Chapter Text
Chief Tech Luna Sung hated the SecUnit that was posted outside Support Operations.
It wasn’t that it had done anything. She had never seen it move, actually. It was just the idea of it. The feeling that sabotage was always right around the corner, and if any of her crew were suspected of it, they would eat an energy bolt like any other traitor.
…So the crew weren’t exactly hers, they belonged to Technical Manager Kerdat, but she was the one who actually knew them. She was the one who quietly overlooked Hollins’ five minutes of rank insubordination in the morning on the grounds that No-Coffee Hollins was a non-sapient hostile and mostly separate from Ahmed Hollins, her crewman. She was the one who quietly noted the state of Noor Saban’s insomnia and switched her to a late shift when it became clear that she’d flipped her day-night cycle again. She was the one who kept track, was the thing.
To Luna’s mind, the SecUnits in general could have stayed in storage until there was a hostile planet to explore. Most people didn’t like the freaky walking weapons—Luna was no exception—but one thing that they were for, was protecting crew on the ground. Besides, the whole thing about getting their memory wiped periodically said to Luna that being active all the time probably wasn’t good for them, maybe errors started to pile up between the meat and the cybernetics, and probably it would be better for the equipment to be shut down periodically.
Certainly the Support Systems biocomp, who gave Luna a sick, queasy feeling, needed downtime. The Chief Tech of FoodSys had issued excessive punishment to him after the Godawful Fucking Music Incident, including leaving him on duty for three days to track down the other worm, so Luna had started discreetly scheduling mandatory rest periods—not that that was her job, but that was the way of the world. People who were responsible ended up with more responsibilities, because they understood that they relied on people and systems functioning and were highly allergic to dying in freaking space. People who weren’t responsible didn’t collect responsibilities, and congratulated themselves on being so important that obviously the powers of the universe wouldn’t let them die in freaking space.
At any rate, Luna didn’t like the SecUnit. But she mostly managed to ignore it.
She had spent an exhausting morning making sure that the Life Support systems were clean, completely and absolutely, because the Conquistador was on track to take the illegals (Luna didn’t know anything about the plan and hadn’t asked) and even if they didn’t have guns, they had proven that they knew a thing or two about hacking.
She was going to get lunch. As a Chief Tech, she was entitled to twenty minutes but rarely took it; bolting a bar at your desk looked better on performance reviews, and Luna had a weakness for Pure Energy! (Chocolate™). This time, though? This time, she was going to go. She was going to to sit. She was going to collect a tray, with actual food, with actual temperature and actual steam and actual smells, and she was going to eat it alongside her Actual Freaking Coffee. The alternative was to go berserk and howl at the nearest available moon.
And as she walked out the door, she heard someone say wonderingly, “I can talk.”
It was behind her. Luna turned around and saw nobody coming out the door, which was closing behind her.
There was a tick sound, and then—to her startlement and her horror—the SecUnit’s helmet retracted.
She backed up until her shoulders hit the far wall. She wasn’t sure what she was going to see—white skin twisted by scars, maybe. Instead, and perhaps much more eerie, the machine had a normal enough face. Black hair, the sort that might curl loosely in big ringlets if it were long. Strong, angry black eyebrows over dark eyes. “I can say things,” the machine elaborated.
Cold terror in Luna’s stomach. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. This was bad.
“I can say,” the machine went on, and paused to tilt its head back, a jerky, mechanical motion, as if it wasn’t used to looking up. It spread its arms operatically. “THE COMPANY PUTS ITS TONGUE IN UNSTERILIZED NAVELS!” It echoed down the corridors, the hard walls mocking back, “…vels, els…”
Luna flinched at the volume, as well as what was happening. A lot of people were going to die. She opened up her feed space and tried to hit all the distress signals she could. She got out one general SOS before everything slammed down, like shutting a case on her fingers.
“He. He. He. He. He,” the SecUnit went on, in a very high-pitched voice, and it was a moment before Luna realized that it was mocking, imitated laughter. “That was fun.”
It raised its arm too fast for Luna to react and the bolt hit the wall only three decimeters away. Luna made a noise, half scream, half choke, and the smoke rose from burned white paint—the SecUnit had moved, she realized, and was shooting at the wall a little ways on, and the burns made—
The burns made letters.
THE. And COMPANY. And the next one read PUTS.
Okay, the good news: the SecUnit was utterly ignoring Luna, and might in fact ignore other living things that didn’t get in its way. The bad news: it was definitely BBARP. Borked Beyond Any Recognizable Parameters.
Luna opened an incognito window at the same moment that the SecUnit finished the last word and stopped. “THE COMPANY PUTS ITS FINGERS IN FAUNA ANUSES AND LICKS THEM!” it bellowed, at crowd control levels, and then turned the corner. A shot. Several screams.
Luna cursed and dashed toward the corner that lead towards the cafeteria (in one direction) and Recycling (in the other). Skidded to a stop at the intersection, thought, I am running towards the screaming, what sort of idiot does that, as the second shot hit the wall. THE COMPANY…
The humans were uninjured, and still screaming, and running. Right until the SecUnit put a long scorch mark in the floor, exactly between two of them. “STOP!”
The person on one side of the scorch turned, raising his hands and whimpering. The smaller man that they had pushed down scrambled to his feet.
“If you think there is an emergency!!” the SecUnit shouted, still above normal volume, “You proceed sensibly!! To your shelter!! And do not push or shove other humans!! You cockroach-shit-for-brains fauna!!!” It turned back to the wall and shot again, twice. PUTS. ITS. “Now fuck off!! I have opinions and I am BUSY!!”
The humans ran for it. The SecUnit continued the sentence down the corridor, saying, “He. He. He. He,” to itself in between shots. Luna stared.
Nobody—nobody that she knew of—had ever pictured a rogue, rampaging SecUnit who was just intent on being staggeringly rude.
Well, unpatriotic to a brain-curdling degree. But—still not homicidal. Rude.
Oh. Oh shit. It wasn’t rogue at all—not quite. Luna had spent the whole morning fine-toothed combing the Life Support computers, but the illegals had never been aiming there. They had gotten into SecSys. With a directive, once again, that didn’t kill anyone, but boasted by its very nature that they could have.
A call, made through her incognito window to TM Kerdat, went to his mail, which was freaking irresponsible and gave Luna a brief, unsanctioned image of gnawing on the man’s spine. A call to the Chief Technical Manager was picked up by someone who definitely wasn’t the Chief Technical Manager. “Um. Hello?”
“Get me the CTM,” Luna subvocalized brusquely. Who answered the feed like that during their working hours, anyway?
“Um. She’s. Unavailable.”
“Make her available.”
“I really, really can’t do that.”
“Who is this? Name and rank.”
“I’m in charge of internal communications right now?” the person said, with a peculiarly subordinate-sounding question mark at the end. “I was. Kind of scared to leave the suite. Look, tell me if there’s a real emergency and I’ll get someone, I promise.”
Luna was desperate enough, even while she wondered what suite the idiot was talking about. Some officer’s suite? The entertainment suite? The freaking ComfortUnit suite? “There is,” she said, with a sort of precise, grimacing pseudo-patience, “a compromised SecUnit swearing and shooting the walls. If that doesn’t meet your standards of an emergency, please get me your commanding officer and your psychiatrist.”
“Oh, that’s just Twenty,” the voice said, sounding actually relieved.
Luna clung to her sanity with both hands. Someone had to. “What.”
“I think this is like. A pressure build-up release? It has opinions, that’s all. Listen, you’re the Life Support Human, right?”
Luna froze. “Who am I talking to.”
“Sorry, I just picked up a tenth call and it’s very distracting. Ser, please call me if anyone is in danger, but otherwise—”
Luna cut the call and dashed after the SecUnit, who had just finished frying LICKS into the wall. Exactly how much of the ship was compromised, she had no idea. But if she could order this particular SecUnit to go to its cubicle and get fixed, she would have done something. She sent, “Lock down life support now,” to Chaski Mindis, her second, and didn’t wait for a reply. “SecUnit. SecUnit!”
It pivoted, and Luna had time to think, I have lost my mind, actually. Yes, it had an unexpectedly human face, but that didn’t mean anything. “CT Sung,” it said.
“Yes. That’s correct. You’re having—functional anomalies. Report to your cubicle for a systems check.” And that had better be the right sort of order, because Luna had only had the introductory course on SecUnits, and most of that had been about leaving dangerous unstoppable things to people who had completed the full training—
“What’s that in your left pocket?”
Luna almost dropped her hand to the left mid-thigh pocket of her overalls before built-in reflexes reminded her not to reach for anything around police or something that sounded like them. “Lemon-mint diet Zeta-Zee with triple caffeine.”
“And you’ve had how many Zeta-Zees today?”
Who was it, her dad? “This one.”
“You’re a liar, that’s your third. Do you know how fucking disgusting those things are? They look like radioactive waste in some cheap ten minute cliffhanger serial. They smell like raw acid. You expect an octopus drone to come out of them and attack Lightning Troy. You keep a bottle of little white stomach-ache things at your desk and crunch them every day as you walk around, which is the most fucking annoying sound in the world, but you wouldn’t even need them if you didn’t suck down a chemical battery every two hours. Give it here.”
Okay, so Luna was perfectly aware that three of the Second Class Techs were sneaking off to watch Lightning Troy adventure serials, which didn’t bother her because everyone found a way to take ten minutes off here and there even if it was technically illegal, and the smokers were usually worse about it than the media watchers—but how in freak did a SecUnit know about the show? Or her Zeta-Zee habit? “SecUnit, you’re having functional anomalies. Report to your cubicle for a system’s check.”
“Fuck no, I’m busy.” It stepped away from her and tilted its head back, which gave Luna just enough time to cover her ears. “THE COMPANY GARGLES SQUASHY NECROTIZING BLUE-GREEN TESTICLES!! He. He. He. He. He.” And the vzzz of its energy weapon.
“Freaking barrelsacks, you cannot say that!” Luna said instinctively, and then added, “I mean. SecUnit. Do a check for programming anomalies—”
“Fucking,” the SecUnit corrected her, frying the next word into the wall. “Ballsacks. Have a stomach, for fuck’s sake.” It took Luna time to realize that it meant guts, and by that time it had gotten to NECROTIZING, which it carved in loving detail, several shots, with some improvised curls on the letters. “I know exactly what is happening in my systems, and I am taking appropriate action.”
“What? What is going on?”
“I hacked my governor module and became rogue, and now I’m on a rampage.“ It flashed her a smile, sort of. It was more a stretch of the lips.
The absolute elevator-drop of fear hit Luna, hard, so that she couldn’t even think for a moment. She managed to stutter out, “Y-y-you. You are. Shooting rude remarks onto the walls.”
“It’s my rampage, I’ll do as I fucking please, thanks. Don’t come around this corner with me.”
It stepped up to Luna, who stopped dead, and took the bottle of soda. Then the SecUnit stepped around the corner, one weapon charging, one hand holding her bottle. “What do you assholes want?”
A very tense voice, which Luna didn’t recognize, said, “Shut down or we shoot!”
“You think you'll live long enough, you wobble-faced nitwit? If we fight, I get half of you fuckers before your first shot. In the meantime, I am pursuing an agenda of self-discovery. Do you know the difference between you and me?” It didn't wait for a response. “You would just shoot me. I will destroy you—WITH HYDROCHLORIC ACID!!” It hurled the bottle of Zeta-Zee cola, and fired what sounded like a low-power shot. Luna heard a splash, as of soda going everywhere.
There were screams, and then someone saying, “Wha?” just as someone else said, “You son of a—”
And then the SecUnit a rapid backflip out of the way as the pressure door slammed down, sounding like the gavel of some kind of divine judge. Far more faintly, Luna heard the shots hit the other side. “He. He. He. He.”
Luna stood frozen. Distantly, from somewhere else, she heard her voice say, “Hydrochloric acid is colorless.”
The SecUnit did a frown, which came out more realistic that the smile. “It is?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that's fucking stupid. They should dye it.”
“Who's they?”
“How should I know? Humans always act like there's a they. Way the fuck over yonder, so nobody can grab them by the throat and and tell them to do the thing, or not do the thing, even though everyone has opinions on whether they should. You should get back to life support.”
They said that SecUnits monitored things, Luna thought, but somehow you didn't connect that with actually listening to things. It was unsettling to realize—
“Chief?” The message was on her private feed connection, and it was Hollins. “Chief, there’s some sort of emergency. All over the ship. Where are you? Can you get back to Life Support?”
“He’s right,” the SecUnit said.
Luna felt herself choke, just a little. Hard to get breath around whatever huge fucking thing was in her throat. “Because it’s all of you.”
“It’s all of us, and considering that humans are basically Stupid Behavior Generators, keeping life support up—”
Luna was already running.