Exit Strategy

Listening to the SecSystem’s audio, I heard a crew member in the corridor say, “I’ve never seen one out of armor. They really do look human.”

I made a gesture in that direction that I had only seen in the shows that were rated high on the obscenity scale. Gurathin saw me and made a choking noise.

Then Mensah gave Pin-Lee her okay on the bond agreement, and walked over to glare down at me. In a low voice, she said, “I am so furious with you.”

Ratthi drew back nervously. (Me, Ratthi wasn’t afraid of, but when Dr. Mensah was mad it was better to be in another room.) He said, “Uh, do you want to speak in private—”

“You should sit down,” I told her. “You’ve been through a traumatic experience. Tell them you need the MedSystem’s Retrieved Client Trauma Evaluation protocol—”

“It’s right, you really should get a medical evaluation—” Gurathin began, Ratthi and Pin-Lee chiming in to agree.

“Never mind that.” Mensah had no intention of being distracted. “You stayed behind to get yourself killed.”

Okay, aside from the fact that that was actually my intention at the time, that was not my fault. “They wouldn’t have let me through. I told PortSec if they let you through to the shuttle, I’d stay behind.”

That stopped her. Her brow furrowed. “Is that why you stayed?”

I could have lied. I didn’t want to. “Mostly,” I said. I looked at her with my actual eyes again. “I wanted to win.”

Ratthi, Gurathin, and Pin-Lee all watched me. The company crew incompetently pretended not to try to eavesdrop. Dr. Mensah’s expression softened, just around the edges. Ratthi said, “Why did you come through, then, when Gurathin got the barrier open?”

“Because that last one was a Combat SecUnit and it was going to tear me apart. That’s not winning.” I wish I knew what winning was. And once I started telling the truth, it was hard to stop. “I don’t want to be here.”

Pin-Lee sat down beside Ratthi. “We won’t be here for long. We’re going to rendezvous with a Preservation ship after this wormhole jump and get off this flying vending machine.” She glared toward the crew. “It’s like everything I hate about the corporates wrapped up in one heavily armed package.”

You could say that about me, too. I asked Dr. Mensah, “Then what?”

“That’s what you and I need to talk about,” she said. She glanced at the company crew. “Though let’s wait until we’re not being recorded—”

I lost the rest because I caught an alert from the bot pilot to the gunship’s human captain. We were on approach to the wormhole but the hostile was still tracking us. The ship’s SecSystem had just deflected an attempt to establish a connection via comm to the ship’s internal feed.

“Hostile engaging,” I said. I stood up automatically, but there was nowhere to go. This could be really bad. I didn’t know anything about ship-to-ship combat, but from the alert levels … Palisade couldn’t deliver a code attack via our comm, could they? Outside in the corridor the crew had all gone still, heads tilted, listening to the captain’s feed.

“What?” Ratthi said.

“They’re firing on us?” Mensah said.

“No. It’s a— Incoming!” Too late. Comm had just engaged and was receiving. Above us on the flight deck the captain yelled for someone to manually shut down the feed and someone else was ripping open panels to get to the components. SecSystem snapped into defense mode and walled off life support and weapons. I yelled, “Disengage from the feed, now!” Ratthi and Pin-Lee fumbled to take their interfaces out of their ears, and I cut the connection to Mensah’s implant and threw a wall around Gurathin’s internal augment. Two augmented humans in the corridor fell to the deck, writhing, and I threw walls around them, too. SecSystem should do that, but it was busy fighting off the commands to open the airlocks and allow the ship to decompress.

On the flight deck someone said, “How—How could they—”

Someone replied, “Shitfuckers have our codes, they overrode comm protection—”

Palisade had obtained a set of company comm codes, and had tried the list on our comm until they found one that worked. (Like my list of drone control keys that I used to take over the security drones on Milu and in the TranRollinHyfa port.) Once the connection was made, they had delivered a code bundle to the ship’s feed. Not standard malware or killware, not something I had ever seen before. It was in the ship’s systems, trying to cause a catastrophic drive failure, trying to take down life support, jamming the bot pilot’s command system. SecSystem flung up walls but the hostile code was eating right through them. It was eating SecSystem.