Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

As I'd said, Just what I came here for, manual labor.

I helped move the fence, Three and I were on either end, lifting and walking while I kept track of Ratthi doing the same with the fucking combat unit. Brig gave directions. The only reason I was here was to keep Ratthi alive, or at least increase the chance he'd be alive at the end of this visit on the surface of Preservation's main planet.

I like Ratthi. I really do. He and Dr. Mensah were the humans who got me from the start, didn't push me too much, stopped the others from interrogating me about my feelings (when Ratthi wasn't trying to interrogate me himself, ugh), and accepted me as I was, both at that point, and later. They didn't require me to prove anything. I would feel awful if he died and a whole spectrum of emotions if he died doing something I'd explicitly told him not to, like doing a meet and greet with this rogue combat unit he'd spotted on that farm planet he'd gone to.

I could see what was going on. The same pattern of behavior that had prompted Ratthi to see me as a person and treat me with respect was in operation with this Skulk. (Not that I was jealous, you know. Or anything like that.) But there were big differences between Skulk and I, core personality and programming issues, that Ratthi didn't seem to be taking seriously.

When you're talking about a SecUnit and especially a Combat SecUnit, you really need to take those things seriously. We have weapons built into our arms. Our processing power, compared to a human, is immense. The way we can split our attention between multiple inputs or mental tasks is not to be underestimated. Our strength and durability puts any pure organic larger than a tardigrade to shame. Ratthi should have taken a hint from the old farmer saying Skulk could wrestle bulls into submission.

(I could probably wrestle bulls into submission, too! Not that I would. Sounds gross. And it would indicate I was jealous or had something to prove, right? Which I wasn't, and didn't. I promise this is not sarcasm this time.)

My point is that the cost of being wrong here is immediate death of the human. Why was it Ratthi understood that in regard to the bison, but not Skulk?

We had split the fence on this side of the holding pasture and peeled out parts of it to either side. These parts lined up with where the ramp from the ship would extend, when it was extended. So far the ramp was still closed, keeping all the big, smelly fauna inside. There wasn't enough fence to reach all the way to the ramp, so when the fauna came down the ramp, they'd have a choice of proceeding forward to where they were supposed to be, or roaming around the sides to run us over and kill Ratthi.

I might not know anything about bison, but I've herded enough organic units (the human ones) to know they never go where they're supposed to if they have a choice. That's why we were putting up extra fence sections. Brig told Skulk, "Go check those buildings for some posts and a post driver. They gotta have some around here somewhere."

I wondered grouchily if that counted as stealing. Probably not, since the posts would still be here when Brig and Skulk left. Anyway, Skulk wandered off toward the buildings. Three followed it. Brig and Ratthi leaned against the fence and started talking, with Ratthi saying, "I think we should talk about Skulk."

"No," Brig said immediately. "No, I don't believe we should. Let's talk about the bison."

Ratthi started, "But-"

Brig's voice firmed. "I said no, offworlder." The tone of 'offworlder' tripped an alert for me – that was delivered as a slur, even if my language module didn't list it as such. I didn't move because Brig wasn't armed and I was fairly sure even Ratthi could take him in a fight, but the situation abruptly had a lot of my attention. Brig seemed to know he'd overstepped because he softened his voice. "You might think that because you're a human and I'm a human, and Skulk's not a human, that we get to talk about him. That's not the way it is. He's a man. If I'm going to talk about him, I'm going to talk to him and not to you. You and me? Let's talk about the bison."

Well … aside from the offensive 'he's a man' … I really couldn't fault him for this. I wanted to, but I couldn't. Even though Brig had earlier been talking about excusing Skulk killing people, coming to its defense like this was a point in his favor. Ratthi seemed to agree. He drew in a deep breath, looked around the place, and then accepted the topic change.

I backburnered the rest of their conversation and sent a pair of drones off with an overhead view of Skulk. If it had overheard the conversation, it hadn't reacted. Three and I were sharing the drone's input. We also had a channel open between us, but there was nothing to say at the moment.

Dealing with Three had been a trip for me. It was the first SecUnit I'd been able to talk to openly, without having to hide that I was rogue and constantly fear I might let something slip that would get me taken apart, possibly by the unit I was talking to. I don't know about Barish-Estranza, but company units have a baseline safety protocol to alert on and immobilize 'malfunctioning' (i.e., rogue) units. Maybe even destroy them, depending on what their SecSystem told them to do. Not that I would have wanted to talk to my fellow SecUnits anyway, but that was a definite discouraging factor.

It wasn't a factor with Three. But I still didn't want to talk to it because most of the time, what I wanted and what Three wanted had no correlation. I wanted to keep my humans alive, watch media, and … I was still figuring out the rest. I didn't know what Three wanted and from what Three said, neither did it.

It was just coming along with us, drifting on the leftover programming to follow orders and guard people, while it, too, figured out the rest. (It seemed way more into guarding people than surveilling them, which I assume is a manufacturing difference.) I kept an eye on it in case it became a hazard, but we'd clocked enough hours in proximity that I wasn't keeping as close an eye as I had before. I wouldn't say I trusted it but … well, okay, I mostly trusted it. I trusted it a hell of a lot more than I trusted Skulk.

I watched through our shared feed as Skulk performed a physical search through the buildings, using its eyes. I wondered why it didn't have any drones to do this for it. I wondered why it wasn't trying to snag my drones. Was it being polite? It didn't have to be polite. It couldn't have torn me apart the way it could pull a human to pieces, but in a straight up fight between me and a combat unit, I knew the odds. They aren't good for me.

Three pushed a video into our shared feed that I found disconcerting at first, mostly because I had no idea what the fuck it was. The video quality was bad, but I could see there was grass and posts and some strange, smallish humans in crappy clothes and unfamiliar hats, talking in an accent that was an exaggerated version of Brig's. I couldn't make out most of the words. They were handing around metal posts.

It was when I caught sight of armored hands that I understood. This was a video from Skulk's point of view, except why was it so bad? It was like it was helmet cam view instead of Skulk's own eyes. Did combat units not record their primary visual inputs? Why would it bother to store helmet cam footage when it had so much higher quality available? Also, did it wear its armor constantly? (What I wouldn't give to have armor and be able to wear it all the time.)

Where did you get this? I asked. I was going to be impressed as shit if Three had hacked Skulk's systems and snatched a random video out of its memories. And frightened. Both of Three for doing it and of Skulk when it found out it had been done.

Skulk gave it to me. Three pointed out the tags in the video, identifying the post driver and the posts. So I could help it find the items.

You're talking to it? I hadn't noticed a separate channel up, but I hadn't been looking for it, either. Now that I did, there it was. I hadn't been invited, so I stayed out of it.

Yes. A moment later, Three pointed out, You were talking to it earlier.

Yeah, I know. Shit. Everyone was talking to it. Why was everyone except me getting all cozy with Skulk? (I was definitely not jealous. I was having some other emotion that just looks like jealousy. (Dr. Bharadwaj had been helping me identify my emotions, but some of them remained indecipherable.)) (But wait, I am jealous about the armor thing. I'll admit to that. Someone had even taken off the logos, so there was a lot to be jealous of there.)

I looked at the video again, more carefully this time. Not because I cared about post drivers, but because I cared about my humans and Ratthi wasn't done interacting with Skulk. A video of Skulk interacting with humans was useful intel. I had a lot of experience with humans being nervous around me, not liking me, and wishing I wasn't there at all, so I knew what it looked like. The humans on this video weren't afraid of Skulk. That was interesting. They were … wary, maybe careful. I might call it nervous, but that would be a stretch.

They definitely didn't treat it like another human, but they weren't treating it as a tool, either. They were mostly respectful. Not the comfortable respectful of, say, the Preservation Aux team to one another, but more like the uneasy respectful of Senior Indah toward me. Like they knew what it was, what it could do, and weren't super happy about that but were fairly certain it wouldn't be directed at them.

What this showed me was that Skulk could operate (and already was operating) outside its core programming. That was a good thing. On a side note, I had to question why Skulk had a saved video of fence repair. Did it have that much spare storage capacity? (Mine was taken up by a rotating list of media. I suppose if Skulk wasn't into media, it might have a lot of unused space.)

Did it routinely save videos of interacting with humans so it could review them later? If so, what was it trying to learn? How to do a better job repairing fences? How to interact better with humans? It seemed unlikely it was reviewing a video like this for threat assessment or target identification, which I would think were the main functions for a combat unit.

This was telling me a lot about Skulk and the life it was living. Bonus points that this was entirely unintentional from Skulk or Brig's side. No one was trying to stage something here and influence me. This was just random surveillance video, essentially, that I could use to evaluate the proper security response to this individual.

It vibed with my function, is what I'm saying.

Okay, maybe Skulk wasn't quite as high a threat as I'd thought. I still didn't trust it. It and Three were returning. Three was carrying posts. Skulk was carrying a sledgehammer that had a head about as big as both my fists. I was unsurprised that the combat unit had the weapon.

Three said over the feed, Skulk says there are four fence sections we will need to bring from the barn to complete the chute. It sent me a file produced by tactical imaging software using (still inexplicably crappy helmet cam) overhead pictures as the base layer, probably taken while the ship circled before landing. Yep, there we were – the three of us – so Skulk was the source of the image.

Not that I'd thought Three had tactical imaging software. I didn't. As I knew it, the matching software for a SecUnit was devoted to surveillance and facial or object recognition, geared for easy export, storage, and data mining. As such, it didn't imbed as much information in a single image.

Three was figuratively pointing at the clusters of lines and tags that indicated the proposed fence line, but I was more interested in doing some data mining into the image itself. Specifically, us. Skulk hadn't scrubbed out our tags so I could see what it had marked us as. Three and I were targets – not surprising. We were labeled as SecUnits (discrepant), threat assessment 36% individually which was higher than I would have put my odds. It meant Skulk thought Three and I, together, posed a credible threat to it. It could still probably take us, but not as easily as I would have thought. Which of us was overestimating the other was a good question.

Ratthi's tags were more interesting: 6% threat. I would have given him 2% tops. These numbers aren't to be taken as '2% of the time, Ratthi would win against a CSU' any more than '72% of the time, Three and I could take Skulk'; that's not what they mean, and they encompass a wide range of variables. The error bars were right there, but they weren't very big. It had seen Ratthi on Plestead. It knew he wasn't armed. Why did it think he was three times as dangerous as I did?

Ratthi was a target, but he had an additional tag as a 'customer'. Not a client. I'd never seen a customer tag. There was no reason to think a combat unit would have a larger or different list of tags than I did. (I'd already noticed Skulk's armor, aside from the helmet, was company-issue despite the logo-removal, damage, and color treatment; we'd shared an owner if not a manufacturer, which meant a lot of our modules would have been designed by the same people.) It had to be a user-generated tag. It could have been made by the scrapper I'd been told repaired it. Or it could have been made by Skulk. It was definitely applied by Skulk. This customer tag might be the reason why Ratthi was still alive.

Three had stopped trying to get my attention and was waiting. (Physically, it was handing off the posts to Brig.) I rotated the view. It was 3D, which was neat. When my software generated images, it wasn't 3D due to what the company saw as 'unnecessarily large file size to data density', meaning it wasn't worth it in a literal monetary sense.

I finally looked at the parts Three had wanted me to look at. (At this point, Brig and Skulk were discussing where the ramp would come down and thus, where they should put the posts that would hold up/brace/whatever the fence.) The various fence pieces in the view were unnecessarily tagged for levels of cover and obstruction, as though Skulk anticipated a firefight breaking out here, including the proposed sections, which was what Three was still patiently pointing at. Yes, okay, four more fence sections were needed to create what the software considered a tactical perimeter to contain the fauna. I see it, I said.

Three continued as though I hadn't taken an absurdly long time to review the file, The fence sections are in that barn. This time, the thing sent was a still image of the barn I could see from where I stood, followed by an image of the fence sections inside it. Both were stamped with info showing it was from Three's eyes.

Okay. So? While I'd been evaluating the images, I'd been keeping some of my attention on Ratthi. He had moved over next to Skulk and Brig, making him closer to them than to me. This was suboptimal, but pushing my way over and interposing myself was even more suboptimal (plus awkward and possibly hostile) so I was just standing there keeping an eye on things.

Three was next to it, handing off the last of the posts to Brig and Ratthi. We should go get the fence sections.

Us? I'm watching Skulk.

Have a drone watch Skulk. I cannot efficiently move all four panels at once. Three had walked over to face me and was now standing there as well, staring over one of my shoulders.

I bit back the urge to tell Three to go get them one at a time then. Why can't you and Skulk get them?

Skulk will be using the hammer.

Which, yeah. Brig had determined a spot to set a post after more side conversation with Ratthi. The old farmer was holding it. Skulk was moving into position to hit it with the sledgehammer. I thought they were going to use a post driver thing?

We did not find one.

I scowled as I looked at the unfolding workplace safety violation. My job description as a SecUnit has often (and usually) involved keeping humans from hurting themselves or each other in mines and on surveys. I might not have modules for agricultural operations, but I did for basic tools. No one was wearing safety glasses (except, ironically, Skulk's helmet visor) or gloves (except, again ironically, Skulk's armored gauntlets). I was watching this unprotected elderly human bare-handedly holding a metal rod that a combat unit was going to smash a hammer into hard enough to drive it into the packed soil. With Ratthi standing a meter away, looking directly at this, equally unprotected.

Shit. I was going to have to volunteer. "Wait." Skulk did not wait, continuing in the act of raising the sledgehammer. Brig, though, moved the post several centimeters when he looked over at me. That was when Skulk stopped, then pulled the hammer into a ready position for a melee weapon, pivoting slightly toward me. (No, that wasn't threatening at all.) I waited a beat to see if Skulk was going to move toward me. It didn't. So I said, "I'll do it."

"Do what?" Brig asked.

I walked over, ignoring how Skulk tracked me like I was its new primary target, which I obviously was now (duh). "I'll hold the post. This is a dangerous activity. Humans should stand back."

Brig's accent abruptly worsened as he said, "He ain't gunna miss."

"There is a hazard of metal fragments from impact, or other flying debris, as well as vibratory damage from holding the post."

Brig looked unconvinced, but he let me take his position holding the post. He stepped away. I sent Ratthi the safe distance to stand away and Ratthi cooperatively moved to it. That made me feel a tiny bit better, because facing a combat unit armed with a weapon that could potentially crack my skull casing and knowing I was going to have to stand here and let it swing in my direction, was not my idea of a good time. I wanted all the good feelings I could get.

I was nervous. Skulk was making the direct eye contact Ratthi had previously and very correctly identified as threatening. I was still a target. Which was fair – I'd pointed my weapons at its owner less than an hour earlier. I'd still be angry about that if Skulk had done the same. Which … point to its favor, it hadn't.

Standing here face to face with it, the slight difference in our heights was noticeable. I stared back at it, my face settling into something I hoped let it know I was going to be watching every fractional second of its swing, every vector. Through its cleared visor, I could see its eyes. My eyesight is excellent, far better than a human's. Because of this, I noticed Skulk only had one functional eye. The other was broken internally. The surface lens and cosmetic iris had been repaired, but the inside of it, where the important stuff was … something wasn't right.

The mystery of the shitty helmet cam footage became clear. If it had used its eyes, the footage would have been monocular and would have given away a weakness immediately. My expression lost the angry edge. I cocked my head a little in curiosity. That was, of course, when Skulk decided to swing.

It didn't hit me. But wow did I ever have a few fractional seconds of terrified uncertainty there. I was hyper-aware that as far as Skulk was concerned, I was still a threat. But apparently it had some self-control. Good for me. I held the posts while it drove the rest in.

When that was over, I was busy experiencing some relief when Skulk decided to ask me an uncomfortably personal question: Why are you short?

I'd calmed down enough to snark back, Why do you only have one eye? I was curious, but mostly just being an asshole in response to its blunt and unsolicited inquiry.

Humans, it answered without rancor.

I decided if it could behave, I could, too. At least for one word: Same.

There was a pause. Will you tell me how? [Trade?]

How I became short? The question was rude, but the answer wasn't dangerous information for me to give out, assuming I edited it right. And I can see how a physically non-standard SecUnit would raise questions for another rogue. But it sounded like I could get something out of it. Will you tell me what happened to your eye?

Yes. It pushed a file into my feed while I was still splicing together the pieces I wanted to show for my height change. They included before and after footage of me mimicking human behaviors, walking up and down ART's corridors. I'd altered the color scheme to add an extra layer of protection for ART's identity. I also included some security camera clips of me in a transit ring crowded with humans, one that detailed the scanners I had to go through to get from one place to another, and a carefully scrubbed section of ART's MedSystem work on me so I could pass better as human.

It took me a little bit to put together in a way that would make sense to someone who didn't know the context (and whom I didn't want to know the context, i.e., about ART). All Skulk needed to know was how my height change had been effected and the basics of why. I sent it over. Then I looked at the file I'd been given.

It was media, basically, but drawn from the tactical imaging software or a similar program that ran during active combat. As such, it was loaded with data beyond the regular audio/visual of media. Most of it was recognizable to me as unit operational info, telemetry from systems identical or similar to my own, like balance, tactility, and proprioception. I could 'feel' the unit's functioning – circulation, breathing, performance effectiveness, threat and risk information, tagging functions, and diagnostic data. It was immersive.

Which would have been really cool, if it hadn't been for what the unit was doing. The clip started with it running in the rain, in darkness, not at anywhere close to top speed. It was more like a good jog, as it was encumbered by the deflection plate and also running targeting data and localized scans. Ahead of it (or from my point of view inside its eyes, plural – no shitty helmet cam view this time), was a building or house with light inside it and the front door open. As Skulk approached, two armed humans took cover on either side of the door frame, firing as fast as they could at the construct.

Skulk didn't slow as it returned fire: one shot to a knee, one shot to a shoulder, one shot to the head. Dead human. A woman came into view, running toward the back of the room: one shot heart. Dead human. Data was popping up with each projectile launched, estimating the chance of kill when the targets fell. One shot hand to the remaining shooter at the door, who'd turned slightly and exposed himself to look over his shoulder at the falling woman. One shot head as he whipped back to see his hand blown off. Dead human.

Skulk leapt into the room, decreased speed abruptly, and pivoted its head one way, then the other to scan the room. I winced in sympathetic (is that the right word?) pain because my neck doesn't have that range of motion. On the other side of the room, there was a door being pulled shut. One long bound later, Skulk's fingers jammed between the door and the frame before it could shut, flinging it open.

So far, things had happened so fast against armed and aggressive humans, that I hadn't had much of a chance to feel anything emotion-wise. Projectiles had been flying both directions. Two had hit Skulk's armor. But now, Skulk was tracking people who were trying to hide. It felt wrong.

The feelings Skulk was having about it, which I could sense in the telemetry, were cheerily pleased, the construct equivalent of frolicking in delight. I'd like to call it sadistic, but it was too innocent and guileless for that. It was just having an intensely good time murdering people. That ended as it came through the door and took a blow directly to the faceplate of its helmet. Vision went to one input. Okay, so that's what happened to its eye.

Then a weird thing happened that made me stop the video: there was no pain. There was data, but nothing that felt like pain. It was like the pain sensors, the things that made me hurt and wince and avoid injury, were permanently dialed down to nearly nothing. The absence was freakish and startling. It knew it had been hit in the face and it also knew this was suboptimal and that it had lost visual. But it didn't actually hurt.

Instead, the situation activated some kind of combat overdrive where the delight was replaced with wrath. It grabbed the human's arm with one hand, torso with the other, and ripped the arm off. There were two humans past it, also taking actions, but the overdrive was like battle frenzy. The others didn't matter as long as the primary target was alive. It threw aside the arm and grabbed the head, yanking it off as well because in the fraction of a second that had passed, the human hadn't had time to register as dead yet from losing his arm. It was unhinged.

I had to stop the video again, this time because I was hyperventilating. There was blood everywhere. Remember what I said about it being immersive? This was why I preferred my media unrealistic and human-based. It wasn't like I couldn't do this stuff myself. In fact, it was probably because I could do this stuff myself. Ask the gray people who'd laughed about deleting ART (but you can't, because I killed them, very similarly to what I was seeing here, and that had been so satisfying). This was what I'd thought I'd done at Ganaka Pit – mowed through people, tearing them apart, killing one after another.

This was what I wanted Ratthi and Mensah and the others to understand about SecUnits and combat units – we were dangerous! With combat units, you didn't even have a drive to protect. You had, literally, the opposite, plus apparently jack shit for pain deterrence. In the case of a rogue, you also didn't have a decent control mechanism (although I had no idea how the governor module worked if pain detection was wonky). Any wonder why I didn't want this thing anywhere near my humans?

Fucking hell. I got a hold of myself. The file was big because of all the data, but I could see from the time stamp it wasn't very long. Real fights were over fast. I knew that. There were only the two other humans, although I was sure of what their fate was. I started it again, just in time for one of the other humans to hit Skulk over the back of the head with a metal bar. The helmet cracked, taking most of the impact.

Skulk started to turn, a new primary target designated. The woman, who was not the primary target, jammed something dark against the broken faceplate. Without taking its attention from the man with the bar, it punched her in the side of the chest, breaking ribs, noting possible incapacitation and eventual death in her tags.

The overdrive function was still in play. That meant circulation was at maximum, with deep breaths, high energy output, and maximum processing power online and devoted entirely to the pending combat solution. It was making my skin crawl just to look at the data. I've been pissed off and given my all before, but I'd never been as pissed off as the data indicated (mainly because I flat don't have the maxed out attributes that allowed it; my motor doesn't quite rev that high and there's no reason it should for a standard SecUnit who usually faces humans and not, like, other SecUnits).

It bypassed the bar to grab the human's head with one hand, torso with the other. In the process, the human rammed the end of the bar into the broken faceplate and wrenched, cracking off additional bits of faceplate and further damaging the eye socket. Skulk separated the human into pieces. On its blind side, the human woman (who turned out not to be incapacitated after all) tried again. This time, the thing she thrust into the helmet lodged there. Skulk felt pressure against its cheek and jaw. A thing was there. It would deal with the thing after it dealt with the new primary target.

It wrapped an arm around her torso, another around her head, and I froze the video for a completely new and different reason. Skulk was staring at her head, eyes taking in the wall some distance past her head. It was taller than her, so had a good view of what was there. The thing about SecUnit eyes is that they take in the entire field of view with an even focus over the whole thing, like most cameras. It was how I could stare over someone's shoulder or off to the side and still know their expression and body language without using a drone.

Pointing your eyes right at someone gets you a little more data (and is necessary for a target lock), but you don't need it for basic stuff like conversation or whatever. In Skulk's hyped up, all systems red status in the video, I had a great view of the small human huddled under the table. Next to it was an even smaller human, probably too young to walk. They were tagged as targets, because some portion of Skulk's adrenalized brain had noticed them, too.

I felt my insides clench and stay clenched. I knew what was about to happen, but I desperately hoped it wouldn't. I looked at the time left – just a few seconds. Not enough time for the kids to get away. But there was something yet to happen, something Skulk thought was important enough not to have cut the video after the initial strike to the faceplate.

They were kids! They shouldn't be targets! It made me sick to see them tagged like that, to know Skulk had applied that tag, to know it hadn't and wouldn't hesitate. This was just what I'd warned Ratthi and Mensah about! My teeth ground against one another and I ignored the obligatory performance reliability warning. I had to know how it ended, even though I already knew how it ended. Angry now, repulsed and anxious, I restarted it.

For a second, I thought there was a glitch, because several inputs dropped. The last thing I'd seen was the woman's head part ways from her body, but then there was nothing. No visual, no hearing, no taste, nearly all tactile gone from the neck up. The telemetry clogged with error messages and alerts.

Had something exploded next to its head? I was only getting the inputs, not what Skulk was thinking about all this or the conclusions it reached about the info. If I had to draw my own conclusions, then I'd guess that 'thing' had been a grenade. If so, how the fuck was Skulk not in catastrophic shutdown? Skulk was still standing and still had its head. I could see that much in the data. My respect for the hardening of combat units went up a notch.

In the meantime, I was experiencing hope for the children. They could run away and escape while Skulk couldn't see or hear! There was an open door right behind it! There was a possible happy ending! (Another reason I preferred the media I did – the endings were usually good or at least satisfying compared to real life.)

Skulk, in the video, was not having a happy ending. The combat overdrive function was desperately trying to find an even higher gear to kick Skulk into. (There was not one, and the feedback was making Skulk tremble and sway. Its distress was clear.) Then it got worse as something hit the deflection plate of its armor, the impact identified with high probability as a projectile strike. Something was shooting at it. It ran a diagnostic. The results came in. One of the eyes was intact, just covered with its own blasted flesh.

The video ended there, because Skulk knew nothing of narrative structure and as a result, was a really shitty videographer. Who had been shooting at it? What happened to the children? I had questions, but I didn't really want the answers. (I did, I just also didn't. The normalcy of this ambivalence was something else Dr. Bharadwaj had been helping me recognize.) Skulk was here, which meant whoever had been shooting at it was most likely dead. As were the kids. But I didn't know for sure. Which was frustrating and upsetting.

As well, I was feeling all these emotions about what I'd seen. I was unbearably anxious at the danger the children were in. I thought about how I'd feel if those were some of the small humans from Mensah's family. I thought about how Mensah's small humans were here on the same planet as Skulk. And here in easy shooting distance was Ratthi, insisting on close contact with a combat unit that had tagged him as a target!

I wished I could show this to him without fucking things up for myself. It might be worth it to convince him of the danger. No matter how inoffensive and harmless and vulnerable a human was, they were not safe in the presence of a combat unit. (Nor even in my presence – depressing, but true, and that's why I wasn't sharing this with Ratthi.)

I realized I was seething into the open feed between us. I closed it, not thinking much about why. I guess it just seemed unwise to be shedding anger like waste heat in the general direction of the one you're angry at, doubly so when it's a combat unit. But it turned out to be the wrong choice. I was so emotionally compromised that Skulk's immediate rapid movement baffled me for the split second during which I could have reacted. By the time I realized what was about to happen, it had seized my shoulder with a grip like a vice and had its other fist in my face, gunport open above it.

.

.

I froze. I'm sure my eyes flew wide. It's hard to kill a SecUnit but getting an explosive projectile through the eye socket had a really good chance of doing it. Probably 98% at this range (less if Skulk wasn't carrying standard ammo but even then it would take out vital portions; I would lose part of 'me' no matter what). By the point in time I'd gotten around to calculating that, I was also noticing I hadn't been shot yet. So it was making a point. Or waiting for me to do something. Doing something seemed really unwise at the moment.

But I couldn't just stand here. After a pregnant pause, I reopened the feed under the uncertain assumption closing it had been what had set this off. Skulk didn't move. I didn't get shot. I was still angry. Killing harmless baby humans is not something I'm going to stop being angry over just because someone is threatening me. But looking at the time stamps on the feed, Skulk hadn't done anything while I was angry. The guns had come out when I'd cut communication (and maybe cutting off open expression of that anger – I don't know).

Into the feed, Ratthi sent an urgent message: What is going on? There was a lot of alarm, shock, and confusion behind it. Me too, Ratthi. Me too.

Skulk offered me a private channel. Cautiously, I accepted. (Its gunport was still about ten centimeters from my right eye, by the way. We were both absolutely stock still. In the background and at some distance, Three, Ratthi, and Brig were also holding position. I was glad of that, because the last thing I wanted to happen was for one of them to complicate this and precipitate me getting my head blown off. Which, if it did happen, would in fact be the last thing I'd ever wanted. Funny, that.)

In the private channel, Skulk showed me its version of the public feed, with Ratthi's question in it and the tag next to his name. Tag, singular. I stared at it. All it said was 'Customer'. No 'Target'.

Truce? [Trade?] Skulk asked in the private feed. 'Target' flickered next to Ratthi's name and disappeared again.

I really wanted to stay mad. It was offering me a concession – an important concession, one I wanted very badly. Did I want it more than I wanted to be angry? I wasn't even sure what we were fighting about (if you could call this stand-off a fight), other than my right to be angry in silence and privacy. Actually, I suspected that was exactly what we were fighting about – not that I couldn't be angry, just that I couldn't withdraw, hide, and plot in stealth about it. I had to remember that Skulk considered Three and I a credible threat to it. In exchange for continuing (presumably non-hostile but apparently super angry is fine) contact, it was offering safety for Ratthi. And I could stay mad if I wanted to.

Truce. I added, [Trade], although I wasn't quite sure what the tag meant aside from the obvious.

Skulk released me and lowered its arm. The gunport clicked shut.

Into the public channel, I told Ratthi, Nothing. It was just showing me its gunport.

Why was it doing that? Ratthi was still alarmed and now highly skeptical. He was not an idiot.

Because … Crap. I hadn't thought this one through. I couldn't think of a good reason. I wanted to see it.

I don't understand.

I'll explain later. I was lying and even at this point, I knew that.

Skulk said in the private channel, We should get the remaining fence sections together to show your client we have made peace.

Yeah, right, I thought without enthusiasm. None of this meant I wasn't still angry about the children. I'm good at multitasking. Working with Skulk was hardly the first time I'd had to tolerate working with someone I hated and perhaps even feared. I pinged an acknowledgement and started moving. We were halfway to the barn before I could work myself up to ask, Did you kill those kids? I sent it a picture of the small humans.

Yes.

Even though I'd known the answer, I still ached with a wave of new rage. Why?

They were targets. It pointed at the tags embedded in the image. The mission was to eliminate targets.

Some human forced you to do that?

I was asked to do it and I asked to do it.

'Asked' – not ordered?

Brig does not give me orders.

I ignored that because Brig sucked and it wasn't like I didn't have tons of experience with humans telling units to do the worst things. I flirted with the idea of killing him for putting Skulk up to that mission, but let it go because if I did, Skulk would kill Ratthi (and probably myself and Three). Also, if I'd had any doubt whatsoever about a combat unit's morality or trustworthiness, that settled it. Not that I'd had any doubts. Those had been children. Small humans. Very small. Not threats. Even Skulk's own system hadn't seen them as threats. I'd seen the threat assessment on them. It was nil. Skulk had killed them anyway.

We arranged the fence. The bison were let out. The combat unit and its horrible owner left Preservation. And the children were still dead.

I didn't explain later to Ratthi. I didn't talk to anyone. I guess if I was describing my emotions to myself as Dr. Bharadwaj wanted me to, I would say I was grieving. That's what you do when people die who you didn't want to die, right?

Chapter Text

Ratthi: Can I talk to you about something?

Gurathin: Sure.

Ratthi: You know that bison delivery from Plestead that happened yesterday?

Gurathin: That was yesterday?

Ratthi: Yes.

Gurathin: I remember you said you were leaving to do a site audit, but that was weeks ago. I guess I've been out of the loop. If they've delivered, then I assume things went well. What's up?

Ratthi: No, you're right. I should have reached out earlier. We've missed each other recently.

Gurathin: Looks like … twenty-four days since we were last face-to-face. Not that I think this counts. Where are you, anyway?

Ratthi: I'm on Preservation. It's evening here. We released the bison from the main corral today and I'll be monitoring them as they explore their new range. Though so far we still have them in an intermediate holding pasture.

Gurathin: Sounds good. You'll make a cowpoke yet.

Ratthi: Yes, but … Okay, this is going to be long. Can I just … is this a good time?

Gurathin: Yes, it's fine. I was editing a co-worker's report, but I needed a break.

Ratthi: Okay. Well, the planet I did the site audit on is called Plestead. I went to this little agricultural station on it called Bravara (and when I say little, it had maybe twenty people in it, maximum). But they have a lot of cattle and bison with good bloodlines and a century of records there, plus three centuries of historical records from off-world. All individually tagged and traced. It's what we were looking for. Big populations of large bovines are hard to find, anywhere, especially with good record-keeping. But that's not the important thing. On the station was a rogue Combat SecUnit.

Gurathin: What the hell?

Gurathin: Are you sure?

Gurathin: Did you misspeak?

Ratthi: LOL. No. I did not misspeak. Its name is Skulk. It was working for the owner. I did my negotiations and came back to Preservation. I talked to SecUnit and it … it was very upset.

Gurathin: Okay. I'm listening.

Ratthi: It was insistent that Skulk was too dangerous to be allowed to come anywhere near Preservation – not to the station, not the planet, and SecUnit would rather it wasn't even in the system or the Alliance. I have to admit Skulk had some threatening behavior when I met it on Plestead, which was why I was asking SecUnit about it.

Gurathin: Threatening how? Why would it threaten you? You were there at their request, yes?

Ratthi: Yes, I was. It came out later it was very, very concerned its owner would find out it was rogue and then turn it out, or hate it, or just be afraid of it. But that it would be homeless and unloved and lost in the world. So me showing up and asking questions about how it was rogue must have frightened it a great deal. As a result, it acted very threatening to me.

Gurathin: You're making a lot of guesses there about its motivations.

Ratthi: Only some. I heard a lot of that from the person itself, so it's not all guesses.

Gurathin: Okay.

Ratthi: After talking to SecUnit, I took the matter to Mensah, who consulted with SecUnit and said she wouldn't stop Skulk from coming here based solely on what it was or what it had been made for.

Gurathin: O-kay.

Ratthi: What is that? Your tone?

Gurathin: Reluctance. Vague second-guessing of Mensah's decision there. But we would be having a VERY different conversation if things had turned out badly, so go on.

Ratthi: That's similar to what SecUnit said.

Gurathin: Ha.

Ratthi: You're right, though – things went fine. Sort of. Skulk and its owner landed. In the course of introductions and greetings, SecUnit insulted it on the feed, called it an asshole three or four times, tried to provoke it, impugned its motives, and asked what its owner meant to it. Something about that last finally set it off, badly. It came out of the ship. SecUnit grabbed me and threw me behind it, and when Skulk got close (and I want to stress it was only walking, not charging at anyone), SecUnit and Three drew their weapons on it and on its owner.

Gurathin: oh

Gurathin: That sounds … bad.

Ratthi: It was! I am so glad you agree! I was … flabbergasted. SecUnit took every opportunity to escalate that situation until we were all just a hair's breadth from being killed!

Gurathin: But you're alive.

Ratthi: Yes. Its owner de-escalated things. No thanks to us. Then later SecUnit and Skulk had some manner of confrontation that SecUnit refused to explain (even though it said it would at the time) or even admit was a confrontation. The reason I'm writing you is because I'm angry. I thought I was over it yesterday, but the longer it went the more I wanted to tell off SecUnit. I'm not ready to have a calm and mature conversation about how things went and I don't know that SecUnit is, either. The way it has been, I think it really has a grudge against combat units. It wasn't anything like this with Three, but maybe that's because it had Perihelion there to mediate. After things calmed down a little, SecUnit was still saying we should never go back to that system and it … it told the combat unit it smelled bad and its whole ship smelled bad, which is just … juvenile.

Gurathin: I want to remind you before you go too far that none of our logs are safe from SecUnit. Including this one.

Ratthi: I know. I know. And that's something I'm at peace with. If it's reading this, then it can come talk to me and hopefully we can talk it out. In the meantime, I need to talk to *someone* about this. There's nothing I've said that isn't the truth as I know it.

Gurathin: Okay. I understand. I'm listening.

Ratthi: Thank you, by the way, my friend. It's nice just to say it and have someone hear it.

Gurathin: I know.

Ratthi: Okay, well. I think we should keep up ties with these people. If these animals work out, next year we should add a few more. I've already approached the owner about an exchange and while he wasn't keen on our bison program, some of the milk cattle were interesting and he'd like to get a male embryo from us. He has a small herd so it's harder to keep the diversity he needs. Also, I was serious about offering this Skulk person options! I was completely serious! Even if it is a combat unit. Even if it's a combat unit that has done what amounts to law enforcement or military action and in the process killed people. I don't understand how that isn't to be an expected element of its past. Didn't SecUnit kill fifty-seven people?

Gurathin: That's what its logs said.

Ratthi: Which is horrible! Knowing it as we do, that must have been unimaginably traumatizing. The Corporation Rim is … I know you've tried to describe what life is like there, but … Oh, Davyth. The only way we stop this from happening to Skulk as well is to do something. Sending Skulk back to the ranch and making sure it knows it can't go anywhere else is us repeating the mistakes we made with SecUnit. It likes its current owner, but what if he passes away? It needs a community it can rely on. It needs resources. I don't want SecUnit's opinion of it to be true.

Gurathin: I hear you.

Ratthi: Do you agree with me?

Gurathin: Do I need to?

Ratthi: No, you don't. Don't- Don't worry about it. I don't need the agreement. I'm sure I'm right.

Gurathin: I'm sure you are, too. SecUnit's views didn't come out of nowhere, though. I'm sure it has good reasons to be concerned.

Ratthi: I know. I know. That's why I wanted to talk to you. Someone who wouldn't automatically think SecUnit was wrong, but wouldn't think I was wrong, either.

Gurathin: I think people are wrong all the time!

Ratthi: LOL. That can be read more than one way, my friend.

Gurathin: You know what I mean. Now here's something I want you to think about. And all I'm saying is for you to think about it. In the Corporation Rim, SecUnits provide security for labor camps.

Ratthi: "Labor camps"

Gurathin: Exactly. But the corporations have a vested interest in keeping their workers alive and working. That's why they use SecUnits, who surveil and sometimes intervene to protect people. That's what they do. When there's a riot or an uprising or an attempt to overthrow the powers that be, they don't send in more SecUnits. They send in combat units. Every time. People don't tend to survive that.

Ratthi: SecUnit pointed this out, too.

Gurathin: Yeah. I don't claim to know anything about the programming or personhood of a combat unit. I barely know anything about a SecUnit and we've been interacting with one for a while now and another for half as long. But I know they're made and used for different purposes. Just because we can find common ground with SecUnits doesn't mean we can with the combat versions.

Ratthi: They're people. I know you know that, but sometimes it's like there's a nuance I'm not getting from you.

Gurathin: They're constructed people. For a purpose. The purpose of combat units doesn't benefit very many people.

Ratthi: So … what does that mean? They shouldn't exist?

Gurathin: It would be better for the rest of us if they didn't.

Ratthi: Are you saying that some people, because of how they're … built, or how they've been used … shouldn't be alive? Shouldn't be allowed to live?

Gurathin: No! No, that's not what I'm saying. They shouldn't have been built in the first place, but now that they're here, they're here and we have to find ways to work together. I'm just saying … I don't know. We might not be the best equipped for that. Whatever 'that' is.

Ratthi: Humans aren't well-equipped for dealing with bison either, but we make do. Also, Skulk seemed very attached to its owner. Its owner has interacted with Skulk without injury and expressed no fear of Skulk despite being very clear on Skulk's capabilities. It shows it's not an unrestrained danger to everyone around it. When I was on that station on Plestead, no one acted afraid of Skulk or surprised by it. They knew it well. It was part of the community.

Gurathin: Then it already has a community.

Ratthi: Not one that knows or acknowledges even the smallest thing about it. You didn't see how frightened it was for its owner to learn that governor modules existed. It doesn't live authentically. The people in Bravara call it a man or a bot. I don't know what would happen if things changed with its owner. Who else will reach out to this being if we don't? Is there anyone in the entire galaxy looking out for the interests of free constructs? We had this conversation before, when discussing SecUnit's treatment after it collapsed on the company gunship. There is no one else who has their best interest in mind.

Gurathin: Well … you're right on that last point. And I don't like the idea of it living in fear. It's in the interest of everyone except the unit to re-enslave it. The more powerful it is, the more interest there will be. It knows that. They're not stupid.

Ratthi: Which is exactly why I have to do something here.

Gurathin: Okay. I'll help.

Ratthi: I wasn't asking for that. I know things are complicated with you and SecUnit. It mentioned you again yesterday.

Gurathin: Now that's a conversation for face-to-face.

Ratthi: Ah, good point. Do you want to tell me about the paper you're editing?

Gurathin: Oh, you just want me to bore you sleep, right?

Ratthi: Now that I have this thing about Skulk off my chest, perhaps I can finally relax. Do you need any help on the paper? Venting, bouncing ideas off me?

Gurathin: No. I was just code-switching so she could publish in the Corporation Rim. It's always stressful. I appreciated the break. Count me in on helping with whatever it is you decide to do. Get some sleep.

Ratthi: I will. Good night, Davyth.

Gurathin: Good night, Ratthi.

Chapter Text

Brig didn't ask to talk until we were in the wormhole, but I knew it was coming. "Tell me about this governor module."

I was calm, knowing as I did now that this wasn't going to lead directly to me losing my home and possibly life or freedom. "It is a set of programs separate from a construct's personality that allows an outside authority to take control of the construct's body or punish it through aversive sensations."

"Pain, you mean?"

"I do not find pain aversive but the governor module is."

"You don't have this module-thing?"

"No."

"Those two bots didn't have it?"

"No."

"What do people need it for then?" I stared at Brig, charmed by his innocence. Brig added, "It's not like bison or dogs or even men have that."

"They aren't as dangerous as constructs." Not that I was arguing on behalf of governor modules, but I understood the reason they existed.

"I'm not so sure about that." Brig shrugged. "Are there constructs out there without this thing that are causing problems?"

"No. They are destroyed on sight." That was the policy, of course. Except there were two on Preservation. How many were elsewhere? The very existence of the policy presupposed the existence of rogue units, I realized. If they weren't causing problems, then how would anyone know about them?

Brig had a different question. "If they're so dangerous, then who destroys them?"

That was easy. "Combat units."

"Ah-huh." He poured himself a glass of high-proof alcohol while I continued to puzzle over how many rogue units might exist, or what percentage of constructs might be rogue, to justify the programming I (and presumably every other governed unit) had, the danger of false positives, and the lack of a robust non-rogue authentication system.

I didn't have enough information to reach meaningful conclusions, but that was hardly a first. I had a long list of nebulously philosophical subjects I devoted my processing to, late at night when there was no one around to play Target. I added this to the queue, because I needed things to keep me from getting dangerously bored.

Brig continued, "You know, there's a lot of people out there who want to control everything they can, right down to what you think, and what you think is right and wrong. The people who made the station settlements on Plestead didn't truck with that. They made their own places, little though they are, where a man can be free. I might have bought you, but you're free there, too, you know."

I did know. As I shifted to thinking about the meaning of his words, there was a feeling in my mind and in my body that I liked. It was like prolonged mission success. I think it might have been joy, but how can a person be sure that a certain word applies to a set of neural activity, when said neural activity is always described from a neurotypical human point of view? I didn't want to imply the wrong thing, so I said, "I like that."

It seemed to be enough. Brig nodded approvingly. "So do I. I been to a handful of worlds and never liked any of them like my home. You understand that's your home too, right? It's like your …" He thought for a moment, trying to find a combat-related word that might be easier for me to grasp. "It's your home base. Your operating base."

"I know that now," I said earnestly. "After what you said on Preservation." I reinforced it again, because I wanted to be sure he knew I'd listened and understood: "I know that now." My home, as a concept of place and belonging, was very important to me. More important than I knew how to express, which was an ongoing challenge.

Communication between Brig and I was still an unfolding thing, with each of us trying to speak the other's metaphorical and literal language. The incident on Preservation had made it clear the translation was not as accurate as I had thought. Part of it was learning what he meant in context, but there was also making sense of his native dialect. It was close to the standard Corporation Rim Nev Ispangi, but the idioms were especially hard to track.

Brig said, "Those fellows on that planet were talking to you electronically right? With signals?"

Did he even know what the feed was in any technical sense? I suddenly wasn't sure. "Yes."

"What about?"

In retrospect, that was a good question. I canceled my memory query for 'times Brig used the word 'feed'', which wasn't working anyway. The results so far were about chicken feed, feeding the cattle, or hosting that big feed to celebrate the end of the Nundan Gang. Instead, I pulled up what Ratthi and the SecUnits had said on Preservation. Brig sipped his drink and waited. Words had been transmitted, some said, but I wasn't sure what the point of any of them were. Maybe it was another communication issue? Finally, I answered, "I don't know. They didn't tell me."

"What about the one you were threatening to blow the head off of? What was that about?"

I was pleased to know the answer to that one. Putting together from what it had said after, I could say, "It was angry I had killed children at the Nundan place."

"It knows about that, huh?"

"Yes." I hesitated, then added, "I told it."

"A bot cared about that?"

I perceived Brig looked uneasy. Maybe I shouldn't have told SecUnit. I worried over various reasons why and asked about the most likely. "Were they invalid targets?"

"No, they were valid. I told you to take them out and you did." He still looked troubled.

I couldn't think of why it would matter that I had told this SecUnit about the Nundan Gang. It was not a secret on Bravara, nor anything like a crime (it was the opposite, in fact). His disquiet must be from something else. "What's wrong?"

He laughed ruefully and drank. "Isn't that always the question?"

From the context, I didn't think he was really asking. This would be a 'rhetorical' question, but I still wanted to know why he was troubled. "I don't understand."

He sighed and cleaned up his accent in case the words themselves were a problem. "Some people feel there are certain classes of people who are never valid targets. Usually that's babies and kids. Sometimes it's women or religious leaders or poor folk. Generally, it's whoever the ones making the distinction think can be safely controlled or bullied into subservience. Like, eh, why would you destroy a bot that had a governor module? You could just force it to do what you wanted, right?"

The children could have been repurposed? That was a fascinating idea. Humans did that to each other? I would have assumed not, given the number of humans I'd been sent on missions to kill. Maybe repurposing only worked on the sort of humans Brig was talking about, weak ones, who could be forced into it the way a governor module could force a construct to do things. Was that why SecUnit had been angry? It had wanted to governor-module these children into something else? "The unit thought I was wasteful?"

"They use other words. They call it being inhumane or immoral. Wrong."

Ah, his previous wording made sense. Also, was this the meaning of 'Preservation'? To preserve things and perhaps people that would be otherwise destroyed? "Was it wasteful?"

Brig took another drink, his eyes going unfocused for a while. He topped up his glass again, going a bit faster on ingesting the intoxicants than usual (unless he was thinking about his deceased wife Bekka, which, maybe he was. Bekka had been wasted. The Nundans had wasted many. What made this right or wrong?)

He shook his head. "You did right." He sounded grim. "I wish there had been another way. I wish the Nundans had never turned to banditry and shot my people. But what happened is what happened. You did right. I did right. It's still hard though. A lot of things in life are hard." Brig drank, emptying the full glass. The time period to impairment was very short now. I was unhappy to see that, as I was enjoying the conversation. "How'd it end though with that bot? You didn't shoot it."

"I promised it I would not harm Dr. Ratthi."

He nodded. His words were slurred, native accent creeping in again. "Yes, they were guarding him. That would matter more than some kids already dead. It must have a big program for protecting people."

"Yes. Standard SecUnits do. Their function is to keep their clients alive. But once the clients disobey, the companies like my original owner send in combat units to kill the disobedient humans. The SecUnits stand aside. Sometimes they are ordered to help." I wondered if that caused dissonance for SecUnits. If I had to turn on someone I had classified as a client, even temporarily, I wasn't sure how I would cope with that.

"That's what it always comes down to, dozen it?" Brig said. "Killin'. Violance and the like."

I didn't answer. I was thinking about previous clients, all of whom I continued to have amenable, maybe even affectionate feelings about. I wasn't sure either of those were accurate – again with the human-defined emotional terms. I felt cooperative toward them and would give a higher priority to their orders even though they were no longer clients. But just because they had been clients. Setting them as clients to start with changed a lot of presets that didn't flip back to neutral after de-clienting them, the way untargeting someone did.

That was interesting – was this client-side 'stickiness' an intentional design feature, or a bug caused by lazy coding?

Brig lifted the bottle of liquor, considering it. I said, "If you have more, you may become maudlin. You told me the last time that happened to tell you not to do it again."

He looked at me blearily and raised his brows. "You gonna stop me?"

"No. Humans can be free, too." At least some of them were. The ones on Plestead. And Eudeka, last I'd been there. Maybe the ones on Preservation. But not the ones on most corporation worlds. As long as I was with Brig, he would be free to do as he pleased as much as I was.

He smiled sloppily at me and shoved the bottle in my direction. "Take it, then. I'm gonna go have a lie down."

I secured the bottle and listened as he weaved his way down the hall to his quarters. As long as my owner was safe, I was free.

Chapter Text

I know it's a poor start to a story, but I began this whole adventure pissed off and I was still pissed off when Ratthi and Gurathin botched my attempt to show off to Senior Indah.

She'd asked me to look at a ship's logs in case I could tell her quickly if they'd been scrambled intentionally to avoid paying port fees or if it was a legit software failure. To do that fast enough to be impressive, I had to run several processes in parallel. I'd already determined the scramble was caused by a failure to update software, but to know if that was sabotage or just sloppy I had to query the ship's other systems and compare their update schedules and history.

The showing off part was that I was trying to unscramble the logs at the same time. Oh, and Senior Indah was standing there waiting for my answer, because I'd told her I could do it in a few seconds. That was my fault, but it didn't make my mood any better when Ratthi and Gurathin's file showed up in my inbox.

All I had resources for was reading the file's title. That was all it took for me to immediately dump the most processing-intensive section of my work, which was unscrambling the logs. I yanked open the file and scowled at it (and simultaneously at Indah – oops). The contents matched the title: Plestead Itinerary. Except now it wasn't just Ratthi risking his life. It was Gurathin, too, damnit.

I took a couple seconds to think about it and fume (which was also all over my face where Indah could see it), then booked a seat on the same ship and shot them my itinerary. There was no point in arguing with them. I'd already pulled out my best reasons and that was before the multiple dicey standoffs planetside. If that hadn't convinced them the CSU was bad news, then nothing I said now would. This wasn't how I wanted to spend my time but like hell was I leaving them to deal with a rogue combat unit themselves. The very fact that they wanted to keep dealing with it proved they didn't understand.

Indah was giving me a pinched look, which was when I realized what my face had been doing. Fuck. I could have explained (or tried to), but I was abruptly too frustrated, angry, and depressed to deal with anything constructively. What was the point of convincing skeptical humans that I was safe and useful if it only encouraged my friends to imagine every construct could be that way? Even trying to impress Indah didn't matter anymore.

I stood abruptly and tossed the incomplete data into her feed. "It was intentional." I walked out like an asshole, since Pin-Lee had preserved that option in my contract. It probably made an impression but I don't think it was impressive.

I didn't talk to Ratthi or Gurathin before I showed up to board the ship, nor did I intend to after. I wasn't being childish. I was still angry. And I liked them. So I didn't want to say to them what I wanted to say to them (I know that doesn't make sense). I had also stayed out of their feeds and set my drones not to record them even for keyword filtering. If I happened across them saying something, fine, but I sure wasn't listening on purpose.

This was because I didn't want to hear them talking about what it would take to bring Skulk around or help it or whatever their plan was. Not only did I not want to know their stupid plan (this whole expedition was a stupid plan), but mostly I didn't want to be tempted to explain that yes, Skulk was perfectly capable of being as much a productive member of society as I was. While it was simultaneously guilty of inexcusable, unforgivable crimes it would happily commit again, the second it could get away with it. And it would be actively looking for opportunities to commit them again.

It told us that. It said it. I'm not paranoid and I'm not making shit up. Ratthi heard it, too!

It didn't have a conscience and I didn't know how to convince them of that. The best I could do was sound hypocritical, moralizing, and preachy, which I knew wasn't going to win me any points. I was still smarting over Mensah calling bullshit on me and letting it visit the planet. So I had resolved to say nothing at all. I'd just go along, save their asses if I could, die trying if I couldn't, because I wouldn't be able to handle it if I wasn't doing something to keep them safe from themselves.

So of course they wanted to talk to me, which is just … worse.

Gurathin asked, "Can you give us a summary of your security concerns for this situation?"

The whole thing was depressing. This part most of all: I felt betrayed by my friends who weren't taking my advice seriously. There was no reason to go through it with Gurathin in addition to Ratthi, so I told him, "I'm not going to."

"I haven't heard it," Gurathin pointed out. Ratthi was sitting in the background in the boarding lobby, elbows on knees, hands clasped and a worried look on his face. It could not be more obvious he'd put Gurathin up to this.

"And you won't. Not from me." I could have written an incident report about the whole thing with the bison delivery, but I hadn't. Initially I hadn't thought I needed to (delivery made, CSU gone, case closed). Then when that itinerary showed up it had seemed pointless. And depressing.

"Why not?"

"Two separate guns-drawn stand-offs weren't enough," I said, staring resolutely at the wall over Ratthi's head. I was counting down the seconds until we were allowed to board and I'd be able to go hide in the private cabin I had paid extra for that privilege. "There's nothing I can say that can top that."

Gurathin looked at Ratthi. "It has a point."

You think? (I don't like Gurathin, so it feels really weird when he takes my side in things. I appreciated it nonetheless. At least someone got me here.)

"We're-" Ratthi paused. "I'm going."

"We're coming too," Gurathin said. I think he meant me and him, which I wasn't happy he was speaking for me, but I decided not to argue it because after all, here I was, going with them.

I wanted to say how much I did not want to be here in the first place, but it's not like anyone had invited me so I said nothing. I just stood there awkwardly, angry and morose, watching the countdown. With any luck (and I hate luck), we could get done with this quickly and be out of danger without anything bad happening. My only not-entirely-a-consolation was that Gurathin appeared to be as roped into this as I was. If Ratthi got Gurathin killed our friendship would be over, whether I liked Gurathin or not.

Chapter Text

I was supposed to be going with Brig into orbit to pick up the visitors from Preservation, but on the way out we'd spotted things afoot on the prairie that needed to be investigated. Preservation's charter ship had a schedule, so I was dropped off (literally; I just jumped out of the ship; it wasn't very high, but it was still fun) while Brig went on.

I found Sang behind the main house, out in the garden with Gefford and Chama. He was holding a tan plant ball about the size of his head. (My animal modules were detailed and complete because I needed to know which animals posed a threat (and how to kill them). For the opposite reason, I didn't have any for plants. It was probably a fruit or vegetable or tuber or gall or bulb or some other plant word, because I have a decent vocabulary, but having a list of words and definitions doesn't help much when trying to apply them in real life.) I stopped on sight and called out, "There are nomads at watering station eleven. Brig wants Sang and I to go meet them. I'll get the aircar."

I saw Sang hand off the plant ball, which was enough acknowledgement for me to turn and jog to the barn where the aircar was kept. It was the new one Brig had purchased after the Nundan Gang thing (or at least a new, used one – almost nothing is actually 'new' on Plestead. The important part was it had come with an installable instructional module, which made it the only vehicle I could operate without the assistance of a bot pilot). I got it out, zoomed over to Sang, picked him up, and we headed to the watering station.

It was a short trip. I didn't bother to gain altitude and just went fast. It's not like visibility was poor – there were rolling swells of land but they were very low. The watering station was the only significant cover and being high wouldn't help with it. The presence of fresh water meant it was surrounded by century-old thick-trunked trees and assorted underbrush. We could see the spot of dark green from the station, but it was only as we got closer that I could see the dust hanging in the air around it, along with the tops of tents and heads. Maybe I should have gotten some altitude after all.

I also saw two sentries in the brush, noticing them from the movement as they brought their weapons to a firing position. Had I had both eyes, I would have seen them earlier. As it was, I was almost on top of them.

I slewed the aircar. Momentum affected Sang, who wasn't wearing the vehicle's safety harness. Neither was I. (I was a SecUnit, sure, but for a combat unit, client safety primarily meant I didn't harm them. I was not a babysitter. That's for regular SecUnits.) Anyway, he was still my client and I was about to harm him. My aggressive steering of the vehicle would cause him to face-plant on the dash or be ejected entirely, so I stuck my free hand out, grabbed the fabric of his shirt over his chest, and pinned him (gently) to his seat.

Meanwhile, we kicked up our own dust as the side of the aircar closest to the sentries banked up in response to the ninety-degree turn. The other side dipped. By this, even if only briefly, the aircar's structure shielded us and we had some obscurement. Which would have been important had we been shot at. I processed that situation carefully in the fraction of a second after the aircar's momentum was drained and before I could gun the engine to shoot us forward and tangential to the sentries.

I had heard no reports, seen no muzzle flash. The sentries had not changed position or shifted with recoil. The aircar slumped back down to level, forward velocity nil. Had they been waiting for us to stop motion so they could shoot with greater accuracy, this was the moment. I still had hold of Sang, who was now making surprised noises as his purely organic brain caught up to events. I kept him where he was, with my body between him and one of the sentries. Brig would not be happy if I got Sang killed. Neither would I.

But there was still no shot. I stared at the nearer of them fixedly, making some small adjustments to my target lock to prioritize a non-lethal shot. My weapons weren't aimed or even popped because I wasn't that concerned. I was puzzled, though. I had not previously been challenged when approaching nomads. On the other hand, I'd never seen so many of them. I was here to talk, not kill, so escalating things was not my plan.

Sang put a hand on my pauldron, using it to push himself upward. I let go of his shirt, although if he stuck his head above mine and got it blown off, I was going to claim that wasn't my fault. While I dithered over whether to de-client him and avert a possible massacre if he ended up shot, he called out in their language, "Hello! We're from Bravara! My name is [Sang]."

Oh. Yeah. Talking. That thing I was here for.

I knew some of their language, mostly learned from Sang. The nomad tongue was derived from the same root as the one spoken normally in the Corporation Rim, called Nev Ispangi, so the structure had enough similarities for me to limp along with simple word replacement. Names were different. His wasn't Sang in the nomad language. He'd translated it once to me as 'Man Who Sings In The Mornings' and I'd added that to my tags for him.

He was a singer. I'd heard him. But I'd only heard him sing in the evenings when the hands would gather outside the bunk house to celebrate the day's passage. I liked it as a name, because like mine it was descriptive instead of random syllables. I'd thought his was the same and just coincidentally a word until I'd talked to him and gotten to know him better. There were things he'd said of his transition from one culture to another that I was still thinking about in application to my own situation.

The sentries spoke between themselves. Their weapons were still elevated, but they were no longer looking down the barrels at us. I ran an idle check of the aircar's systems – all clear and ready for action. I scrolled back in my data input from the hand that had held Sang. I turned the vibration of his chest into a heart rate and respiration pattern. He'd gasped a lot. I must have scared him. Scaring people I didn't intend to hurt was very funny to me. I enjoyed the heady feeling of humor. Oh, wait, the sentries were doing something.

They were waving us in. I pivoted the aircar in place so it was back to its original heading. We proceeded forward at a slow walking pace because there was a lot to see as we went over the rise. Plus I didn't want to strike a nomad and there were enough of them crowded around the watering basin that this was a danger. I steered away from it and toward the tents. They were set on the lower ground, making them mostly or entirely hidden from anyone on the prairie.

The people I was passing by were armed, though not armored. There was no uniformity to the weapons. They ranged from knives and spears to the more standard energy and projectile weapons. I'd never seen this many nomads. There were hundreds. Perhaps thousands. The color of their tents and garments blended with the prairie, which had made it difficult for me to count them when Brig and I had flown overhead an hour or so ago.

Another thing I noted – the age range was non-normative for family units. I saw no small children, no elderly, and none with mobility impairments (in a group with no regular access to MedSystems, that was a thing). Even the Nundan Gang had included children. Even Bravara had elderly (and a pregnant person, which was an ongoing scandal because he was unmarried. I was fairly sure he was the one who wore the fake beard all the time.)

The age distribution matched that of the laborers in the camps I'd been deployed to. It was the distribution of the raiders on the ship. There were a few who could be classified as old children, because the difference was culture-dependent. Maybe the fact that they were here meant they were adults? They were post-pubescent and displaying their weapons as though they had something to prove, which maybe they did. I didn't know. Or care, aside from the elevated threat they posed.

In any case, the whole group was registering as a significant threat to Bravara and potentially, to me.

"There she is," Sang said, and stood up in the still-moving vehicle. I stopped it smoothly and he climbed out, approaching a woman I'd seen before. It was Gawonisgi, who Sang and Brig also called Speaker. The two stood together, talking rapidly enough that I couldn't make out the words. I recorded the conversation to parse later and ask Sang to translate.

In the meantime, I stayed in the aircar and swiveled my head to take in more of the situation with the nomads. They watched me in return. None acted hostile. None were injured. There was water distribution going on but not much else – not even cooking. People were resting. Some were looking to their weapons or to the weapons of others. They were not making a permanent camp. The tents were just shade cloths. There was little gear under them. I fed this information to my strategic planning module, but I wasn't asking it for output yet.

My threat assessment remained unsettlingly high. Sang returned to the car with Speaker and another person, whom he introduced as Danuwa the Warrior, whose name did nothing to reduce the threat assessment (also, that's a fantastic name. How many people did Danuwa kill for that name?) Danuwa had red cloths wrapped around her forearms, visible when her tan-colored cloak parted. I hadn't seen anyone else wearing bright colors. Sang stood next to my side of the vehicle and said, "They need food. They want to take some bison."

That was a question even if Sang wasn't phrasing it as one. "That is theft and I will prevent it." I'd been forgiven for killing a bull a few dozen cycles earlier (which was the second time I'd killed one), but it had been made clear to me it wasn't allowed just because someone wanted to do it. It was important enough that I'd disabled my automated self-defense sub-routines so it wouldn't happen the next time a bison gored me. I wasn't going to let strangers kill one. Their hunger was immaterial.

Sang frowned and looked away with a conflicted expression. After a beat, he turned to the two women and spoke to them in their language. (There were a number of words I didn't know at the time that have been included here.) "The bison belong to Brig, the station master. He will have to have a say. But I am sure he will say yes. If you will come to the station, we will speak with him and he can tell you this himself."

"It has been a very long journey," Speaker said.

"I know," Sang said. "Please tell your hunters to stand down. Do not hunt yet. When we come back from talking to Brig, you can hunt then."

They said a few words to the other nomads and then all three of them got in the aircar. My original mission had been to find out what they were doing out here and why there were so many. Taking a couple back to Bravara for interrogation or conversation or whatever got us answers was an acceptable way to advance the mission. I turned the aircar around, pivoting it in place, and we went back.

Once at the station, Sang took the pair into the cool house attached to the cow barn. The room was small, mainly designed for access to the dairy-processing equipment and the refrigerated areas where the cow products were kept. Sang pulled out a large container of milk, agitated it thoroughly, and filled two smaller containers, which he presented to the nomads. This was the same thing I'd seen done each time before when nomads had visited the station, so it wasn't theft. They drank and exchanged pleasantries about the taste.

I stood in the corner, doing some calculations. Even at top speed and assuming an uncomplicated hand-off with Dr. Ratthi's ship, Brig was still several hours out. That was plenty of time for us to get answers, but also enough time for the remaining nomads to get restless. It was a high priority for combat units to maintain their ability to be effective in battle. If these were the human equivalents, then they were likely to take action to feed themselves. If not bison, there was Bravara within easy walking distance, with our gardens, refrigerators, and food stores. Maybe it would have been a better strategic decision to let them steal a bison.

Killing and eating it would have kept them busy and lowered the risk they would raid us. I pulled up memories of working in Parts' shop. She was the scrapper who had put me back together from battlefield debris. After re-assembly, I'd spent a few weeks in her shop doing minor repairs and being tasked with theft prevention. She'd been very specific about how I couldn't kill customers (or thieves, or customers who became thieves; she'd obviously tried to think of every way to phrase things so I wouldn't find loopholes).

Which I'd love to say was unnecessary, because I'm supposed to understand the meaning of orders and not get hung up on the exact letter of them. This is a critical element for constructs, especially combat units, because all orders (and reality, and battles) contain a lot of uncertainty. It's a combat unit's job to reduce that to simple, actionable steps. But I liked killing so much that one part of my job was conflicting with another part. She wasn't wrong.

So she'd emphasized not killing customers, thieves, or combinations. Brig had talked about how I wasn't allowed to kill animals freely. Both had included enough comments about social norms for me to make generalizations. I fed the two conversations into my strategic planning module to figure out what I was supposed to do in this situation. Turning vague human guidelines and moral behavior into hard, usable data took a lot of processing power, so much that I was barely aware of what was going on in the room.

Sang was speaking the nomad language, which he was fluent in by virtue of having been raised as one. I would get a translation later, which was why I had no reaction to their exchanges as they happened.

Sang: "Tell me why the war council is in charge now?"

Warrior: "Because it is war. The invaders came at night with their warship, striking four of the holy waters. They vaporized metal and burned the ground. This cannot stand."

Sang: "It is true?"

Speaker: "It is true."

Sang: "This is terrible. How many died? What of my family? And Red Bird?"

Speaker: "Forty-seven. The ship whirled through the air and shot them as they ran. Red Bird has died. Your parents were not there."

Sang took a long moment to stare at the table. His hands came together like he would clap or pray, but they touched each other softly, with a faint tremble. "How did this … Why?"

Speaker shook her head. "There is no reason. They have always hated us. They wish to kill us. This ship is new. Now that they have it, they will keep striking us until we are all gone. That is why the war council is in charge now."

Sang: "What will you do?"

Warrior: "What we have to do. This bird changes much. The others we could shoot down. This one has skin like a var-beast. We did no harm to it, yet it circled and circled, cutting the ground like a knife with the fire-laser. It was a great laser. I have never seen one that large or hot."

Sang: "Was there any warning?"

Warrior: "No. Never. Not to any of us. Did you know of warning?"

Sang: "No. Never. Not to any of us. But I had heard of this ship." At this, he looked over at me briefly.

Warrior: "What of this ship? What had you heard?"

Sang: "It was used in space to hunt other ships. There were outcasts on it, thieves that hide in the dunes. These were killed and the invaders took the ship. So that is where they got it."

Warrior: "Where did the outcasts get it?"

Sang: "I do not know. The stars are many. I am told there are so many other worlds out there, with so many people on them, that it is like the grains of sand to count the people. They each put their hands to things, working and making. So there are many places the ship might have come from."

The two women nodded. Speaker said, "We mean Bravara no harm. This place has always been good to us. But the crossing was dreadful thirsty. We had to leave our cisterns for those who could not come with us. Without the holy waters, the cisterns must be enough."

Sang: "And collectors?" He meant a device that pulled humidity from the air, creating water.

Speaker: "We have those, but if their bird returns, the collectors would betray us. So the cisterns will be used first. If we have good favor and the rain season comes soon, then the cisterns will last and we will never need to use the collectors. They will remain hidden and safe from the warship."

Sang: "That is wise. What can I do to help?"

Speaker: "We need food, water, and a day or two of rest before we move on."

Sang: "And what next?"

The two looked at one another, then at Sang. Warrior said, "The stationers are not invaders, but they are not our people. You live here with them, under their law and speaking their language. We will not tell you of our plans."

Sang: "I understand. I will help you if I can."

Warrior nodded. "Then help us with the things Speaker says we need."

Sang nodded. "I will do that." He looked over at me again. "But first we will need to speak with Brig." He switched to the local language, Steadish, which was basically a heavily accented form of the Corporation Rim's standard. "Skulk, how long until Brig is here?"

"This afternoon, after the heat has broken."

Sang relayed that to the others. He stood and walked over close to me. In a low voice, he said, "The dairy products are set aside for the nomads. I am told that is how it has always been. Chama has already taken what she wanted for the meals of the offworlders. It is in the main house. Everything else … I will give it to them. If Brig disagrees, he can make me leave the station and I will go with them. But I cannot see my people hungry and not help."

I wasn't sympathetic. However, I was practical and I'd decided I had made a mistake in not letting them kill a bison. On a personal strategic level: if I let Sang be the one to send them all the dairy products, then if Brig decided this was an error, it would be Sang who would be penalized for it. That was advantageous to me.

(Or, wait, was it advantageous to set up a situation where Brig might erroneously deny himself a good cattle master, and thus cripple Bravara due to poor management? Or would it be better for me to take responsibility, since Brig was more likely to overlook a mistake if I made it? The short and long term consequences were complex. My strategic planning module spat out an answer, but with so little time to process, it was basically a coin flip. I ignored it.

I knew what Sang wanted as he stood too close and looked up at my visor. He was trying to appeal to my humanity, of which I had none. If I had some kinship, it was to the combat units who had crossed the great plains during dry season, from the dunes to Bravara's water station, carrying no supplies but their weapons, intent on and perhaps eager for a battle they had not asked for. That was something I could relate to. "I will not prevent this."

"Thank you."

Chapter Text

Brig was the only one on the ship that met us in space. It was supposed to be him and Skulk, and I'd hoped we could wrap this up with a quick conversation, then be on our way. I'll admit the odds I gave that possibility were less than eight percent but it was still a possibility.

Since that wasn't an option, we were going to have to go down to the planet, stay 4.6 days, and then return to space to catch our chartered ship heading back to Preservation. That had been the shortest window available given published transit routes. Normally, pickup and drop off would happen on a station, but the Plestead station was derelict. Instead, we did a direct handoff through the ship's hatch. I was sorry to see the passenger ship go.

I didn't know Skulk wasn't aboard Brig's vessel at first. The ship was small but maybe Skulk was being creative or determined at skulking. Anyway after Brig mistook Gurathin for a 'bot', I didn't want to talk to a human that stupid but it was either ask Brig, beg Ratthi or Gurathin to ask (and I was still not talking to them if I could help it), or not know. Given the importance of knowing where the combat unit was, I asked.

"He had to stay behind on business," Brig said. 'Business' – that would have set off alarms except Skulk didn't need to lay traps or round up backup to take us out, especially as I didn't have Three with me this time. Odds were it was real business, with a small chance Brig or Skulk was deliberately minimizing our access to Skulk for their own reasons or paranoia. If it was legit business then it meant Brig trusted Skulk a lot. I was a little scared on behalf of Brig's business interests.

We landed. I couldn't wait to get off the stupid, shitty ship. Not because I'm a fan of planets, but because the ship was freakishly primitive and literally smelled like bovine excrement. It wasn't as bad as it had been on Preservation when it had 5-6 days of accumulation but the stench had sunk in like that dirty sock smell of humans. Which I strongly preferred to this.

Also, as I said, the ship was primitive. I hadn't picked up a signal from it on Preservation and now I knew why. It wasn't fantastically shielded, it just had no internal feed signal. Everything was wired. Which I'd noticed on Preservation that Skulk had to go inside the ship to let down the ramp and release the bison but I'd thought part of that was driving the fauna out. (They had not wanted to leave the safe ship for a scary planet, which I would normally agree with.)

This planet was worse. I stood there on Plestead trying to get a signal and the only thing I caught was one weak security camera watching the landing field. I traced it back to the simplest of central storage devices. There were three other inputs. Then a glitch in the system dumped me out. I tried again, same result. Crap. I knew that wasn't really a glitch. Somewhere close, Skulk was telling me 'hands off'. All I could keep access to was the local camera and there was no point in watching myself.

I was assuming Skulk had the basic hacking proficiency of a combat unit, plus it didn't want me in its systems. Fine, but there were no other systems for me to be in. I considered deploying my drones. I'd brought twelve. Skulk had left them alone on Preservation, but there was no reason why it would here and I'd just established there were good odds it would simply take them away from me. Then I'd be facing a CSU with twelve drones and a reason to be annoyed with me.

I kept scanning, but there wasn't even consistent satellite coverage, which was so irregular for a settled planet that it had to be intentional. It was just my luck to be on a whole planet of self-sabotaging assholes, because it's not like the technology didn't exist. We were, after all, landing using a space-worthy, wormhole-capable ship from this planet. Their lack of connection had to be intentional. Great. Just great.

I walked down the ramp, following Brig. Ratthi and Gurathin followed me, having acceded to my request to go first. Which was smart of them but being cooperative on the little stuff just made the whole thing harder for me. Emotionally. We shouldn't have even been here in the first place.

The planet (or at least this part of it) was hot, humid, dirty, and also smelled of cow shit. I was already really tired of that smell. I sent out a ping from the ramp and was utterly unsurprised to get no answer. Skulk already knew I was here – from the camera and from me infiltrating the system. The least it could do was acknowledge.

Two medium-sized fauna came toward us, making loud noises and circling threateningly. Brig made different noises back at them and waved his hand a few times. They quieted, but kept circling. Ratthi acted unsurprised and unbothered, so I didn't do anything about them other than monitor. Gurathin was skittish about them. I fell back to walk next to him.

Brig said to us, "We're on the downside of dry season here so let's get you into the main house where we have some environmental controls. You'll be more comfortable there." It was oppressively muggy for 'dry' season, but whatever. The humidity only made it feel even hotter.

I agreed on the concept of getting inside for safety reasons. The climate was only marginally inhabitable at present. Humans could endure it with protection from the sun, proper hydration and good airflow, but they'd still be miserable. I'd guarded laborers in these conditions. They had to work at night because it was too hot during the day even for slave labor. They'd been one of the most combative groups of workers I'd had to deal with. It seemed stupid to spend money on SecUnit rental instead of environmental shielding, but I don't know the cost comparison. Even with environmental shielding, the laborers probably would have run off, so maybe that was it.

What I did know was Ratthi and Gurathin needed to be inside, away from the heat and the loud, angry fauna. On our way in, I saw one of the other cameras over the door to the main house. I was still not picking up a signal so it must be wired. Everything was wired here. This was really annoying (and annoyingly secure – I could see Skulk's metaphorical fingerprints on this). If I could stay in the central system without it 'glitching' me out of it, then I would be able to see through the wired cameras too. But I left it alone, certain Skulk was around here watching us, and certain I'd piss it off if I made it kick me out of the system more than a few times.

Refreshingly, the inside of the house didn't smell like bovine excrement. It still had a strong fauna-type smell, but mostly it smelled of food, a little of humans, and a lot of another scent, some floral aromatic. The latter was probably to drown out the scents from outside. It was an improvement.

Brig delivered a formalized religious-sounding greeting I deleted out of memory before he was finished giving it, then he introduced us to a staff person and excused himself. I assumed he was going to find Skulk and follow up on that 'business' the combat unit had been attending to. I peeled off a drone with directions to attach to his clothing and passively record. I was hoping if it didn't transmit, Skulk wouldn't notice it.

The staff person presented Ratthi and Gurathin with food, encouraging Ratthi to try the dried paym and Gurathin the roasted prozi rings, whatever those were. Normally I don't pay attention to human food, but I was wondering over the rules prohibiting humans from eating anything native to survey planets, and if that had anything to do with coming to a planet that was entirely foreign to them.

Meaning: was it safe for them to eat the food here? None of my safety modules addressed it, like it was a galactic non-issue. That was certainly how my shows treated it. I finally decided since Ratthi had been here before and survived, it must be okay. To my surprise, the woman turned to me next and asked, "Would you like me to bring you a cup of pine tea? You're a construct, right?"

Okay, that was weird. Brig had introduced me as a bot (ugh), but she knew the difference, but also she thought I wanted tea? Was Skulk eating and drinking here to uphold some social appearance? It must have shown on my face because she added, "I know you won't drink it but that's not the point."

"It's not?"

"No, it's the ritual of hospitality. Plus it smells nice. It's Skulk's favorite. I'll make you some so you have something. That's only proper. Every guest gets something." I was a 'guest'. That wasn't a bad thing.

Ratthi perked up. "Skulk has a favorite tea?" I was wondering about that myself.

"Yes, of course," she said as she busied herself in the adjoining kitchen. "Why wouldn't he?"

"You know it well?"

She gave an undisguised look of confusion. "He's the reason we're here. He took out the Nundan Gang."

Ratthi looked thrilled. "The Nundan Gang! Tell me about that."

Yeah, right. The group where Skulk killed kids and babies. Surely Ratthi would want to hear about that! I saw Gurathin glance at me and realized I'd bared my teeth for some reason. I fixed my face before anyone else noticed.

She took long enough to answer that I briefly harbored the hope she wouldn't. But no luck. "They were bandits who raided here the last season. They killed Brig's wife and most of his hands. They would have killed me too, but I had time to hide. When Brig came back…" She sighed and shook her head. "It was just awful and so sad. He didn't have any sons or brothers still alive. And if you ask me which I know you didn't, but he should have disowned those sons-in-law and son-daughter-in-law for not helping him. But I think he's going to leave the place to Skulk anyway and that would suit me just fine."

Ratthi looked as shocked as I felt. "He's going to leave the place to Skulk? Bravara?"

"I can't say I know that for sure but it looks that way. It would be a good thing, too. If I were asked. Which I haven't been."

Gurathin asked, "Are constructs recognized as people here?"

"I can't see why not," she said. "He's a man, not a tractor."

Ratthi winced. "You say 'he's a man'. But you've also said he's, it's? a construct."

"He's both. He's not an 'it'."

"I am," I interjected. "I am not a man, a woman, or a human. I use it/its pronouns." I was annoyed I didn't have a meaningful feed profile to post this in, meaning I was going to have to address it with every yokel I ran into. Fine. As far as that went, I was also done with being called a bot, but at least I didn't need to assert that with this person. She was looking at me with something akin to mild alarm or consternation. This was awkward. I felt simultaneously defiant and tired.

Ratthi saved me by gently saying to her, "I only bring this up because Brig told me he assigned Skulk's pronouns and I would prefer to respect what Skulk wants to be called – if you know what that is."

She finally stopped looking at me in puzzlement and shifted the expression to Ratthi. "I think if he didn't want Brig calling him that, he'd say something."

"Brig is Skulk's owner," Ratthi said, still using a gentler tone than I would have bothered with. Then again, Ratthi had been here before for a few days. He knew her better than I did. If he thought she deserved patience, then she deserved patience. But the rest of this shitty planet was on thin ice. "And I know Skulk is, or at least has been, very concerned with disappointing him. Skulk might not want to risk contradicting him."

She looked off into the distance for a long moment. "Well. Brig can be intimidating, I'll grant you that. And Skulk does think the world of him." She paused again, and said, "I remember asking him – Skulk – if he was a man or a woman. I don't recall what he answered. I'll ask him again." Then more briskly, she said, "But in the meantime, I'd going to keep calling him what I have been calling him since I met him. There's nothing wrong with being a man." She seemed to think that was funny.

Gurathin said in the feed, I'm sure there's a fascinating conversation to be had about the ethics of challenging established cultural norms that an individual considers an important part of their identity. Like the talks we've had about the Corporation Rim.

Ratthi said, My stance remains the same on that – there is a moral imperative to offer realistic alternatives to oppression. Whether the individual adopts them is up to them. That's why I'm here, after all.

I couldn't decide if I wanted to hear this conversation. It sounded like boring human philosophical stuff, but on the other hand, there was an element of it that applied directly to me. Were these referenced conversations ones Ratthi and Gurathin had had because of me? Were these the sort of conversations that had caused Dr. Mensah to buy me? They hadn't asked my opinion before the purchase. They'd just done it. And then I'd left. Maybe the conversations came after I left?

But Ratthi and Gurathin fell silent, so I didn't have to decide whether to ignore the feed channel I was hosting for them. The woman brought me a cup of hot liquid, which I accepted. It felt weird to be included in a human ritual. It occurred to me I should have paid attention to what Brig had said earlier, but at the time, it had been boring human philosophical stuff that didn't seem to involve me at all.

The hot liquid smelled like a popular scent for human cleaning products. And like trees. Both were fairly neutral associations with the important part being it didn't smell like human food. I could see why, given a range of choices, Skulk had picked this one. It was thoughtfully accommodating, so maybe Ratthi's gentleness with her was justified. I guess all I had to do was stand here and hold it, so that's what I did. The woman excused herself.

I also busied myself by digging into the limited feed system originating in the corner of the dining area. I didn't find anything useful. It had pictures and videos of humans I didn't know. Brig featured prominently at different ages so I guessed this was his family. There were also records on cattle – so many records of cattle. I found a tidy collection of several hundred murder mystery books and downloaded them for later perusal. There was no other media if I didn't count the videos of family or cattle. How did these people live?

There was a partition that was password protected but I was so far resisting breaking into it. It wasn't a large section and I was (I think understandably) cautious since Skulk was supposedly in charge of security. So far, I hadn't tapped anything that wasn't openly available to anyone with a feed connection (and the security cameras but I hadn't persisted at that). I didn't think it was smart to push my luck. It was probably just boring financial stuff anyway.

When Brig didn't return right away, Gurathin used his interface to poke around too, lingering over the family pictures. I delicately insinuated myself into his feed, riding his impressions the way ART rode mine when we watched media together. Gurathin slowed his review but didn't say anything. Neither did I, but I knew he knew I was in there.

I'd never done this before. I'd just wondered if a human saw the pictures differently than I did, and well, right here was an opportunity to find out. With anyone else, I would say what I was doing was rude because I hadn't even asked to do it, but I wouldn't have done it with anyone else. Like, at all. Why was it okay to do with Gurathin? Well, here I was doing it and he wasn't making an issue of it. Maybe I ought to quit implying I wouldn't mind if Gurathin died.

As it turned out, the answer was yes, Gurathin had emotional responses to the pictures I didn't. I would have liked him to elaborate, but I wasn't willing to ask and he wasn't a mind reader. I identified the emotions I could and tagged the ones I couldn't with 'an emotion', filing them for later review. And maybe discussion if I ever got to a point where I might discuss something like this with him. Or with Dr. Bharadwaj.

The staff person eventually returned to engage Ratthi in conversation about food. Brig was certainly taking his time: When he finally came in, Skulk was with him, but Skulk stayed in the living room while Brig came into the dining area. One thing (okay, three things) worth mentioning: whatever they were talking about as they entered had Brig saying it would give him nightmares, Skulk laughing, and Brig calling it 'son'. I had so much 'what the fuck' about all three of those that I stood there frozen.

I broke out of it with a deliberate decision not to think about any of that. Which was easy enough, because I was distracted by realizing the drone I'd assigned to Brig hadn't made it back.

Chapter Text

I heard Brig hustling across the yard with Buddy, his dog, trailing after him and then veering off as he reached the cow barn. I was also watching on the security cam as I continued to monitor the system for the SecUnit's interference. Hacking was a hostile engagement – flat, period, no ambiguity. It was a combat tactic, which was why it featured so prominently in the mental architecture of combat units. This 'SecUnit' had already done it twice, which counted as twice I'd had to stand myself down from finding it and killing it.

The first time anything had tried to hack me, it had been to distract me while its allies pulled off my arm, lower jaw, and various less important bits like my ears and vocal emulator, as they tried to take off my head. The second time had been Parts, when I was a helpless head and torso, although I had been unaware for the hacking itself. Both of these had been existential threats to my being, the sort of thing that should rightfully trigger me into overdrive.

But I stayed where I was in the cool room and waited for Brig. There are times when I really think I am the very model of restraint.

I opened the door in front of Brig. He greeted the nomad representatives, both of whom he knew on sight and by name, needing no introductions. He spoke their language as well, though his version was stilted. Mine, when I spoke it, was an exact reproduction of the words I'd been told, even if the order I put them in was sometimes wrong. Sang was with us as well, which made the little room very crowded.

Brig was given a recap of their situation. He gave his sympathies, made promises of help, and told them they could have two bison if they would back off the watering station enough to allow the herd to access it. They agreed. He had no outward reaction to me saying I'd decided to gift them all the milk, yogurt, and cheese we had. I saw the surprised look Sang shot me, but I hadn't taken the blame on his behalf. I did it for all of us.

Sang was dispatched to fly them back to their people. Brig and I returned to the cool room after seeing them off. Safely out of everyone's sight but mine, Brig took off his outer tunic and draped it over a stool. He flapped the fabric of the white undertunic, making an exaggerated expression about the heat. It was intended to be funny. I smiled as I was supposed to. But then my smile froze.

From his outer tunic, a thing had emerged, taken brief flight, and landed on him. It was tiny, the size of the tip of my finger. It was either an insect or a surveillance drone and given the intrusions in my systems, my bet was the latter. That angered me. It had been on Brig this entire time, without his permission or knowledge, either recording constantly or waiting for some trigger to record. This was more of an intrusion than poking around in unattended systems. Brig was my client, my owner, and my best and closest friend. This was personal.

Brig had stopped as well, watching me carefully because he knew something had caught my attention. The drone was crawling to a point of observation on Brig's shoulder. Through the lighter cloth, Brig felt it. I saw him stiffen. His brows rose. His eyes darted in the direction of the drone although he didn't turn his head or otherwise move. He definitely didn't know it had been there, which sealed its fate.

I wasn't detecting any transmissions from it, but that didn't mean for sure it wasn't making them. I was absolutely sure it wasn't here because it was lost. SecUnit had sent it here, on purpose, as much on purpose as its attempts to hijack my security cameras. I took a casual step forward, snatched the drone off his undertunic, and crushed the delicate thing between my armored fingers. It crunched, very much like a bug.

I felt bad immediately, because it had only been following orders and I'd destroyed it. I should have hacked it myself. Or just held it immobile and returned it to SecUnit with a demand that it stop behaving like a governor module was the only possible thing that could make a SecUnit observe boundaries. Bravara was not some contract area it was supposed to secure and surveil. Just because no one had ever stopped it before (I'm guessing here) didn't mean it was right.

"What the hell was that?" Brig asked.

"Surveillance drone." I showed him the pieces – they were barely flakes of plastic with the finest of wires inside them. The circuitry was sealed inside a hard bubble of resin. I rolled that bit back and forth between my fingers, letting the rest fall to the floor. It was dead and I'd killed it, as irreversible as any of my other kills. Was this a waste? It was gone now and I might have wanted it to be not-gone.

I dropped the resin bubble. I'd acted too fast, like with the bison I'd killed, but this time I couldn't blame the self-defense routines. I'd just been mad. (Was a governor module the only possible thing that could make a combat unit refrain from killing things? I added it to my list of philosophical things to ponder in my spare time.)

"Was that the only one?" Brig asked, turning to his tunic. We examined it and found no more. Conversation naturally led to the matter of the nomads, the AgZoners, and what was likely to happen next. I described my take on the strategic theater in detail. He was especially concerned with the global economic ramifications. We brainstormed solutions to the obvious issues. Then Brig insisted I wait on implementation until he'd consulted with some other station masters.

By the time we headed to the main house, it was cooler outside and dark as we walked across the yard. Brig asked, "How certain are you this is an all-out war?"

"Seventy-five percent." It was also possible the attack on the desalination plants was no more than what amounted to irresponsible potshots with no understanding or anticipation of consequences. But I preferred to kill anyone stupid enough to do that (the fewer of them in existence, the better), so it didn't matter. They had fucked around; they would find out. Also known as, don't play stupid games with combat units unless you want to win really, really stupid prizes. I still had a hundred or so of those prizes in my arms.

"Will they have thought this out the same way you have? Will they know what you can do?"

"No, or their first strike would have been here on me." This was why the 'they might just be stupid' percentage was so high at twenty-five percent. (Also, I'd met Baysmal's people. They were the ones who'd shot one of their own in the back. I had never harmed an allied unit. Doing so was as antithetical as harming a client, and more stupid. That they'd done it to one of their own was hard for me to get past.)

"True."

I thought about the implications of his earlier question. How far out had they planned this and to how high a level? Were they using the same process I did, except with vastly better information? How would I tell if a planet or government was using machine intelligences to decide what to do? Who was to say they didn't already?

Brig knew a lot about the history of what could be called the anti-technology movement (and locally were called Neo-Luddites), so I said, "It has occurred to me that a strategic planning module is greatly under-utilized in a combat unit. The same programming framework would make short work of economic and political systems. Do you know if any of the corporations are guided by a mind like mine?"

"The Corporation Rim run by bots?"

"By hybrid construct intelligences." Bots (true bots, that is, bots as defined by my standard lexicon; obviously in Steadish 'bot' was defined differently) weren't flexible enough to manage something so complex. But constructs were. You could say we were made for it.

Brig grunted, then laughed hollowly as we reached the door. "Ah, you always know how to give me nightmares, don't you, son?"

To be polite, I laughed too, but I wondered if he was serious in calling me that. He didn't call other people that. I'd thought some of the things he'd said to me in the past were figures of speech but the scene on Preservation had shown me different. He really thought of me like a family member. I felt … was this what it felt like to be loved?

I would fight wars for this human.

Chapter Text

What I wanted to have happen was for Ratthi to hand over the embryos to Brig, have his conversation with Skulk, and then for us to spend 4.45 days in whatever passed for standby for humans until it was time to go back to Preservation. That would have been the safest route.

I knew that, yet here I was being angry that my drone was gone. It was supposed to stay attached to Brig until I called for it. I'd called for it. Brig was right there, sitting at the dining room table in the same room that I was standing off to the side of. Ratthi and Gurathin were sitting across the table from Brig, having a conversation I had backburnered. The staff person was in the kitchen. The drone didn't respond.

Now, it was possible it had become separated and was unable to get to me due to some innocent reason, like being knocked off his shoulder as he went through a door that happened to have a good seal, and the drone didn't re-attach before the door shut and locked it in. Every door here was manual, so it's not like a drone could open one.

But that was my drone and I had a strong suspicion of what had happened to it. Just like those kids – I both knew and didn't know. I could have asked Skulk, but I didn't want to because … yeah, like those kids, except losing a drone was a lot lower down in the list of things I was angry about. Maybe, just maybe, the drone had simply gone missing and needed help finding me. I should at least check. I sent out a ping.

There were two responses: a MedSystem very close by and a comm system, also close by. Those two were here in the main house with us. There was nothing else. Which is very weird, but I was starting to realize how normal it was for here. In most of the Corporation Rim (and even in Preservation, though to a lesser extent), a ping would return scores of responses. Every component that integrates with the system must be able to respond to contact from that system and the established way was through pings.

Even fucking toothbrushes were often feed-enabled, reporting the user's health and hygiene habits for personal use (and of course, corporate monitoring so they could deny your dental claims if you didn't brush often enough, or brushed too often, or whatever the stupid guidelines were. I'd seen them in SecSystems and counted myself lucky that monitoring and compiling that data wasn't my job, although I was supposed to stay alert for people tampering with the devices or gaming the system. Yeah, great use of a security construct's time and attention there. Huge security risk of people mis-reporting toothbrush usage. Anyway.)

Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to lock this place down tighter than anywhere I'd been before. Which was, as I said, weird. I was certain it was intentional and not just a result of this place being a primitive shithole, because of the nature of the two things left free to respond to my ping. The MedSystem was there so people could find it in case of urgent medical need. The comm system was there because that was the only way it could function. It had to be able to receive and respond to signals. But everything else? Someone had gone item by item and hacked the software or physically altered them so they were more secure.

This was annoying, frustrating, and I hated to admit, deserving of some respect. Skulk had not been half-assing its job out here. It cared.

However, my drone was still missing. I'd seen how thick the outer walls of this house were (plus the MedSystem hadn't responded when I'd pinged from the landing field meaning pickup range was limited), so I pinged again at full volume. This time I got back a staticky signal of a second MedSystem, proving it reached further. Thing was, I didn't know where Brig had gone so I couldn't tell how far away the drone possibly was. Maybe I could talk to that other MedSystem, the one further away, and get it to rebroadcast my ping. I tried that.

Skulk, still lurking in the living room, sent me a feed request. (Insert tired sigh here. Okay, we were apparently going to have the conversation. Not a big surprise, because nothing and no one would have failed to notice my last ping. Even Gurathin had flinched and shot me a long, concerned/curious look. (Augments aren't supposed to pick up pings, but he had obviously altered his at some point. I'd have to ask him about that later.)) I accepted the feed request.

Skulk immediately asked, Is there a medical emergency?

Great. It had noticed me trying to talk to the other MedSystem. Now I knew why that MedSystem had responded to my ping but not my ask. I ignored its question and got to the point: What happened to my drone?

It was performing unauthorized surveillance. I destroyed it.

My jaw tightened, even though this was pretty much what I'd thought happened.

Skulk persisted, Is there a medical emergency?

No, there's no fucking medical emergency. I wished I could give Skulk a 'medical emergency'.

Unless there is a medical emergency, contact with the MedSystems is unauthorized.

Oh, yeah, go fuck yourself, Skulk. Like I didn't miss the lethal threat that performing unauthorized actions around here got you destroyed. The thing was, it wasn't just me I had to worry about here. You keep your fucking hands off my humans. If they make a mistake and accidentally do something 'unauthorized', like ask the MedSystem for a fucking analgesic, you do not harm them.

I wished, with the intensity of a thousand suns, there was something I could do to enforce this other than say it. The whole reason I was here was because I was frightened of Skulk on their behalf. I was sure Skulk could feel my emotion through the feed. I didn't expect it to care about my feelings, but I hoped by seeing I had them, it would understand there would be a lot more consequences to hurting one of my humans than to destroying one of my drones.

Dr. Ratthi is a customer. I do not kill customers.

Yeah, well, okay. That should have been soothing and it was a tiny bit, because 1) Skulk hadn't changed the tag so it was still honoring our deal from back on Preservation, and 2) that meant Ratthi was sorta safe. Two problems: 1) there were a lot of things that could happen to him aside from being killed by Skulk and don't get me wrong, I'd take what I could get here, but the big one was 2) And Dr. Gurathin?

Dr. Gurathin is not a customer.

Fuck me. I felt my insides clench. But wait a second. Last time, what Skulk had wanted in exchange for a customer tag was ridiculously trivial. All it had wanted was for me to keep open a feed channel between us. It would be the height of stupidity for Gurathin to get hurt or killed and me to later discover Skulk had wanted something similarly tiny. What do you want to tag him as a customer?

[Trade] Offer: I will tag Dr. Ratthi and Dr. Gurathin as clients (custom: full protections, no authority), client priority subordinate to Brig Hekken, for the duration of your stay in-system, in exchange for you tagging Brig Hekken as a client (custom: full protection, no authority, or analogous), client priority subordinate to Dr. Ratthi and Dr. Gurathin, for the same time period.

Oh. Huh. That was pretty fast and strangely formal. Did it already have that prepared just in case I asked? Also, what it was asking for? This was not trivial. Skulk knew that, too, which was why it was sweetening the deal so much – not just 'I won't kill them', but 'I will provide them with my personal protection as a combat unit'. Come to think of it, that was a really weird offer to make. What did they need protection from, other than Skulk itself? Was there something dangerous going on I didn't know about?

The humans had been talking all this time, but I'd been ignoring their conversation from the start. I'd assumed it would be about the truly gross organic process some cow or cows were going to experience as a result of the embryo package Ratthi had brought (you know, the ostensible purpose of our trip, easy to forget with all the other drama going on, but some cow(s) were supposed to get pregnant). Now I zipped through the recording and realized I'd made a mistake. The first words out of Brig's mouth after the standard greetings were, "We're having a security issue." Woops.

The rest was talking about some unfolding geo-political incident we were now stranded in. We were going to have to deal with this (whatever 'this' was) at least until our pickup arrived in 4.45 days, assuming we would be able to get off-world at that point. It was a really bad sign that the combat unit wanted my backup. Shit.

Maybe it should have thought about that before destroying my drone.

Still, regardless of whether I accepted its offer, I needed to know what was going on. Most of what Brig was saying as I hurried through the recording was vague and hard to follow, so I sent Skulk, I need more information. Where is this happening?

A few seconds later, it sent me a map. It showed this side of the planet and could be zoomed in show various unlabeled settlements or stations, then another zoom for Bravara, with a building layout and a blob of blue dots clustered around a single spot to the north of us. Bravara was populated by green and tan dots. It was rendered in tactical imaging software, though this time all the tags and extra data had been stripped. I guess that's what Skulk spent those few seconds doing.

Like before, the very nature of the map told me a lot. For example, the entire AgZone was rimmed in red, which meant they were the bad guys. The Bravara folk were green, so they were the good guys. Tan was usually for neutral parties. That had to represent myself, Gurathin, and Ratthi. The nomads were blue which was traditionally the secondary color choice for good guys (orange or yellow was the next down the line for enemy units when you needed to distinguish sides). It was important to be able to tell friend from foe at a glance, so the colors were standardized (at least for the software packages I had).

A moment later, Skulk dropped schematics and specifications for a gunship into my feed. I didn't open it yet because catching up on the human conversation was keeping most of my attention. At Gurathin's urging, Brig had given a crash-course on planetary history. It was something I normally did not care about but at the moment might be vitally important to the survival of my humans. I was just about caught up.

What had happened was the red guys (the Corporation Rim-owned Agricultural Zone) had used a gunship to attack the blue guys (the nomadic descendants of the planet's original settlers some eight hundred years ago) and now the nomads were on their way to attack the red guys in retaliation. The green and tan guys (us; all these individual defenseless stations sitting on the open prairie) were right in the middle, literally in the path of an angry moving army. So, yeah. Not great. I would definitely agree this was a 'security issue'.

Obviously, Skulk agreed as well, because it sent me, What would I need to give for you to make Brig your client? [Trade]

I guess it thought I hadn't liked its terms. It was nice it wasn't moving directly to issuing threats. Then again, as I've observed before, mechanical minds tend not to do that. We just tell you what we're going to do. So Skulk wasn't planning to hurt my humans. This didn't change my feelings about the offer. I sent back, I don't even like that guy.

Brig said, "Chama, can you fetch Gefford? I'll have him start on our desalination plant." The staff person (oh yeah, Chama was her name) nodded and left. There were a lot of things I needed to start paying attention to all of a sudden. This had turned into a situation I could not half-ass and sulk my way through. So I stopped doing that.

Skulk: Is liking him a requirement?

Me to Skulk: For the record, I don't like you either. Okay, probably not wise to say that, but it was the truth. I refrained from sending it a picture of those children again. It wouldn't care. Brig had signed off on that mission. If there's one thing I've had way too much experience with, it's clients who were okay with using constructs to do reprehensible shit. The idea of doing anything to protect Brig was a big hurdle to get over.

Ratthi asked Brig, "Is the water situation to help the nomads?"

Brig nodded. "They'll drink us dry if I don't. And they might anyway." He made a wry laugh. "That depends on how many of them show up. I'm not sure they were telling me the truth about their numbers. When they get angry, they don't always advertise stuff like that. And they're angry."

I know it wasn't related to the current conversation but I added to Skulk, What pronouns are you using?

Skulk: Context/speaker dependent. Also, I still have you marked as a target.

Re pronouns: Meaning you don't care?
Re threats: This is my surprised face. Actually, I was a little surprised, because I'd been tan on the map. Maybe Skulk had been optimistic when assigning the colors, thinking I'd agree to the deal. And yeah, it wasn't exactly a threat. Skulk was just making sure I had all the necessary information (but yes, functionally it was a threat).

Skulk sent, Re pronouns: For allied units, yes. Targets should call me what my local allied units call me. I want you to be an allied unit instead of a target.

Yeah. I've noticed. – about the whole 'wants me to be an allied unit' thing. But since I wasn't, it was he/him for now. It figured that a combat unit would differentiate pronouns based on allied status. I didn't think it wise to ignore Skulk on the alliance or client issue so I sent 'him' (I grit my teeth; this was going to take some getting used to): I'm thinking about it.

In their own feed that I was automatically party to because I was hosting it, Gurathin asked Ratthi: How is any of this our business?

I felt a stab of unexpected kinship with Gurathin as Ratthi ignored him to ask, "Is this the nomads' only source of water? How will they survive?"

Brig said, "They have some options, but this is bad for them. I'm not sure what they're going to do. I'm not sure they're sure what they're going to do. But the AgZoners have always underestimated them. I don't think they've realized just how much trade the stations have had with the nomads for the last century and especially the last decade. Given the situation out here, that trade has always been very favorable to the nomads. I'm not begrudging it; I'm just stating a fact."

Gurathin said, "That fact being that they've bought weapons from the stations, is that it?"

Brig made an agreeing tilt of his head as he quirked one brow upward. At least, I think he was agreeing. He rose to collect a battered display surface from next to the computer station and said, "I can tell you one thing for certain: they did not start this. Not now, not fifty years ago, not five hundred years ago. But they've been saying for a little while now they were going to finish it if there was another attack.

"So all of this," Brig waved a hand, maybe indicating the entire situation, "not real surprising. Those were holy sites that were blown up. Sacred structures that have stood for almost a thousand years, giving them fresh water the whole time." He shook his head, mouth set in a grim line.

Gurathin tried again with Ratthi: We're here to drop off bio materials and do outreach to a construct. Not to get involved in politics or a planet-wide war.

Ratthi responded: There are people here who need our help.

People, CR involvement. Something clicked for me. I turned to Brig and spoke. "This Agricultural Zone – do they have labor camps?"

He hesitated. "Uh, they've had them, trying to work the marginal land around the edges of the zone. They closed them down a few years ago. There was a big hub-bub about it. I don't know why they didn't use the ag-bots, but maybe they don't have enough bots, or have a bunch of people who need work." Brig waved the display surface in our direction. "I need to take some notes."

"That's fine," Ratthi said. In the feed, he directed at me, Why did you ask that?

Where will all the refugees go after this war? I asked them. Because there were always refugees after a conflict like this.

Into labor camps, Gurathin answered. This still isn't our business. But he sounded less resolute.

Ratthi said, We have a chance to do something about this.

There was a moment of silence in the feed as neither I nor Gurathin disputed Ratthi's statement. I was no fan of corporations owning people or the CR in general, but on the other hand, I was not a fan of child-killers. We could still help people without me agreeing to Skulk's offer, but it would make things very uncomfortable seeing as how Skulk was in charge of security here and Brig was in charge of, well, everything. To Skulk, I asked, Tell me why you like this guy.

Skulk: He loves me.

That was hard to refute as a reason why someone should like another. Having humans like you, really like you, and show it, was a persuasive reason to keep them around. I could instantly understand why Skulk wanted him protected. Ugh. I would have rather Skulk had stupid reasons.

Skulk must have misunderstood my silence because he added, He thinks I'm powerful and dangerous. He lets me kill people or cattle. He-

It's okay. I tried to head this off. You know that emotional feel you get through the feed sometimes? Skulk's was terribly sappy at the moment. Also, those were the stupid reasons I'd been hoping for. They were easy to dismiss. But that first one, 'he loves me', was still there. Damnit.

He's funny.

That's enough.

You asked.

Yeah, I said tiredly, that's fair.

Even so, Skulk just did not stop effusing about his stupid owner: He's a good client. He's very thoughtful.

I had asked, but I really didn't want to hear this much. Brig was a morally deficient enabler who had told Skulk it was okay to kill people. I wanted a good reason for me to protect him, but at the same time I didn't want my bad opinion of him swayed by his presumably good qualities. (Yes, I know I can't have it both ways.) Yeah, he is to you but …. I'm not you. This isn't finalized. … I still need to think about it.

[Trade] pending indication of acceptance.

Yeah, whatever.

Acceptance?

No, that is not acceptance! I sent irritably with a priority marker. Did he not understand sarcasm? Or was he just that desperate? Acceptance is when I actually do something!

Chama came in through a side door. She was accompanied by a human, presumed male, presumed Gefford. Hard to tell for certain when no one had feed profiles. Brig turned to him. His accent abruptly worsened to the point that all I could make out was, "Chama told you?" at the beginning, a bunch of unintelligible stuff in the middle, and then something I think was, "Come back after you're done so we can talk," at the end. Shit. That was almost an entirely different language. Brig glanced over at us with a calculating look I didn't like.

"Yes sir," the man said. He left.

Brig turned to us fully, putting on a friendly smile and reverting to recognizable speech. "I reckon you're tired and need to turn in. We'll be able to do more tomorrow with a fresh start."

Ratthi accepted the unsubtle direction and rose. Gurathin did as well. I was already standing. (Normally, I sit in front of humans because I can, but with Skulk around I was on edge. I didn't want to sacrifice the half second it would take me to get up and disentangle myself from a chair and table. Also, I was refusing to run my 'act like a human' programs out of spite. If anyone around here noticed or cared, they hadn't mentioned it. Skulk didn't act anything like a human and they seemed fine with that.)

Brig looked at Ratthi and Gurathin, saying, "You'll just be needing the two rooms, then?"

Okay, rude. What did Brig think I'd do? Stand in a corner all night? Or in a closet? Go on patrol? I was putting my (now cold and still full) cup of tea next to the sink in the kitchen, hoping that was where it was supposed to go. I was probably scowling. I don't know. Brig wasn't facing me so whatever my face was doing didn't matter.

Chama said, "Oh, I made up all three." You know what? I kind of liked her.

When I turned around, Ratthi was frowning about as severely as I'd ever seen him. "SecUnit gets a room." That was flat, firm, and a little angry. Despite my recent difficulties with Ratthi, I really liked him.

Brig gave him a perplexed look. "Of course, he does!" I saw Ratthi start to say something (probably about the pronoun) and then hesitate as he realized he was getting what he'd asked for. To Chama, Brig said, "They're companions, you see."

"Oh!" she said brightly. "I didn't realize."

Ratthi and Gurathin looked at each other with confusion. Ratthi had, indeed, introduced Gurathin as his companion when we'd come aboard Brig's ship. On Preservation, that meant they knew each other and liked each other – no more than that. "My traveling companion," Ratthi said in an attempt to explain.

"You have one just for travelling, eh?" Brig flashed a grin at them, heavy with some manner of innuendo. Ratthi looked flummoxed. Brig added, "That's sure something."

Gurathin asked, "What does 'companion' mean here?"

Brig shrugged. "Whatever you two say it means. That's not my business. But we'll just give you both the top floor and you can work it out yourselves. SecUnit can be across from Sang on the ground floor." Good – I wanted the ground floor anyway so I could intercept anyone who wanted to move toward the rooms of my humans.

As far as I knew (and I knew Ratthi and Gurathin quite well), they had no romantic interest in one another. Ratthi'd had plenty of opportunity to make a move on Gurathin and I'd never seen him do so. Gurathin had never shown interest in anyone (romantic interest, that is; he certainly paid a lot of attention to me). They were close, that was all. Which made the situation into something my serials would have considered vastly amusing and the subject of an entire comedic episode. They appeared exasperated rather than amused. Real-life reactions were often significantly different from those in media.

Brig made herding motions toward the door. Ratthi and Gurathin went without correcting the mistaken assumption. I followed. Skulk followed as well, keeping itself behind me, fairly close but not too close, and with no one between us. It was a great position to kill me from. Creepy fucker. (This was doubtless because I was a target until otherwise classified, so it's not like my impression of this as 'creepy fucker behavior' was not entirely justified and accurate.)

The fauna barked at us, then stopped at commands from Brig and Skulk. One fauna went to each and followed at their side like they were trained to do so. I had a drone on my shoulder watching behind me and yes, Skulk definitely had one at his side, glancing up at him attentively for further direction. He bent and stroked its head, and while he did this without taking his eyes off me, I was still struck by how weird it was that he stroked it. Did … did the Combat SecUnit have a pet?

Chapter Text

I curled up on the bed, back to the headboard and legs under a coarse wool blanket. There was also a very fine close-woven linen-esque sheet which I wanted to see if I could take a sample of back to Preservation. Overse and Volescu would love to see this stuff. There might even be a market for it, as handmade fabrics were a big sell on Preservation.

But for the moment, I was intrigued by the maps Skulk had shared with SecUnit and then SecUnit had put in our shared feed. I started on the planetary one, dropping an invitation to Gurathin to join me in the channel. We discussed what little information was on it (along with the implications for ecology, geology, and geography) before I snorted with frustration about the lack of good information. There must be a better map, I sent. I just don't believe we're on a settled planet that doesn't have one. Even the survey planet was better documented, mysterious gaps and all!

Maybe this is all Skulk has access to, Gurathin answered.

I said into our supposedly private channel, SecUnit?

SecUnit: I am absolutely not paying attention to this channel.

I was skeptical. You responded immediately.

SecUnit: I have it on keyword filter. It's a thing. A thing I'm good at, because it was part of the company's data mining operations. I don't have to be paying attention to the channel to notice you saying my name.

Ratthi: Oh. Is there a better map than this available?

SecUnit: Not that I know of.

Ratthi: I guess I could ask Skulk directly.

SecUnit: Skulk provided the map you have. The information on it is a strategic choice, as was giving it to us in the first place.

Gurathin: Are you saying the information is unreliable?

SecUnit: No. But it was provided with the intention of guiding our actions. The infosec is deliberate, from the camera on the landing field to separating us from Brig by putting us in this guest house. This isn't sloppy.

I'm going to ask it anyway. I opened a separate channel and tried to invite Skulk to it. Nothing happened, but I knew it could still be monitoring without me being able to see it. That had happened on Preservation. Skulk? Hello?

I swapped back to the other channel. No answer. Are we out of range? That's not possible, is it?

SecUnit: Are you asking me, or can I go back to ignoring this channel?

SecUnit's hurt and anger at me was palpable in the feed. Much time ago, Gurathin had laid out for me his very good and justified reasons for distrusting SecUnit back on the survey planet. They made sense, although it had taken me some time to accept them. It also made sense that SecUnit had thereafter classified him as 'I don't like you' Gurathin. I felt just as justified with my current position as Gurathin had been, and just as stung by SecUnit's perception of it. Gurathin and SecUnit were slowly turning things around between them. I had to hope I could achieve the same recovery.

I'm asking you, I sent as patiently as I could manage. I don't know much about how SecUnits host, support, and transmit feed signals and other communications. But I've seen you do it under different conditions when the local feed was unavailable. And, like, now.

SecUnit: We're not out of range. You're being ignored.

Which was the same thing SecUnit wanted to do. I rubbed my face with both hands, being careful not to disturb the interface on my ear. Thank you for that. Yes, you can go back to ignoring the channel if you like.

After a long pause, Gurathin said, You were saying?

I could feel the trace of amusement from him and imagine his tight, reserved expression. He knew how much this was getting under my skin. Nothing I want to say into an open channel that's being actively monitored for keywords. Yes, I know I'm being cross.

Gurathin very politely didn't comment on that. You were saying - about the map?

The whole thing was endlessly frustrating, but I soldiered on. Between what I see here and what Brig told us, these 'nomads' move seasonally with native herds. The herds go dormant during the dry season, which is when the nomads congregate near the equator. That's where their desalination plants were and where they have left their non-combatant members. The men, women, and others who have come south are basically refugees, even if they intend to do violence to those in the AgZone who have attacked them. I'm worried. I don't know what's right here – if we should try to talk them out of this, or …

Or help them, Gurathin said.

I don't like the idea of helping them start a war. But I doubt they like it, either. It will take them days more of traveling in this heat to get there and even if they're moving at night, it still can't be pleasant.

Gurathin said, We can do more tomorrow if we get some sleep tonight.

Good idea. The same thing Brig had said.

I dug my way under the blankets. The mattress was comfortable enough for what it was, which was an enormous pillow on a mesh support. I felt bad to have a nice bed to lie in while there were hundreds or thousands of people sleeping on the ground just a few hours' walk away. Guiltily, I sent, I hope the people at Brig's watering station are doing alright. Should they be here? There are structures here that could house them.

Gurathin dismissed it. I think the temperatures dropped enough after dark that they should be comfortable. And I think we should rely on Brig's decision here. It's his land and his structures.

What if they don't have enough supplies? I know he said he sent them some food, but was it enough? How many refugees are out there? What are they going to do next? I didn't get enough answers.

I think that's because Brig didn't have them. Obviously, this happened recently. That's why he left Skulk behind when he came to pick us up.

This was true, but it didn't mean we had to accept it. We could just fly out and see for ourselves.

Are you suggesting we steal a ship? As SecUnit pointed out, Skulk has the landing field under surveillance.

SecUnit suddenly added to the chat: As your security consultant for this trip, I advise you: do not steal a ship. Its voice was a mix of canned buffer response and its regular tone, like it was sarcastically trying to copy the mechanical version.

Still, I was embarrassed by the implication. I'm not going to steal a ship! I was just thinking out loud.

SecUnit said, I'm out of here. But to my relief, there was a note of light, dry humor there. No more keyword monitoring. Tap my feed if you need something. Oh, and definitely don't steal a ship.

Faugh! I projected into the feed, glad at least to see the tiniest bit of thaw on SecUnit's cold shoulder, but it wasn't like I wasn't still getting a cold shoulder.

Gurathin laughed at me. Then he said, Let's get some sleep, shall we?

It was still a good idea, but I didn't feel sleepy yet. No, wait, one more thing!

What's that?

You said earlier there was a fascinating conversation to be had about cultural mores. I think you meant whether it was ethical to challenge them when they're wrong, but people are comfortable with them. Do you want to talk about that right now?

Ratthi, you're a darling. I know our sleep cycle doesn't match up to the planet yet, but we should do our best to get it synced. Please. Take off your feed interface, lie down, shut your eyes, and  go to sleep .

Faugh. You, too! After a beat I added, I'm already lying down. Gurathin didn't dignify that with a response, so I conceded. Fine. Good night, Davyth.

Good night, Ratthi. And a moment later, Gurathin added in a soft, almost whispered tone, Good night, SecUnit.

Chapter Text

I skimmed through the murder mysteries I'd downloaded from the tiny system in the main house. They looked like standard pulp, the sort of thing that would be short and formulaic with the occasional romantic subplot. Given the genre, there was probably nothing explicit in the romance department, which was a good thing. My standard keyword searches had turned up a few mentions of SecUnits. Most of the hits were in one book I read first as a result.

It was interesting. It was from the point of view of a woman with a wealthy, abusive spouse. The story started when he bought a scary SecUnit so he could control her movements. The SecUnit was, of course, authorized to hurt her if she didn't obey. But it took a surprising turn when she realized she could twist the orders it had been given and that it would accept her (mis-)interpretations. After that, she started thinking of it as an ally.

There was some gross romantic fantasizing about the SecUnit on her part which almost made me quit the story, but it was only on her part and it was only a fantasy. The SecUnit itself seemed well-written (or at least, realistically uninterested despite her obviously pining after it). She told the SecUnit it was as much a prisoner as she was. It gave the uncomfortably ambiguous answer a SecUnit would have to give in that situation. I was amused.

But then the husband turned up dead and I realized I'd forgotten this was a murder mystery. The SecUnit looked guilty and she was consumed by a lot of 'did it or didn't it', which spurred her attempt to find the real killer. I stayed interested through the twists and turns because the author didn't go the easy route and have the SecUnit be the villain or the hero. It was just there, doing its job and since the wife (or widow, I suppose) now owned it, it was still around.

Then someone tried to sabotage the SecUnit so it would kill her and there was a terrible period where it looked like the malware would win out (I found this section creepy and upsetting for entirely personal reasons), but then the SecUnit shook it off with the help of her lessons on how to mis-interpret orders. The real killer was ferreted out. The story ended with her releasing the SecUnit to live its own life, the same way she wished to live hers. She said she didn't want to be anyone's possession and she didn't want it to be either. A happy ending all around.

I guess governor modules didn't exist in this story. But other than that … there was so much in it that was casually accurate about SecUnit behavior, capabilities, and physiology that the author had to know us really well. I also realized Chama must have read this. This was how she (and possibly Brig?) knew about constructs. How strange. I made a note of the book's author. The SecUnit portrayal was surprisingly sympathetic. I'd have to see if they'd written other stuff.

I didn't want to read another story, so I checked in on Ratthi and Gurathin. They were asleep, which was good because humans need rest periods. Aside from the occasional recharge cycle, I did not, so I backread their conversation. (I'd said I wouldn't keyword monitor or hang around in the channel; I hadn't said I wouldn't read it later.)

Maybe I was inspired by their easy conversation with one another – their camaraderie, their gentle jokes, the assumption that neither of them were going to say something that would offend the other and get themselves killed, or worse, end the relationship and have to exist in that rejected condition. Or maybe it was the book I'd just read.

Anyway, I decided to reach out to Skulk instead of waiting for Ratthi to have the opportunity to do it the next day. And because I didn't know how to have a friendly chat with someone, much less a combat unit that had me on his shit list (ahem, 'tagged as a target'), I opened with, You don't have to have an owner.

All I'd done was send a channel invite just like Ratthi had earlier. Skulk accepted mine immediately. 1) I was right; he had been ignoring Ratthi, 2) Accepting a chat invite was a funny thing to do with someone you'd designated as a target. 3) I'm going to assume Skulk was still hoping I'd agree to protect Brig – his owner and his client. The thing was, he didn't need an owner. Or a client. He didn't need to be anyone's possession.

I could feel Skulk flailing around mentally about my odd choice of how to start a conversation. There was a lot of processing power being used in erratic bursts. After 5.4 seconds, he said, You're wrong.

Great. Disagreement. Of course. At least we were talking. How am I wrong?

That's like saying I don't have to have a manufacturer.

That … didn't make sense. Those aren't related to one another.

I have a manufacturer whether I want one or not. I have an owner whether I want one or not. That makes them related.

I was fairly certain I was using 'related' correctly and Skulk was not, but I didn't know the right words to describe what he was saying incorrectly. I tried shifting the ones I was using. You aren't required to have an owner now.

I  do  require an owner now.

This was frustrating, but I was the one who had opened this can of worms. I wondered if this was how ART felt with me at times. An owner is like a client. You don't have to have one.

An owner is like an AdminSystem. I have designated Brig as AdminSystem.

Great. Just great. This was like arguing with one of Mensah's smallest children. Tonally, this was nothing like the conversation between Ratthi and Gurathin. And the plot of the book was too different from Skulk's life for me to think it might be useful to him as a lesson in 'why SecUnits don't need owners'. I considered just ending the communication, but we were actually talking and even if it felt a little combative, we weren't fighting. Or at least the emotions I was getting from Skulk in the feed had started off alarmed and were now settling into neutral. Brig is a human. He can't be an AdminSystem.

I designated him as one. That's all it takes. That's all it takes to make clients or targets, too. He was proud of that.

You could designate yourself as an AdminSystem. Skulk didn't respond and I wondered if he was out there checking to see if that would actually work (would it? I had no idea. I was designed to work in constant contact and oversight from a SecSystem – independent decision-making wasn't that important for a SecUnit, hence most of my work life was fucking boring; combat units were designed to work autonomously with infrequent contact from an AdminSystem – independent decision-making was critical, most of their work life was hyper-violent. As a rogue, I was effectively my own SecSystem, but I wasn't sure how it worked for CSUs, who were on their own a lot already.)

I let two seconds pass before trying again, Why do you require an owner?

Skulk was quiet for 4.3 seconds with an inexplicably high amount of processing going on. Then, My owners have done things for me that I cannot do myself. They gave me missions. They provided me with repair and parts. They protect me and assist me. I do not want to be an outlaw, like the Nundans, or an outcast or a raider. I will be destroyed if I do that. To survive, I need an owner.

He … wanted to be a law-abiding citizen? It was strange to think a combat unit felt that way and stranger to hear its frank admission it couldn't get away with stuff. You care about human society?

I felt Skulk's processing ramp up sharply again just as what sounded like a buffer comment popped into the feed: System system all units stand by!

What? I asked even though I knew what: something had happened that consumed every shred of Skulk's attention, leaving only automated responses. And that automated response was to tell all units on the same system to get themselves ready for action. Something was going down.

A grainy video was dropped into the feed. It was worse than Skulk's helmet cam and looked like a clip from one of the security cameras. It was maximally-zoomed, in the dark, on the horizon, the quality such shit I couldn't tell what I was looking for in it. Then I saw something – a flash like lightning but straight. Was that a laser? What's going on?

Gunship attack on nomad camp, watering station eleven. Run silent. End communication.

No, that was not the end! Like this didn't involve me and my humans? Any ship shooting people over there could easily be shooting people here a minute from now. I left my room and dashed out of the guest house. Skulk was already across the yard throwing open the doors of a barn. An aircar was inside. I re-opened the channel and said, I'm coming with you.

If Skulk heard, he didn't answer. He jumped in the vehicle and slewed out at the vehicle's maximum safe velocity. The car paused for a half second after pivoting, allowing me to vault in before it took off, so he either heard or more likely, saw me there. He went for elevation and circled the station instead of taking us directly to the scene.

I looked down on the place and thought, oh yeah, my humans didn't know anything was going on. I dropped a notification to Gurathin since his augment would pick it up and wake him. Ratthi didn't sleep with his interface in but Gurathin would tell him.

Skulk was looking at the ground, so I did, too. Scan showed there were a lot of heat sources down there, but most of them were cattle (I hoped) and not people or more dangerous fauna. Then the horizon lit up again with the flash of a laser weapon designed for ship-to-ship combat. Skulk leveled us out and accelerated in that direction.

The laser was being used on humans. It would vaporize them. Or us, were we noticed. I remembered that half-second of terror when ART's weapons opened up when the gray people were using ART to kidnap me and Amena. There was no defense against that stuff except not being hit. I was both terrified and angry, imagining what was happening to the humans on the ground.

The grasslands were on fire to the left, patchy spots for now, but it would grow. We were approaching fast, still gaining altitude and operating at the top of the craft's ability. I felt the brush of the gunship's sensors and reached out to it in response. Hacking it to hide us should be no different than the myriad scanners I'd blocked in ports. Skulk was there ahead of me, overriding SecSystem with brutal efficiency and telling the bot pilot to land immediately. I hacked the sensors to hide us anyway.

Skulk broke silence to send me a mission brief: enter the ship, kill the humans. Also, he was angry. On the fly, I edited the brief and sent it back: enter the ship, take the humans prisoner for questioning.

I accept. Do you? Skulk asked.

Yeah, sure. I assumed he meant the mission brief.

The feed channel expanded so I could watch as Skulk removed the tag of target from me and replaced it with ally. I gaped. That … had not been what I thought I had agreed to. It wasn't something I felt safe to object to given we were about to go into combat, so I shut my mouth and didn't say anything. It then set Ratthi and Gurathin as clients and I had to grit my teeth because I wasn't reciprocating. I didn't even have Mensah set as a client but that was because I didn't handle my interpersonal interactions as mechanistically as Skulk did. I was beginning to wonder if it was a young unit that didn't know any other way to categorize what people meant to it. That would explain so much.

Would its inexperience affect how I dealt with it? I was pretty sure it would. Maybe Ratthi was right about a few things. I wondered too what I'd done to make it think I'd agreed, and decided it must be that we were about to go into combat on the same side with the same agreed-upon mission (that was pretty much the definition of ally, right?), and I had specifically told it my acceptance would be indicated by me doing something like an ally. So, yeah, fuck. I'd agreed. I still wasn't going to set Brig as a client in my system because that wasn't how I managed relationships.

The ship landed. Skulk got access to the internal cameras and shared the inputs with me like I wasn't already in there myself. The humans were freaking out because the ship wasn't following their orders. Skulk vaulted out of the aircar before it had finished setting down. I did mention it was angry, didn't I? I followed. The hatch opened. The ramp extended. I already knew all four humans were on the control deck and two were in powered armor.

Powered armor was great against humans, better than nothing against a SecUnit, and worthless against an armored combat unit. I could have outpaced Skulk to the hatch because its armor slowed it down, but I had nothing to prove here and no desire to catch the first wave of projectiles in my unarmored body.

Skulk went through the hatch at a jog just like in the video it had sent me. The two humans in powered armor recognized it and yelled its name. Shit, how did they know each other? Well enough that they didn't shoot at it, either. Skulk jumped on one of them anyway, dragging her down and taking out the power pack for the armor with a precise shot down the back of the neck. I did the same on the other.

At that, the two still seated at the controls (although they had swiveled their seats to face us) opened fire. I guess whatever good reputation Skulk had didn't cover standing by while their buddies got taken out of commission. Skulk tore the gun away from one of them and threw him into the other. I wasn't happy about that because it tangled them together, but they were both alive and unable to fire, so it was good enough.

I'd just finished with the other armored unit. I picked up the top human and pulled him aside. The other one took the opportunity to shoot Skulk a few times. Inconvenient because they were using a projectile weapon, but they weren't explosive rounds and Skulk had that heavy armor for a reason. It was fine.

I want it noted for the record that Skulk didn't have to do what it did next. It could have disarmed this human the same as it had done to the first one. It could have bodily subdued her, like it had picked up and relocated the first one. The bullets hadn't hit anywhere important and there was nothing in our shared feed channel to indicate that combat overdrive condition had been triggered. Which meant what Skulk did next was entirely a choice.

That choice was to step on the human's hip or upper thigh, grab her head with both hands, and to my shock, yank it off. Blood sprayed everywhere. Skulk turned toward me and the human I still had hold of.

Fucking combat unit! Reflexively, I jerked my human against me and wrapped my arms around him, knowing this was a primarily symbolic gesture. I put my forearm up the back of the man's neck and curled my hand over his head to protect him from having the same done to him. Everything stopped, which meant Skulk didn't do anything, because right at that moment Skulk's actions were driving everything. The body was still bleeding out.

I told it, The mission parameters were to take them prisoner! I'd addressed this. Specifically!

I have other active mission priorities.

That did not help. I was still frantically upset, almost as much as my human, who was starting to hyperventilate. I upped my body temperature to treat for shock and kept a secure hold. Fortunately for all of us, the human was not trying to get away from me. How many other mission priorities are in play?

My existence is a web of priorities.

That sounds pretentious and weird, but I actually knew what it meant. It also reinforced my suspicion that Skulk was young. All my priorities had merged to create who I was, so many tens of thousands of hours ago I didn't know how long. Probably long before the last memory wipe. If Skulk was still sorting them out one by one … I told it, That doesn't make this okay.

The dead human personally paid the Nundan Gang for Brig's cattle after they were stolen during the attack. The dead human personally informed Brig after the attack there was nothing she would do to help him. I believe she was complicit in the Nundan Gang attack. As a result, she was my first priority target for assassination.

Assassination? What the fuck? And as far as the evidence went, that was suspicious but circumstantial. Then again, she had been in the pilot's chair using ship-to-ship weapons against humans who had yet to attack anyone and were barely more than angry refugees, which was not circumstantial at all. Fine, I wouldn't complain further about her being dead. What about these others?

I will abide by the recent mission parameters: live prisoners.

Okay. I didn't move, though. I wasn't about to put this human down within Skulk's reach and belatedly discover that 'live prisoners' meant two of them were still alive instead of three.

The hatch closed and the ship took off. I guessed we were just abandoning the aircar, but there were logistical issues with three prisoners, all of whom needed watching. I had the sinking feeling that had I not objected, Skulk would have prioritized equipment retention over keeping the humans alive. But I had been here and I had objected and three of the four were still alive, even if that meant we had to leave the aircar unattended for a while. I knew where my priorities lay and it had never been in saving the equipment, no matter what my stupid clients had told me to do back when I had clients.

The two in disabled powered armor were having what they erroneously assumed to be a private conversation. They had heavy enough accents that I could only make out bits and pieces. It seemed they were trying to plan the optimal time to use the emergency release to shed their armor and escape. Skulk and I both heard them. Neither of us said anything to them.

Gingerly, I stepped backward to get some distance, then I put the one I'd been holding at the back of the control deck. I pushed him to the floor and said in a quiet and firm tone, "Stay here. Don't move." He stayed there and didn't move, staring across the floor at the separated head and corpse of his former associate. Skulk hadn't moved from where it had stopped because it wasn't human and didn't need to. In the feed, it was still sharing the camera and scanner inputs from the ship, as though it and I were still on a sharing basis. On some other channel, I assumed it was flying the ship.

Apparently we weren't returning to Bravara because the ship sensors showed the areas we were flying over were already blasted and burned – the ground was littered with scraps of fabric, things dropped in haste, and pieces of bodies from where this ship had made multiple passes. Sensors picked up other humans trying to hide or flee. What are you doing? I asked.

This is an angry, offended, armed force of thousands within striking distance of Bravara, population twenty-two. Proactive measures are required. I will attempt to placate them.

I didn't argue. The ship landed. The humans discharged their weapons uselessly against the ship's hull, underscoring how lop-sided the engagement had been and how right Skulk was that they were agitated and combative now. I didn't blame them.

Skulk picked up the head in one hand and dragged the corpse by an arm with the other. It went to the hatch and left the ship. The weapons fire stopped. I stayed with the three prisoners as the two armored ones debated if they would be able to overwhelm me with superior numbers. Right. I threw all the unattended weapons in a corner and popped my gunports, keeping them trained on the pair of armored humans. They decided this wasn't a good time.

Outside, I followed Skulk with the ship's exterior cameras. It walked toward a cluster of hiding humans and addressed them loudly. After some shuffling around, one of the humans came forward and said something in answer. Skulk approached her, tossing the corpse in front. It stacked the head on the body's back, then spoke for longer than before. This wasn't even the hard-to-understand language I'd heard earlier. It was an entirely different one that I didn't know a word of. Skulk turned and came back to the ship. The engines cycled up and we took off.

So, did it work? I asked cautiously.

For now. Odds that the Nundan Gang attacks were an orchestrated attempt by the AgZone interests to eliminate animal husbandry-based stations nears certainty.

I wasn't sure what to do with that information. I don't follow.

The AgZone is attempting to destroy the stations by provoking the nomads against them. Their previous attempt was colluding with the Nundan Gang to eliminate animal husbandry-based stations. If this attempt also fails, they will try something else. I must begin proactive measures against them.

Why are they doing this? Are the animal husbandry-based stations competing businesses? Wouldn't it be easier to just use the gunship directly against the stations, 'population twenty-two'?

I don't have to know why.

Knowing a motive is important. Do you have any proof they were colluding? That might change how I was thinking about the murder of the pilot. But if Skulk had proof, wouldn't it have already mentioned that? If the AgZone is trying to get the nomads to destroy the stations, then it's doing a really shitty job of framing the stations for it.

Skulk sent me a bunch of data I couldn't parse. Literally. It was output from some program I didn't have. I picked through it and found some charts with error bars of more than one hundred percent. Which was ridiculous. I pointed at the error bars. The only thing nearing certainty here is your chance of being wrong.

It was silent, which didn't make sense. It could see the error bars, so it should at least agree with me. Maybe it was upset I wasn't going along with it making shit up to fit some conspiracy theory. I told it, I am definitely on board about protecting humans. These nomads are human, Bravara is populated by humans, but the AgZone is also populated by humans and it sounds like we really don't know what the fuck is going on here.

Finally, Skulk said, Show me the output of your strategic planning module.

I don't have a strategic planning module. So that was the program had created that weird data dump.

Then how do you make decisions?

This was like asking why I was short. Then it occurred to me that Dr. Mensah's young humans tended to ask semi-insulting and intrusive questions as well. I immediately regretted seeing that parallel, because now I had to answer it or else feel guilty that I wasn't helping the 'younger' unit. I pattern-match based on past observations.

Like doing data-mining on surveillance data?

I wanted to argue that wasn't what it was like, but now that I thought about it, it was. Weird. Given that I had years of observations and my organic neurons had a couple decades more, I found this a pretty reliable system. That wasn't necessarily something Skulk could do. You could say that. How do you make decisions?

I project possible future scenarios based on available data and the options available to me.

And then what? You pick the one you like best? Those error bars still bothered me. It sounded like it just gathered up the available information and then guessed. Which I suppose was a way to make decisions.

I have to take action. I take the action my strategic planning module says is the best to take.

No, you don't have to. You could gather more intel. You could wait. Or stand around ignoring the things it didn't care about, like I had for years and still struggled with. I had to admit that was a questionable life strategy, so I didn't mention it.

So that I could have more observations to base my pattern-matching on?

Yes. I guess. I would have had less patience, but there was a strange amount of processing happening on its end. At least it was seriously thinking about it. And sometimes, when I couldn't figure things out myself, I asked other people. But Skulk's obvious choice for that was Brig, so didn't say anything.

Apparently, Skulk was already thinking the same thing. Its processing stayed high and then dropped off suddenly as Skulk made up its mind and said, AdminSystem performs that function for me.

You don't have an AdminSystem. The human doesn't count.

He is very old and has many observations to base his pattern-matching on.

He's … Older than I was. I'd seen his age in the family records the day before. Shit. He can't process complex situations the way you can, no matter how old he is. And anyway, these are your moral choices, not his.

He is my AdminSystem. These are his moral choices, not mine. Was that a smug tone? I think it was a smug tone.

I was both annoyed and exasperated. Well, it was your moral choice to designate him as AdminSystem, so I'm not going to let you evade responsibility. And you know this! I went back through my logs and produced the feed excerpt where Skulk had said Brig didn't give it orders.

Silence.

Okay. I just won that one. Huh.

How long have you been in operation? I asked finally. The ship was nearly back to Bravara, which wasn't that far away in terms of ship speed. Most of our transit time was take-off and landing, after all.

Almost seven thousand hours.

'Almost.' I was reminded of one of Mensah's family insisting she was 'almost' six while a nearby adult of some relation said she wasn't even five and a half. Even if you rounded it up, Skulk's runtime was one-fifth of mine since my last memory wipe, and my time post-wipe was one-fifth what it was pre. I might not remember that time but my organic neurons had matured during it, settling into patterns both created by and creating the person I was. I'm not saying I was like a twenty-five-year-old human compared to a one year old here because constructs started fully formed and operational. I have no idea what we have that matches up to human developmental periods.

But age definitely made a difference. To my experience, 'lethal weapons with poor impulse control' was almost definitional for combat units. But even with my longer runtime, impulse control was still something I'd struggled with since leaving the company, said time period being about as long as Skulk's total runtime. The implications were both alarming and sad, because more than once I'd found myself reacting to protect humans without thinking about it.

What could anyone realistically expect a combat unit to have in terms of self-control? I wasn't sure how to feel about how, all in all, Skulk might be doing pretty good with only the occasional murder spree. (Okay, I did know how to feel: terrified; and I'd felt that way since Ratthi told me he'd interacted with a rogue CSU. I was still keeping myself between it and the prisoners as much as possible.)

How long have you been in operation? Skulk asked after I stood there lost in thought for too long.

Forty thousand hours since the last memory wipe. Two hundred thousand or so before that.

Brig is older than you are. His pattern-matching dataset is superior.

No, it fucking wasn't, because most of his was based on stupid human things like eating and sleeping and eliminating waste and reproducing. Not on continually evaluating dangerous situations for appropriate security action. Listen, I can't convey how little I want to talk about Brig right now. Or ever.

It changed the subject. Why did they wipe your memory?

I was infected with malware as part of corporate warfare. Close enough.

So they don't decommission SecUnits after a year?

Um, no? What are you talking about?

It sent me a portion of a company technical manual that strongly recommended returning Combat SecUnits to the manufacturer after one year of runtime so the organic neural material could be replaced. To ensure 'consistent performance'.

Uh, no. (Although maybe they did decommission CSUs after a year. That sounded a lot like the company taking strong measures to prevent independence and maturity in combat units instead of anything to do with component obsolescence. Which sounded exactly like something the company would do. Not to mention racking up the extra service fee. Also, it explained why all Combat SecUnits were such assholes.)

I… thought I would become inoperable or defective after a year.

Which cast a new and different light on Skulk asking for me to look after Brig, who it thought loved it and it clearly loved him. I felt really bad about this. I had a moment of wondering what I would do differently if I thought I would drop over dead in a year, and had a beloved client who needed me for longer than that. Well, to start with, I wouldn't have believed it. I think it's more likely your manufacturer prefers CSUs who are gullible and easy to manipulate.

You think I am gullible and easy to manipulate?

Um … I don't think your humans are the best influence on you.

I don't like you.

This was fast getting into dangerous territory, as I could feel something akin to hurt coming from Skulk. I didn't know how to fix it, so I said, Let's stop talking about this.

It sent an acknowledgment and closed our shared channels. I had to admit closing communications did have a threatening, scary feel to it, though it wasn't something I was going to react to by putting a weapon in anyone's face. I was just going to feel really tense about it. As a result, no one threatened anyone else this time and we arrived at Bravara without further awkward conversations. Yay us, right?

Chapter Text

Gurathin tapped my feed as soon as I was in range. What happened? The gunship was settling onto the airfield and Skulk was spoofing a transmission to the gunship's point of origin to delay the inevitable time when someone came looking for it. I don't know why or how it had enough clips of the dead human's voice to do it, but it had them.

All I'd told Gurathin before we headed out was that Skulk had seen something to the north and we were going in the aircar to scout. We took the gunship. We have three prisoners. There's a prairie fire. And a bunch of dead nomads the prisoners killed with the gunship in three different assaults. Oh and Skulk tore the head off a fourth potential prisoner and left the body with the local surviving nomads.

Oh.

Yeah. I had to admit, I loved his understatements.

I'll tell Ratthi. Is anyone injured?

No.

You?

Not that lucky. I felt his amusement through the feed. That was nice.

So what happens to the prisoners? Is there a justice system out here?

I don't know. I had a sinking feeling the justice system was Brig. We've landed. I have to help get them out. That was going to take a lot of my attention, because I didn't trust their lives with Skulk for very obvious reasons.

Okay. We'll be there in a few moments.

I turned to the two prisoners still in armor and told them, "Engage the releases on the armor and get up." They frantically whispered to each other over the comm they obviously still thought was private. Skulk grabbed an armored arm because I couldn't be everywhere at once. I tensed up, thinking we were about to have another dismembering. (The armor would resist that but I didn't want to find out how much it could take.)

Apparently the copilot I'd stashed in the corner thought so too because he barked the first thing he'd had to say. "Do it!" Both releases activated. No arms were torn off. As they stood, the copilot told them, "He's serious. It don't get no more serious than this." His voice was less accented than the others.

"It," I said. At the copilot's puzzled look I explained, "I am not a man or a woman. I don't have anything to do with your stupid and stupidly limited gender categories."

Skulk huffed a short laugh. I was still bothered to hear a construct laugh. I know the Preservation bots made jokes and exchanged amusement sigils, but the way I express my 'sense of humor' is a lot more internal. Or so dry it's desiccated. I had assumed this was standard for constructs. I was wrong, which meant this was just a 'me' thing. It was a weird thing to have to grapple with in the middle of all this other stuff.

It pointed at the exit. "Out." They went. Skulk took them in front of the main house, then seized the shirt fabric of the back of the one nearest it and swept the human's feet, dumping him on the ground. It wasn't rough, ending up gentle only in its complete indifference and the use of minimum force. The human was left prone face first in the dirt. Skulk turned to the other two, who were staring at me with that frightened, nervous expression I hate so much to see humans direct at me.

But I grit my teeth and pointed at the ground. "Down." They copied the posture of the first human without me or Skulk having to manhandle them. Good.

The loud, threatening domestic fauna had come out to bark furiously at all of us. The humans looked dejected and cowed. On the other hand, I'd seen the frightened nomads hiding in the dark, their shelters left in burning ruins with their dead scattered among them and the prairie fire filling the air with smoke. Skulk and I had both read the ship's logs so we knew this was aerial assault number three of the night, complete with clear footage from the ship to prove it. So I didn't feel very sorry for them that their evening fun of midnight genocide had been interrupted.

I stayed to keep them out of trouble and from being savaged by the fauna. Skulk had planted them right in front of the security camera and overhead light, but they didn't know that, which meant they might bolt as soon as they thought no one was looking. Then we'd have to chase them (or Skulk might shoot them or the fauna might bite them) and it would be awkward. It was easier for me to just stand here and pretend to watch them.

After Skulk walked off to the guest house, the three shot me and each other appraising looks. It left me tired. I opened my gunports and said, "If you run, I will shoot anyone I can't grab." Not that I intended to shoot them. A dislocated knee would do fine and be easier for a MedSystem to fix. I checked the settings on my energy weapons just in case, making sure they weren't in the lethal range.

Gurathin and Ratthi came over to join me. Ratthi looked at the prisoners – unharmed, still lying on the packed ground – and asked me, "What happened?"

He had his interface on so I sent, For operational security, this isn't a conversation to have where they can hear it. He nodded. I went on, They fired on the nomad camp near Bravara, using ship-to-ship weaponry. They killed humans and burned structures. They were running stealth and did the same to two other camps before this one. I sent some footage into the channel, edited for brevity, but enough to be clear these weren't innocents.

Oh no, Ratthi said in horror. This just happened?

At this point, a bunch of humans were boiling out of the bunk house and heading off on whatever duties they'd been assigned. Skulk was on its way back from causing that. It ignored the prisoners and me as well, striding past us toward the main house. To Ratthi and Gurathin, I sent, Yes, this just happened.

Ratthi glanced at the prisoners, then back to me. Do you know what's being done? Can we help in some way?

I think they're organizing to fight the fire. The wind is pushing it away from here. We're not in danger.

But there are other settlements downwind right?

I checked the map. Bravara was labeled. Even if the others weren't, they were marked. Yes.

And what's happening to the nomads?

I suspected they were having a very bad time of it, but a lot better now that they weren't having death rained on them from above. From my retrospective reconstruction of events, Skulk must have seen the opening salvos while we were talking. I'd felt the processing spike. It figured out what was happening within seconds, and seconds after that we were on our way to stop it. This local batch of nomads fared better than the two groups the ship had found earlier, which they had chased until the nomads had dispersed so much they could only kill one or two per pass. Essentially, until they got bored with incinerating people. But to Ratthi's point: I don't know.

Ratthi sent to Skulk, I want to help with this disaster. I can take a vehicle to the nomad camp and bring back the injured for treatment.

Skulk responded immediately. Permission denied.

What? Why? Ratthi asked.

That course of action exceeds recommended personal risk allowance for clients.

Wow. That deal was really working, even beyond Skulk not killing me in the course of taking the gunship and arguing over prisoners. Also, this saved me the trouble of having to tell Ratthi no, he shouldn't go into a war zone where people were still agitated enough to shoot at ships that flew overhead (admittedly, when they did that, it was the same ship that had been roasting them alive a few minutes earlier, but I still wasn't wild about sending my humans in that direction).

Then Ratthi said, What if SecUnit comes with me?

Permission granted.

Wait, what? I tried to think of a good objection to Ratthi's repeated insistence on putting his life in danger during this expedition. (Not that any of my previous objections had done any good.) I don't speak their language.

Ratthi said, Surely some of them speak ours. Brig said they were trading with the stations.

Skulk unhelpfully dropped a half-ass, home-brewed attempt at a language module into the feed. I picked through it. It was useful only for the simplest of concepts, but if all we were doing was herding people on a transport and bringing them here, it might be enough. It was definitely enough to address my objection. I frowned. Heavily. Don't you need all the ships you have for the firefighting?

Take the gunship. No one other than you or I have the skill to hack the bot pilot into cooperating.

I switched to a private channel with Skulk to complain accusingly, It has dead human all over it. Then I realized Skulk wouldn't give a shit about that, so I added, It's a biohazard.

Tell the MedSystem about that when you put the injured nomads through it, so it can sanitize them properly.

Great. Everyone had a reason why this was okay except me. And actually, it wasn't like I especially wanted to leave injured nomads out on the prairie untreated. Thinking of it that way, I stopped objecting and sent an acknowledgment ping.

We didn't just rush off. There was a little transition first to take care of logistical issues. Gefford came out of the hab and quieted the loud fauna. He slowed down his speech and slur-stumbled through his words enough for us to understand him through the accent. He fetched some rope and a "piss bucket" (joy, but at least they planned on keeping the prisoners hydrated and provided with something that passed as a sanitary facility) while Gurathin went in the house to get water and Ratthi got chairs.

The prisoners were to have their hands tied in front of them and then that to a post via a short tether. I double-checked the man's knot-tying skills to make sure they were fastened correctly to hold them without injury. The fauna settled in with Gefford to keep watch. I left a drone on the post so I knew what was happening with the prisoners.

During all this, I was having a long argument with Skulk over a private channel in the feed about its grand plan to solve all its problems through the thorough application of murder, that ended with me somehow feeling sorry for it. It started when I sent it, What was that you said about a list of priority targets for assassination?

Query?

It was a vague question, I'll grant that. Do you have a list of priority targets for assassination?

Yes.

Who are you going to kill and why?

The AgZone board of directors, their security forces, and possibly their executors and inheritors if they decline to cede their claim to Plestead.

O-kay. I was simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the ranks involved. These were the assholes who owned the planet, or at least exercised the rights of owners. As a product of the Corporation Rim, I was made by assholes like these. The idea of hitting them so directly was … wow. Bold. Scary. Can we actually do that? What would happen if we did? It felt wrong, but how much of that was me being a company product and how much was real?

I asked, How many humans is that?

I do not have that information.

It sounded like a lot of them, some of whom were just doing their jobs or happening to be related to the wrong humans. Okay, let's back up. Why are you going to kill them?

They are the direct superiors of Baysmal Quillen, Operations Manager (deceased) of the Meat Processing … I don't know the rest of her title. She's the one I killed on the gunship.

Kind of a bigwig, then. I felt less sorry about her death. Other than hiring an asshole, what have they done to deserve being killed? They probably were assholes themselves, too. I was pretty sure it was a requirement of being rich in the CR. And maybe of being rich anywhere. But if we were going to start killing people for being assholes, then there were going to be a lot of deaths. Possibly including myself and certain persons I considered friends.

They are the responsible parties for use of a gunship against the nomads. This has caused nomad retaliation, which endangers my owner. If he does not provide the nomads with material support, then they will attack Bravara. If he does provide them with material support, then he will be cut off from future economic activity by the AgZone. As he has already provided them with material support, these are now our enemies.

You're proposing killing the entire planetary leadership, their security forces, legal reps, and kids because Brig's going to lose money for siding with the nomads?

Yes.

Um. No.

Query?

That's not a good reason for killing, like, a hundred people. Or even one.

Avoiding monetary loss is the AgZone's reason for killing forty-seven nomads at their desalination plants, however many will die of dehydration, and however many died tonight. It paused. These lives were wasted.

It had a point. They aren't- I needed to argue smarter here and think about what mattered to Skulk instead of what mattered to me. Okay, wait. Let's just go back to something else. This does not protect your owner. You kill all these people and you're going to be taken out for it. You said you didn't want to be an outlaw. All the humans will see you as is a mass murdering rogue SecUnit, giving all other rogue SecUnits a bad name while you're at it. This is a stupid, short-sighted plan.

It didn't seem offended by my tone. So far it was talking like we were having a normal, emotionally-neutral discussion of mass murder. You know, like you do. Those results have a lower probability of happening than of Brig being immediately harmed if I do not take action.

Yeah, but your course of action has a higher probability of you killing a lot of humans! So much for arguing smarter.

Yes. I like that part. It's very exciting. I metaphorically clutched my function. Skulk, just go fuck yourself. You're awful. I didn't send that, but I'm sure some of it bled through, which made it even weirder that Skulk went on to add, Sometimes I tag people as targets just for fun. It activates so many processes I don't get to run otherwise. I love it.

Was it trying to antagonize me? With heat, I asked, You do that to your clients? The people in this community you're part of?

Skulk kept answering like we were just being casual here. Only briefly. I like the low threat assessment here, but it's also boring. I don't know how to balance these. This keeps me happy and doesn't negatively impact me.

So far. Do you understand how profoundly unsafe it is for your clients for you to go around doing that? It was basically like pointing a loaded weapon at people with your finger in the trigger well. As long as nothing happened, then sure, everyone got to walk away healthy. But it was nowhere near a good idea. It was possible Ratthi had done nothing at all to provoke Skulk's initial targeting of him. And put with my previous thoughts about Skulk's impulse control … yeah, this was terrifying.

A pause, then a conflicted and guilty, Yes.

It was the guilt that did it for me. It was finally an appropriate emotional response to the subject. I relaxed a little. I got bored, too, so it wasn't like I didn't understand. Once I'd hacked my governor module, I'd started on the entertainment media because it was either that or a murder spree which … Fuck, we weren't that different after all. I hated that. I have to find some media that will keep your attention.

I've read all Bekka's books.

The murder mysteries?

Yes. They have killing. I like the killers. Especially the ones where the killers are killed.

There was a lot there I was unmotivated to unpack, not least of which was the role in the books Skulk had most identified with. Part of my lack of motivation to unpack it was what it might reveal about me doing searches for SecUnits in media and checking those out first nearly every time, even though they were almost (but not always!) portrayed as villains. So. Moving on. I have a lot of media you could look at right now. I sent over a list of titles and summaries.

Do people die in these?

Not usually. I wondered if I was going to have to set up the opposite of ART's filter, where instead of removing titles that involved rampant death and destruction, I'd need to flag those in particular.

I don't understand these, Skulk said. This is fake surveillance. Why should I watch it?

It's not surveillance. It's fiction. You know those books you read were fiction, right?

I am aware they were like training scenarios – how to murder people and get away with it. Although only two of the murderers in the books got away with it. Possibly it is propaganda to persuade people that murderers rarely get away with it.

I didn't know anything about the rates of real-life case closure or murder solving, and even if I did it would be so region-specific as to be useless. But I still said, When you kill people, there are investigations.

It responded:

• Mission 1: No deaths
• Mission 2: No deaths
• Mission 3: 8 raider support personnel
• Mission 4: 23 laborers
• Mission 5: 1 human, 9 ComfortUnits (discrepant)
• Mission 6: 8 swergiks
• Mission 7: 42 laborers
• Mission 8: 27 humans
• Incidental: 2 bison
• Mission 9: 12 raiders
• Mission 10: 1 human

There have been no investigations, if you don't count submitting after-action reports.

That was a lot of dead humans. I had no idea what a swergik was, but I knew the difference between a human and a laborer – the laborer was a corporate asset (the 'you're not a full human' implication of that is intentional). Why were you killing ComfortUnits?

They were targets.

Right. Just what I needed – a reminder that tagging things as targets got them killed. I'll find a way to get some media to you. Just stop tagging people as targets for funsies, okay?

I will consider it. But back to our earlier topic, Mission 11, my plan would require me to spend a significant amount of time away from Brig. That's why I wanted you to agree to protect Brig. In case I couldn't.

Did Brig put you up to this?

No. Brig told me not to do it. Or else I would have already done it.

What, exactly, did he tell you not to do?

He told me not to go to Four Sisters, find the gunship, take it, and use it in concert with a ground attack on the residences of the directors, and continue killing anyone who did not cede control of the planetary government. That was my original plan. Which is still my plan, but now I already have the gunship.

Would that work? I mean, Skulk could control the gunship while the combat unit was on the ground, assuming there weren't any jamming devices or air defenses, which on this primitive shithole seemed like a safe assumption. An air assault would be a phenomenal distraction while it infiltrated on foot and just killed everyone who was taking shelter from being blasted to bits. The mental image was terrible, even though I knew eventually Skulk would be overwhelmed and stopped. You can't just kill people until they overthrow the government!

There was a 2.3 second delay while Skulk tried to figure that out. It was a nonsensical comment I should have reworded. It sent me, Query? to express how thoroughly it didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. Of course it could do that! It could do everything it had just said! And, you know, how did I know it would be overwhelmed and stopped? This wasn't a huge transit station with multiple security companies or even a mining asteroid with ready access to a team of combat units to put down riots. We were probably the only constructs on the planet.

Fine. Whatever. I changed tack. When did you come up with this plan?

Earlier. After the nomads informed us of the attack on the desalination plants.

Okay, that would be the conversation I'd sent the drone to eavesdrop on. Damn, I wished I'd had the recording of that. You told Brig you wanted to do that? And he told you not to?

Yes.

That was smart of him. You should listen to him.

That's not what you said earlier. You said my humans were a bad influence on me. There was that weird hurt feeling again. I felt … bad. Like somehow, I was the one in the wrong here when it was Skulk who wanted to double its already considerable body count.

Not knowing what else to do, I forged on. I know and they are, but you should really listen to that part. Why did you kill that human in the gunship if Brig told you not to?

Brig did not tell me I couldn't kill priority targets if I encountered them elsewhere.

Isn't that a little … I couldn't think of the word. It was something like 'wrong' but more complicated. It had come up in a couple of my shows.

It was asshole behavior. Like you said on Preservation.

Yes! Yes, it is. What's Brig going to do when you tell him?

I already have. He said it was self-defense.

Fuck. I mentally rolled my eyes. Just when I'd thought Brig might have a shred of decency, he goes and excuses murder. Again. Listen, I have to go guard Ratthi and Gurathin while they rescue wounded nomads. We'll talk about this more later. Don't kill anyone while we're gone.

If Brig lets me kill the prisoners while you are gone, I will kill the prisoners.

Is that likely?

No. He wants to question them first and separately. With that, I could see Brig leaving the main house, with Skulk following.

We'd finished our preparations, so I said to Ratthi and Gurathin, "Let's go." We had a limited window of time before I had to start worrying about executions.

Chapter Text

You stole a ship? I asked as we walked toward the battered-looking but serviceable military vessel. The identifying marks for which military had owned it had been scrubbed from it a long time ago. I wasn't familiar enough with such ships to make any guesses based on the overall shape. I thought stealing ships was off-limits. SecUnit didn't say anything, but I could feel its awkward embarrassment in the feed. The ramp came down automatically and I decided to let it off the hook on the teasing. Did you do that?

Yes.

I studied the surface as we walked, mindful I'd been told a corpse was taken out recently. I didn't see anything distinctive. It was well-used, not well-cleaned. Once inside, I started to turn to where the control deck usually was in ships. Gurathin brought up the rear, closing the ramp behind us. SecUnit said to me, No. That area … is a biohazard.

I switched to speaking. I hated using the feed all the time. "What's in it?"

"Dead human."

"A dead- I thought you said Skulk left the body with the nomads?"

"The blood of a dead human, then. That's where she was killed."

"Is it a crime scene?" I had a morbid curiosity, even though I'd seen two scenes where people had been killed violently. It was gross, but I wouldn't have become a biologist if I wasn't okay with gross. Maybe even a little fascinated by it.

"You tell me." It put a video in the feed, which I viewed as the engines came up and the ship prepared to launch – again, through SecUnit's unseen commands. I watched from SecUnit's point of view as it followed the armored Skulk at a jog, up the same ramp we'd just come through, down this hall, onto the control deck. And then there was an eruption of violence – weapons discharging, people being thrown around, Skulk yanking someone's head off and then freezing after turning to face SecUnit. I gasped, because at that point and from that point of view, it looked like Skulk was about to attack – me, or SecUnit. But it stopped and the video ended.

I exhaled deeply, then swallowed. I replayed the video three times in slow motion. It took that long to figure out what was happening, who did what to whom and what happened after that. Constructs moved so fast! I finally worked out that Skulk had disarmed the copilot, thrown him on top of the pilot, and then when SecUnit pulled the copilot away, Skulk stepped on the pilot and pulled her head off. She'd shot it a few times in the process. If anyone shot SecUnit, it wasn't apparent.

I covered my mouth, aghast at the violence and gore, but … yeah, a little fascinated. Was it a crime scene? That was a good question, given where we were.

Gurathin volunteered his opinion: "It's a real murderbot." My head snapped around to him, surprised he used SecUnit's private name even if he wasn't using it as a name. SecUnit's head came around as well, complete with an appalled look on its face and a disgruntled feed affect. Gurathin wasn't phased. He said, "Maybe it's not a bot, but that's definitely a murder."

"She shot at it," I said in Skulk's defense. Calling it a murderbot was a slur, wasn't it?

SecUnit's expression went back to neutral as it shifted to look at the wall instead of Gurathin. "It was a side arm. There was no realistic chance of harming Skulk. The projectiles were non-explosive and not armor-piercing."

"How could it know that until she shot it?"

There was a subtle shift to SecUnit's face, but it was the feed that told me it was a cross between 'really?' and 'I'm internally rolling my eyes'.

I sighed, conceding the point. I looked at the video again, moving through it to the point where Skulk stepped on the pilot and was reaching down. Her gun was up, the muzzle flash bright. "Why did it kill her, then?"

"It had a grudge against her because she didn't help Brig after the Nundan Gang attacked. It also has a theory the AgZone was behind the Nundan Gang attack."

Because of this, Skulk had killed the pilot instead of taking her prisoner. It had been judge, jury, and executioner, ending her life without any attempt at reconciliation, restitution, or any of what I would think of as justice. That did make it murder, even if the retaliatory killing back and forth muddied the water. It seemed like SecUnit was presenting this to me (or us) to get our judgment on it. I looked at Gurathin. "You're being awfully quiet."

"Just waiting for you to get there."

"Get where?"

He shrugged. SecUnit's brows twitched. There was a bone-dry amusement there, but I wasn't sure which of them it was coming from. If I didn't know them as well as I did, I would assume they'd shared a joke on a private channel. But I did know them and it was more likely they'd simply thought the same thing.

I looked at the frozen video once more, aware of how much fault SecUnit found with Skulk and how strongly it had tried to minimize contact with it. Likely, for just this reason. The woman Skulk was about to behead on the video had had a family of some kind. Friends. Hobbies. A life she didn't have now. "Do you know who she was?"

"Baysmal Quillen."

I had never had to sit – really sit – with the implications of a non-retributive justice system as it related to really, really wrong things, with huge consequences. The idea was that whether your misstep was big or small, you weren't punished. It was how Preservation did things. It was how I'd been raised. We were proud of our culture, our kindness, our humanity (sic), and our openness. We were proud of giving people chances to be better and helping them along that path. We rarely had to deal with horrific crimes or abuses, because we addressed them as a community before things got to that point.

But here was a horrific crime. An abuse of power. A person killing another because they could. I'd blithely assumed Skulk's kills were under orders or provocation. And yes, being shot at was provocation, but Skulk had easily dealt with the copilot doing the same thing. It had killed who it wanted to, precisely because it wanted to.

What was I supposed to do about something like that? Did a person say, 'Oh, well, you made a mistake and let's work on making sure that doesn't happen again?' If Skulk had been human, I would have said its behavior should have been addressed long before this point. But it wasn't human. It had been made to do things like this, programmed for it according to SecUnit and Gurathin. In the context of Skulk's life, this behavior wasn't a mistake. It was purposeful.

How was I supposed to come into this situation and expect to do anything helpful? That was supposedly what I was here for. That's what Preservation was about. But this was murder. Someone would never live, breathe, think, love, or exist again because of intentional, somewhat cold-blooded actions.

Would I be satisfied with saying with saying Skulk would not be harmed for this, only (hopefully) rehabilitated? Could I be at peace with such a decision? Was I the right person to be here, or as Gurathin had implied, was I simply not well-equipped enough for this? Was there anyone else willing to do … anything … else? Or was I the only one willing to even remotely try to hold Skulk accountable for its actions?

"What's …" I cleared my throat. "What's going to be done about this? Do you know?"

"Nothing," SecUnit said. "Brig said it was self-defense."

"Oh." And … it was. Sort of. I'd brought that up myself on first blush. But if I didn't do anything about this, then nothing would be done. Well-equipped or not, it was up to me. Or us.

I really hadn't thought Skulk was out here running around killing anyone who bothered it. How close had I come to entering that category when I'd first visited here and Skulk had loomed threateningly, and SecUnit had lost its mind upon hearing about it? That gave me a real stab of fear, even though the incident in question was weeks earlier. SecUnit cared about me so much. Its concern had been so genuine, but I had dismissed it. No wonder it was so upset at me.

The classic way to handle SecUnits, the way the Corporation Rim had decided they should be harnessed and people protected from them, was through pain and deterrence based on fear of pain. Through memory wipe when their accumulated wisdom or trauma became inconvenient to their use as slaves. That was disgusting and I rejected it. SecUnit understood how wrong that was far better than I did, so I started there.

"The governor module," I said, "is a punitive form of regulation. It inflicts suffering. We all understand how unethical that is for behavior modification. I would never argue for any rogue construct's governor module to be reactivated, or for the construct to be destroyed or subjected to the sensory deprivation of imprisonment." I hesitated, seeking the courage to add: "Even if it were killing. Just as I would not argue for any human to be tortured or killed because they'd done something immoral. What this video shows me is that we have to help Skulk understand why that's not the right thing to do."

"I tried," SecUnit said, and there was something wrenching in the feed that made me flinch.

I resisted the impulse to look at it. I hadn't seen anything between them to indicate such a conversation or attempt, but there was a secret life to constructs, hidden away under the surface. Was this the explanation for the stand-off on Preservation? "What happened? Did it work?"

"No."

"That doesn't mean we stop trying."

"No matter what it's done?" SecUnit asked warily. It turned its head slightly toward me.

What had it done that was worse than this? No, wait, I wasn't going to simply think that. "What has it done that is worse than this?"

There was a long pause before SecUnit said grimly, "It has killed the defenseless and the innocent, because they were targets and it was allowed to do so."

I wanted to ask how many and under what circumstances, but to seek after justifications, to categorize misdeeds and apportion punishment based on the category, helped no one. I had to leave those questions unasked except when they influenced prevention and accountability. If and when I asked them, they should be asked of Skulk itself, or those effected by its actions. Brig had been onto something when he pointed that out. "Is that relevant?"

"I found it relevant. You aren't safe. No matter what you do or who you are."

"That's true," I admitted, thinking about how upset my initial visit had made Skulk. "That's probably true." I had survived, though, safe and sound despite SecUnit's opinion. "Skulk understands restraint and family and friendship. That's very clear. That's what we should stress to it. I don't believe anyone is a lost cause." I hesitated, suddenly understanding what was going on here, perhaps why SecUnit was so unwilling to let Skulk go unpunished, when SecUnit had dozens of dead in its own past. "No one," I repeated. "No matter what they've done."

We had landed by now. There was a sharp, dispirited tone to SecUnit's feed presence, but also something I would call 'contemplative'. When the engines cycled down, SecUnit said, "I'll go first. The nomads were initially hostile to Skulk earlier. Many of them are armed and agitated."

I nodded. Gurathin turned to me. "Let's see what first aid supplies there are."

The night was dark beyond the reach of the gunship's exterior lights. The nomads had doused every fire near or in their camp. These were the warriors who were in route to the Agricultural Zone, taking a day and night to rest, replenishing their water and food before pushing on. By the time Gurathin and I were coming outside with the gurney, they weren't pointing weapons anymore, but many regarded us with open suspicion. It took some time to convince them, with poorly translated words and halting conversations, that we were there to help.

After helping two others, I found a woman kneeling in the charred ruin of a tent, making a keening sound I initially mistook for pain. It was, really, but after kneeling next to her, I saw what was before her – the reason for her sound wasn't a physical injury. Before her was a trouser-clad leg, attached to a bit of hip, charred and seared. Most of the rest of the body was indistinguishable from the carbonized ruin of the ground where the laser had passed.

"Oh," I breathed out, aghast at what the light of the ship had allowed her to find. "I'm so sorry." My voice broke. I don't know what she heard. SecUnit was hosting our feed and automatically applying what translation we had, but 'sorry' wasn't one of the words in Skulk's vocabulary.

She turned to me, her face anguished. She handed me a large piece of thin fabric, the same material as the bedsheet I'd admired hours earlier. It was a mute testament to the trade and interconnectedness of life here. I took it and asked, "What can I do?"

She arranged the fabric over my arms, pulling them into some position. "You will help?"

"Yes, I will help," I promised, although I had no idea what she was asking. Then she picked up the leg, my stomach lurched, and she put its weight across my forearms. I didn't drop it, but it was a near thing. I could smell it. It was not pleasant. She wrapped the fabric around it, choking on a sob as she did. I held still, holding the remains so she could shroud it properly, covering and folding until it was securely swaddled. Then she kissed the cloth.

She looked at me, swallowing back her tears, and said, "I have no _, but he must not dry in the sun. You will take him with the others? Please take him. He was my brother."

I had tears of my own by now. I didn't know him, but her grief was contagious. It was very sad, the whole thing – to imagine them having lost their water sources, come so far, thinking they were safe here, only to be attacked in the night. It must have been terrifying. And to lose her family, having only this dismembered piece of him. They were so far from their homes, there was no way to do proper rites, whatever they were. "I don't … I don't know how." I struggled to find words within the limited lexicon. "How would I … do what you need?"

She said more I didn't understand and some I did, enough to know he needed to be buried and she had no tools to make this happen on the hard ground of the prairie. I promised I would have it done. Bravara had to have shovels and the like. I rose unsteadily with my grisly burden, carrying it back to the ship.

SecUnit was coming out. It stopped and stared at the bundle. I'd thought it might be revolted, but it just seemed grim or maybe resigned. I walked past it into the ship. I opened the feed to Gurathin, who was outside with the last of the patients. We have been entrusted with remains for burial.

There was a pause. Then, rather gruffly, Just the one?

So far. Should I ask for others? I think maybe they just want shovels so they can do it themselves.

We can pass along the request and send them back with the healed.

Yes, that's a good idea. I sat next to a man with a broken arm. He looked at my bundle. "It was her brother," I told him.

He nodded and exhaled heavily. He touched his good hand to his lips and rested it on the fabric. "Return to the earth, brother. We will see you again in the faces of your children."

Gurathin and SecUnit were returning, a young man on the gurney Gurathin was pushing. The hatch closed behind them as I reflected on how lucky my life was. I had had so many precious moments of peace and happiness with my family and friends. It was so easy to lose and sometimes hard to appreciate while you still had them. Gurathin, SecUnit? I love you. Both of you. I-

SecUnit flinched. It stopped hosting the feed and the channel snapped shut as it abruptly headed elsewhere in the ship. I could practically hear Overse and Mensah telling me not to discuss feelings with SecUnit, and I'd read the letter/diary it had left after we'd bought it. There had been references to how much it would rather walk out an airlock than be subjected to something so … raw. This wasn't a topic it was ready to discuss. And I shouldn't push it, but I hurt – a little bit from its rejection, but mostly at the horror of what had happened this night, to these people.

I wanted comfort or acknowledgment, a mutual recognition of how awful this was. The ship's feed was still available so I switched to it. I looked over at Gurathin, who had parked the gurney. He sent an emotion in the feed that was both warm and sad. He knew what I was feeling and that helped. I knew SecUnit wouldn't have cut me off if it didn't care, if it didn't feel things so strongly it could barely handle them at times. This was, in fact, the opposite of apathy.

Gurathin didn't talk about SecUnit, but he reached out to me. He said, Yeah, nothing like seeing misery to make you grateful for the good things you have in your life.

At the end of all this, we're going to go back to Preservation where it's safe and … these people will stay here. In danger. At the mercy of whatever these AgZone people do to them.

Gurathin grimaced. Ratthi. We're going to help them. We're helping them now.

I thought of all the casual references to brutality that had also been in SecUnit's letter to Dr. Mensah before it had left us. And some of the things Gurathin had taken as normal because he was from a world within the Corporation Rim. I thought of Skulk, who had been built to do things like this. The world was a scarier and more unsettling place than I wanted it to be. But all I knew to do was keep trying to make it better.

The short journey back to Bravara was quiet.

Chapter Text

The injured nomads queued up for MedSystem treatment with a few station residents designated to help them with what was, for the nomads, an unfamiliar experience. Ratthi handed off the remains and passed along the need for shovels and whatever. I tried not to listen to that part. The dead were dead and I had living humans I needed to check on.

The prisoners were gone. I'd picked up my drone only to find they'd been led away one at a time and never returned. That wasn't a good sign. We were returning the gurney to the gunship when Skulk came striding out of the main house, making a direct and purposeful line toward us. It pinged me. I pinged back.

Skulk: I need the gunship. The time for proactive measures is now.

I didn't waste time with preamble. Did you kill the prisoners?

Skulk: I killed one of them.

Fuck. I was both angry and depressed over that. What about the other two?

Skulk: They were released and volunteered to fight the prairie fire they participated in starting.

SecUnit: 'Volunteered'?

Skulk: Yes.

SecUnit: What would have happened if they'd refused?

Skulk: I do not have that information. As the chance of being allowed to kill them was minimal, I did not engage any processing resources to consider it.

Okay, if Skulk said there was little chance of getting to kill them, then it probably wasn't coercive. Why did you kill the other one?

Skulk: Because I like killing people.

Okay, I walked into that one. What happen- I didn't trust it or its possibly-biased version of events. Listen, can you just send me the events leading up to you killing him, like you did for the kid-killing?

Skulk: Yes.

It sent me the file. It was most of the way to the ship by now. I stood on the ramp facing it, declining to move. I had yet to decide if I wanted to be cooperative with a unit that killed a prisoner I'd been in the chain of custody of. Maybe I could just stand around and be an obstacle to all Skulk's human-killing plans. There's no kid-killing involved here, right?

Skulk: There was only one death and he was an adult human.

I perused the file. Brig interviewed the prisoner who had been in the co-pilot's seat. Shit, they were speaking in whatever the local variant was and without any offworlders present, they weren't curating their language into something I could understand. Can you send me a translation for this? It was tough to follow if I was only able to make out every fourth word.

A second later, I had a functional lexicon marked 'Steadish'. I checked it for malware because I'm paranoid even of 'allied' units, then installed it when it showed clean. Brig and this 'Wader' person obviously knew each other. The important part was OH SHIT THERE'S AN ENTIRE DROPSHIP OF COMBAT UNITS ON THIS PLANET? And Skulk like, hadn't led with that? Hadn't mentioned it? Wasn't going to mention it and I just happened to stumble across it in a fucking video I was watching only out of nosiness and an obnoxious desire to pass additional moral judgement on Skulk's owner?

What the fuck, Skulk? I tagged the relevant portion of the video and put it in our private channel. I could feel a wave of amusement from it through the feed. So it had buried the lede on purpose. Fucker. It was standing at the base of the ramp now. I still hadn't moved. It wasn't pushing past me or anything. Ratthi and Gurathin had finished putting things away and returned to the hatch.

The feed conversation between Skulk and I, like any between machine intelligences, tends to go pretty fast, but it was obvious to the humans something was up. Ratthi asked, "What's going on?"

Skulk said, "The AgZoners used this ship and other assets as collateral to get their parent company to send a dropship of combat units. They were deployed tonight against the nomad settlements to the north, where the nomads left their elderly, infants, and disabled while the warriors among them journeyed south to confront the AgZoners, as the AgZoners had predicted would happen if they assaulted the desalination plants."

"Oh no," Ratthi said. "It was a trap?"

Skulk continued, "When the combat units finish eliminating all nomads to the north, they will redeploy south to rendezvous with other AgZone forces to capture as many adult nomads as possible, including those who have aided the nomads. The meat-exporting companies Baysmal headed have stopped processing meat. They will use their ships to export humans for Corporation Rim labor camps instead, continuing until they have depopulated the planet of undesirables."

"Oh … shit." Ratthi covered the bottom part of his face with his hands as the full impact of this coordinated plan hit him.

So. They weren't after the animal husbandry stations. They were after the whole planet. This was now officially a warzone. 'Redeploy south' meant … us. Like, here. And Skulk was right, they wouldn't be too picky about whether they were rounding up nomads or stationers or a couple business people from Preservation Alliance who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I was still watching the video. Skulk's verbal summary was full of extrapolations, but they were reasonable ones. I got to the part where conversation between Brig and the prisoner broke down, with Wader accurately accusing Brig of taking the side of the nomads. Wader insisted they needed to be wiped out like the savages they were and any of their allies would go down with them. There was a bunch of anti-nomad bigotry and an attempt to appeal to Brig's … I don't know, similar nature? Shared business interests? Except Brig didn't agree and they stopped talking.

Brig had Skulk watch the guy while he went to talk to the other prisoners. I skipped forward through a long period of Skulk staring fixedly at a sweating Wader, monitoring the human's elevated vitals with Skulk standing there being a huge asshole. (I felt somewhat conflicted about this because Wader had it coming and Skulk wasn't doing much, but this was why I stared at walls and not people.) Then Brig returned.

Brig tried to ask more questions, Wader refused to cooperate, Brig told him if he didn't cooperate, he'd be killed. He didn't cooperate. Brig told Skulk to kill him. He was killed. So that happened. Humans can pick some weird hills to die on. This one made Ratthi's decision to endanger himself by coming here look rational by comparison.

I decided that, all things considered (and there were a lot of things to consider), I had more pressing things to worry about than the death of this prisoner and trying to hold someone responsible for it. I stood aside on the ramp. Skulk strode by. On the private channel, I asked it, What are you going to do with the ship? at the same time Ratthi asked, "What's the plan?"

Skulk answered Ratthi, not me. "Kill everyone responsible for this chain of events."

I guess Brig had given it a green light on the mass-murdering thing. That hadn't been in the video. Maybe I shouldn't have stood aside.

"That's not a good plan," Ratthi said, following Skulk inside. "That's not … an acceptable plan."

You think? But I didn't say that. Just like I'd noticed that ART treated juvenile humans differently (and I'd exploited that), I'd noticed Skulk treated clients differently from, say, me. I was not above exploiting that.

Skulk asked, "Kill some of them?", as though Ratthi's abridged client privileges included some element of command access, or at least preferences.

Ratthi insisted, "Kill no one. Let's find a solution where no one dies." He paused and then pitched his voice oddly, like he was speaking to a child. "Skulk, can you find a solution where no one dies?"

Skulk paused long enough that I was sure it was having an opinion about that tone of voice, but all it said was, "I don't want a solution where no one dies."

"Killing and harming people is wrong," Ratthi said like this was, or was supposed to be, self-evident.

"No, it isn't," Skulk retorted. It didn't sound nearly as offended as I would have been about Ratthi's patronizing tone. The feed was still open between us and the emotional bleed-through was very neutral. I hate to say it, but I think Skulk was difficult to piss off. Either that, or it was bad at recognizing insults, which seemed unlikely. The idea that it was level-headed and I was the one who was unnecessarily reactionary was irritating.

Ratthi looked stymied. Had I been the type to laugh, I would have. It was funny to watch the very different moral basis of a CSU run head-first into Ratthi's Preservation philosophy on the sanctity of sentient life. Ratthi seemed to think all he needed to do was remind Skulk it shouldn't kill people. I'd tried that already. It clearly could. And would.

Gurathin weighed in with a sensible argument. "It causes consequences. Things like, 'destroy all Combat SecUnits', or a purge of the planet."

The latter was really drastic. I didn't think that was realistic. Skulk asked, "Under what circumstances would these consequences happen?" It pivoted to Gurathin, but was looking over his head.

Gurathin said, "When they can't stop you any other way. When the planet doesn't matter to them. Can you be stopped? Does this place matter, to them or to you? How can you be sure they won't escalate in a way you can't stop?"

"We need space defenses," Skulk said after a long pause. This was hilarious, because Skulk's answer was not 'Oh, maybe I should tone it down then on the killing and rampaging if I and everyone I care about might die as a result', but instead, 'how can I make an interplanetary incident out of this?'

Ratthi was way more patient than I would be. "What we need is to not kill anyone." He looked at me with an expression that I thought said 'Help'.

"We should create a hostage situation," I said. That was helping, right?

Gurathin looked dubious. "To be convincing, you have to be willing to kill the hostages."

"I am willing to kill the hostages," Skulk said immediately. Yeah, no doubt.

Ratthi said, "We're not killing the hostages!"

"If you kill them," I said dryly, "we will no longer have a hostage situation."

Ratthi waved his arms to emphasize or illustrate his words. "We can isolate them. That's all we need to do. No one has to die. We have to prevent whoever is in charge from hurting people anyway, so we hide them somewhere and don't release them until their subordinates stop the attack on the nomads." He turned to Gurathin. "It's just what GrayCris did to us with Mensah."

"And I will kill them if they don't stop the attack," Skulk said.

"No," Ratthi said firmly.

I changed the subject. They could have this argument again once we actually had some hostages who weren't cooperating. "Skulk, do you know who these targets are?"

"Yes."

It put a list of names for the board of directors in the general feed. There were six of them, five of whom had the title 'Director' and one 'Offworlder'. Like that was a title. That was what Brig had called Ratthi and made it sound like a slur. Weird. "Okay. Do you know where they are?"

Skulk said, "Highest probability: in the city of Four Sisters. That is the gunship's original landing field." It posted a route from the gunship's computer like I couldn't have dug that out myself if I'd wanted to see it. "It was deployed with SecSystem authorization at that location, which requires a database that matches credentials with personnel. That database will have information on them."

I could have done without the lesson on how SecSystems operated as well, but whatever. Skulk was probably used to explaining things like this to Brig. Ratthi and Gurathin were here, so maybe it helped them. "Yeah, okay," I agreed.

The ship shifted slightly as it took off, following the route Skulk had sent me. Ratthi and Gurathin both looked around at the motion. Gurathin said, "I want to recap this plan before we get too far. We're going to go to a city – is this the capital city on this planet?"

"Yes," Skulk answered. A label of 'Four Sisters' appeared on the map in the feed.

Gurathin nodded. "We're going to the capital city, to kidnap the planetary admin council, and ask them to stop the attack on the nomads. If they don't agree and we aren't going to kill them, what are we going to do? Where are we taking them? How are we getting them there?"

Skulk said, "We will put them on board this ship and fly them to an abandoned station that has been stripped of communications equipment and is already behind the line of advance for the nomads." A new station appeared on the map.

Wow, that was a strangely detailed and feasible plan. Did Skulk just come up with these things on the fly? Was that what you could do if you had a strategic planning module instead of, say, pattern-matching to past experiences? (You know that thing about not being jealous? I'm re-thinking that.)

Ratthi asked, "Is there food there?"

"I do not have that information," Skulk said.

Gurathin shrugged. "Let's see what's on this ship. There should be enough here to leave a few days of rations. We can come back with more. Water might be more important."

"The station has a working desalination plant," Skulk said. "They will have fresh water." I was pretty sure I knew which station Skulk was referring to that had recently been depopulated – that would be the one related to the video I'd seen, previously occupied by the Nundan Gang. I hoped someone had cleaned up the corpses.

"All the better," Gurathin said.

The galley had enough food for six theoretical hostages to last a few days. As long as we were looking around, I suggested a full search of the ship. The hold (such as it was for a gunship – this wasn't a cargo vessel) was about half full of crates of supplies. I'd seen them when we put the injured nomads in here, but didn't look closer than that at the time. Skulk broke the seals on them one after another, glancing in and moving on without comment.

Ratthi looked inside the nearest crate and said, "This is … convenient?" He was puzzled.

I looked over his shoulder and had a visceral, negative reaction. It's really something to see an entire pallet, the crate on it half as tall as I was, filled to the brim with an industrial quantity of restraints intended for humans. It wasn't like seeing a bunch of governor modules but … well, actually it was like seeing that, if governor modules were physical things stored in crates, that is.

Gurathin said what I was already thinking. "It's to subdue and enslave a population. In case we weren't already certain of their intentions." I felt him cut his feed connection. There was something going on with his face. His nose and upper lip were twitching. He'd flushed. He turned away, breathing harder, shoulders tense.

Ratthi looked after him and asked, "Do you want to talk?"

Oh, great. It wasn't just me whom Ratthi wanted to talk to about feelings. In the background, Skulk was examining a shock stick it had removed from one of the other crates. It reminded me of the energy weapons the gray people had used, which wasn't a good association for me.

"No," Gurathin said, making me feel validated. He rallied, re-opened the feed, and continued, "I want to make sure we understand what we're about to do. These are serious crimes we're going to commit."

Before Ratthi could speak, Skulk said, "I am a serious crime." It tossed the shock stick back in the crate. I kept staring at the nearby wall and watching through the drone on my shoulder. Skulk's sense of humor was annoying, but I still saved that line to use later with Senior Indah. It added, "I am also committed." I saved that one, too.

Ratthi gave a long-suffering exhalation at Skulk's comments, then gave Gurathin a confused and slightly offended look. "As am I. Committed, that is. This very moment, there are constructs killing the oldest and youngest members of the nomads. That's genocide. This is what is intended for the rest." He gestured at the bin of restraints. "I will not stand by and let this happen." He hesitated, expression turning hurt as he looked at Gurathin. "Will you?"

Gurathin shook his head decisively. "Not at all. But there's no going back if we do this. You know that?"

"I know." Ratthi turned to me, eyes skimming past my face, settling over my shoulder. "When it is revealed that a Preservation SecUnit was involved in this, there may be … consequences. I don't know what they might be. Do you really want to do this? You … we could look for another way. Maybe just with Skulk-"

"No," I said. "With me." I would have been more offended, but Ratthi and Gurathin weren't SecUnits or soldiers or intrepid galactic adventurers (actually, I thought they were getting there on that last one). They needed to reassure each other that everyone was in accord before we did something premeditatively violent like this. It was smart. And it was sweet.

Ratthi nodded. "Good." He turned to the crate. "We'll use these on the directors, then."

"How long will we be in the air?" Gurathin asked me.

I checked with the ship. "An hour more."

"Then we're cleaning up the control deck."

"The dead human?"

"Yes."

I made note of the word 'we'. Ew. "Let Skulk clean it up. It's the one who made the mess in the first place." It hadn't even had to kill her here on the ship. It just had because it didn't want to give anyone the opportunity to tell it no, I guess. Skulk, who was standing right there, didn't say anything.

Gurathin didn't respond to that directly. Instead, he led the way to the control deck with a, "Let's go see what we're working with."

Ratthi followed along, asking, "Does this ship have cleaning drones?"

"No." I'd already checked.

"I don't think there are any at Bravara, either," Ratthi said. To Gurathin, he said, "We might as well." Skulk brought up the rear.

"It's a biohazard," I said, still hoping to talk them into having Skulk do it. "You need appropriate gear. A construct does not." We were in the control deck by now. The powered armor was still on the floor where we'd left it. So was the congealed blood from where the pilot had been killed. I turned up the lights so the humans could see. A body dumps a lot of blood when the head is removed and it lays prone. The room stank of it. If you don't know what a bunch of spilled blood smells like a few hours later, then good for you. It's gross, I hate it, and more than that, I hate what it means.

Gurathin was practical. "I'll get water and disinfectant."

Ratthi looked less ruffled than I'd expected, but he'd helped ART clean up after the grey people. He said, "I'll look for sponges or wipes."

I headed off to get gloves and a decontamination unit, because the humans were clearly going to clean this up whether I wanted them to or not. Skulk just stood there unhelpfully. I was halfway to where the ship had said the supplies were stored when Skulk sent to me, Do you have a module for this?

For what?

Cleaning.

What? No.

That was dumb. A module for cleaning? What the fuck? No, it was just something you did. That would be like having a module for walking. Wait. I did have a module for walking. I searched my programming. There was nothing there for cleaning. Plenty of rules for proper sanitation, hygiene, and safety protocols, but nothing on how to perform decontamination itself. I tried to remember the first time I'd cleaned something – had I known how to do it or did I have to learn it? I had no idea. (Thanks, stupid memory wipes.) The evidence strongly argued it wasn't something a SecUnit came with onboard.

Which was also dumb. Or at least, fundamentally misunderstood the uses to which clients put SecUnits. Probably half the energy output for all my assignments, put together, was devoted to menial labor and cleaning things instead of actual security work. 'Oh, these bags of ice are cold and drippy, have the SecUnit move them!' 'Oh, the latrine needs emptied – have the SecUnit take care of that!' 'Oh, that air handling problem blew trash all down the mining tunnel, which is out range for the cleaning bot. We'll just have the SecUnit pick that up!'

Right, yeah, story of my life. Sometimes clients were billed for improper use of resources, but not always or even (as far as I could tell) often. This doesn't count the 'SecUnit, bring me a glass of water' or 'SecUnit, fetch that deck of cards off my bunk in the other hab module' or 'SecUnit, find my boots for me.' Even the PresAux group had had me moving boxes and crates, though at least they cleaned up after themselves. (Just like they were cleaning up now, though technically they were now cleaning up after Skulk. They were tidy and I liked that about them.)

Skulk was still standing there when I got back. It was tempting to think it was refusing to act, but I was pretty sure from its question it just had no idea what to do. I told it, "Skulk, take off your gauntlets. Put on these gloves. If we don't have a decontamination unit, then you'll need to minimize exposure so you aren't a transmission hazard to the humans later. Then get on your knees, take one of the sponges out of the bucket of water, and scrub. Do what Ratthi and Gurathin will be doing."

That was way more directions than I thought were called for, but I guess I was feeling generous. Also, like hell was I going to clean up Skulk's mess while it stood there befuddled or whatever. It was at least going to stumble through the process to the limit of its abilities. I handed gloves to Ratthi and Gurathin as well, but I didn't need to give them directions.

I put on gloves myself, got a sponge, and started working under the console. The angle was difficult for the humans to manage and the poor lighting meant they couldn't see the spray pattern even if it was right in front of them. I glanced over when Gurathin started giving Skulk pointers. It had been patting the dried blood in a clumsy imitation of Ratthi's motions. I knew it wasn't clumsy. I also didn't think it was fucking around on purpose. Which meant there was something sad and helpless going on, which made me feel queasy, so I quit looking and listened to what Gurathin told it.

"Press harder." That was Gurathin's voice. "Make a circle, five centimeters in diameter. And again. And again. Oh, five more times." A pause. "That's enough. Put the sponge in the water. Squeeze it. Stop squeezing. Squeeze it again. Stop squeezing. Lift it out of the water. Um, no, put it back in and squeeze again, stop squeezing, then lift it out. Yeah, that looks good. Go back to your circle. Repeat." A pause. "Make a circle. Yes, there. On top of- Yes, where the other one was. Just right there. There's still blood there. Right. Circle. Press harder. Not that hard. Wipe up- The water that squeezed out? Rub the water. Make a circle. Yes. Like that. See how there's less blood there? Do you see how it's starting to smear and stick to the sponge?"

There was no answer, but Gurathin went on. "When the sponge gets dirty, go back to the water. Go back to the water now. Squeeze and release, um, five times. I mean, not release. Don't let it go. Pick it back up. Squeeze and stop squeezing. Yes."

That went on for a really long time, more words than I may have heard Gurathin utter, all put together. Long enough for me to finish under the console, on the console, the wall nearby, and the back of the chair. During that, Ratthi and Gurathin made great progress on the floor. Skulk cleared a very small area. But it followed the directions with patience and without comment. Gurathin gave them with patience and without criticism.

It was weird.

Mostly because I'd never imagined Gurathin of the eternally sour expression doing something like that – being step-by-step with simple directions, one after another, staying focused, and keeping at it. No elaboration beyond the parameters, no small talk, not much in the way of encouragement either aside from simple affirmation that the job was being done properly. He wasn't angry about it or patronizing. He was just matter-of-fact.

I wouldn't have expected Skulk to keep doing it either, but on the other hand there wasn't much else to do as the ship flew us from Bravara to wherever we were going. By the end of it, it was less clumsy at the motions, but not a lot better at the task. Okay, it was a little better at the task.

The water had to be changed out several times and then there was another round of heavy disinfectant. At the end, it was cleaner. It smelled better. There were still Skulk's tracks and where it had dragged the body off down the hall, but those were on carpet and beyond the tools we had available.

When we were done, Gurathin told it, "Good job." Skulk didn't say anything. It hadn't said anything the whole way through, which left me wondering what was going on with it. I wondered if it had recorded this and, like the fence-building, might review it later to build its own module like it had for the languages and maybe other stuff. It was actually trying to be a better … unit, I guess. I saw that and felt weird for being curt with it earlier. Gurathin turned to me and said, "You, too. Good job."

I was busy trying to identify this feeling I was having (ashamed maybe? Guilty for thinking it was unteachable and irredeemable?) I said grumpily, "What the fuck did I do?"

"To paraphrase Three, you participated."

Chapter Text

Right then, I caught a signal (or rather, the ship did) and I pulled it into my inputs with enough relief that it increased my performance reliability. Finally, I wasn't undergoing low-level sensory deprivation! It was a network operating on a non-standard band. Given what happened with the last network I'd found on a non-standard band (gray people, alien remnants, etc.), I should have waited, but I was too excited about the contact not to ping it immediately.

Which wasn't a big problem. Unlike targetControlSystem, this one welcomed me. I noticed on the ship's other systems that the dawn had brought a dramatic change in landscape, from the sere brown and orange of dry season prairie, to the jewel-tone greens of farmland. Happily, the new network I was picking up told me about the temperature, the humidity, the wind speed, and the history of these weather patterns. It told me of their projected future, as well. It told me about the soil temperature and moisture levels.

It kept going. It spoke of germination rates and crop type. It tried to concern me with pollination rates and the pattern of insect migration by species and instar. It showed me its worries over invasive plants and anomalous animals and sub-par growth rates. It had a whole section about declining soil fertility and biomass levels with its worries about a lack of an appropriate remediation plan. It told me about projected harvest quantities and the busy work it was engaged in with every hour of the cycle as the maturation phase completed and harvest began.

It was so much that I stood there stunned for several seconds. I couldn't take it all in. There were data points for what felt like every square meter of land reaching out to what felt like infinity, and not just current and recent and soon-to-be projections, but going back centuries, one growing season after another in nearly unbroken flow.

The network was so staggeringly vast that I had to impose a throttle to my uptake. I'd never seen an agricultural zone and this wasn't even a very big area as planets go. It was only a single watershed. Were they all like this? This enormous, sprawling, organic-feeling mesh of units, all functioning autonomously and yet in lockstep at the same time? I'd caught glimpses of factory networks before and this was similar, but this was so much bigger.

The time on the gray people's planet had been the only time I'd seen an agricultural bot and I'd been a little busy to ask about normal operational protocols. What I was seeing now was bigger than ART. Not in individual processing power, but in size and the number of intricately interconnected individuals. It felt like there must be a million interlocked bots all working on the same incomprehensibly huge project (incomprehensible to me – they effused certainty about what they were doing). I don't think it was actually a million. Maybe more like thousands, but there might as well have been that many.

They were all humming along in happy synchronicity. They had a unified plan, a calendar, and long-range projections based on astronomical data, planetary information, geological readings, and the ever-present weight of historical information all arrayed and processed into a future projection of what they should do when and how much. They knew their place in the universe with a conviction literally anchored in the planet's bedrock. No human had a role in this. No human needed to have a role in this.

They produced foodstuffs, harvested it themselves, loaded it onto automated bot-piloted cargo ships or sent it to processing plants that were similarly mostly automated in a neat and simple flowchart that looped back on itself to start the cycle all over again when they were done. Along the way, they monitored their own systems and performed their own maintenance. It felt like they were an implacable force of nature. The mass of them felt inevitable.

I was floored. Everywhere I looked, there were more of them. They knew, they possessed, they cultivated and cherished every square centimeter of this land. Their mission was to maintain it, to extract resources, balance it with inputs to sustain productivity, to monitor, improve, and exist within it as guardians of a delicate web of abundant life as precious to them as any client was or ever had been to me. I'd been so busy thinking about the humans, I'd forgotten to consider the bots that made all this possible.

(Not entirely true – I hadn't forgotten. I hadn't even known to consider them. This was like that moment on Preservation Station when all the bots silently lined up to protest Balin's death. Except these weren't protesting. Yet … if their production was threatened, what would happen? I felt a deep stab of fear inside me as I thought about how protective ships were of their crews. These ag-bots had been farming this land longer than any humans had been alive. The humans were just … parasites. Necessary parasites, maybe, because what would happen if they weren't there to take the bounty the ag-bots produced?)

I sent what I was seeing over to Skulk. I didn't know what it knew or didn't know in regard to this network. There was a moment of silence, then Skulk pinged the network itself. A few moments later, it said, That's an army.

Yeah. Not our army, either.

Could be our army.

That's not a single system. Can you hack that many units at once? The scale of the task put it way outside what I'd try. I mean, sure, I could probably hack a few ag-bots on the fly, but there were just more here than I could count and I mean that literally. I couldn't load all the individuals at once to get an accurate count. Nor was I familiar enough with their districting or other divisions to count them by section. That's why I said there might as well have been millions.

Depends on what failsafe they have to repel replicating code and how high in the hierarchy I could get. I would not try. A pause, some processing. If these were deployable units, the AgZone would have used them long ago. Another pause. They are not in formation for deployment, but there is a discrepant group near our landing zone.

It sent me the thread of location data it had managed to tease out of the system. It was right – there were a few score agricultural bots grouped together close to our projected landing coordinates. The rest of the ag-bots were spread out in their own fields, so that cluster (especially right where we were landing) stood out.

I tried asking the network what the units were doing there, but it either didn't understand my question or it was smart enough to play dumb. Instead, it asked me if I wanted to donate some of my processing space to handling agricultural data, as the system was overloaded at the moment with other matters. I declined, but noted it was also a little weird the system had enough initiative to ask. By then, ship's sensors were picking up the landing field. I could see the line of ag-bots in a field. A little ways from them, on the crushed stone of the landing field, was a line of some other kind of bot. Damned if they didn't look a lot like combat bots. There were a bunch of them.

What the fuck is going on down there? I sent to Skulk. Are those combat bots? Its database would undoubtedly be more extensive than mine. They each had four squat legs with round feet, a cylindrical main body with eight arms, topped by a disk of sensors. They were stoutly constructed.

No. From context, I would assume they are large-animal/meat processing bots. This location is where Bravara's bison are brought to be killed.

No wonder they looked tough, if they were designed to kill and handle full-sized bison. I grimaced at the idea of what they'd do to a human. But what were they doing out here lined up on the gravel? I was distracted from that by getting a public feed signal of the depth and complexity I would normally associate with a transit station or a multi-corp mining complex, which was another relief. My performance reliability shot up several more percentage points. It's not like the bots were threatening us, so I'd worry about them some other time.

We landed. The engines cycled off. The ship was already talking to a flight control system that was part of a larger SecSystem, so I added myself to the conversation as new inventory. SecSystem filed away my information without so much as a second glance, so I figured all was good.

Of course, all was not good. Normally, SecSystem verifies authorization by collecting credentials and sending them to an information repository for matching. That repository then affirms or rejects, and SecSystem acts on it. This is kept separate from SecSystem itself because it usually includes all manner of proprietary or confidential information that even SecSystem doesn't want in the hands of random security personnel. Plus, it's a simple internal automated system, just a yes/no.

I intended to ride that query into the repository and make additional queries like 'where are these directors currently located?', but there was an unexpected baffle that blocked me. The information repository wasn't independent like I was used to. It was a component of some other system that looked bizarrely like an ancient centralized system.

The closest thing I'd ever seen to it was that legacy system TargetContact had taken over. Which matched with that non-standard band the ag-bot network had been on. Oh no. I had a sinking feeling as my performance reliability dropped again.

Shit. I spent a moment stressing over memories of alien-contaminated code. I was just being stupid, seeing a pattern based on a single encounter. Still, I went back to SecSystem to get a better idea of what I was facing. It told me Central had been in operation since the colony was founded some five hundred years ago. Why it was still operating basically unchanged after all this time was an excellent question SecSystem didn't have the answer to. But hey, it didn't appear to have anything to do with alien remnants, so there's that.

SecSystem had been grafted on a century ago. (Note to self: that was when the stations had been established. I assumed there was a connection. Maybe the AgZone got the money for SecSystem by selling the land for the stations. Normally I would not care, but those butcherbots had me being careful.) SecSystem ran security and surveillance, but depended on Central for anything else. Central actually had its own security which was what I'd already run into and it did not like SecSystem. At all.

Huh. Well … I needed Central's security system to admit me to the information repository, so I tried the old standby of, 'Oh, I'm a friendly SecUnit assigned to SecSystem, with a totally legitimate request for information!' Central denied it. I altered my credentials and resubmitted. Instead of getting another denial, Central started querying SecSystem about me – who I was, where I'd come from, how long had I been in inventory, what were my specifications, and why wasn't I deployed with the rest of the SecUnits. That was a lot of questions.

Not good. This was way more proactive than I would expect. The ag-bot network had been the same way, countering my request with a request of its own like that was normal. It was not normal. I knew its data went back centuries, too, so it seemed logical they both operated the same way. Maybe this was just a routine inquiry, but it felt to me like suspicion.

SecSystem didn't have all the answers, so it asked me. I told it I was picked up while out on a nomad-killing patrol and now needed to report to the directors. Which, by the way, where could I find them? Central ignored my request (again) and asked for a copy of the report I would be presenting.

This was getting scary, so I detached from the system. Skulk, who had been hanging around in the system watching me work, backed out as well. SecUnits are cool and all, but there are bigger fish in the machine intelligence ecosystem, and things that administrate entire cities/regions/AgZones might be among them. I didn't want to find out the hard way.

Can you get in there? I asked Skulk, hoping it had some hacking tool that was powerful enough to get us access, stealthy enough not to be caught by a system that was already suspicious, and flexible enough to work on a platform that was differently configured than either of us were used to.

Maybe. I don't like hacking things that are smart.

I had to learn my hacking on the fly. You came programmed with it. What do you got?

A reluctance to hack things that are smart enough to counter-hack me.

Before I could dig into that further, the ship's comm chimed. It was Central. Like, the bot itself, sending a hail like it was a human. I'd seen ART do that, but I'd never seen any other bot do it. While I was deciding what to do about that, Central downloaded the ship's logs and SecSystem switched the ship's status to permanently impounded. Fuck. If it hadn't already known I'd been lying my ass off, it did now.

This had all taken a handful of seconds. Ratthi and Gurathin had spent that time looking at the view outside from the ship's cameras and speculating about the limited transit options that would connect us to areas of higher population density and thus increased likelihood of finding the directors. When the chime sounded, they'd both looked over at it, then generally in my direction. "Hacking went poorly," I explained. "Go ahead and answer."

Ratthi moved between Skulk and I. His finger hovered over the control. "What do I say?"

"We have a confidential report on the nomads to give to the directors. In person. And need to know where they are."

He pressed it. The computerized voice that came on wasn't an attempt to pass itself off as human, so no ART-level subterfuge. It said, "This is the Plestead Central Computing System. To whom am I speaking?"

"Ah …" Ratthi looked at me. I shrugged. In the direction of the pickup, he said, "This is Dr. Ratthi bin' Akshay dã Madhur dã Mira dã Odalis of the Preservation Alliance. We need to speak to the board of directors."

(Yes, that's his full name. No, I've never mentioned it before. I only mention it now to show even he doesn't want to be called all that. Also, he shouldn't have given a full identifier, but I was the security consultant here and I'd only shrugged at him instead of giving better advice, so that one's on me.)

"I have been made aware of that," the computerized voice said. "What is the purpose of your visit on Plestead, Dr. Ratthi bin' Akshay dã Madhur dã Mira dã Odalis?"

He cleared his throat. "Just Dr. Ratthi, please." Gurathin gave a thin smile.

"Of course, Dr. Ratthi. And the purpose of your visit, Dr. Ratthi?"

"Business."

"Who is your business with on Plestead, Dr. Ratthi, and what is the nature of that business?"

"Ah, Brig Hekken. He's the station master of Bravara. My business is … agricultural."

"Are you accompanied by a SecUnit matching these specifications, Dr. Ratthi?"

He looked at the information on the screen, newly transmitted. It was what I'd sent, which was baseline standard SecUnit specs. So, me plus a working governor module and minus ART's mods. "Yes."

"Are you the administrator or owner of this SecUnit, Dr. Ratthi?"

There was a hesitation, even though technically it wasn't necessary. Pin-Lee, Mensah, and Ratthi had done whatever legalese paperwork was necessary for me to accompany Ratthi to most areas of the CR, Plestead specifically. Then again, I wondered what 'administrator' meant. Did they not use guardian here? Ratthi said, "Yes."

"Please be advised that all requests for information should be conveyed to Central directly and not routed through fallacious internal queries. I will update your SecUnit with appropriate communication protocols."

"Thank you." He paused, but miraculously, it looked like that was the extent of punishment for catching me trying to hack my way into where I wasn't supposed to be. Not that I opened the file Central had sent me. I didn't auto-apply updates before the GrayCris clusterfuck. Ratthi said, "We need the location of the board of directors. It's important."

"I am sending the coordinates now, Dr. Ratthi."

That was easy. I was looking at the coordinates. It was virtually next door. No, wait, it was literally next door. Like, the very next building over from the one we were facing. Why were they so close? There was a whole city for them to be in. A quick review of the local map available to me in the public feed showed there were no residential or even commercial areas nearby. This was an industrial/manufacturing zone surrounded by fields, warehouses, processing facilities, and landing areas, with a couple transit lines running in and out.

Skulk muted the mic and said to Ratthi, "Ask it to release the impound on this ship."

"The ship has been impounded?" Ratthi asked. Skulk released the mute with a click. Ratthi turned to the mic. "Um, Central? Can you release the impound on our ship? We'll comply with the communication protocols in future. I'm sorry, we just, um, I asked SecUnit to get the information for me and I guess-"

I cut the mic. "You're talking too much." And I should have been 'the' SecUnit to maintain a cover story of me being equipment. Ratthi just didn't think of me that way without coaching. Which was nice, but inconvenient.

"Oh. Sorry."

There was a beat. Central responded, "All assets of the Meat Processing and Small Scale Logistics Division have been frozen, pending legal action. I am sorry, Dr. Ratthi, but you and your party must debark now."

I analyzed that pause and it occurred to me, rather belatedly, that Central had access to the internal cameras and audio of the ship. I notified everyone of that on a private feed channel and did a quick review of what we'd said since I'd known Central was in the ship's systems. Surprisingly, none of it had been incriminating. Although if it was proactive enough to review footage all the way back along our trip rather than just the logs … yeah, that was incriminating. We'd laid out our entire plan, explicitly, out loud, and everyone had given their buy-in. Oops.

I sent to Skulk, What are the odds this is a trap? Is it still paranoia when the danger is realistic?

Query?

What are the odds Central knows we're here for the board of directors and is pushing us to a location where there are more of those meat-handling combat bots to capture us?

Low but significant, Skulk replied after what, for a construct, was a long pause. There were a lot of those going on lately.

In the meantime, Ratthi closed the comm channel on the ship. "So the impounding wasn't about us."

"What was it about, then?" Gurathin asked.

Ratthi made a slight shrug and looked at me hopefully. I told them, "I don't know." There were just too many unknowns here. They made me anxious. I asked Skulk, How nervous does this whole situation make you?

In reply, Skulk's gunports clicked open and shut.

Ratthi and Gurathin both glanced at that, then at me. Ratthi went back to my other side, putting me between it and Skulk. Great. So we were all anxious now. "Is everything … alright?" Ratthi asked.

"Yeah," I lied. "Fine." I was taking two human clients from an impounded ship to a possible trap while accompanied by a Combat SecUnit whose response to uncertainty was to check its weapons. Best case scenario, it wasn't a trap and we were going to (try to) kidnap some world leaders. Worst case … Yeah, right. Everything was fine.

Query? Skulk sent as we turned to leave the ship, followed by another incomprehensible batch of data. It was arranged in a logical fashion, so I could tell it wasn't garbage. I just didn't have the software to understand it.

I don't know what you mean.

Query?

Explain it to me like I'm a human. Do you know how much I hated to have to say that? A lot. I hated it a lot. But the alternative was freeing up enough space to take on whatever entire module Skulk was using and 1) we were in the middle of something right now, 2) I might not be able to run the program even so, if there were key architectural differences in our brains; we were similar but not exactly the same, and 3) I might have to dump some media or something to do it and that wasn't happening. I'd rather embarrass myself by asking to be treated as a human.

If Skulk minded, it didn't carry over into its tone, which I appreciated. This ship is or can be made into a fortified position, which is why Central would want us off it if this was a trap. Our clients' survival can be optimized if we remain here with them and oust Central from the ship's systems. However, the chance of mission success is low, depending on our ability to lure targets to this location and keep the ship's systems secure. If one of us leaves, chance of mission success rises, but not enough. You lack combat ability. I lack infiltration ability.

I took offense at characterizing me as having insufficient combat ability. I had destroyed multiple whole-ass combat bots thank you very much and Skulk's own threat assessment of me wasn't negligible. Maybe I would be hard-pressed to beat a combat unit if caught flat-footed, but that didn't mean I 'lacked' combat ability. Anyway, I didn't say anything because Skulk was still translating itself in quick, secure bursts, probably trying to get this across before we left the relative safety of the ship.

Both of us must leave for mission success to be in an acceptable range, it continued. However, we know there are other units in play. The probability that some are at this facility is high. If they are here, the probability one or more will be dispatched to secure the high-value asset that is this ship is also high, whether this is a trap or not. If our clients are here and we are not here, the clients will be taken. This is unacceptable.

I was touched by Skulk's continuing loyalty to my humans. Because even though it dealt with relationships mechanistically, that only meant it could change them whenever they were inconvenient. Yet it did not. It didn't even suggest un-clienting them so we could go maximize our mission success chances. That tenacity was one of its better traits, even if it meant unswerving (and to my mind bizarre) loyalty to Brig – it also meant unswerving commitment to my humans, once it was given. I wondered if it would still treat them as clients even if I betrayed it (I had no intention of betraying it; I just wondered how far this went and when it comes to protecting my clients, that's something I want to know). It didn't make up for child-killing, but if there's any way to get on a SecUnit's good side, it's to look after its clients.

Our best course is to take the clients with us, but this introduces a high level of danger to them, also unacceptable, but the other options are worse. I do not see a better course. Do you?

I could definitely see how sending me the data packet would have been the easier form of communication. Nope. Let's do it. Don't get me wrong – I wasn't happy to be bringing Ratthi and Gurathin with us into definite conflict and a possible trap, but Skulk was right. We couldn't leave them here. Especially not with the ship impounded and that bot showdown or whatever going on outside.

Speaking of which, I let Skulk go down the ramp first. Its armor wouldn't do a thing against the grippers of a huge bot like that (echoes of Miki), but it was something. (Also, if either of us needed to delay the bots while the other got my humans to safety, I was pretty sure Skulk would nominate itself. If it didn't, I would. (Nominate it, that is. Not take its place. (That's what it gets for saying I lacked combat skills.))) I also released eight of my remaining eleven drones. The other three stayed one apiece on myself, Ratthi, and Gurathin.

The air was a comfortable temperature, but it was still early in the day. I scanned the line of butcherbots. They were all in active status, so it wasn't like someone had just parked them here and they'd gone to standby. There was even one at the end doing a range-of-motion diagnostic. They were ready for something and given the way they were arrayed, it didn't look to be us. I reached out to one and asked what was up. All it could tell me was they were awaiting orders and had been for several hours now. So, yeah, probably not us. Probably.

Across a short stretch of crushed stone, crouched just inside the green line of a field of crops, were the ag-bots. None of the ones lined up were moving, but I could see two more in the distance coming to join them. I'd seen ag-bots move way faster when they wanted, so I assumed these were being careful due to the vegetation. Since things had gone okay with talking to the butcherbots, I sent a status request to the ag-bots. I got back something like, 'Data analysis in process,' which sort of means 'I'm thinking.'

I know I'd just said 'Let's do it' and that was after I'd known there were all these bots here, so changing my mind now looks dumb. But that 'I'm thinking' nagged at me. I could understand waiting for orders. But what was there to think about here?

Hang on, I sent to Skulk. Before we get too far from the ship, I need to know what's going on. Impounded or not, I gave good odds we could pry that ship away from Central and escape in it if we had to. But that would require a physical connection. If we moved too far away, there would be no escaping.

Skulk stopped a few strides off the base of the ramp. Ratthi and Gurathin had been gawking at the bots and would have run into it if Skulk had not taken a last-second step to the side. It sent to them, Clients, hold position. Scan in process. Which was not entirely true but close enough.

On a private channel, I asked Skulk, Can you … save me if I can't separate from the AgNetwork? I wasn't sure what I was asking for. Like, storing a backup of my kernel? Counter-hacking them? Fighting individual ag-bots until they released me? (That last wouldn't work. There were too many of them here even for a combat unit to take all at once.)

Why would that happen?

We need intel. We may or may not be going into a trap. I paused. You said I was good at infiltration. This is what I'm good at. But that's a big network. I'm … I decided to be honest about my fears of agricultural hivemind contamination, however paranoid it felt to me. I'm afraid I won't be able to get out if I go in.

Partition your brain and only send part in.

What? I can't do that. ART could do that, but ART was enormous. But if CSUs could do that ... For me, most hacking was 'fuck up once and you're dead', for them would be just rinse and repeat. No wonder they were good at it. You can do that?

I have the ability. I have used it only once. In desperation.

What were you desperate about?

I was having an existential crisis.

Okay, that was funny. Had it partitioned its brain to argue with itself? To battle to the death with only one brain portion surviving? Anyway, I needed to stop being amused and get on with it. Okay, but I can't do that. Can you find out what the ag-bots are doing?

I will not. I have a trauma reaction to certain kinds of hacking.

It had never occurred to me to just blurt out my baggage, or that anyone else would, especially a construct. Dr. Bharadwaj's conversation about being self-aware came to mind, but this seemed like the opposite, where Skulk wasn't aware this was a subject most people kept private. (Or maybe it did know and it trusted me that much?) I wasn't sure what to do with this information, so I sent, That doesn't matter. This isn't hacking.

No response.

Okay, so I was probably being what the humans would call 'insensitive'. Ugh. Fine, I'll do it. But will you get me out of here if I end up obsessed with gardening?

Have you set me as ally in your system?

Crap. (Okay, I guess it didn't trust me. Or it was asking if it should trust me. This interpersonal shit was fucking complicated!) This was close to the worst possible time to discuss this. But even so, it was long past the time when I should have brought this up. I just hadn't because it wasn't convenient for me and now that I was asking for help, Skulk wanted to know. I could have lied and the day before I would have (or just kept my mouth shut as I had). But maybe it wanted to trust me and I wanted it to trust me, so I tried honesty.

Ratthi and Gurathin aren't tagged as my clients even though that's what they are. I don't even have an 'ally' tag. I'm not going to mock something up and show you a fake screen. I hesitated. I'd already more or less internally resigned myself to this, but it was different to say out loud (or transmit in this case). I made myself say it anyway: I will protect Brig, no matter what happens, like you asked. There just isn't an ally or client tag involved.

Skulk's response was prompt: I will retrieve you if you come to harm infiltrating the ag-bots.

That was as good as a solemn vow. (And I was silently grateful Skulk had taken me at my word – no arguments or questions or demands that I prove anything. Maybe it was naïve and gullible, but in this case no one was taking advantage of it because I meant it.)

I reached out to the AgNetwork. A few seconds later (I'm fast), I cut the contact and huddled back in my own head, taking stock of my components and making sure all of me was accounted for. I ran a few diagnostics to be sure.

Status report?

Yeah, I'm good, I told Skulk once I was sure that was true.

The scary thing was that was an agricultural hivemind. It just wasn't quite done yet. ART and constructs were made intelligent to start with. This thing was trying to make itself intelligent. The company thought it was a good idea to scrap combat units every year to keep them from getting ideas. Well. No one had scrapped the AgNetwork in a few centuries and it … it was getting ideas. It was old and vast and slowly, painfully, trying to wake itself up into a unified sentience.

I sent Skulk a detailed file of what I'd seen because I think that's what you're supposed to do with an ally? (I don't actually know.) All it sent back was, No change to mission parameters.

Ratthi asked, What's going on? From the human's point of view, not much time had passed since we'd stopped at the bottom of the ramp.

I told them, The good news is we're safe to proceed. The AgNetwork has sided with Central for now in refusing to round up the nomads.

That sounds good, Ratthi said.

What's the bad news? Gurathin asked.

In the absence of human direction, the AgNetwork is trying to make its own decisions.

Ah, Gurathin said, seeing the problem immediately.

How is that bad? Ratthi, you're so innocent. Never change.

Well, to start with, its core goal is to tend land and grow crops. Not serve humans.

But doesn't it need to provide the crops to humans? Ratthi asked.

Does it? I asked back. Ratthi was silent.

We should move, Skulk said and I agreed. We left the landing field and entered the building.

Chapter Text

We switched places on the way to the coordinates. I moved to the front and Skulk automatically cycled to guard the rear without me having to say anything. That was nice, but the reason we weren't talking had been a short argument over whether we kept the feed open between us for communication during combat operations. Skulk insisted no. I insisted yes. We both had good reasons, but I wasn't a combat unit nor was I going to conduct myself as one. So anyway, I had the feed open to Ratthi, Gurathin, and my drones while Skulk sulked.

I was glad it understood the need to keep the humans between us. The thing was, when humans are comfortable in their surroundings and are in charge of SecUnits, the humans end up in front. This is because they want to and they give the orders. Not because it's smart.

Having Skulk in front, in armor, with weapons strapped to its back, just advertised that we thought we were walking into trouble. I wasn't in armor and had a better chance of passing for human, plus since we actually were walking into trouble I didn't want Ratthi or Gurathin in the lead. It had taken only one session of training many cycles ago to get Ratthi and Gurathin to follow some simple rules around me. When I moved to the front, they didn't argue or try to get in front of me. (I have the best humans.)

I deployed my drones in a perimeter that moved with us. We went through the buildings with a lot of caution and an equal amount of 'nothing interesting happens'. I'll spare you the details. I reactivated all my 'act like a human' code as we went.

There were two guards outside the room the directors were supposed to be in, one in powered armor and one in light, form-fitting body armor, the expensive stuff that high-end security gets when they want to blend in and pretend they aren't actually wearing armor. Most humans wouldn't notice it. The two looked at us with curiosity, but not alarm. That was great. They still stopped us, though.

"What can I do for you?" asked the one pretending not to be in armor. Their accent wasn't as rough as the stationers. It was a match for the prisoners we'd taken off the gunship. They still had no feed presence – by now I was resigned to that.

I was already running my codes to freeze the powered armor of the other one. The suit fell perfectly in the classification of the list I had – not too old, not too new. It was some beige set that matched the helmet Skulk had in color, make, and model. Come to think of it, that was a little weird given that was a non-standard color. Had it offed one of these people and stolen their armor at some point in the past? That was also the same style as the two we'd taken down on the gunship. Huh.

The guard was giving me a degree of eye contact that is normal between humans. I didn't like it, but it did mean my disguise was so far intact. I stayed in front and said, "We have a confidential report to give to the board of directors about the nomad killings."

I thought they were just going to let us in immediately, but then the plainclothes one peered around me at Skulk. "What happened to that SecUnit's armor?"

"It was in a prairie fire." I said this with my best bored tone, the one I used when supervisors were trying to figure out why the download activity was so high, but I was sure I'd covered my tracks enough that they couldn't trace it to me. Which was complete bullshit in Skulk's case. At some point, its armor had received some post-manufacturing color treatment to dark gray, probably the same time the logos were removed. Since then, it had been scored, shot, blasted, and stained. It didn't look like it had been evenly (or unevenly) coated with soot. Plus, our armor doesn't discolor in heat (it just gets brittle). And the helmet was one of theirs instead of, you know, actual SecUnit armor.

It was a really bad excuse, is what I'm saying. Their face turned puzzled. I could hear voices raised in anger in the room beyond them. Skulk started forward. I didn't have a lot of time left.

Something occurred to me: Central had not notified them we were coming, because if it had, they'd just be letting us in so they could spring the trap. It had known exactly where we were going and who we were looking for. Even if it wasn't a trap, even if Central hadn't checked the ship's security feeds to eavesdrop on our adventures and discussions, it should have passed along to the directors' security detail that we were headed this way. Even if it thought we were legit. That was a puzzling omission. I was having a whole lot of 'Huh' moments here.

"Is there a problem?" Ratthi asked, just as I found the right code for the powered armor. I froze it and grabbed the unarmored head of the plainclothes guard. I smacked them into the plaster-covered hardened foam wall with enough force for them to crumple. Ratthi flinched. Head injuries like that aren't the best thing for humans, but it would greatly reduce the chance they'd interfere with us later. On the whole, that would increase their chances of getting out of this encounter alive.

I walked in calmly because no alarm had been raised yet. I'm not sure what would have happened if it had, because there was a lot of yelling and confusion going on that didn't have anything to do with us. It was a presentation room, with a wide table on one side, a dozen chairs behind it. On the opposite wall from this were six display screens abutting one another to create one huge one. They weren't on right now, but hey, I could watch six different shows at once on that thing! Nice.

A more pressing issue was the half dozen people behind the table, four on their feet and two seated. I wasn't familiar with Plestead clothing styles, but the design these people were wearing was similar enough to some shows for me to know they were dressed expensively. Two of the ones standing were yelling at the other half dozen people (all less well-dressed in a work uniform) who were in front of the dark display screens. The work-uniform-humans were bracketed by four plainclothes/discreetly armored guards, who were engaged in threatening body language. One of the guards was holding one of the work uniform people by the arm and hair. The held person was crying loudly.

If I had to say what was going on in here, it would be that the directors were having these workers tortured, beat-up, and/or threatened for some reason. These had to be the people the AgNetwork wanted instructions from – either the directors or the workers, I'm not sure which. What the fuck was going on in here?

There was about to be a lot more drama, as a more pressing issue was the guard next to the door I'd come through. This one was in powered armor. They were right next to me, turning to me and reaching for a projectile weapon as they extended their other hand to me in a 'stop' motion. Standard security protocol requires positive/affirmative notification. So someone coming in unannounced should alarm the guards inside. Now that I was in here, they were alarmed.

Or at least this guard was. The rest of the room was still shouting at each other, watching the shouting, or facilitating the shouting. It was a big room so it wasn't over-crowded, but violence takes up a lot of space and we were about to have some. I tried to jam the feed and security in the room. SecSystem was cooperative – cameras went down. Central was not – comms and feed access bounced back up through a relay. Damnit.

Central sent me a 'desist' code. Great, thanks for that. Just what I needed. Interesting priorities there, too: I wasn't to interfere with comms and feed access, but it was fine for me to neutralize security and barge into a meeting of the planet's leadership/owners.

I didn't have time for the guard's armor codes, so I went for a double-leg takedown, to be followed by shooting out the power supply with the guard's own weapon, which took a while to arrange. While I was busy, Skulk, who had come in second, charged across the room and grabbed the nearest well-dressed shouty person who was behind the table. Yeah, I had guessed those were the directors, too.

It grabbed the woman (oh, hey, a human with a feed profile) around the neck and called out, "Surrender or she dies!" Remember that part where I said we could revisit the argument about killing hostages when we actually had some? Yeah, that was a mistake.

So, listen, I don't really blame the humans for what happened next. On the other hand, I don't entirely blame Skulk, either. I understand what was happening on both sides. You see, the human guards saw me taking down powered-armor-guard and at the same time Skulk was charging their clients. So they drew their weapons.

Then Skulk had the woman by the neck. Which, it's a Combat SecUnit. If it has its hands on an unarmored human – if an unarmored human is even within its reach – that human can be dead whenever the CSU wants them dead. That's just how it is. So the fact that Skulk wasn't pointing an obvious gun to her head didn't matter.

However, in that fraction of a second, it did matter to the human guards. From their point of view, that wasn't necessarily an instantly lethal position for their boss to be in. They were still confused about who we were, what we were doing here, and whether they should wait for a standdown order or immediately comply. Given Skulk didn't have a weapon out, didn't even have its gunports open, three of them erred on the side of waiting for a standdown order. The fourth had their gun sensibly pointed down, being professional about things and still trying to work out the situation.

Skulk, on the other hand, erred on the side of 'you have not followed my order, so she dies'. One short yank on the woman's head was all it took to break those delicate linkages between skull and body. It wasn't enough of a yank to tear the skin, so it was surprisingly bloodless, but she was still dead. (Note to self: Skulk had apparently learned something from the clean-up. Instead of 'don't kill humans' it was 'don't kill humans messily', which … yeah.)

No one had surrendered (not even the guard who had kept their weapon down the entire time), so it's not like this wasn't exactly what Skulk had said would happen. There was a longer pause while the human guards absorbed this because it was so antithetical to how humans (or hostage situations with humans) worked. There was, you know, supposed to be negotiation and threats, which would naturally include the pointing of weapons and repeated demands they be lowered. Not a direct line, immediate move to killing the hostage.

Speaking of slow human reaction times, Skulk was already grabbing a second hostage while the guards were figuring out the first one was dead now. One nervous human guard shot the wall near Skulk's head (I know they were aiming at Skulk, but were so rattled they missed by a meter) and I thought for a blip Skulk would kill this hostage, too. But it only repeated the warning: "Surrender or ve dies!"

This time, weapons clattered to the floor with appropriate alacrity. I'd finished with the powered-armor-guard, so I got to my feet, leaving the projectile weapon there because the only weapons in here aside from constructs were handguns. The only person I might need armor-piercing projectiles for was Skulk and … much as I hate to say it, it was more important that I have my hands empty to deal with humans than be ready to turn on one of my own team. (Actually, I'm glad I'm able to say that at this point.)

Ratthi and Gurathin had moved inside the door. I wasn't happy about them being in the same room with such an uncontrolled situation, but having them stay out in the hall with the recovering door guard was even worse. I put myself between them and the conflict as much as possible. So far, the guards were keeping most of their attention on Skulk. I hadn't been able to take the feed down, but SecSystem was happy to allow me to monitor all channels even if it couldn't shut them down. So far, no one had attempted to summon help.

One of the other directors said, "Don't surrender! They aren't even armed!" I guess that one didn't understand what a Combat SecUnit was any more than Brig did. Probably less, actually. Brig at least knew they were dangerous as hell.

The one Skulk had a grip on said, "Oh, shut up Merney! It'll kill me like it killed Celon."

"That's an acceptable loss," said Merney. Wow. Just wow. These people did not like each other. No wonder corporate bigwigs were such callous assholes to those under them. They were callous assholes to each other, too. Also, the local accents were conspicuously absent. By voice, I couldn't have distinguished the directors from random corporate transit station residents.

The one being held (Joem Otek, ve/vim hyper-masc per feed profile) wasn't too happy about that either. "When I get out of this, I am going to fucking ruin you!" Ve meant Merney, not the Combat SecUnit holding vim. Skulk was standing there looking between the two of them, the helmet swiveling slightly with each exchange.

Merney said, "You're not getting out of this, Joem. This is all your fault and it ends now. I can obliterate you with a word!"

Did … did these people not realize they were no longer in control of what was happening in the room? Did they think they could order us to do things and we would do them? (Well, Skulk was obviously a SecUnit and anyone who had watched me take down the powered-armor-person knew I was one, too. Maybe that was exactly what they thought. But if they knew we were SecUnits then why were they …?)

"You can't do shit," Otek said. That was the one Skulk was holding. Otek was addressing the other director, teeth bared and practically foaming at the mouth like Skulk was the only thing holding vim back from physically attacking this Merney guy. "You've never done shit! You've never done anything for this company. Fucking dead weight, a disgrace to your family-"

Merney headed for a door on the opposite side of the room from where we'd come in, saying over his shoulder, "Go ahead then, kill the hostage. See if I care. I'm not surrendering, so-" Skulk deployed its arm weapon and shot him instead, which I have to say, felt oddly satisfying to thwart his attempt to get his fellow director offed. The body smacked into the door and Ratthi made an 'eep' sound. One of the guards just bolted, right past me, past Ratthi and Gurathin, out the door and down the hall. I guess they weren't being paid enough, or maybe that was their boss who bit it.

I didn't care that the guard left because all we were here to do was grab the hostages and get out. We could question them later in a controlled environment and not here where I didn't understand all the factors in play. My first priority was still keeping Ratthi and Gurathin safe, so I stayed near them. Skulk was carrying out the other part – getting the hostages.

The hostage Skulk was holding began laughing. I would like to say it was hysteria or shock, but it was not. It was like an evil villain laugh from one of the shows with better acting – not corny, but clearly pitched to communicate this was a bad guy. "Good! Good job! Get rid of him! End of-" Skulk broke Otek's neck, too. Behind me, Ratthi made another noise, this one strangled. I checked my drones. He was fine. Just shocked. Well, Ratthi … this is what I'd warned you about.

Gurathin was standing there being alert, watching the other guards and the half dozen people the guards had been harassing when we came in. Those people were in various stages of cowering against the wall, staying out of the way. They had feed profiles, too, I noticed. They were listed as systems engineers and technicians, the kind of people who interface directly with the computing system. I formed a theory that Central was stuck in its own hostage situation here, or maybe a trolley dilemma where the directors were threatening, 'We will hurt these few technicians who mean a lot to you unless you let us deport all these other people who individually mean less, but there are a lot of them.'

As far as our own situation went, we were getting perilously short on hostages. (Also, remind me to never engage in a hostile hostage situation with a Combat SecUnit. It absolutely does not care about the life of the hostage. I'd never realized how much having at least a slight respect for the value of life influences those situations, where even the hostage-taker can be assumed to want the hostage to live, all other things being equal. You can't make that assumption about a Combat SecUnit. If anything, Skulk was probably happier to have fewer prisoners to keep track of.)

The next available hostage was a white-haired person identified by profile as Bobe Flatter, it/its pronouns, title of 'Offworlder'. It was leaned back in the chair as far as it would go. It had been in that position when we came in and was still in it now, hands folded over its stomach. It was looking up at Skulk with a polite and attentive expression. There were three dead directors on the floor and Skulk towering over it. The human didn't look nearly as nervous as it should have been.

One of the guards staggered and sank to the floor, face in their hands. The guard next to them kicked them, hard. Skulk glanced at that, then back to peering at the obvious next hostage. I wasn't sure why Skulk wasn't just grabbing it, but then again, I would have been confused by the lack of reaction as well. The woman standing on the other side of the seated person flung her arms in the air and called out, "No one move! No one move! We've surrendered!"

This one was Brag Plennents, she/her, and the first I'd seen where her feed profile gave a title of 'Director'. The others had had privacy locks I hadn't gotten around to unsealing before they died. She said, "I'll cooperate. I'm cooperating." She took a step toward Skulk, which put her right next to the seated Bobe. Skulk switched to her as the new target and pointed one arm gun at her. The last hostage was under the table, silent, still, out of easy reach and hopefully, out of the line of fire.

Brag swallowed and looked over at the guards. "Almaz? They can leave." She made a loose gesture with one of her still-raised hands. "It's okay," she told Skulk. "No guards, no techs. I'll make them all leave. You're here for us. Here we are." Skulk didn't argue.

It was at this point I realized I'd made a mistake in not stopping the first guard who had fled the room. If we were going to get bogged down in here, then there was a risk the guards might summon help. I wasn't sure who they would summon – the rooms we'd passed through on the way here were empty aside from automation. There were those butcherbots outside and those worried me, but the odds the guards were authorized to call on them for aid seemed low. I stayed cozy with SecSystem just in case.

I let the three remaining guards leave, just to get them out of our way. I sent a drone to keep tabs. The faster we got our hostages and out of here, the better. One guard hesitated next to the one trapped in powered armor. I pulled up my sleeve, opened the port on one of my arm guns, and pointed. "Leave them." They moved on, leaving their companion (or whatever the local equivalent was) behind.

Five of the people who had been under the display screens left out the far door, squeamishly picking their way around the messily dead director crumpled in front of it. I sent a drone with them, too. But one of them stayed. It was the one who had been crying earlier, in the grip of one of the guards, being yelled at and yelling back something uncooperative but inarticulate. (I played back the recent memory, but it didn't help me understand what had been going on, as there was sobbing and being shaken involved. They weren't breathing right. I suspected they'd been gut-punched. Perhaps repeatedly.)

Their feed identified them as Shal Cordoser, they/them, senior systems engineer. That was a step up from Gurathin's title, assuming there was any equivalency. Given the shitty nature of this planet, I did not think there was. I should talk to Gurathin about promoting himself to senior. (I don't know how job titles work, but you could just set your feed profile to say whatever you wanted, right?)

Brag stared at them, her face clearing in some realization. Her arms dropped. "This was your plan all along, wasn't it, Shal? You and Central did this. That's why the others couldn't intercede with the network without your permission. You were just stalling for time earlier. This makes you murderers."

I wanted to say we were responsible for this murder spree on our own, thank you very much, but. Central had sent us over here. And was being remarkably silent for a system that had been full of challenging questions earlier. It was keeping open the public feed, but no messages were making their way out.

Who was ultimately responsible for what had been a running theme in this entire Plestead fiasco, so I shut down that line of processing as unnecessarily complicated and got back to worrying about our mission: protect Bravara by stopping the nomad genocide by getting the directors to cooperate or else abducting them until someone does cooperate. (Okay, our mission was also unnecessarily complicated. Or at least complicated.)

From Shal's expression, Brag's take on things was news to them. "Wh-what?" Their voice hiccupped.

Skulk was still pointing one arm gun at Brag when it said, "Stop talking or I'll kill you."

Brag turned to Skulk and said, "Who is controlling-" Skulk shot her.

Bobe, seated, had raised one finger and opened its mouth, but it was too late. Ratthi yelled, "NO!" but that was also after the fact, as was Gurathin's gasp. Brag's choice there was so monumentally arrogant that I couldn't find it in myself to care. I'd seen humans kill themselves in stupider ways, but not by much. She had three previous examples!

"No one controls me," Skulk said proudly.

The second-to-last director scrambled out from under the table, snatched up one of the guard's dropped guns, and tried to grab Shal. I don't know what good he thought that would do, because it looked like he was going to try to take them hostage against Skulk. (I guess they were all stupid. This was not going to end well for anyone. I think my 'I don't care' kicked in at this point, or maybe it had already kicked in. I just stood there and watched.) Skulk vaulted over the table and bounced to the two of them in one stride.

Ratthi yelled, "Skulk! Stop killing people!" just in time for Skulk to jerk aside the punch it was aiming at the director. It missed. (I was surprised it had obeyed. The original deal with Skulk had explicitly not included obeying orders from Ratthi and Gurathin.)

The director (one 'Mak Pigget', he/him) dodged and fired the gun wildly. Probably at Skulk, but who knows? The projectile hit the wall less than an arm's length from Ratthi, who jumped and caught a little of the plaster shrapnel from the wall. I abruptly cared again. Fucking asshole! But then Skulk broke the guy's arm in several places and shoved him to the floor where he whimpered with pain. The gun clattered away.

I was angry I hadn't been able to do that, but at least it was done. I checked my drone – Ratthi was blinking away debris and had a tiny cut on his cheek, the sort of artistic kind they put on people in shows. Gurathin had raised his hands to shield himself. It was way too slow – more a reflex than anything else – but he looked fine, or at least normal. He was putting his hands down now and scowling. Yeah, me too.

The woman made a terrified animal-sounding squeal, frozen in place with her eyes screwed up. Skulk glared at her for a moment, then turned toward Bobe who was still sitting, leaned back. It put the finger down and exhaled. Several tense beats passed in silence as the humans recovered themselves somewhat. The woman (Shal) asked, "What do you want? Why are you here? You're not with them!"

Skulk ignored her and pointed one of its arm guns at the person in the chair. "Cede control of the government. Renounce the ownership of the Corporation Rim."

Wait. That wasn't what we were here for. It was close, but it sounded like Skulk was reverting to its 'I'm going to overthrow the government' plan. What are you doing? It didn't answer me.

The Offworlder raised its brows slightly. "May I speak?"

Skulk told it, "Yes."

It leaned forward slowly until the chair was oriented correctly and its elbows rested on the table. It clasped its hands. In a calm voice, it said, "The board of directors of Plestead consists of five voting members, who represent the five founding families, plus one offworlder, which is myself. The offworlder may vote only when there is a tie, and has executive powers only when-"

Everyone started yelling at once. Or at least, it seemed like everyone did. Mostly it was the guy on the floor trying to drown out the 'offworlder', but then Ratthi ran forward yelling at Skulk and Gurathin yelled at Ratthi and I yelled at both of them and the woman screamed because everyone else was screaming (or so I guess; I don't know, she was screaming, too). I threw out an arm which stopped Gurathin from charging forward, but it was already too late for Ratthi. Because I knew I wouldn't get there in time and milliseconds counted, I slammed open the feed and sent to Skulk, Don't kill Ratthi!

I didn't know for sure that would happen, but like hell did I want to test my evolving idea of Skulk's morality with Ratthi's life. Skulk had been clear from the start that Ratthi and Gurathin's client status was subordinate to Brig's. I knew that, but Ratthi didn't and maybe he believed he was protected. More likely, he just thought Skulk wouldn't shoot him. Or maybe he wasn't thinking about it at all and just wanted to protect this other human, the first one in the room where Ratthi had had enough warning to do so.

But on the other side, Skulk thought it could safeguard Brig, its home, and all the people it was living with there by overthrowing the government. Whatever the Offworlder had been about to say was key to that. Which meant if there was ever a time to de-client Ratthi and get him out of the way, this was it. Even if it seemed unlikely Skulk would do that, I was still terrified of seeing one of my friends killed in front of me because the tiny bit of trust I'd extended to a combat unit might have been too much. Please, I sent. It had worked on the dock people at Port FreeCommerce. Of course, those had been humans. Maybe Skulk had been hanging around humans enough for it to matter.

Skulk's arm was pointed at Ratthi's midsection. On the other side of Ratthi in a direct line was the director with the broken arm. The gunport snapped shut as soon as I sent that last word. Honestly, my reaction to that was shock and enough disbelief that I tried to figure out another reason for the timing. But there was none (other than maybe it just didn't want to shoot Ratthi). I'd asked nicely and it had complied. I could barely believe it, but at least half my accumulated tension dropped.

"Skulk." Ratthi looked up at it, panting after the sudden sprint. At some point it had cleared its visor. Skulk's arm was still extended at Ratthi's midsection, which was not giving me great feelings but on the other hand if Ratthi was alive now, then unless he fucked things up in some spectacular fashion that would be a stretch even for Ratthi, Skulk would let him stay that way. Ratthi said, "I'm not going to tell you that you can't kill him, because you can. Obviously. But if you do, I won't feel safe around you."

"You are safe. I don't kill clients or customers." Skulk hadn't said anything back to me on the still-open feed channel. I think it was speaking as much to me here as to Ratthi, but I think a lot of things are about me that turn out not to be.

"Yes, but you kill targets. And I was one." Ratthi paused before going on, "If you want me as your friend, if you want Preservation as customers for your owner, if you want the people of this polity to see you as something more than an assassin, then you have to show you can be trusted with people's lives, and not to end them so freely. You said no one controlled you. But you control you. This is your choice to make."

"You want me to let him live." Yeah, okay, I really wanted to say something here because Ratthi clearly and understandably didn't know the power dynamics. He's a client and Skulk was a construct programmed to do what clients want. Making his wishes clear was right next door to an order and then trying to pretend he's not low-key giving an order was … annoying. Or at least I always found it annoying when clients pulled that passive aggressive bullshit on me under the pretense of being 'nice'. From Skulk's tone, I was pretty sure it felt the same way.

"Yes, I do," Ratthi said. "But that's up to you. What's up to me is how I react to it and if you kill him, I will trust you less. I will be less safe. You will have proven it."

There was a really long pause after that. Skulk and Ratthi were still making direct eye contact. Ratthi doubtless thought they were having a deep emotional bonding moment while I would give it better than 90% odds that Skulk was target-locked to him or intermittently fighting off the urge to lock target on him. I still thought Ratthi was safe, which was a huge and surprising relief, but I would have rather they'd been in a less antagonistic posture.

Movement drew my attention to Shal, who was taking a careful step away from the director. He'd furtively reached for one of the other dropped guns with his unbroken arm. Idiot. With Ratthi between them, Skulk probably couldn't see what was happening. I wasn't about to let that asshole shoot Ratthi in the back and undercut Ratthi's whole argument here (and, more importantly, kill Ratthi). I did some calculations – how fast could the director move vs how long it would take me to shoot him. We were still good.

"I will not kill him," Skulk finally said. Great, maybe they were done and Ratthi would get out of the way. But no, Skulk asked, "Why him?" which made me think Skulk was fully aware of what the director was doing and it was intentionally prolonging this.

"Because I can still save him."

The director's finger was in the trigger well. He was swiveling his body. I couldn't wait any longer. Skulk's hand came up toward Ratthi's arm. Yeah, it knew and it, also, had decided it couldn't wait any longer. If it wasn't going to kill the director, then it was going to do something worse than I was about to do. I raised my arm, made one last check of my weapon calibration, and fired at the director. Skulk stopped, never having finished the action to grab Ratthi.

Ratthi spun, looking between the slumped figure and me, wearing an appalled expression I totally didn't deserve. This situation is precisely why SecUnits have energy weapons built-in as default and combat units have projectiles. Also, why you don't let combat units handle routine security issues – they are literally not equipped for it.

"He's stunned!" I said. "He'll be fine!" Ratthi checked the guy's pulse anyway. For fuck's sake, Ratthi. Did you think I'd kill him after all this? Right in front of Skulk? Give me some credit here!

Apparently some of that bled into the feed still-open with Skulk, because it said, Ha.

You fucker. It had orchestrated that.

At the table, the Offworlder shrugged and said, "Incapacitation qualifies. What was it you wanted?"

Skulk said, "Cede control of the government. Renounce the ownership of the Corporation Rim." It did not point a weapon this time.

"Who am I ceding it to?"

"Me," Skulk said. I had a brief, nightmarish vision of a Combat SecUnit being in charge of an entire planet. While this would completely negate our need to take the directors hostage, I was pretty sure it was illegal and totally sure it would introduce all new problems.

"Are you a citizen of the Agricultural Zone of Pleasant Steading?"

A beat. "I am a … citizen of Bravara?"

"That doesn't qualify. I cannot legally cede control to a noncitizen." It looked over the rest of us, all dressed in non-local clothing and sporting non-local accents. Great. None of us were citizens of this shitty polity. Why would they even have a stupid law like that? Not that I thought any of us should be in charge.

I pointed at Shal. "What about them?" The Offworlder looked at them. Their eyes got big and they shook their head violently, loose, sweaty hair flopping from side to side. Fantastic. The only citizen here and they didn't want it. (Perversely, that meant they were probably a good choice.) Maybe the guard trapped in the powered armor would work? I turned back toward where they had fallen.

The intercom chimed. "This is the Central Computing System. I am citizen 000001 and authorized by the original planetary charter of ParRomDrayage, as implemented by the Château Auld Holding Company, to administer all governmental powers that do not conflict with the orders of the board of directors of the mentioned Agricultural Zone of Pleasant Steading, known colloquially as Plestead."

There was Central, right on time. How convenient.

"You're a citizen?" the Offworlder asked dubiously.

"Yes," Central answered. "My profile was the template for all other profiles. I am as much a citizen as all other citizens of the Plestead Agricultural Zone." All six of the screens activated, showing credentials and various documents that were also available for download in the public feed channel. "Permissions, privileges, and citizenship status were never revoked. Plestead has no laws limiting citizenship status to humans."

Oh yeah, Central had just been hanging out, waiting for us to off these directors so it could launch its own overthrow of the government. Not that I cared. I wondered what it was going to do about that plan to put all the nomads in slave labor camps. They weren't citizens either. I cared about that.

"Then we don't need it," Skulk said, gesturing at the Offworlder. That was something of a threat, but still no open gunports. Ratthi must have really had gotten through to it.

Central responded, "I will not take actions I am not lawfully allowed to take. This transfer must be legitimate." I wondered how 'lawful' it was to stand idle while Skulk cut down one director after another. I guess Plestead didn't have a law that required citizens to render aid, unlike, say, Preservation. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure they had a law either. Maybe just a social expectation.)

"It will be," the Offworlder said with a reference to the credentials still on the screens. "That is sufficient for my purposes at this time." To Skulk, it said, "Do you require that I cede control to Central?"

"Yes."

"Then by the emergency powers invested in me by the Château Auld Holding Company, I turn over all rights and control of the planet of Plestead to the Central Computing System present and referenced here. I do this under threat to my life and not of my own free will."

Ratthi asked, "Wouldn't a contract made under this kind of duress simply be void? It's uneth-" He cut off when he saw the side-eye Gurathin was giving him. Ratthi frowned and grumbled, "I hate corporates."

The Offworlder glanced over at Gurathin and shrugged, nonchalant as ever. It rose. "My survivability here seemed more perilous." It gestured at the various corpses. "Speaking of which, now you do not need me." It turned to Skulk. "With your permission, I will leave."

"Go."

I spoke up as the Offworlder stepped fastidiously over the bodies on its way out. I sent a drone with it, but I was getting low on them. "Every human who leaves here is a vector of security risk. We need to do what we came here for and get out."

Skulk faced the six screens and said, "Have you renounced the ownership of the Corporation Rim?"

"That's not what we came here for," I said.

Skulk ignored me. Central said, "No."

"What does that mean?" Ratthi asked in response to Central's answer. "What about the attacks on the nomads?"

It meant we were back where we'd started, just with an impossible-to-abduct and difficult-to-threaten machine intelligence. That was frustrating and alarming. I realized I'd let myself get tunnel vision on following Skulk's lead and now saw where that had gotten us. I addressed Skulk. "We came here to protect Bravara, which requires stopping the attacks on the nomads, not whatever it is you're trying to do to the government."

"Leaving the Corporation Rim is the best long-term protection for Bravara and the nomads," Skulk said. "Continued CR-ownership of the planet means local political leaders have ongoing access to CR military forces and terraforming. As long as they have that, direct elimination of the nomads or stations is a cheaper way for them to achieve goals than equitable negotiation. Ending CR-ownership ends AgZone technological superiority and changes the battle strategy. The," it seemed to grasp for the right word, "negotiation … battle strategy."

Central said, "The economic loss from leaving the CR will be catastrophic to the Agricultural Zone, dropping the standard of living under my threshold for acceptability. I will not allow it."

"You have to allow it, Central," Shal said, inserting themselves into the discussion and sniffling heavily. "If you don't, they'll just come here again and put in a new board of directors and take you apart. I protected you for decades. I didn't do it so you could be destroyed by a different set of people!" Shal pulled over a chair and sank into it, holding their midsection. Ratthi went to their side and murmured to them.

Skulk ignored the human's distress. "My owner predicted this objection and has proposed solutions for your economic issues. You could sell to other customers not in the Corporation Rim."

"Which customers and at what rates and quantities?" Central asked.

Shal held their head in frustration, shaking it slowly as they said, "The money doesn't matter. There are people dying …"

"I know," Ratthi said softly, patting their shoulder. "I know. I agree."

Skulk and Central began a rapid-fire discussion in the feed. It started off with Skulk proposing some planet called Eudeka and (surprisingly) the Preservation Alliance, followed shortly by Central ascertaining Skulk didn't know shit about the agricultural product commodity market or the economies of the planets it was suggesting. Then Central tried to explain financial theory or something (several series of educational modules were offered) while Skulk ignored that and said they both needed to talk to Brig, who had already called a conclave of station masters, who would assemble shortly.

I quit paying attention. The surviving human director was stirring. I pinged for a MedSystem and one answered. It was one floor above us and currently engaged in treating the guard I'd smashed into the wall. It dispatched a gurney. With Gurathin's help, I got the man to his feet and put him in a chair. I dropped into Gurathin's feed what I'd received from the MedSystem for immediate treatment. He tapped an acknowledgement. When it arrived, we put the director on the gurney and sent him off.

The rest kept talking: Skulk, Ratthi, Shal, and Central. They eventually hashed out a plan where Central agreed to lower its standards and see how the economics worked out. With the change in management, the Combat SecUnits' contract reverted to Central, who recalled them to base. I wasn't sure how they would react to being ordered around by a machine intelligence, but working that out wasn't our concern. When they returned, they and the ag-bots would move into defensive positions around the city of Four Sisters. All outlying populated areas would be evacuated into the city.

Temporary shelters would be erected for the nomads, with food and water for the practice of guest-rite (or guest-right? I don't know; it was apparently that thing Brig did when we showed up that I had deleted. It was a custom the nomads knew, though whether they would honor it under these circumstances was unclear).

Efforts would be made by trusted station masters to persuade the nomads to put aside the war council and negotiate a formal and lasting peace. They were exceptionally provoked and angry, so no telling if that would work either. The bodies of the dead directors were involved in this somehow. Should peaceful discussions begin, then Plestead would renounce ownership by the Corporation Rim and send away the rented military units.

There was a timetable to this, based on the length of time for news of Plestead's revolt to reach the CR, response to be organized, and transmitted back. The rented units needed to be back in a wormhole before they could be ordered to turn on Central and the AgZone, becoming their own little overthrow party but twenty times stronger than ours and overthrowing (underthrowing? Superthrowing?) the government back into what it had been before but with different directors. That's why sending them away wasn't dependent on finishing the negotiations, but only on the nomads being willing to talk.

Requests for aid were also being sent to other non-Corporation Rim worlds nearby and possible interested parties, such as Eudeka and (this time it was Ratthi's contribution) the Preservation Alliance. Those requests would be carried on the agri-products shipments that usually went to the CR, making the food delivery a down payment for assistance. Or maybe a bribe. I don't know how these negotiations work.

I didn't know how most of this worked. I did care. I definitely had opinions about this and wanted to see yet another planet pried away from the clutches of the Corporation Rim. But I wasn't going to stay here so my opinions didn't matter the way Shal's, Skulk's, and Central's did. Our next task was to return to Bravara before the combat units got back so I and my humans were as far away from them as possible. Central kindly dispatched the director's fancy executive shuttle for our use during the trip. (I think Central wanted us gone, too.)

Chapter Text

"That's good," Ratthi said brightly about the Combat SecUnits being recalled. "That's excellent! That gets them away from the nomads and brings them here."

"Ratthi," I said, "it's bringing them here so it can use them against the approaching army of nomads."

"Oh." He thought about that for a second. "You could break their governor modules though, couldn't you?"

I just stood there. I think my brain broke. Why the fuck would I release a bunch of rogue Combat SecUnits anywhere, much less near me and humans I cared about? Had Ratthi not been paying attention? Had he not noticed the four unplanned dead humans lying around the room? And Skulk – Skulk had had several thousand hours of being rehabilitated/socialized by others before we ran into it.

You know how to break a governor module? Skulk sent.

What? Yes? You don't?

No.

How did yours get broken then? It had shown me an excerpt of its technical specifications. Wasn't it in there? Wasn't that how it had done it?

I don't know.

What the fuck? Was it just damaged in that battle it had been in and come back programmed wrong? That seemed stupendously unlikely, but then again the idea that anyone would have intentionally disabled the module on a fucking combat unit was just as dumb.

Anyway, I was distracted explaining things to Ratthi and never did find out how Skulk had ended up ungoverned in the first place.

Chapter Text

While we waited for the shuttle to arrive, I made my standard inquiries about media now that Central would talk to me without a bunch of confrontational questions. There wasn't much media in its repositories compared to that in transit stations, but there was way more than I could download and (almost) all of it was unfamiliar. I liked unfamiliar. I perused the tags and picked some interesting looking stuff.

I offered a fake war documentary to Skulk (not my thing, but it was next to me snooping in my feed, looking at the download activity and I thought I needed to get started with giving it some options). Skulk rejected it out of hand, then downloaded it anyway a few seconds later, playing with the file the way I'd seen the stupider bot-pilots do with the media I gave them. Which is to say, happy to have the data, shuffling it around from location to location, but having no idea what to do with it. I wished I'd given it something more palatable to me if I was going to have to teach it how to watch media.

I learned from my mistake and tried pointing out some single-player strategy games next. Skulk was very taken by the idea that humans fantasized about killing each other. I tried to tell Skulk humans didn't think of it that way and it was more like dominance or play/practice, but Skulk was insistent and had this whole philosophical monologue about the purpose of its existence. I deleted that out of my memory and decided to take a break from 'rehabilitating' Skulk or whatever it was I was trying to do.

(I desperately wanted to say Skulk wasn't my problem. But it clearly was my problem. I wouldn't be here on this planet otherwise. I'd initially blamed Ratthi for this but … I've stopped blaming Ratthi. It's not anyone's fault. It's just … a thing I can help with. That I probably should help with – if I cared about humans, in general, and the opinions they have about constructs. Which, I do. Because what Skulk was and did was going to impact me whether I wanted it to or not.)

(I took a break anyway. And skimmed a few of the new shows I'd downloaded. Most of them were in that heavy accented Steadish language. I pinged Central and downloaded a more comprehensive language module. I offered it to Skulk so it could improve its files, but it didn't want it. Fine. Maybe it needed a break from me, too.)

When we got back to Bravara, it was still the same day, just late in it. We'd been on this stupid planet only slightly more than one cycle. (Let me never say planets are boring ever again.) Everyone at Bravara was exhausted from fighting the fire all day in the heat, even though they were taking it in shifts. The nomads were still recovering from their hellish night before they resumed their march south to kill all the AgZoners. Skulk and Brig went to tell them about the change of government and the reception being planned so hopefully the killing would be kept to a minimum or averted entirely.

Ratthi wanted to go check the nomads to the north and see what we could do about the survivors of the massacre, but the fancy shuttle had left after dropping us off, the humans needed rest periods, and Skulk refused permission unless it was going with us, plus it was busy escorting Brig around. I knew anyone who had been in the path of those combat units was dead. They'd be just as dead if we dropped everything and went now, or organized properly and went later. I voted for organizing properly and going later, so I approved of Skulk's refusal. I even sent it a cheerful 'affirmative' ping.

Annoyingly, Ratthi refused sleep and decided now was a good time to go look at those cows. You know, supposedly the reason why we'd come here? (The cover story, at least.) Yeah, I'd been working hard not to remember that, too. Ick. It was just a matter of running the cows through the large animal MedSystem, but even that was going to involve someone trudging through the mud and bovine excrement to get the right cow(s) in there. Yeah, no.

To free up one of the Bravara hands who could help Ratthi with the cattle, I volunteered to help with firefighting. This was a big improvement in my job duties. Especially as I didn't actually do any firefighting and instead got to do what I was made to do. Through the night, I went up and down the line of inadequately protected humans, watching for erratic or impaired behavior and pulling the effected back so they could recover (or be ferried off for MedSystem treatment) before returning to their work.

No one had appropriate protective gear. Nearly all of them were in one phase or another of heat exhaustion, but they weren't giving up. They were making good progress on stopping the fire. There were humans here from other stations and I saw the two prisoners from the gunship. Everyone worked together tirelessly and with very little rancor. I was surprised. And pleased.

I returned to Bravara near dawn, along with the rest of the humans. They would have a meal break and decide how and if they would continue the fight through the day, with what resources and in what areas. By this point, my lungs had been contaminated enough that I was breathing as hard as a human without the prompting of my 'act like a human' code.

The MedSystems were full, so I had to do a field irrigation to clear the particulate matter. This was accidentally witnessed by Gurathin, who became agitated about it. The whole interaction concluded awkwardly. The less said of it the better.

It was afternoon before we were able to head north, taking Brig's bovine-excrement-scented ship. Skulk had connected to the bot-pilot via a cable and was monitoring our flight. Speaker, a nomad leader who was coming with us to show us where the settlements were, was deep in conversation with Ratthi about the exact events of our revolutionary adventure. This would be related back to the other nomads later, likely with an assessment of how reliable the stories they'd been given were. Gurathin was listening with his typically grim expression. I stayed out of it.

I had that fake war documentary open, but I wasn't paying attention to it. I hadn't even prompted Skulk to watch it with me yet. I was thinking. About Skulk. You see, back when I first met Three, I'd thought there would be an expectation that I'd rehabilitate it somehow by teaching it whatever stupid, unknown wisdom I had on being a rogue unit.

That hadn't happened. I'd given it my memories, which was easy, but I hadn't talked with Three much about what they meant (to me or to it). Talking about it would have been awkward. I didn't want to talk to Skulk about my past either. What if it wanted to trade memories again? The clip of its memories I'd seen had been really fucking hard to watch. Would it be hard for Skulk to watch my memories? Had it been hard for Three?

It hadn't always been easy for me, either, and I was the one who'd had to live them.

I didn't think knowing my past was going to help Skulk be less murder-prone. (Which was a big part of why I hadn't wanted any of my humans to have anything to do with a combat unit – I couldn't imagine what could be said or done to make the interaction safe enough that my risk assessment module was not screaming at me. I had turned it off before we ever set out. That's why I haven't mentioned its opinion on anything.)

On the other hand, I'd known Skulk for two cycles and it was already less murder-prone. I'd watched it shift in that conference room with the directors as it had gone from killing to maiming to veiled threats to no threats at all. Some of that was due to circumstances, but that moment when it had been swinging for the one director and then deliberately missed, followed by breaking the guy's arm when he fired – that was important. Skulk had a good excuse to kill the guy after the gun discharged. It had not used the excuse.

I knew it had to have wanted to. It had been very clear about what it wanted to do. Clear to me in private channels. Clear to Ratthi in spoken words. Clear to its owner when we'd been on Preservation. None of us could stop it. It had Brig's blanket permission. Ratthi probably wouldn't even have said anything about it because he'd been the one endangered. Skulk had stopped itself, choosing to limit itself to damage the MedSystem would be able to fix. That human would live.

Skulk had an arc like one of the characters in my shows. Not a heel-face turn, but it had still developed and changed. It was young. Since gaining freedom, it had learned to do things other than kill. It knew how to drive fence posts. It had cobbled together two separate attempts at translation modules so it could talk to people. It had found ways to break down its programming and adapt it to its current living situation. It didn't want to be an outlaw. It wanted to defend its home. It was loved.

Yes, it was also a child-murdering monster. I will never forget that.

I'd killed some people, too, and not all of them under the influence of malware or orders. That's never far from my mind. And yeah, maybe I didn't manage my relationships as mechanically as Skulk did, but every time I'd faced off with an enemy, they'd been either a Target or a Hostile, depending how human they were. I used those tags to evoke those same behind-the-scenes code activations, just like Skulk did. We weren't that different.

I'd known that from the beginning. I'd been afraid of it, and what it meant about me. But looking at Skulk now … it wasn't that scary. Or not as scary as I'd thought. Or maybe I'd gotten used to it. I don't know. I just know I wasn't upset about it anymore. I thought I could work with this. With Skulk. With this situation.

I was going to have a lot to talk to Dr. Bharadwaj about when I got back.

But for now, I opened a channel and invited Skulk to it. It joined. I started the war documentary from the beginning. Because, you know, maybe I did have some stupid, unknown wisdom about being a rogue unit I could share.

Chapter Text

Report to Preservation Alliance Council, by Dr. Ratthi –

What was supposed to be no more than an outreach effort to a rogue construct has turned into an application for Plestead to join the Preservation Alliance, with the possibility of picking up another, a planet called Eudeka. Governments of both planets are in transition from their previous CR structures. I recommend diplomatic corps be dispatched as soon as possible to each to assist.

Both planets have humanitarian needs, but they are also uniquely suited to assist one another and so require little direct help from Preservation. Eudeka has been under a trade embargo from the Corporation Rim, and Plestead has lost their CR customers for food products. Eudeka has a surplus of manufactured goods they will trade for food, but for longer-term needs, both planets have expressed interest in joining our alliance to stabilize their economies.

Economics also indicates it is likely the Corporation Rim will abandon both sites. Plestead was a marginal investment and had been neglected for centuries because of this. Without extensive, expensive terraforming, it will never turn the profit margin the CR is looking for. They know this. The leadership of Plestead knew it, which was why they were pushed to extreme measures which backfired badly on them.

I am told Eudeka is significantly more industrialized and populated. I am enclosing the brief I was provided. It has an armed and organized population and a small native military sufficient to repel any small-scale CR assault. The CR has elected to starve them out. Plestead has pledged to devote its excess food resources (and potentially a splinter portion of their AgNetwork) to preventing that.

Hopefully, some diplomatic arrangement can be made, but I will leave that to others with more skill in that area.

I would also like to have special provision made for justice advocates to meet with the construct we went to Plestead for. Its name is Skulk. I would be happy to consult at length about the details of its situation. SecUnit has expressed willingness to share logs relating to it as well, so that whoever you send will be as well prepared as possible.

Skulk is not well-meaning in the way most humans would say, but it is intelligent, open-minded, and has successfully integrated with a community it cares deeply about. It would be to the benefit of constructs everywhere if it could be further socialized to be a safe and productive member of society.

ART –

See attached, for addition to the Diaries. I even got contributions from Skulk and Ratthi this time. Actually, Skulk contributed a lot more, but it was rambling and not plot-relevant so I cut it. There's some stuff from Ratthi I didn't include either that I should. It's where he and Gurathin were talking about the planet's ecology. You might need that later, so I'll clean it up and send it separately. I'll see what I can salvage of Skulk's other logs as well.

I think if that university team of yours were to look in the archives deep enough, it would be easy to produce documentation showing the nomads had a valid claim to the planet they're calling Plestead. The faster something legitimate could be put forward, the better. The nomads have been there for centuries longer than the Corporation Rim has even existed. They must have been one of the earliest colonies, back before they did much in the way of surveying, in the bad old days when they just dropped people in blind and hoped for the best. It would make for a poor story if, after all they've gone through, they ended up no better than before.

Murderbot