around that liked being lectured to.) So there wasn’t a lot of pretending-to-be-human training involved in that.) Our cargo bot reached its hatch just as it was cycling open. It climbed inside and Three’s dark-vision filter activated, so the airlock’s blue and green safety lights lit up more of the interior.

It was a lock designed for bots, so it was pretty utilitarian. There wasn’t even any active process to clean off the build-up around the vents. Our suit feed gave us stats

on the flush of station air and the pressure and gravity change, and we started picking up ambient audio. Then the inner hatch slid open.

This was a bad moment. We couldn’t risk a peek over our cargo bot’s shoulder and Three couldn’t deploy drones without setting off the dock’s interior alarms. Three admitted, This is not ideal.

By which it meant it was somewhat terrifying. I acknowledged but didn’t reply; I was waiting to grab the interior feed so we didn’t get killed.

(It turns out executing a deliberate, convincing distraction is a lot harder than being a distraction accidentally.)

The cargo bot stepped through the inner hatch and we slipped off its back. Its giant body continued on, even as a flotilla of hauler bots swerved to avoid it. Three had frozen into immobility as I pulled in the dock’s feed and started to work. We were in the shelter of the lock’s safety overhang, which was in a visual shadow because of the angle of the wall lights; it was also a tiny motion and audio sensor black-out zone. (Since my penetration-testing report on Preservation Station, they had installed individual sensors on all the hatches where that happens. Mihira and New Tideland’s stations and space docks were in the process of doing it now.)

(This is why humans shouldn’t do their own security, or farm it out to automated sensor sweeps. Sensors can’t see what they can’t see, right? And while humans are shit at security, mostly because of the overreacting and some being assholes who just like using weapons to hurt each other, they are fantastic at getting into places where they aren’t supposed to be.)

(Apparently it’s genetic? Overse recommended a book on human evolution and it was even more fucking weird than anything I’d read about it before.)

I made it through the first three DockSys feed walls and got a view through the cameras. The dock was arranged in a cylindrical column, with multiple levels of platforms around a central pillar with lifts and ramps. We were on level 20. The walls were just bare metal, scarred by accidents, no decoration or holos or anything. (This was supposed to be a big deal Corporation Rim torus/ whatever, you’d think they could make an effort, even in here. But they never do anything fancy where it’s just indentured workers to see it. The only real color was the Barish-Estranza logos stamped on everything.)

Hauler bots sorted the cargo containers into pallets ready to be transported to modules or ships or for internal dispatch. Large shafts in the floors of the platforms accommodated cargo containers with their own propulsion systems or climbing cargo bots. There should be very few humans in here, since most of the supervision and oversight would be done via the dock’s inventory system. (Which was standard practice because

it was cheaper, obviously, but really, areas like these are dangerous for anybody squishier than a hauler bot to be wandering around in.) (The exception to this is mining cargo docks, which, surprise, have an insanely high casualty rate. Even company executives would leave notations on the mortality reports like What the shit are they doing in there.)

But with a little tweaking, my camera views found plenty of human activity, scattered at different sheltered points around each level. They were all in protective suits that looked bulky enough to hide security armor. Some of them were actually working, but most were just pretending to.

This is great, because it meant our distraction plan would work. Also not so great, because I would like Three to get out of here alive.

I sent Three the schematics highlighted where the potential security personnel were located; it replied with an acknowledgment sigil and an updated map projection. The cargo bot lumbered out of the potential fire zone and we eased forward. Ambient audio was low, just the hum of hauler bots and the clank of maneuvering modules on the level below us. The cameras spotted more human activity on a platform two levels above us, a scramble of workers (probably the real workers) trying to get to a lift tube and a few workers (the security humans pretending to be workers) holding them back. I’d hoped

we’d have a little more time. Fortunately, I was now in three different Sec and Safety systems and MotilityControl for all the lifts, including the central cargo lift. I already had my files queued up and loaded, I just needed to adjust the code for these individual systems.

There were a lot of things they could have done to slow me down, if they knew I (or something like me) was coming. (They couldn’t keep me out, not with what they had available, not without isolating their SecSystems from the feed and each other, and that’s not possible if you want them to do their jobs.) But they hadn’t done those things. Which meant (1) their intel was flawed;

(2) they didn’t know I was coming and this security was for something else.

I ran that through risk assessment and it produced the equivalent of a shrug sigil.

(Emotion check: Shrug sigil right back at you, you piece of shit.)

The kind of coding I did didn’t leave a lot of what ART liked to call forensic artifacts behind; if Barish-Estranza had good intel they might be familiar with the results of what I could do, but they would assume I’d just be bashing around in there destroying stuff with viral code, not redirecting process commands.

We couldn’t delay any more without making them suspicious. They obviously knew we/somebody was in here, even if they weren’t quite sure where/who yet, or the indentured workers they had dragged in as cover wouldn’t be panicking. I told Three, We’re go. Proceed.

Three started across the platform, staying in shadow and using the hauler bots as cover. I could have removed it from the cameras entirely but intel suggested they didn’t know I could do that, and I wanted to keep them from knowing it for as long as possible, since it was really important for the rest of the plan.

Three reached the cargo lift and used a magnetic grip to attach itself to the side of a powered cargo module moving upward. We drifted up with the module, so it would look like we were heading for an admin access three levels up. I glitched their security feed at random intervals, to keep their attention on it, while I was setting up on MotilitySys.

Systems like Motility are designed to keep things from running into each other; it’s hard to override that to cause crashes. It’s much easier to get the system to send things on increasingly chaotic routes that don’t crash, causing mass confusion instead. Humans always assume you’re going to kill them, which is one of the reasons they overreact to everything. (Ratthi says that’s genetic, too, but I think he was being sarcastic.) (Maybe he wasn’t.)

We reached our target level and I gave Three another go-ahead. It released its grip from the cargo container and dropped onto the supposedly unoccupied platform. It said, If TorusSecurity does not attack, should I engage them?

That isn’t going to be a factor, I told it, and added, feint aggressively toward that inventory kiosk, then drop and roll back toward the lift shaft.

Three charged the inventory kiosk where the armored human security guard was hiding. They overreacted (surprise), jerking up their heavy projectile weapon and firing. By that point Three was on the ground as instructed and the projectile passed over its head toward the lift shaft. I had already nudged the powered cargo module currently floating serenely upward into position. The projectile slammed into its side plating.

A powered module should be able to take a hit like that (they bump into each other all the time) but I had followed up the positioning nudge by cutting power to one of its stabilizers. So the force of the armor-piercing projectile knocked it into a spin and right out of the lift field. The module tumbled across the platform, startled cargo and hauler bots scattered, and every audible and feed proximity/safety alert in the whole dock went off. I kicked its stabilizer back on and MotilitySys engaged a temporary air barrier. The module stopped right in front of a transparent section of wall over an office, where human supervisors had been pretending not to watch us. Well, they had been doing that. Now they were belatedly screaming and flinging themselves away from the window.

Three was already up and sprinting and I engaged code haulerfight.file and cut off all access to the cameras.

So that worked great.

The hauler bots accelerated and charged at each other, then veered off at the last second. The patterns were complex and unpredictable and it was happening on every level of the dock. I’d put some of it together from code I’d used before, but changing the variables and adapting it for B-E’s specific code architecture on the fly was tricky. MotilitySys was helping everything along, obeying what it thought were my authorized instructions to “test” its tolerances. It was really going for it, too. It wasn’t going to last long, though, which was why Three needed to move fast now.

SafetySys had ordered the cargo bots to climb the walls or head for the nearest hatches, so they were all in the way, too. We were both scanning the updated map data but Three spotted the best route first, including a feint toward a maintenance access and faking a dive into one of the side lift tubes. I made a couple of adjustments and suggestions. Three said, I have it now. You should go. Right, so, I am not actually physically present with

Three.

I was tagging along with it via a new share-architecture code derived partly from ART’s ability to create iterations of itself and partly from the way we had built Murderbot 2.0. “Partly,” because the me who was with Three was not a full iteration; it was a partial download, but it was the parts I needed.

This wasn’t a full independent virus (or software baby, as Amena would say), it was just me going partially dormant while taking a temporary ride on Three’s hardware. We did have a secure feed link, but it was currently dormant, too, waiting until we needed it. We had to do it this way so B-E’s SecSystem couldn’t detect (or worse, break) our connection.

This was necessary because Three just doesn’t process as fast as I do, despite being a newer unit. I knew my processing stats had increased over the course of going to a lot of places and needing to write increasingly complex code at increasingly fast rates in order to get out of those places. Notwithstanding the time I nearly blew my brain out trying to process on a company gunship’s hardware. Three didn’t have that experience and sending it in here alone would have been basically murder.

This way was better. Three would cause a little more chaos, then exit the torus through a lock it had already identified and return to the shuttle. It would even get to ride inside this time.