She won’t let them leave the shuttle to look for you. They’re having trouble contacting the station for help.”
Abene looked up, frowning. “What trouble? We were in contact with the station when we arrived. It shouldn’t—”
I actually lost the rest of it because my drone pinged me with a report. It had reached the decontam room and had the hatch of the shuttle in scan range, and it hadn’t found any sign of the combat bots. I said aloud, “They aren’t there.”
“What?” Abene stood up from the console, alarmed. “Who?”
“The combat bots. The drone didn’t find them on the route to the shuttle.” I was skimming through everything it was sending me, the scans, the visual data, audio. The drone’s scan was a lot better than mine, and it had been actively searching the route, checking spots for potential ambush. Comparing it to the schematic, I couldn’t see anything it had missed. “They aren’t there.” I sent the drone’s visual into our closed feed connection.
Miki’s head cocked as it reviewed the video. Abene threw a worried look at Hirune. She said, “Then they must be here, near this pod, trying to trap us.”
Maybe. I found my careening invisible lift pod, told it to go to the nearest lift junction to the drone, and ordered the drone to take the lift to the junction outside the geo pod. Within a minute the drone was in the access corridors outside the hatches I had sealed, scanning. I watched it record empty corridors and junctions. Nothing. The bots weren’t setting up an ambush for us on the way to the shuttle and they weren’t outside the geo pod.
My potential strategy hadn’t experienced a catastrophic failure or anything, but I was missing something.
Right, this wasn’t a good time to panic. I went back to my first contact with the drone, the intel I’d gotten before it had been locked out of the combat bots’ network. There was the entry for that third active combat bot. It was marked “active out of range.”
I had assumed it was out of range because it was headed toward where the shuttle was docked, to set up a trap for us when we tried to retreat, but I didn’t know that.
Go back further. Wilken and Gerth had been sent here in place of the contracted GI security to stop/kill the assessment team. So why hadn’t they acted as soon as they arrived on the transit station? With so few people there, it wouldn’t have been difficult. They would have needed an exit scenario if they had acted on the station, but they needed an exit scenario even more here on the facility. The team’s shuttle wasn’t wormhole capable. They would have to return to the transit station, kill the PA staff who would possibly be asking a lot of questions about what had happened to the rest of the assessment team, and steal a wormhole capable ship. (Preferably a ship without a bot pilot who would vigorously resist being stolen.) That sounded like a lot of work, especially considering the fact that there were combat bots on the facility, ready to destroy intruders, so why had GrayCris hired someone else?
The obvious answer was that Wilken and Gerth weren’t here to kill the team, but wanted to get into the terraforming facility because there was something, either data or a physical object, that they intended to retrieve. But they had made no move to retrieve anything. I was certain Wilken had been surprised by the combat bot attack, my analysis there was not faulty. Had Wilken and Gerth even been sent by GrayCris, or was there another corporate or political entity in play?
I needed help. I was rattled, I was still leaking a little, and I hadn’t been able to watch any media in what felt like forever. In desperation, I copied all my possibilities into a potential strategy/decision tree diagram and threw it into the feed for Abene and Miki.
Abene winced, startled at the sudden large image in her feed. Then her face went still as she studied the diagram. Miki wiped wound sealant onto the last shrapnel laceration in my back and shifted into analysis mode. Hirune, still half conscious, watched us with a confused expression.
In the feed, Abene detached one of the assumption squares and moved it away from the tree. She said, If we assume Wilken and Gerth were sent by GrayCris, then they aren’t here to retrieve anything. GrayCris had ample opportunity to remove anything