Activation Degradation, page 21
Its handler was supposed to guide the platform robots, take care of the robots. But if Aimsley believed Maya, then it had to believe its handler had lied. That the one person it had been programmed to trust the most had brought it into this world intent on using that trust to mislead, betray, and delude.
Aimsley could try to forget what it had seen, remember that it had come aboard expecting subversion, expecting conversion. Remember that this ship had attacked its platform and its sisters. Remember that its handler had sounded so worried for it, so sorry for it.
It would be easier in many ways to simply choose to remain Unit Four. To decided nothing it had encountered here made a difference. To give itself over to its handler, regardless.
But trusting Maya offered more. More time, more chances, more . . . unknowns.
As it sipped its tea, it came to a resolution. A way forward.
It had to choose the broader path. The one that could lead to the most opportunities.
It had to choose to believe the humans.
Choose to be one of them.
“My handler is coming,” it blurted. It still felt dulled, its emotions grayed, but it put force in his voice.
Maya, who’d been reading something on her fold-up screen, looked up and blinked. “What?”
“They spoke to me when we were outside the ship. They’re coming for me.”
“Oh shit.” She scrambled to put her screen away. “Buyer!”
“I don’t want them to come for me,” it told her earnestly. “I want to help you get away.”
“You do?” she asked as Buyer came over from the dash.
“What is it?” the captain asked.
“I think everyone should hear this,” Maya said quickly. “We should call Fuentes up from the engine room and Jonas from the hold.”
Buyer gave her a skeptical look, but immediately bounded over to a comms box to assemble the whole crew.
“Three days?” Buyer asked sternly, arms crossed over his broad chest.
“Less than forty-eight hours now,” Aimsley said. It and Maya still sat in the booth. The others stood across from them, bodies rigid and faces a mix of angry and skeptical.
“And we’re spinning our wheels not far from a giant bull’s-eye,” Jonas huffed. He hadn’t shouted yet. Aimsley was waiting for him to shout.
“No way we can get far enough off our current position with the maneuvering thrusters alone,” Fuentes said. “Not far enough to confuse the trail, anyhow.”
“I’ll help you fix your engines,” Aimsley said carefully, looking at the dregs in the bottom of its teacup. The last few mouthfuls had been especially bitter. “But I want something in return.”
“Of course you do,” Jonas said under his breath.
“You aren’t in a position to negotiate,” Buyer said.
“Of course I am,” it countered lightly. Not a challenge, just a fact. “Based on a few things I’ve heard Fuentes say, I’m guessing your fusion engines rely on a field-reversed configuration, or maybe a spheromak. Am I right? You said the plasma torus wasn’t stable, so there’s likely something amiss with your magnetic field generation. Maybe the alignment’s just off, but I think you’re all pretty sure you’ve got irreparably damaged components. Which means, one, we are really fortunate you only lost an exhaust nozzle when we forced the manual cutoff; and two, you need new parts to fix the engines. Parts you have, but don’t know how to use. Parts from my ship. I’ll help you integrate the systems, if . . .”
Buyer raised an eyebrow impatiently. “If?”
“If you agree to save my sisters.”
“Your sisters?”
“The other robots aboard the platform.”
“You just told us your handler is coming to get us, and now you want us to hang around?” Jonas asked incredulously. “Go back to where all those fuckers—?”
“There are other things on the platform that might be of interest to you,” Aimsley said quickly. “That you could bring back to your Harbors. Tech. Supplies. There’s more hydrazine, more fuel. Presuming everyone has survived since my launch, you’ll be rescuing a maximum of four units. We can gather enough food and water to feed ourselves on the journey out of the solar system, so you won’t have to worry about sustaining the additional passengers.”
“And by food you mean reconstituted”—Fuentes twirled a finger in Aimsley’s direction—“human proteins.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, fun, more cannibalism,” Jonas snarked.
“We usually consume it fresh from the vats, but we have plenty of emergency stores, dehydrated for longevity. We won’t be an extra burden to you.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Buyer said with a sardonic chuckle.
Jonas looked around at his shipmates. “This is a trap, right?” he asked, voice gone an octave higher than usual. “This is obviously a fucking trap.”
No one answered him right away.
“Yeah,” Fuentes said, closing her eyes as though searching for strength. Clearly she didn’t want to believe it might be a trap, but did nonetheless. “It stinks, Buyer. Can’t lie.”
“We should do it,” Maya said, gnawing on her thumbnail nervously. “We go in fully alert, sure. But if it’s not a trap . . .” She looked at Buyer. “This haul, it could be the one.”
“And if it’s not the one, we could all end up dead and hacked up into bits to make more meat robots,” Jonas snapped. “I don’t believe this thing’s sad little act for a minute.”
“You didn’t see Aimsley’s panic attack,” Doc said. They were the only one who had listened to Aimsley’s confession of contact with clear sympathy instead of disdain. Of course, Aimsley had only admitted to contact during the spacewalk, not its initial call for help. But its senses were still too dulled for it to feel either shame or triumph over the deception. “Its reaction was genuine,” Doc continued. “Those kinds of biometric spikes can’t be faked. I count that as fair proof that this shift—this change of heart, this request for help—is sincere.”
Buyer sighed heavily, as though irritated to have a moral voice he could not ignore finally pipe up. “Look, if it was any other ship sending up an SOS, you know we’d help—”
“I don’t see why we shouldn’t treat this just the same,” Doc said. “There are people down there that need rescuing.”
“Yeah, but most ships sending up an SOS aren’t likely to shoot us down on approach,” Fuentes said practically.
“If the communications tower is back up, I can talk to them when we get in range,” Aimsley reassured the crew, glancing sidelong at Jonas while it spoke. It was sure this next bit of the plan would only rile him. “I think I can get them to let us come close. I might have to lie to them, though. Tell them I captured you. That’ll be the quickest in, the best way to be sure they won’t attack.”
Surprisingly, Jonas said nothing. He narrowed his gaze, scrutinizing Aimsley, but didn’t suggest again that this was a ploy—a way to get the unsuspecting humans to simply deliver themselves into enemy hands.
Aimsley noticed Jonas was wearing a gun holster slung around his hips, blaster in place. Likely a message—or an open deterrent, presuming the dampening field could be turned on and off at will—now that Aimsley was walking around the ship mostly unfettered. He might have made peace with Aimsley’s presence and existence, but that didn’t mean he was about to make nice and be friendly.
“What’s our other option here?” Fuentes asked. “Hang around Jovian space just hoping we can reverse engineer those triangle parts on the sphere before the Earth handler gets here? They’re going to home in on you like a beacon, aren’t they?” she asked Aimsley.
“I honestly don’t know what kind of tracking implants I might have,” it said. “They can read my biorhythms, upload information, and speak directly into my auditory processing centers, so a tracker definitely isn’t out of the question. But,” and this was important, “they weren’t able to see me inside the wedge, only when I was outside. Your shielding blocked the transmissions. They do have our last-known position, but as far as I can tell, that’s it.”
“And they’ll know if you leave the ship again. They’ll see you back on the platform.”
“Yes, most likely.”
“Does that mean they’ll be able to track you when we get to a Harbor?” Buyer asked.
Aimsley fiddled with the rim of its cup. After swiping up an errant drop of tea, it rubbed the wet pads of its fingers together nervously. “Perhaps. I don’t know what the range might be, or how your Harbors are composed—or what they even are, really.”
“Well then this is definitely a no-go,” Jonas said. He turned to Buyer, laid a hand on his shoulder before whispering directly into his ear. Fuentes clearly knew what they were saying; she looked away from Aimsley, as though it could read the secret in her gaze alone.
Buyer uncrossed his arms, gave a shrug, then crossed them again. “I know. I know that was the point. Shit.”
Aimsley looked to Maya. She, too, looked away.
Buyer ran a hand over his face. “He’s right, Aimsley. We can’t put the Harbors in danger. We barely keep out of Earth’s reach as is; we can’t let you lead them right to us.”
“Doc,” Maya said, “is there any way you could identify a tracker in Aimsley? Remove it?”
Doc took a deep, disappointed breath. “I wish I could say yes. But Aimsley’s enhancements are very unlike the holopad implants we have. Its are more . . . integrated. Even if I could identify the specific matrix and thought myself qualified to perform brain surgery—which is what we’re talking about, let’s be honest—there’s no way for me to know what removal might do to Aimsley. I wouldn’t risk it. If we had enough time, with more qualified doctors, then maybe. But now? Out here? No. Not to mention I’d have to do it another four times over for its siblings . . .”
“So the best deal for everyone is to just drop the bot back where it came from,” Jonas said. “It goes its way, we go ours.”
“No,” Aimsley said emphatically, fidgeting even more. “If you leave us on the platform, you’re leaving us there to die. Unit One might not last another week, it was so close to its TID.”
Buyer reached across the table and put a hand over one of Aimsley’s, stilling the nervous flicking of its fingers. It was surprised by the gesture, as it didn’t seem one of irritation. Instead, one of concern. Aimsley was taken aback by the comradery it conveyed. “If you come with us, you’d need to remain aboard until we figured out how to shield you. Short of putting you and your sisters in lead suits, I’m not sure what we could do. You’d be trapped.”
“Better trapped and alive by choice than trapped and dead by design,” Aimsley said. “Plus, I think I can come up with a diversion that can at least guarantee my handler won’t bother trying to follow us out of Jovian space.”
“Oh?”
“Their priority will always be the mine, not the AMS units. Threaten the mine, distract the Earthling.”
“This is pretty risky, Buyer,” Fuentes admitted. “But really, I don’t see another way. We need Aimsley’s help. The engines need fixing, no two ways about it.”
“And you and Maya can’t figure it out?” Jonas asked.
“No. Not in the timeframe we apparently have, at least.”
“I will make it worth your while,” Aimsley insisted. “You were out here to scavenge parts and tech. This way, you won’t be sorting through wreckage, but getting it in clean, perfect, working condition. And all you have to promise me is that you will help me save my family.”
“That’s all we have to do?” Jonas scoffed.
It wasn’t his response that Aimsley was worried about, though. It looked to Buyer, whose face was stony, unreadable. He stared straight ahead, into the middle distance. “Either way, your handler is coming, right? Either way, we need your help to integrate the ship parts. Either way, we might be chased out of Jovian space. And either way, we still can’t go back to Puerto Grande unless they accept our offering. Even if it’s not the offering we thought we’d scored.”
“So what’s left,” Doc asked, “but to choose to do the right thing?”
“And the right thing is not to put all of humanity in danger for five robots,” Jonas insisted.
“Five people,” Doc countered. “They’re people, Jonas, I don’t know how to get that through your thick skull. And we don’t just abandon people because we don’t know how to deal with the problems they cause. Do we?”
Aimsley looked between the two of them, the way their gazes had locked. Doc’s stare was oddly grim—accusatory. Jonas’s was heated, ashamed.
The AMS unit was more curious than ever about what had happened to drive the crew this far into the solar system, about what Jonas had done to get them banished, and why he was still aboard their ship if he’d caused them so much trouble.
Jonas, after a moment, demurred. “Right,” he said softly.
“It’ll be a long trek back to a station of any kind,” Doc said to Buyer. “Plenty of time to worry about how to shield Aimsley and its sisters from Earth then, once we’re all safely on our way.”
Buyer nodded. “All right. All right, we’ll do it—but you,” he said, staring at Aimsley, “better make it worth our while. You get us up and running, and we’ll get your sisters off the platform.”
A glimmer of hope flickered to life in Aimsley’s chest. A new warmth, seeping through its limbs, driving the numbness away. “I will. Thank you. Thank you.”
“And no more secrets,” Buyer added with a firm dip of his chin, eyeing Aimsley closely.
“No more secrets,” it agreed.
Chapter Seventeen
They set to work strategizing immediately. Aimsley drew a map of the platform for Jonas and Buyer to mull over while everyone else prepared for the boat’s dismantling.
“We won’t be able to dock with the platform,” it explained to the two men. “The boats are the biggest thing that goes in and out of the hangar—there’s no way to get the Violent Delight inside. We’ll need to make sure everyone’s spacesuits are working and patched properly. No more accidents. My sisters will all have their own shells. All we need to do is guide them aboard.”
“And your diversion?” Buyer asked.
“I’ll need help, but we can usher the platform into a degrading orbit. If we time it right, we can even threaten some of the mining equipment in Jupiter’s atmosphere. My handler won’t abandon the mine to come after us.”
It pointed to the main control room on the platform, down arm-A, and pointed out where all of the automated course-correcting systems were located. They’d have to make sure the emergency overrides didn’t seize control.
When it was sure Buyer and Jonas had all of the basics down, it entered the medbay to ready itself with the others.
Aimsley groaned when Doc presented it with yet another shell.
“Biohazard suit,” they explained. “There’s likely nothing more dangerous than gut bacteria to contend with aboard your ship, but we’re not taking any chances.”
“Plus,” Maya said, helping Fuentes with the closures on her bulky, yellow ensemble, “easier to clean.” She tugged at the collar of her own shirt. “This isn’t going to be pretty, I’m sure.”
“Can I take these off first?” it asked, shuffling from foot to foot, despising the way Jonas’s itchy trousers rubbed against its legs.
It longed to be free again—to throw off all these useless shells. The biohazard suits might be easier to clean than the thin, porous cloth of Jonas’s shirt, but surely that was still more of an ordeal than wiping its own casing.
“They’re made to be worn with other clothes,” Doc said. “But you’ll all have to strip down and hit the showers after, so if you’d rather be bare underneath, I don’t see why—”
Aimsley started divesting itself of the offending fabric before Doc could finish giving their permission.
“Well, that settles that,” Doc mumbled with amusement.
There was a small lamp on the front of each of their suits. Aimsley clicked its on and off out of curiosity while awaiting further instruction.
Once the three of them were suited, Fuentes and Maya flanked Aimsley, leading it down through the ship to the cargo hold.
Aimsley’s typically robust sense of feeling was slowly returning, its senses heightening.
It was almost back to a place that let it fully feel the ramifications and possible consequences of this course of action. Of this choice.
What if it had been duped? What if it had fed itself right into the crew’s elaborate con and was about to hand its sisters over to the enemy?
No, it couldn’t think like that anymore. It had chosen to trust the humans for good reason. Its old programming, its old paranoia, was obsolete. It had to look ahead, to keep moving forward. This was the right path, it was sure.
The lift shifted oddly as they rode down, twisting, sending Aimsley’s insides flip-flopping. “What was that?”
“Gravitational redirect,” Fuentes said. “Don’t worry about it. Just focus on your ship, how to best dismantle it.”
“Should be good and solid by now,” Maya said, as the lift stopped again and they exited, quickly traversing the narrow strip of hall that led to the hold.
“We left it out long enough, I would hope so,” Fuentes replied.
The interior doors to the hold were large—would easily allow them to bring entire triangle panels through, if necessary. The hold itself was a giant bay, like a hangar. More than a half dozen boats could have easily docked inside, with ample room to spare. The microwave array parts had been dismantled and neatly arranged to one side of the hold. On the other, equipment of all kinds, large and small, were stored on racks and shelves. There were even a few wheeled vehicles with grasping appendages and front buckets to help aid in dismantling their “scavenged” pieces. In one corner, a built-in booth and table—not unlike where the crew took their meals—provided either a temporary resting place or a surface on which to fiddle with smaller, more delicate parts.
The boat sat in the center of the space, between the large inner doors and the massive outer doors, which Aimsley realized had to be set in the bottom of the wedge. The gravity on this deck was different, so that they were in essence standing on one “wall” of the wedge while staring “straight down” at the doors in its base.
