Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries #3) - Martha Wells Page 0,18

had passed a lift junction, but it wasn’t big enough for all of them at once and Wilken sensibly refused to split the group. On the feed from Wilken’s cam, I spotted hovering marker displays with the descriptor symbols for biological hazard potential; they were nearly there and I needed to get a move on. I wanted to be tucked up back in the shuttle and watching Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon by the time they finished their check of the bio pod.

The access consoles had been shut down and the data storage would have been removed entirely, which was way more secure than just a system delete. But that wasn’t where I intended to look.

The schematic showed that the facility used diggers. (Actually geological manipulation semiautonomous … something something, apparently I deleted that out of permanent storage. Anyway, they aren’t bots, they’re just extensions of the geo systems.) The diggers have their own onboard storage for their procedures and tasks, but they also have scanning capability and they log what they find. I found and booted their interface console and yes, the diggers were still here, tucked under the geo pod, curled up in containers three times the size of our shuttle, inert without their parent system.

With the interface I was able to make copies of their storage without waking them. Somebody had thought to order them to dump their logs (which would void their warranties, but I guess since the facility was supposed to fall into the planet, nobody had cared). Unfortunately for that somebody, the diggers had dumped their logs into their buffers and then been shut down before the buffers timed out and deleted.

It was a lot of data, but I was able to construct a query to exclude the operation commands and other extraneous stuff. I had to make a direct connection to copy the data to the extra memory clips I’d implanted, which meant peeling back the skin around my right forearm weapon port again. Once I had that done, it went pretty quickly. I sat on the edge of the console, facing the door, and started up a favorite episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon in background to help pass the time, though I kept one channel on Miki and the team feed.

I had just finished when Miki said, Rin, is that you?

I was distracted, stopping the episode, untangling myself from the console and from the sleeping, mostly empty brains of the diggers. I knew the team was still over in the hub for the bio pod (they were doing a physical assessment of the equipment for the bio matrices, and trying to get the consoles rebooted), so the question didn’t make sense. Is that me what?

This. Miki sounded confused, worried. It sent me an audio clip. I heard the humans talking on the comms, Hirune and Ejiro, then Gerth made a comment.

The conversation? It was something about containment units not being where they were supposed to be, and I didn’t understand why Miki was confused. I’m still in the geo pod.

No, Rin, this. Miki replayed the clip and stripped out the comms audio, so the human voices were much fainter. It was ambient audio, I could hear the air system. I could also hear light thumps, fast like a heartbeat … Oh, oh shit.

I wasted .002 seconds throwing a code into Miki’s feed like I was responding to another SecUnit. I was at the hatch to the geo hub before I realized I needed to say it, or Miki wouldn’t understand what to do. I slammed around the corner and up the corridor toward the lift junction. Miki, you have an incoming unknown/potential hostile moving toward your position. Determine direction, then alert your clients, in that order.

Miki widened its scan, and the rest of its senses went dark as it shifted all its attention to audio. It was rotating, trying to get a wider field. I was still getting the comms on the humans’ feed, and Gerth said, “What’s the little bot doing?”

“What’s wrong, Miki?” Abene asked.

Rin— Miki stopped trying to sound like a human and sent me an urgent assistance request tied to the raw audio data. I should have realized, Miki wasn’t a security bot, it had no code to deal with this and no one had ever shown it what to do in an emergency involving active and probably sentient hostiles. I reached the lift junction but the stupid lift had returned to a neutral station