Chapter Text
“Get behind me and fall back to the hopper. We’ve got hostiles incoming,” I told Ratthi and Amena.
Since my humans are generally reasonable, they didn’t question me. They stood up, stepped away from whatever tiny glowy nocturnal fauna they had been studying, and retreated to stand behind me.
Of course, if my humans had been entirely and not just generally reasonable, we wouldn’t have ended up in this situation.
It had been Ratthi’s idea. I’d tried my best to talk him out of it, but he’d been persistent. “We won’t go far. We’ll take the hopper and find a spot a few kilometers from camp,” he’d said. “Amena should get the chance to see how lovely it is out there and not spend all her time cataloguing abandoned buildings.”
I wouldn’t admit it to him, but that last part had been what had sold me on this. Not because of Amena’s education, but because this would be a chance to get away from the outpost.
We were on this planet as part of a PSUMNT investigation into an abandoned early-stage settlement, and I hated everything about it. Going through creepy empty buildings reminded me of That Shitshow with the gray Target people and their failed colony, and I wasn’t the only one. I think everyone who had been a part of that mess was nervous about the current mission.
We’d been on the planet's surface for a week, and nothing bad had happened. Still, many of the humans were struggling to sleep well. It was starting to affect their behavior, too: they were tired and short-tempered and consumed more warm stimulant liquids than usual.
So, yeah. Maybe Ratthi had suggested a nighttime nature excursion because he couldn’t sleep and wanted to get away from the outpost. And maybe I had gone along with it because, as much as I hated planets and their environmental hazards and dangerous fauna, I hated mysteriously abandoned human settlements even more.
And now it looked like the mysteriously missing local humans had found us.
We were four horizontal kilos away from the outpost; way too close for comfort, even if it was on the other side of a steep valley. Our habitat was ten horizontal kilos and five hundred vertical meters away. The rest of the humans were there, having (or trying to have) their rest period, with Three taking care of security. (There's no way I would've agreed to leave the habitat if it hadn't been there.)
This particular forested hillside location had been selected based on (1) the fact that there was a level clearing large enough for the hopper, and (2) Ratthi expected that there would be a nice view once the sun came up. That was still several hours away.
I'd set a drone perimeter, and we were wearing enviro suits, which was standard protocol for the planet. Even though the air seemed fine and we hadn't found any signs of alien remnants or anything else dangerous, we couldn't rule out every risk. Something had to have gone wrong for a hundred human settlers to disappear without a trace.
For the hour that we’d spent outdoors, everything had been fine until now. I'd stood guard and watched a show with ART, who was in orbit around the planet. Ratthi and Amena had looked at fauna and made excited noises.
Then, two of my drones had alerted me about approaching humanoid shapes.
My drones were equipped with extended night vision features, but the hostiles were moving sneakily among the trees and bushes, so it was hard to get a good image. All I could make out was that they were roughly the same size and shape as humans, but the heat signatures didn’t match, unless they were all hypothermic. There were at least six of them.
Scratch that—there were at least seven. One of them had snuck up on me past the perimeter and popped out of a thicket only some meters away from us.
“Run!” I ordered my humans.
Seeing the humanoid properly in the beam of my helmet light was a shock that made me hesitate for a fraction of a second, because it almost looked like a Target. It was more white than gray and not as tall, but it was similarly skinny and wrong-looking. It had no hair, its teeth were too sharp to be human, and in stark contrast to its pale face, its eyes were bottomless black voids. It was dressed in tattered remains of clothes, so worn-out that it was impossible to tell what color or style they had originally been. Its feet were bare, with claws at the ends of its toes.
During my passing moment of distraction, the NotTarget had raised its arm towards me like a SecUnit with onboard weapons, although I didn’t see anything on it that resembled one. Instead, the hostile's hand, which was closed in a fist, was covered in a rock-like growth as pale as its skin that continued up to its elbow.
I was carrying a large projectile weapon, but grabbing that off my back would waste precious seconds. Instead, I pointed my arm guns at the NotTarget and fired.
At the same time, the NotTarget opened its hand, palm towards me. There was a flash of blindingly bright light and a sound unlike I’d ever heard any weapon make, a loud bass rumble with complex higher undertones beyond the auditory processing capacity of non-augmented humans.
I had no time to dodge. The blast slammed into me—and suddenly, gravity was gone.
I knew objectively that whatever weird weapon the NotTarget had in its arm, it couldn't possibly have reversed planetary gravity. Still, that was how it felt: like the zero-G sensation where every direction was down, and you were in constant free fall.
The jolt of my body hitting the forest floor was distant, in some other reality where I still had mass, instead of this unmoored state in which I couldn’t tell where my arms and legs were in relation to the rest of me. I’d lost the feed and comms, too. I had no connection to my drones, let alone ART.
My eyes were still open, giving me a vague impression of pale shadows moving above me. Past a buzzing in my ears, I heard Amena shout “SecUnit!” and then the weird layered noises of several more NotTarget NotArmGun blasts.
Putting all this together, it seemed clear that I’d failed. The NotTargets were going to take my humans.
I tried to force my body to move, imagining where my elbows must be resting against the ground so I could raise myself for a better look. All I achieved was to turn the free fall into a spinning sensation that was so overwhelming, my eyelids closed on their own accord.
My organic parts wanted very badly to vomit. Luckily, I lacked the anatomy for that, but it still felt disgusting, and the gagging noises were embarrassing. I hoped the lack of feed and comms meant that no one would hear them. Fuck, how could humans tolerate this? Although I supposed they couldn’t, not really, since it always made them miserable.
I would’ve almost preferred an involuntary shutdown. Those also sucked, but at least I got a moment of nothing before I restarted.
The soft footsteps of the sneakily moving NotTargets were getting more distant. They were going away. They were taking Ratthi and Amena, and there was nothing I could do, because I couldn’t even sit up.
I should never have agreed to this excursion. Or to this whole fucking mission. It was all a mistake. Not that I’d really wanted to be here. I’d come down to the planet because I’d thought the humans would be safer with me. So much for that; I’d been completely useless at protecting them.
The worst of the hit was maybe starting to abate slightly. My head was still spinning, but I was growing more aware of the grassy ground against my back. Trying to access my diagnostics, which gave me garbage, led me to the conclusion that the issue was mostly related to my bot parts. My organics sensed things as they should, but the inorganics that should’ve interpreted the information were all scrambled. Unfortunately, knowing that didn’t help me fix it, and I still had no feed, so ART couldn’t help, either.
I risked opening my eyes again. I couldn’t see much, just a starry sky and treetops, and no hint of my humans or any NotTargets. Encouraged by my impressive success at lying on the ground and staring into the distance, I tried to get up again. Which instantly led to me landing on the ground face-down, feeling another awful wave of nausea, my face squished against the inside of my helmet.
Okay. Seemed like I wasn’t getting up, yet.
With my mind a little clearer than before, I realized that in addition to losing my humans, which was the worst thing that could happen, I’d been hit with something that was probably alien, and left feeling weird and wrong. Was I infected with something? Oh, shit. That train of thought seemed to be asking for a redacted-type moment, and I didn’t want to risk that, even though it hadn’t happened to me in months. If I were infected, ART could fix me. It had fixed me before. My humans were the priority, because they weren’t designed to be easily fixable.
If I could trust my internal chronometer, which wasn’t a given, it had been seven minutes since the attack. In that time, those NotTargets could already be a whole kilometer away.
I spent another seven minutes involuntarily hugging the forest floor and hating myself for how badly I’d fucked things up, my brain producing horror scenarios of what the NotTargets could be doing to Ratthi and Amena—of my humans turning into pale alien remnant people with dead eyes.
Fifteen minutes after the attack, my feed connection came back to life.
I was instantly bombarded with a billion worried pings and messages from ART and Three. I tapped both their feeds to let them know I was still alive.
I was finally able to sit up. I still felt like my limbs were somehow too light while my head was too heavy, but at least my insides were no longer trying to escape through my mouth. Looking around, the small clearing where we’d stood was completely empty, only some broken twigs and patches of trampled grass showing that anything had happened here.
At this point, ART landed on me in the feed like another alien arm gun blast, demanding a status report. It was a lot to handle on top of everything else. I had to close my eyes again and put one hand on the ground to keep my balance.
I’ve lost my humans, I told it.
I know, ART said, because of course it did, it hadn’t lost all connectivity like me. I traced their location markers to a cliffside one point seven kilometers from your position, where they disappeared, most likely underground. Your marker, on the other hand, just stopped moving, and I couldn't reach you.
Right. I hadn’t even considered how worrying this must’ve looked from a distance. ART must’ve wondered if I’d just died.
I’m fine, I said. It was almost true; I felt much closer to normal already. There were Targets. Or something like Targets. They shot me with a weird energy blast and took Ratthi and Amena.
We’ll get them back. Help is less than five minutes away. Just sit tight, ART said.
Because I rarely listen to its bossy advice, I decided this was a good time to try standing up. Luckily, that was okay. It felt like the ground was moving up and down in waves, and I wouldn’t trust my aim to hit anything smaller than a hauler bot, but I was back on my feet.
I accessed my drones. Since I’d been cut off from them, they’d just hovered in place in a holding pattern. All but one showed nothing but dark, empty forest for the entire time since I’d lost contact. The one exception showed two NotTargets creeping past, one of them holding Amena by the arm. She seemed to be walking on her own, and I didn’t spot any obvious injuries, but I couldn’t be sure; the angle was bad, and I couldn’t see her face. Ratthi hadn’t been caught on any drone cameras.
My comms came to life with Iris’s concerned voice. “SecUnit? Peri says you were exposed to an alien weapon. Are you okay?”
Of course ART couldn’t keep its big transport mouth shut and had made them all worried. I hadn’t expected her, or any other humans, to show up. They should’ve all been asleep this time of the local cycle.
Ignoring her question, I asked back, “Iris? Who’s with you?”
“Three and Tarik. And one of Peri’s drones,” Iris replied. “We’re almost there. We’ll land next your hopper.”
“You shouldn't all have come. It's not safe out here,” I said.
“It’s even less safe for you on your own,” Three pointed out.
It wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t mean it was a good idea to put even more people at risk. None of us should’ve been down here in the first place. Not with those NotTargets roaming the planet’s surface. We just had to get Ratthi and Amena back. Then, we could all return to ART in orbit, where it was safe, and I could try to convince the crew that this mission wasn’t worth it and we’d be better off leaving the whole system behind.
Based on the drone video, I could extrapolate which way the NotTargets had been taking my humans. I started walking in that direction, calling my drone swarm back to myself.
I’d barely taken five steps before ART asked me, Where are you going?
To get my humans back, I told it. It should’ve been able to guess, know-it-all that it is.
SecUnit, stop, ART said, putting as much emphasis on that as it could when it was in orbit and I was on the planet. It made me dizzy, and I had to lean on a tree. If you can walk, you should return to the hopper landing site. We need to make sure you’re not contaminated.
Right. It was absolutely right. Somehow, I’d been so successful at ignoring the possibility and focusing on my missing humans that I’d entirely forgotten it was a concern. Huh. I turned around and headed towards the hum of the approaching engines. By the time I’d made my way to the clearing, the forest was illuminated by the hopper’s lights as it landed in the barely-wide-enough space next to the other one.
As soon as the ramp was open, I climbed inside. We had no time to waste. “ART, check my code for contamination. Three, grab the emergency gear,” I instructed them. “We’re going after Amena and Ratthi as soon as I’m cleared. Tarik, Iris, you should head back to the habitat. You can take this hopper, we’ll return in the other.”
No one moved to do anything. Instead, they all stared at me like I’d been speaking in a language that their translation modules couldn’t handle.
“You were exposed to a weapon that might be related to alien remnants and went offline for fifteen minutes. The prudent course of action would be to take you back to the habitat,” Three said.
“I wasn’t offline, just incapacitated,” I said. “And I’m better, now. I’m not going back without them.”
If you’re contaminated, yes, you are. Sit down and let me take a look, ART ordered, its drone approaching me menacingly.
I didn’t feel contaminated; I felt almost back to normal. But then again, that one time I’d actually been contaminated, I hadn’t felt it, either. I supposed it had a point. I sat down on the nearest bench. “Okay. But if you don’t find anything, I’m going after them with Three.”
“If those humanoids have weapons that can incapacitate SecUnits, it shouldn’t be just the two of you. Iris and I will come, too,” Tarik said. Of course he did; he still had his whole complicated relationship situation thing going on with Ratthi.
“And Peri’s drone,” Iris added. “If anyone’s going, it should be all of us. It’s safer that way.”
What I wanted to say was “absolutely the fuck not”, but I suspected this wasn’t a fight I could win. Iris was almost as good at being stubborn as her asshole machine intelligence sibling, and Tarik wasn’t a pushover, either. “Fine,” I said.
“I could go out and do some reconnaissance while Perihelion tends to 1.0,” Three suggested.
That was actually a good idea, and wouldn’t even involve putting humans in danger. “Yes. You should do that. Meanwhile, ART? Let’s get this over with,” I said, glaring at the ART-drone through my swarm of smaller drones.
Because we liked to have contingencies, ART and I had set up a protocol for situations like this—no scans, minimal contact that wasn’t through isolated partitions, and so on. This was all great in principle, but it wasn’t the fastest way to get anything done. Also, ART-drone didn’t have the same processing capacity as ART-prime, whose connection from the orbit lacked the speed and bandwidth for this kind of close evaluation.
I’d thought the wait until I’d regained feed access and my mobility had been long, but this took fucking forever.
Iris and Tarik wouldn’t stop talking. I knew they were doing that because they were also bored. It was all pointless chatter, clearly careful to avoid any mention of current events that might upset me. Luckily, they didn’t expect me to participate. Instead, while ART combed through my code, I successfully upset myself by replaying the visuals I’d caught of the NotTargets. Skinny humanoid shapes sneaking through the forest like predatory fauna. Bottomless black eyes staring at me from a colorless face, a rock-covered arm pointed at me. Pale figures leading Amena away into the dark.
While I sat around being useless, Three returned from its reconnaissance run, which had been surprisingly uneventful: it hadn’t seen NotTargets or any other dangers worth mentioning. It had inspected the coordinates where my humans’ location markers had disappeared, and found, just like ART had suspected, a tunnel leading into the hillside. It was wide open, without any guards or even a hatch to seal it. That was suspicious, but at least we wouldn’t have to fight our way in.
By the time ART was finally done, it was no longer dark outside. Ratthi and Amena had been missing for two hours and twenty-nine minutes.
I see no signs of contamination, ART-drone declared. No damage, either, as far as I can tell, although I’d need the habitat MedSystem for an in-depth evaluation. Looks like the effects of the unknown weapon were transient.
All of that was a relief to hear. It also matched how I felt: as I got up, the deck was perfectly solid under my feet, and my performance reliability was back in the high nineties.
“Great. Let’s go,” I said.