Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries Book 8)

We reached our target level and I gave Three another go-ahead. It released its grip from the cargo container and dropped onto the supposedly unoccupied platform. It said, If TorusSecurity does not attack, should I engage them?

That isn't going to be a factor, I told it, and added, feint aggressively toward that inventory kiosk, then drop and roll back toward the lift shaft.

Three charged the inventory kiosk where the armored human security guard was hiding. They over-reacted (surprise), jerking up their heavy projectile weapon and firing. By that point Three was on the ground as instructed and the projectile passed over its head toward the lift shaft. I had already nudged the powered cargo module currently floating serenely upward into position. The projectile slammed into its side plating.

A powered module should be able to take a hit like that (they bump into each other all the time) but I had followed up the positioning nudge by cutting power to one of its stabilizers. So the force of the armor-piercing projectile knocked it into a spin and right out of the lift field. The module tumbled across the platform, startled cargo and hauler bots scattered, and every audible and feed proximity/safety alert in the whole dock went off. I kicked its stabilizer back on and MotilitySys engaged a temporary air barrier. The module stopped right in front of a transparent section of wall over an office, where human supervisors had been pretending not to watch us. Well, they had been doing that. Now they were belatedly screaming and flinging themselves away from the window.

Three was already up and sprinting and I engaged code haulerfight.file and cut off all access to the cameras.

So that worked great.

The hauler bots accelerated and charged at each other, then veered off at the last second. The patterns were complex and unpredictable and it was happening on every level of the dock. I'd put some of it together from code I'd used before, but changing the variables and adapting it for B-E's specific code architecture on the fly was tricky. MotilitySys was helping everything along, obeying what it thought were my authorized instructions to "test" its tolerances. It was really going for it, too. It wasn't going to last long, though, which was why Three needed to move fast now.

SafetySys had ordered the cargo bots to climb the walls or head for the nearest hatches, so they were all in the way, too. We were both scanning the updated map data but Three spotted the best route first, including a feint toward a maintenance access and faking a dive into one of the side lift tubes. I made a couple of adjustments and suggestions. Three said, I have it now. You should go.

Right, so, I am not actually physically present with Three.

I was tagging along with it via a new share-architecture code derived partly from ART's ability to create iterations of itself and partly from the way we had built Murderbot 2.0. "Partly," because the me who was with Three was not a full iteration; it was a partial download, but it was the parts I needed.

This wasn't a full independent virus (or software baby, as Amena would say), it was just me going partially dormant while taking a temporary ride on Three's hardware. We did have a secure feed link, but it was currently dormant, too, waiting until we needed it. We had to do it this way so B-E's SecSystem couldn't detect (or worse, break) our connection.

This was necessary because Three just doesn't process as fast as I do, despite being a newer unit. I knew my processing stats had increased over the course of going to a lot of places and needing to write increasingly complex code at increasingly fast rates in order to get out of those places. Notwithstanding the time I nearly blew my brain out trying to process on a company gunship's hardware. Three didn't have that experience and sending it in here alone would have been basically murder.

This way was better. Three would cause a little more chaos, then exit the torus through a lock it had already identified and return to the shuttle. It would even get to ride inside this time.

Acknowledged, I said, and brought my secure feed link forward from backburner. Initiate upload.

CHAPTER TWO

So I had installed a mental health module. I know, I was surprised I did it, too.

The problem was there was no such thing as a mental health module for SecUnits, humans, (I fucking know, not all humans) not believing we had anything resembling "mental" or "health" in the first place. So University Medical: Mental Intervention Department modified one out of the specs for highly augmented humans and one meant for what they called the adolescent stage of what was officially designated a transport bot but was actually a whatever-the-hell ART was. ART actually contributed code to it, using the data it had gathered from when it had to purge me of an alien contamination virus and again when I had my whole trauma incident false memory thing.