Chapter Text
Over the feed, Mensah shouted, Now! It’s opening now!
My drones showed the barrier section had started to slide up. I bolted for it.
Five steps away, I felt a sharp impact in the back of my right knee. I made it two more steps, then my knee gave way and I went crashing to the ground. I could see Ratthi and Gurathin looking at me on the other side of it. Ratthi was crouched down and had his arms stretched out towards me but hesitated before shoving them under the barrier. That was a sensible decision, because it started to lower between us and during emergencies they will not stop for human bodies or secunits ordered to hold them open. (And I didn’t want to see my humans flattened.)
Which is why I nearly had an involuntary shut down when I could see Mensah’s bare feet running towards me and hear her voice going, “Hold it! Hold it! Hold the damn door!”
And Gurathin did something out of sight that I will never forgive him for, because the barrier door paused and then Mensah was skidding under it like a dramatic hero moment in one of my shows. She even made it to my side without getting flattened or losing any of her hair or clothing as the barrier slammed down behind her. I saved a recording.
The others were yelling her name and I could hear one of them kicking the barrier. It didn’t do anything but make me feel angry at them and bad that she was going to die with me.
Mensah stood over me with a small energy weapon she had gotten from somewhere. Her expression was hard with fury and her teeth bared as Hostile One approached rapidly. I was failing, I was going to fucking lose and they were going to catch her and kill her.
I tried to push myself upright, but I wasn’t moving fast enough. My performance reliability was at 83 percent, which isn’t the best when fighting a pissed off Combat SecUnit who wants to kill me and certainly not the best when my squishy human client was between us. All I managed to do was get myself upright as Mensah fucking ran at the Combat SecUnit. (And that was such a stupid idea I never thought a human like her would do, that I didn’t respond fast enough to grab the back of her caftan.) (Note to self: Remove ‘really good commander’ from her profile, because that was really stupid.)
Shit was fucked and if I had a heart it would have stopped working. My processing capabilities stuttered instead and I had to rely on recordings to know how she lived.
The small silver lining was that Hostile One was just as confused and startled by the human running and shooting at it, because it hesitated for a fraction of second which let her get some shots into its head and one of its eyes. (She had really impressive accuracy. I won’t edit her profile). Energy weapons don’t really hurt SecUnits, not even direct shots to the head, but they can disorientate and piss us off. Mensah managed to do both to Hostile One, because it took one step back and then fired off a wild shot that missed both of us and hit the barrier.
(Ratthi and Gurathin started yelling so loud I could almost make out their words, their voices rising in pitch and banging at the barrier. I don’t know how they thought their yelling would help, all it did was increase my stress levels.)
I used Hostile One’s moment of distraction to add my own shots to its face. With one eye down, if I could get the other one we could severely hamper its awareness of its surroundings (not entirely, I could feel it moving through the StationSec systems and cameras) enough that maybe I could get Mensah back under the barrier or to a different gate.
My attempts were slightly impacted by my favourite human launching herself at the Combat SecUnit to grab onto its arm. Sure, it was ignoring her and raising its arm to point its guns at me, but that didn’t mean she should attack it in a way that even my most unrealistic of media would not portray without a warning for human juveniles to never attempt to perform this manoeuvre. All she was doing was making it really easy for it to shoot us both at the same-
It worked?
Hostile One lowered its arm and went into a neutral waiting position. Mensah seemed to realise what she was doing was incredibly stupid, and she let go of it with an “oh!” and backed up quickly from it, unintentionally putting herself between us again instead of relocating behind me.
(At least she picked up her gun from where she had dropped it, and pointed it back at Hostile One. She could get rid of its other eye and give us time to escape. She didn’t. I guess she thought we were in some kind of hostage situation and didn’t know how to respond.)
(I hate hostage situations.)
Another text message package came through the feed and I poked at it. There was nothing to stop Hostile One from overloading my firewall with killware, so I reluctantly opened it. It said: You were lucky.
(Yeah, that sent a shiver down my organics.)
Another message: They don’t want me to kill you.
What about my human? I had to know.
It didn’t respond for a bit, and my anxiety levels started to reach new levels as the GrayCrisSec group started to surround us. Some of them were from the group I had previously incapacitated, and were nursing bruises and very angry expressions. Others were newer faces, blank and in concentration. If the Combat SecUnit wasn’t there I could possibly take them all on, but not with it there and especially not with Mensah between us instead of behind me.
I stood there in my own SecUnit neutral (or as much as I could be, as my anxiety levels kept increasing my human code breathing). My knee joint made a weird clikclik noise when I subtly tested it. I could use it for balance, but I probably couldn’t walk on it like this. The lower part of that leg felt distant on the inputs.
They don’t want to kill your human. The message appeared suddenly, pushed through my firewalls with enough brute force that I nearly ended up on the ground again, staggered a step back which made all the weapons swing to me.
Okay, asshole. Thanks for the heads up.
Mensah was calm and poised as GrayCrisSec finished surrounding us. They were speaking to her and peering at me. Her voice was icy and furious. The feed was frantic with activity between the humans and StationSec. (The activity didn’t include the Combat SecUnit, or me, or Mensah. I went to look at what they were saying, and the Combat SecUnit’s presence descended on me and shoved me out so hard I took a wobbly step backwards).
Everyone froze and a lot of weapons swung towards me. Mensah also started to turn towards me, her forehead wrinkling and her mouth opening to say something but my ability to understand audio was gone.
I was not calm.
I was terrified. I didn’t want to go back. I can’t go back. They weren’t going to kill Mensah. I could take out as many of them as I could and force them to kill me, anything to avoid going back. I could still win. It was the only way I could win.
I took another step back and that was enough for one of the angry GrayCris humans, the one I had grabbed by the hand and head butted earlier, to shoot at me. She missed, but the action was enough to remember my function and I was moving forward towards Mensah. My stupid emotional reactions had put my client in danger, and I needed to protect her from humans firing indiscriminately at murderbots.
I didn’t get a chance, Hostile One sprinted past Mensah and slammed into me before I had made it more than a metre. It was so fast. So fast I had to view the recordings later to register how fast it was and to realise it had been playing with me earlier. I didn’t know Combat SecUnits could move that fast.
It had me on the ground and I hit new levels of panic. I sent Mensah a distress call over our private connection, forgetting that she wasn’t a SecUnit and that it would appear as machine code to her. I was on my back and the Combat SecUnit was forcing my head sideways, I could see her wincing from my distress calls (I couldn’t stop sending them) and then she was trying to lunge through three GrayCrisSec humans to get at me. They piled onto her. She was yelling something, I had never seen her so un-calm and furious. I was pushed harder to the ground, my head held immobile and despite my data port being disabled I was so terrified they were going to put an override into me that I yelled out Dr. Mensah’s name.
Then the Combat SecUnit shot me in the side of my head.
UNIT OFFLINE
I was disorientated.
I was on my back, trying to recover my orientation and memory banks.
My visuals were showing a Station transit bubble barrier above me and beyond that was the expanse of space. Ship traffic was on hold, so there were no moving lights.
I flopped my head to the side and I could see shoes and moving feet and bare feet. Mensah was the bare feet. She was held between two people, they had a hold on each of her arms. Her back was straight and her hands clenched into fists.
I was being dragged along behind them by the Combat SecUnit, but we were stopping as the StationSec squad were arguing and yelling at the GrayCrisSec squad. Probably for having a Combat SecUnit running rampant in their station and destroying transport bots and scaring humans.
(The Combat SecUnit had one hand firmly gripped around the ankle of my damaged leg that it had been dragging me by and was now standing in an obedient neutral waiting position. It had claimed my drones and they were in a holding pattern around its head. Which turned to look at me. I couldn’t see its eyes (or eye, thanks to Mensah) through the helmet, but my organics said it was looking directly at me and making eye contact. I looked back towards Mensah.)
We were closer to them now. They hadn’t given her her shoes back which bothered me, and one of them was bleeding and leaving footprints on the station floor. This pissed me off so much, and my thoughts were too wobbly to do anything like self-control (something I had lost a lot of since becoming properly rogue) and I twisted the upper half of my body to reach out and grab the one closest to me that was holding onto her arm. I tried to say something, but I made a sssZZZt noise instead.
I probably should have thought about this more and planned my attack. I could have held them as the hostages instead to force Hostile One to obey me. I hate hostage situations and I know how effective they are against constructs, but I was so angry at Mensah bleeding that I pulled him down to my level and shot him in his head. Humans are weaker than us, an energy weapon to the unprotected face meant he would never be getting up again.
I made an angry expression at the other humans as they startled back from me, taking Mensah with them. The Combat SecUnit also pulled me back, so now we were being moved apart and I didn’t like that. I tried kicking it and then I tried folding back on myself to grab at its arms and shoot it. Humans are slow about good orders, and it wasn’t allowed to kill me right now, so if I could kill it first-
“Disarm the damn SecUnit!” I don’t know which one said that.
Hostile One didn’t physically move, but I could feel it slamming into my firewalls and then through them. It wasn’t as big as ART. Didn’t have as much processing power as ART. But it had a lot more than I did, most of it tailored to navigating multiple systems while calculating how to best blow my head off and managing a lot more drones than I ever could. It was big enough that it squashed my processing down to minimal baseline for standby and trashed my inputs by overloading them. I convulsed on the ground and Mensah made a noise of alarm (any noises of alarm from her are on a tonal indicator) (okay she was yelling at the GrayCrisSec humans). It hurt and didn’t hurt, because its attack was focused on my machine parts but having your whole body involuntarily go through a seizure tends to hurt the organics as well.
When I reached for my pain sensors, the Combat SecUnit blocked my access to them which was such a shithole move. Then it did something that sent pain up my spine, so much like the governor module, that my whole body went rigid.
It wasn’t holding my foot anymore.
I held my breath as it locked my body down. The pain was moving up and down my spine in waves. I managed one twitch that slammed my head into the floor, which hurt less than the governor module imitation, then it locked my body down again. I couldn’t focus to reach into the feed while this was going on. I was 100 percent fucked and disabled and in so much pain.
Then it stopped.
Audio came back on slowly as the humans corrected the Combat SecUnit for its enthusiasm in following their orders. It gave a full body shudder, a slight twitch of its head and then sulkily withdrew from my systems. I could feel it sitting just outside my inputs, watching me.
“Not like that.” One of the humans was saying to it. “Fuck, we need its memories, you stupid piece of junk.”
One of them nudged me with their foot, but I couldn’t quite unlock my body yet. The waves of pain were gone, but my organics were convinced if I moved they would come back again. “Just disable it physically,” the one nudging me said. “But still able to walk.” She added that last bit hastily, because when a humans potential to be lazy is at risk they suddenly remember how to give proper clear orders.
Hostile One stepped back over to me and rested one foot on my chest. It pressed down slowly and I twitched under it but there really wasn’t anything I could do and I was very aware that each time I had acted emotionally, I had put Mensah at risk of stray fire from panicking humans. I tried to force up a wave of not caring but all I could summon was fear.
“Wait-” Mensah said it off to my side, “Hang on we can talk about-”
It didn’t wait.
It leaned down and grabbed my arm to pull it out firmly from my body. Then it kept pulling. Performance reliability had been hovering at a shaky 78 percent and I had just enough time to lower my pain sensors (it didn’t stop me) then my arm separated from my shoulder socket joint, and then my nerve pathways were stretched tight until they snapped and my skin was also stretched until it tore in an unpleasant sounding wet way and finally my whole arm was peeled off to be dropped next to me.
I didn’t feel good.
And now I was leaking a lot.
And I’d gone all floppy.
It just suddenly seemed easier to let it follow its orders and save my performance reliability for when I could actually help Mensah. At least this way, by pissing everyone off, it was focussed on me and not her.
I didn’t resist as it repeated the process to my other arm and held it.
(One of the StationSec squad made a hacking noise which set off a domino effect of squeamish humans making choking noises and wet splashing sounds. Humans are disgusting.)
Mensah didn’t make a noise, but when I moved my head to assess her condition I could see that she had shoved her hand into her mouth and was biting down on it hard enough that it was bleeding. She had tears in her eyes.
Fuck you. I sent a floppy message to the Combat SecUnit. You made my human cry.
Okay, so that didn’t make a lot of sense to send to an enemy and hostile Combat SecUnit, but I was feeling weird and bad and floppy. Very floppy, in my head. I don’t think I had had my arms removed like that before. They’ve certainly been removed, SecUnits are easy to disassemble for convenient transport and maintenance, so we have manual and system locks to toggle the removal on and off. But I think my organic parts would remember if they had been removed like this before, because my eyes followed my arm as Hostile One dropped it on the ground.
What were they going to do with that? Were they going to leave my arms here, in the station? Or to be recycled? Or to-
Oh it was worse.
They were making Mensah pick them up. To carry them. She looked at me and said something but I’m not really sure what it was that she said because I still felt very weird and very bad and very floppy and my human was holding my arms and leaving footprints in my fluids and her own fluids were also making footprints and a Combat SecUnit was holding my ankle (my foot was still attached to me) and then it was dragging me again and I wanted to look at Mensah but my visual inputs were shorting out and the Combat SecUnit wouldn’t give me my drones back when I reached for them and I couldn’t reach with my arms to Mensah because they weren’t there and-
PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY DROPPING.
SHUTDOWN INITIATED.