Chapter Text
I hate planets.
A quick keyword search of my memory archive says that I have said that particular phrase aloud sixty-seven times, over the feed three hundred and eighty-nine times. The amount of times I have said “I have planets” or “planets suck” or the word “planets” with any derogatory connotation in my brain is not worth counting.
Therefore, I was already annoyed when the explorer touched down on yet another planet, but it wasn’t as if I would let Gurathin and Ratthi go by themselves. Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, I should have known everything was about to suck really, really hard.
The PresAux crew was doing a partial survey of this planet, looking for I don’t know what. Rocks and leaves probably, nature things that I hated. It’s not as if I don’t pay attention and half-ass everything like how I used to; I just pay attention to the important things. If it’s a flora or fauna that is not trying to actively kill my clients, I couldn’t be bothered. This planet- TriSandRyah was it’s name, though I’ll admit I had to look it up- didn’t have that particular kind of wildlife, and the only human inhabitants were another survey group on the complete opposite side of the planet. The only thing I really had to protect my humans from was doing stupid shit.
Although that’s what I thought on that first survey planet, so.
Arada, Mensah, Pin-Lee and Amena were all on the main ship that was hovering in orbit above the assessment area, while Gurathin, Overse and Ratthi made another trip down to the surface. It was supposed to be quick- minimal sample collection, just to confirm some of Ratthi’s findings. I was against the trip- we were scheduled to head back to Preservation the next cycle, but quote Ratthi, “If this really is [insert science word I didn’t bother to look up here], when are we going to get the chance to come back here?”
(Hopefully never.)
One of the reasons I hated this planet in particular was because it had the audacity to have weather. I dislike weather, especially wet weather. And storms. They make the inorganic parts of my joints ache and they mess with my drones. Thankfully it was dry right now, so four of my drones were able to keep an overhead as Ratthi surveyed, looking for some kind of rare flora with some rare compound. (Again, if it didn’t have teeth and/or claws, I couldn’t be assed.) One of my drones sent me back a feed image of dark clouds in the distance, and I was thankful I only brought the four- I had already lost six of my little army to high winds and acid rain on the shit hole, and I didn't particularly want to lose any more. I go through enough as it is. (I recently discovered the existence of punch cards. It’s really a shame that they’re pretty much only for “buy twelve liquids get the thirteenth free”, and not drones). I shared the feed of the creepy looking clouds to Overse, who was hanging out at the explorer, and up through the newly installed long-distance comms channel to the main ship. There was a delay and the quality was shit, but its overall existence relieved a good fifteen percent of my anxiety.
Storm incoming, Overse. Three minutes later the main ship sent back a weather pattern analysis. We had approximately an hour before it would be absolutely necessary to get airborne. The weather- the storms specifically- were the main reason I hated this planet. Slightly acidic rain, high winds that carried toxic chemicals, and the tendency to have tornados. Fuck me, right?
I will pilot us back up to the ship, I said to her. Overse came on this excursion primarily to practice piloting (a concept that, while necessary, made me want to lay down of the floor for a while) and if she didn’t see the obvious safety concern of her piloting the explorer through a natural disaster-serial level storm I was going to order her a MedSys scan.
Okay, Overse replied, but with far more letters than were necessary.
“I would like to stop by the research station if that’s alright,” Gurathin was saying. His voice was muffled by his oxygen filter- like I said, this planet had a tendency toward toxic gasses. I turned in his direction- I was not looking at him, and my helmet was covering my face, but was too lazy to respond aloud so I used body language instead. I hoped it came off as for the love of some higher benevolent creator being, why are you making me stay here any longer than I have to . “I want to see if previous explorations left any notes about what Ratthi is looking for.”
Worth noting, there had been previous trips to this planet by other survey teams. They either a) were corporations looking to build settlements and felt this place wasn’t worth the investment, or b) research teams, which had short trips due to the aforementioned weather. In fact, the last research team had most of its members vanish when they didn’t made it back to the research station before a storm hit.
Something I really didn’t want to happen to my clients, obviously.
Ratthi had looked up hopefully, and I groaned (internally). The station was not far away (I insisted all exploration be within a tight radius, given what had happened to the other research team), so it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable request. I just didn’t want to. “How long would it take?” (I had already calculated it out- we’d have enough time if we left now and didn’t linger- but I was hoping that making him think about it would make him reconsider.)
“A couple of minutes. No more. If it is an extensive analysis, we can leave.”
Ugh. Fine. I was probably being too nice. I sent Overse the update, and heard the engines of the explorer start up as she prepared to move it closer to the research station.
We were about a ten minutes’ walk away from the station (agonizingly slow for me, because Ratthi stopped every couple of feet to look at plants) when one of my drones sent me an image. A small dropship, impressively covered with fauna to camouflage it. My drones were programmed to identify inorganic material, especially in places like this, so why hadn’t it picked it up? I began walking faster as I made the drone move in closer- Ratthi and Gurathin noticed the increase in pace, and exchanged a worried look but sped up as well.
From the drone feed, the dropship had landed recently, probably when we were up in orbit, but there was an instrument near it- a jammer or cloaking device of some kind that had fallen over and malfunctioned when the wind picked up from the storm.
Ugh. I knew it had been too long since I had been shot at.
“Get into the shelter,” I said, and Ratthi and Gurathin both took off. I ordered my drones to begin an immediate sweep for hostiles, including any cloaking signatures based on the code I got from the whole alien-remnant-hostile situation. One of them I sent forward to the research station.
What’s going on?” Overse asked. The explorer was already airborne, and I told her to stay that way- the dropship was too small and lightweight to be able to carry any real firepower, so the chances of any hostiles bringing it down was low.
I backburnered the long-distance comm and shared my field camera feed with Overse as I started running toward the station, catching up with Ratthi and Gurathin quickly. My drones were beginning to send footage of three hostiles approaching our location quickly. (The fact that there were three irritated me, because it was a two-person dropship that I’d seen. Unless they got really comfy, there was a dropship that my drones had missed- I made a note to grab that cloaking device if the storm didn’t chase us out of here). Thankfully, Ratthi and Gurathin were hauling ass.
“Get into the lockdown room,” I ordered. “Don’t open the door for anything.”
Ratthi opened his mouth, probably to say something ridiculous like, Aren’t you coming with us? But he knew the answer to that. Hostiles weren’t going to murder themselves-
My drone inside the research station went down.
Shit.
“Shit,” I said, and burst ahead of Ratthi and Gurathin right before they got to the door of the station. It had been only two seconds since the drone went down, and it’s last ping gave me a pretty good idea of where the hostile was. I slammed through the door at full speed, turned a corner and jumped. Both my feet slammed into the Hostile’s chest and he flew backward. My momentum carried me with him, and I landed, straddling his chest. I snapped his neck before he had a chance to realize what had hit him.
I turned to see Ratthi and Gurathin staring at me, mouths wide open.
“Holy-”
“Move,” I yelled, and they had the sense to do so, because my outside drones showed the other three hostiles right at the station. I really wanted to have a normal fucking day. But nooo , there's always some corp or fringe group or pissed off asshole that wants to kill me. Or my humans. The first one I could accept, because honestly I probably partially deserved it depending on whose memory files you're looking at. (Most memory files, actually.)
But the second? Fuck off.
I wasn't sure who these hostiles were, or how they got here. That was another problem with planets. It's hard to break into or sneak into a ship without some kind of sensor going off that would, at the least, require some ridiculously high level hacking that even I couldn't manage half the time (although Dr. Mensah would probably just say I wasn’t applying myself). Plus, if you fuck up, you're facing either a tight quarters fight where the other side has home-field advantage, or you're probably going to get sucked out into space. But planets? Fuck planets.
Figuring out how the targets got into the current base wasn't my top priority right now. They were already here, after all. I was able to intercept them as they entered the station, giving time for Ratthi and Gurathin to get to the lockdown room. The room had reinforced walls, no windows, a damn-near impenetrable door, and an air recycling system, so they were safe, at least. So I guess I could thank the storms for that?
I found out quickly that the hostiles weren’t human, or normal human at least. Not quite SecUnit- my drones confirmed that, they didn’t have quite the augmentation that I did. But their augmentation, unlike Gurathin’s, seemed to be aimed toward combat rather than data management. So that was new for me. I didn’t like it.
On top of being augmented, the hostiles were batshit insane.
They both immediately threw themselves at me with the reckless abandon I would expect of myself, immediately taking away my option of fighting them one at a time, which is something humans have a tendency to do, even though it’s stupid. Also, they both had knives, which really sucked. Knife fighting is messy. Everyone’s getting cut, even the one holding the knife. And knife fights are particularly messy in close quarters. So soon my clothes were damp with fluid, both mine and theirs.
I had the energy weapons in my arms ready, but the hostiles must have been told to expect it, constantly hitting my arms away with either their fists or their knives, preventing me from taking good shots. I fired off a couple anyway, catching the edges of their bodies, but that didn’t slow them down. In addition to augmented and batshit insane, they were probably also on a lot of drugs. (Thank god I have adjustable pain levels. Otherwise this would really suck.)
One of them- Target Two, since Target One was dead at the end of the other hallway- was trying to grapple me, while the other (imaginatively named Target Three, because I don’t give a shit) tried to stab me again. I’d broken most of Target Two’s fingers on their left hand and dislocated their arm, but they did not seem to care that much.
Target Four was the one I was most concerned about, because it was trying to break into the lockdown room. I wanted to do something about that very badly, but Target Three had switched tactics and was now trying to sever the connections in my elbow.
I sent a quick message to the feed: Ratthi, be-
Pain.
So sudden I lost track of my inputs, so sharp that even when Target Two’s fist collided with my jaw I didn't feel it. For I don’t know how long, I couldn’t do anything. Everything went totally and completely dark, except for the pain.
What the fuck?
I scrambled, shoving aside the error codes (my performance reliability had instantly dropped a terrifying thirty percent) so that I could find my way back into the present. Something was wrong. Very wrong. I had been- I don’t know what kind of state I had been in, because I hadn’t shut down or restarted, but a playback of the station cameras of the hallway showed me dropping and not moving for a full three seconds.
I came back just as I'd been kicked in the chest, and something had stabbed into my left arm. I checked my pain sensors as I shoved Target Two off me, kicking at Target Three as I did- they were still just only high enough so that I knew when I took blows, low enough that it wouldn't matter- what the fuck had just happened?
(It was familiar. It was familiar and I hated that, I knew it was familiar but I didn’t want to accept it.)
SecUnit? What just happened? Ratthi sounded worried, and I checked the feed- what the fuck? The last message sent started as I remembered it, but then turned into a jumble of nonsense code, like a tiny human running their grubby little appendages over a console keyboard. And it was from me.
(If Ratthi was a bot, he probably would have recognized it as a scream.)
I didn't know how to answer, so I didn't. I had better things to do, like keep fighting off three Targets while attempting to run an diagnostic on whatever the fuck had happened. I finally managed to get my arms around Target Two’s neck to twist until it popped, although the cost of it was several additional stab wounds into my shoulder. I dropped Two, had turned to Three when my diagnostic finished- the source of the-
“Stay down,” Hostile Three said, with the tone of a villain on a serial.
It happened again.
It hurt. It hurt a lot.
Performance reliability at forty percent. Restart recommended.
When it faded out again I was on the ground again, curled into a ball. Errors flashed red everywhere, overwhelming, and Overse was screaming at me over the feed. I’d been stabbed more. I was surrounded by smears of my own fluid on the ground. The remaining two Targets were trying to break into the lockdown room. My diagnostic had gone through partially, enough to tell me that some kind of targeted malware had gotten through before the diagnostic had been partially disabled. I sent the command again, bypassing the block, and it started again. But very slowly- my processing speed right now was alarmingly shitty. That terrified me, so I grabbed the leg of the nearest target and twisted. This needed to be over. Soon. I squeezed with all my strength so bone crunched under my grasp, and I was able to haul myself on top of them as they fell to the ground in pain and discharge my energy weapon into their face.
One left. Almost done. I could make it to the end of this. I’d been through worse. I still had all my limbs, after all.
I tried to send a message to Ratthi and Gurathin, but my brain wasn’t quite working right.
The Target Four looked down at me, raised something in its hand. A small weapon. My performance reliability had dropped another three percent, and was far well into make-stupid-humanlike-mistakes territory. In other words, it hit me with whatever it fired. I flinched, expecting a projectile to blow my arm off, but the impact of what hit me didn’t even register on my pain sensors.
A dart embedded into the organic parts of my arm. For a fraction of a second, I thought they were an idiot. My body wasn't the same as a human, so injected toxins had little to-
Oh. My diagnostic was still running.
In 0.3 seconds I found out that it was a virus, but a construct itself, DNA and code wrapped together and targeted, but in 0.30007 seconds it had traveled through my systems to my governor module-
My governor module.
It allowed me a second of pure terror before it detonated.