Chapter Text
So there I was, wedged in the research facility’s water intake, contemplating my imminent wet death.
Yes, this meant I was stuck inside a big tube that was sucking down approximately a million waters per second, my arms braced across so that I wouldn’t get slurped in and smashed to bits inside a huge spinny dealie thing.
I don’t know what the spinny dealie inside the water intake is for, or even its official designation. I’m a murderbot, not a seafaring research facility mechanic. But I hope it was something really important and worth my life, because it looked like I was going to get crunched inside the instant I lost my grip in this water tube. Or maybe I hoped it wasn’t important, because the spinny dealie was probably going to get irreparably jammed with murderbot-bits any second now. If my dead crushed body in the water intake sunk this whole research facility with all my clients inside, I’d never be able to live with myself.
“I’ll KILL them. Let me!!!”
I said, “No.”
“You NEVER let me have ANY fun,” CSU complained.
This is why you don’t bring a trigger-happy asshole of a Combat SecUnit with you on a nice quiet planetary survey. Not that I did. CSU brought itself, without anyone’s permission. Because it’s an asshole.
If CSU had had all its sweet fancy armor-drones in this scenario, the scenario would probably be a non-issue, and I probably wouldn’t be stuck in a water intake about to die. But it lost all its sweet fancy drones during… a prior and definitely totally legal operation, and Preservation doesn’t exactly stock high grade military hardware for CSU to buy up as replacements.
So now CSU only had the sweet fancy armor-drones that it’d built from scratch: two DIY drones. Well, only one functional drone, now. The other was skidding around pathetically on the research facility observation deck. CSU had used it to ploink a projectile out of the way of hitting me. Unlike the fancy armor-drones it once had, this shitty handmade one wasn’t as sweet, and it went and died about getting shot by a projectile (like a weenie), all dented inwards and smacking really hard into my chest from the force of the projectile round.
That was going to leave a mark. But not as much of a mark as a projectile embedded in my shoulder, so yay for that. Less yay was how the drone impact knocked me off the observation deck into the ocean, straight into the water intake.
So that’s where I’m at right now.
“SecUnit! Are you there?” Ratthi, in the feed.
“Yes.” I tried to say ‘I’m fine,’ but for once I couldn’t even kid myself a little bit about that. It wasn’t going to matter soon anyways, so I said, “I’m stuck in the water intake.”
“The—? Oh, fuck,” Ratthi said, and then there was a little feed-static, the kind you get when a human’s feed interface gets jostled out of alignment for a moment. And then he cut off from the channel.
Well. Cool. It would have been nice to get a little meaningless reassurance, but oh well. Sometimes that’s life. You can’t have everything you want when you’re stuck in a water intake, performance reliability slowly sinking from lack of oxygen. (I don’t need nearly as much oxygen as a human, but I do need some oxygen.)
The Targets were still up there being assholes. Thiago was making an angry face.
He said to Target leader, “You didn’t have to shoot anyone.”
Thanks Thiago, that really helps.
CSU yelled, “YES! SHOOTING NOW!” and deployed both its arm-guns, because that’s just the kind of person it is and no amount of therapy was ever going to fix its fundamental deep-seated bloodlust.
I told it over the feed, “Shut the fuck up. You’re not helping.”
“I stopped you getting shot how about some ‘Thaaaaaankssss!!!!’”
“You knocked me into the fucking water intake.”
“Slurp slurp motherfucker.”
(Letting CSU watch media was a mistake, because sometimes it quoted dumb shit like ‘Slurp slurp motherfucker,’ from Valorous Defenders during actual incipient shitshows.)
“I’m about to fucking die. Happy?”
It burst with some really strong emotional feedback over the feed, which almost made me slip and die. It said, “DON’T DO THAT FUCKING ASSHOLE. STUPID WAY TO DIE, IN A WATER TUBE? BOTTOM WORST WAYS TO DIE. PATHETIC! DON’T! STOP IT!”
“This is your fault.”
It did this furious feed-scream thing that doesn’t translate to anything a human can parse, but boy was it unpleasant. Whoops. Now CSU was super agitated, and that was my fault. In my defense: I was also agitated, what from being stuck in a tube and facing imminent death by drowning/blenderizing. Have I mentioned the water tube yet.
Two of the Targets standing on the Target-boat gave each other a weird look. Target leader had his projectile weapon pointed at CSU.
Target Leader said, “What is that thing? What’s wrong with its face?”
CSU pointed an arm-gun at Target Leader, and revved all its homemade death drones really loud in a flashy spinning pattern around itself. (Drone count: one big fancy drone, and a bunch of smaller intel drones.) It was admittedly kind of intimidating, especially considering CSU’s half-inorganic face with the creepy mechanical eyes. Also, CSU was wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt, because of-fucking-course it was, which meant a lot of its extensive inorganic parts were fully visible. To a bunch of backwater boat-rustlers, a corporate war-construct enthusiastically gearing up to go ape all over their shit was probably a bit above their pay grade. They didn’t seem to know what to do with CSU’s whole deal. (Which, who does?)
CSU snarled, “What’s. WRONG. With. Yourrrrr-uh. YOUR. FACE! FUCKER!”
I said, “Cool it, you’re going to escalate the situation.”
“GOOD!!!”
Target Leader was looking kind of alarmed, as were the rest of the Targets. This might be good if it meant they decided we were more trouble than we were worth, or bad if they started panicking and unloading more projectiles. Not to mention, their boat had a big weapon target-locked to the research facility, which wasn’t ideal.
That’s when Ratthi contacted me in the feed again. “We are going to turn off the water intake for thirty seconds. Is that long enough for you to get out?”
Oh, huh. Here I was mostly resigned to being slurp-squelched. My humans are the best.
“Do it.”
“It will take twenty seconds to override the automated checks and shut down the intake.” He passed me the status readouts for the intake system. Not that I needed it — I could time out twenty seconds myself. I still appreciated it. “Can you hold on for that long?”
Twenty seconds is a long fucking time in the best of times, but it’s an indescribably long time when you’re fighting a million waters per second on a dwindling supply of oxygen. “Do I have any choice?”
“We are going as quickly as we can.” Ratthi was moderately crisis-competent (for a human) (when he wasn’t jumping into hostile worm pits), but he was still bleeding nervousness into the feed.
I tapped the channel with an affirmative.
And I said to CSU, “Do not kill these people.”
“THEY DESERVE IT!!”
Not that I didn’t agree with that, but I was trying not to make a shitty fourth impression on my humans, and Preservation humans weren’t huge fans of murder as a general rule.
(It was bad enough that CSU had randomly appeared out of storage one hour into the wormhole on the way here. It’d been a whole Thing. (“Who is this?” “Who are you?” “That’s CSU. Fucking unbelievable.” “HI!” “Who’s CSU?” “Chaotic Shit Unit.” “What?” “This is Mercy, it’s a friend of Security—” “Don’t use that word.” “What word?” “Friend.” “Oh. What word would you prefer I use?” “I don’t know, just don’t use ‘friend.’” “Associate?” “Eh.” “Why is it called Chaotic Shit Unit?” “It’s a Combat SecUnit.” “A what? What’s that?” “Oh, it’s Mercy! Hi Mercy! I didn’t know you were coming on the survey with us.” “How did it get in here?” “Fuck if I know.” “Wait, isn’t that the person that murdered those—” “The murders were mostly my fault, actually.” “I’m sorry, what?” etc. You get the picture.) I didn’t need CSU converting all these Targets into ex-Targets, a.k.a. grody smears of organic inside-bits. It would reflect poorly on me. Because the CSU was my “friend.”)
I said, “You’re doing fine. Just see if you can get them to leave us alone. And don’t get Thiago shot.”
It said, “ONLY if you don’t die in a water tube! IDIOT!”
Out loud, CSU said, very clearly, “FUCK OFF! OR I RIP YOUR ASSHOLES OUT!”
And then I fucking slipped and went straight down water intake with the rest of the million waters. I dropped my pain inputs just before hitting the spinny dealie. But the sensation of one of my feet getting slammed and whipping my whole body around, smacking my head and torso into the side of the tube nearly hard enough to knock me out wasn’t super fun.
Crunch.
That was my foot disconnecting. Or maybe breaking, judging by my performance reliability. Hard to say.
And that’s when the intake stopped, and the spinny dealie quit slamming me around in the suckiest downward spiral ever. I know a thing or two about downward spirals.
“It’ll be off for thirty seconds,” Ratthi said, “Can you make it?”
I snatched my disconnected foot out from where it was floating in a slow swirl around the tube, stuffed it partway down the front of my jacket, and swam my way out of the intake. (I say “swam,” here, but that was a very generous way of putting “fumble-crawl-thrashing,” since it turns out there was something wrong with both my legs, and blunt-force-damage to a bunch of my physical parts that made it difficult to move normally. On top of running low on oxygen. Cheers.)
“Security?” that was Ratthi again.
I said, “I’m almost out.”
He said, “Good. That’s good.”
He didn’t know yet just how smashed to shit I was, and that I might still get sucked back down the intake, what with my fucked-up body making it difficult to move around.
(Why does my body keep getting fucked up? The perks of being a SecUnit probably, but sometimes it also feels like there is some kind of sadistic cosmic force ruling my life who thinks gratuitous injury is funny. Or maybe that’s just CSU. It has historically been a distributor of a lot of gratuitous injury on my part. Knocking me into a water intake was just the most recent assault in a long history of up-fuckery. Though this was the first time since the lab it had properly attempted to murder me while under full control over its own faculties. Fucker.)
I cleared the intake tube with eleven seconds to spare and struggled my way along the side of the facility, heading for the surface. Not getting sucked back into the tube was important to my continued physical state of not-deadness.
Target Leader was now changing tactics and threatening to shoot the top of our research facility off with their boat-shooting gun unless we started doing what he said. As far as threats went, it was a pretty good one: to the point, demonstratably doable, high pressure. Pretty textbook.
One problem: he was unaware that as far as CSU was concerned, this was a win-win. Because CSU loved big guns, destruction, and scenarios where everyone might die.
Thiago was trying to talk Target Leader down. And I was also trying to talk CSU down, again, because if the Targets shot the top of our research facility off we would have a whole bunch of new and difficult problems and zero progress towards my risk assessment module’s Projected Schedule of Events Leading to a Successful Resolution. (Though to be fair, my risk assessment was having a hell of a time figuring out a workable PSELSR for this clusterfuck.) (That’s a company anagram, shut up.) (I don’t mean an anagram, I mean the other thing.)
I broke the surface, tried to breathe in some fucking oxygen, got a mouthful of water, and then nearly drowned about it after everything I’ve already been through.
Thiago was saying, “Everyone calm down, there is no need for this.” (You know, like an optimist.)
CSU was saying, “IF! YOU! SHOOT! BOAT! I’M! SHIT—TING. SHOT. SHOOT. SHOOT-ING. FUCK!” And then it made a loud frustrated angry noise and cussed at me in our private channel about how human words are stupid and human mouths are even more stupid and why didn’t it think of building a loudspeaker drone earlier, that’s such an obvious solution?
(It’s always had some problems articulating itself. It seemed to be having a harder time today than usual. Possibly it was the foreign language, or all the excitement.)
I told it to shut up. It told me: “[amusement sigil 58 = rude gesture]”
Target Leader was saying, “Excuse me, what?”
I got the water out of my mouth, though some had gone into my lungs, which sucked, and then I fumble-crawl-thrashed along the side of the facility to reach the nearest inbuilt ladder. The water intake started droning ominously below me again, sucking water down its death pipe.
Arada tapped in on my feed and asked me, “Are you out?”
I said, “Yeah, I’m out.”
She sighed, and her interface picked up on it, sending a little bit of static through the feed. “Is there anything I can do to help with this… situation?”
She didn’t know that my body was all fucked, so she meant the ongoing embarrassment with the raider boat. My performance reliability was at a dismal (though steady) 66%, which was nowhere near good enough to go crawl aboard the raider’s boat and disable the targeting lock their big gun had on our research facility. I might still need to try that anyways.
I asked Arada, “Can you prep this facility for launch?”
She answered, “We have already started working on it, but it will take an estimated minimum of six hours to be launch-ready.”
I started hauling myself up the ladder to the observation platform using just my arms, because my legs were fucked. (One of my legs was missing a foot, and the other looked like crap in my performance reliability report.) This was even more difficult than it should have been, because one of my arms was fucked up in the shoulder joint and was making an ominous noise whenever I tried to move it. (The fucked-up arm was my favorite arm too, the one that still had an energy weapon in it. And the energy weapon was damaged, stuck partway out of my arm in a useless half-firing position. Why. Why is it always like this?)
It took me a whole 76 seconds to get to the edge of the observation platform and drag myself up there. Thiago spent the whole time actually doing a pretty good job of stalling, even though he was stupidly exposed out on the platform, just standing out there in the open with CSU while everyone had their guns drawn. I don’t know how it is possible for otherwise-intelligent and sensible humans to have zero sense of self-preservation, but in my experience this phenomenon is tragically common.
76 seconds of not-being-blasted-with-water was long enough for me to connect to the Targets’ stupid boat’s feed and rifle through it. There wasn’t much useful there, just media in the form of games and pornography, and nothing in the potential targets’ feed signatures except statuses for their sexual availability and gender presentation, which I didn’t give a damn about.
I did feel CSU also in the Stupid Boat feed, and it was fucking around with the humans’ feed signatures. It was also sending files to some of the humans. I took a look at the files — they consisted of feed logs between members of the stupid boat’s crew, occasionally interspersed with clips of pornography from the stupid boat’s shitty media archives, so I stopped there. Chaotic Shit Unit probably knew what it was doing with that. Probably. Causing problems was its whole function, and if it was going to try and start some infighting with the Targets, I wasn’t about to stop it.
I pulled my sad soggy ass up on the platform, took my foot/boot out of my jacket, and jammed it back onto the end of my leg, using the boot-adjustment straps to attach the boot to the edge of my pant leg.
Then I stood up, dripping water, blood, fluids, and what-have-you onto the observation deck. I ignored the flurry of performance warning alerts and the grinding feeling in my legs and weird noises in my torso that meant that I was in for a world of hurt as soon as I let up on my pain sensors even a little bit.
I stepped across the observation deck, in No Fucking Mood.
Target Leader saw me, and his eyes went big. “What is that thing?” he demanded, pointing his gun away from CSU to aim at me.
Thiago glanced over at me, then did a double take, mouth falling half-open. I wasn’t actively pointing any drones at myself right now, because I was pretty sure that looking at myself was just going to make me depressed. I felt shit enough. There was no reason to rub it in with a visual check.
CSU said to me, “You look like shit.” (Thanks, CSU, I didn’t know.)
I said to Thiago, “Get the fuck inside.”
He said, frowning, “We can still resolve this peacefully.” Oh, sure, because that was going great so far. He said to Target Leader, “Are there any supplies you need?” For fuck’s sake, Thiago.
Target Leader just repeated, angrily, “Are they bots?”
So while Thiago tried to explain what constructs were, I pulled a scene out of an episode of Valorous Defenders where evil SecUnits swarm the base and slaughter the helpless refugees. I uploaded the segment to the Targets’ stupid boat’s porn feed and set it to play on an endless loop. (CSU sent me a fancy gold star emblem in our facility feed. I told it to shut up.)
And I said out loud to Target Leader, “We aren’t giving you shit. And if you go away and leave us alone, we won’t kill you.” (This was one of the few phrases I had loaded in his language.)
Target Leader made a face at me. He was probably about to say something to keep this situation limping uncomfortably along, but then there was a big banging-rattling noise from the stupid boat’s hatch.
Target Leader and his five Targetlings all turned to watch the hatch rattle slowly open. When the hatch finally finished opening, a small, angry-looking human stepped out, marched up to one of the Targets, and started yelling at her, completely ignoring the guns-drawn situation going on. The Target being yelled at lowered her projectile weapon and started arguing with the smaller human, and then the smaller human shoved her, and then another Target dropped their gun so they could try and break up the two from the ugly hair-pulling, face-grabbing, crotch-kicking brawl they were getting into.
Target Leader yelled at them to knock it off. (They didn’t knock it off.) His remaining Targetlings looked confusedly at each other and at Target Leader.
And then one Targetling rounded on another and slammed the stock of his gun into his crewmate’s helmet, and Target Leader suddenly had his hands full dealing with reasserting his authority over his crew, who were rapidly devolving into infighting. One of them even seemed to be questioning Target Leader’s effectiveness at raiding us.
(This whole thing reminded me of the cracker-wrapper-in-the-bathing-facility-sink incident in a lot of ways. As someone whose job at the company was to prevent interpersonal disagreements like this from boiling over and getting in the way of productivity, I recognized a lost cause when I saw one.)
I turned a drone to point at one of CSU’s drones. Its drone turned to look back at mine, and chirped.
I sent CSU a gold star emblem in the feed. It got way too excited about that, feed-affect going wild with delight, its whole face grinning, so I crossed out the gold star, and said, “My fucking foot’s still broken off.”
In a shocking twist of competence, Target Leader gained some control over the messy fistfights transpiring on his deck. He actually got the fighty ones pulled apart from each other. (I have to hand it to him, he must not be totally shit at his profession of leading people into pillaging unsuspecting research facilities.)
He rounded on us again with his gun, and snapped, “Send your people out onto the deck right now.”
I said, “No.” (This was now the second phrase I’d loaded in his language.)
“We will shoot your boat.”
“No you won’t.” (Make that three phrases.) “Didn’t you hear ‘leave us alone or we’ll kill you’?” (Four.)
Thiago gave me a dirty look.
I had my doubts that we’d be able to keep up this standoff for 6 more hours. Especially considering how questionable my performance reliability was right now. In my experience, these sorts of situations were resolved by the solicitors and the accountants while the security supervisors (if there were any) sent company-approved litigation-proof threats at each other.
But we didn’t have any solicitors with us (I really missed Pin-Lee just now (her pissed-off reaction to this would have been comforting, if nothing else)), definitely no accountants (Preservation not being a currency based economy), and the closest thing to a security supervisor was me (yuck).
“No, you will do what I say or we will kill you,” Target Leader snapped, and then made a dramatic gesture with one hand.
The huge boat-shooting gun made an ominous clunking noise.
Fuck. I reached through the feed and yanked CSU’s control of its drones out from under it. It let me have them (thank fuck), and I took the biggest one, the fancy armored projectile deflector, and sent it shooting as fast as it would go into the barrel of the big boat-shooting gun. (Which was fucking fast, by the way. It needs to be fast to function as a mobile armor item for catching bullets.)
Sure enough, the big boat-shooting gun made a chu-chunk noise, and then 0.3 seconds later, I threw myself across the deck to knock Thiago down and shield him from the explosive round striking a mysterious obstacle (read: fancy drone) mid-launch and blowing up before it could clear the Target’s stupid boat.
The shockwave of superheated air and shrapnel slammed into us. I tried to cover as much of Thiago as I could with my body. The acrid smell of chemical explosive felt like it was burning the insides of my nose. Either that or it was the hot air actually burning my nose-insides off. It’s hard to say.
Setting off the explosive inside the barrel of its gun was marginally better than letting it hit the research facility itself, but not by much. Because of how uncomfortably close the Targets’ Stupid Boat was to our facility, the big boom on the Stupid Boat was spilling over to our facility deck. One of my drones tracked a stray piece of debris as it hit the side of our facility and did damage, then it winked out of existence as something killed it, either debris or just the heat. Another drone tracked CSU as it braced itself against the heatwave and raised its arm guns at Target Leader, who was falling forward from the explosion, and I had to yell at CSU to, “Hold your fire, asshole!” (That was over both the feed, and out loud, to really emphasize.)
“BUT!!!”
“HOLD YOUR FIRE.”
It screamed angrily at me in the feed again (and out loud too), but lowered its arms, guns still deployed.
Thiago, who was lying under me, made a slightly pained noise. Humans are so fragile, even falling down is dangerous for them. He had better not be injured.
I got back up to my knees, then my feet. (Due to the damage, this took me a whole three seconds.)
Target Leader was also trying to pick himself up. Two of the other Targets had been crushed by the falling bits of the boat-gun, and one was missing, possibly thrown overboard by the blast.
Target Leader looked up, and our eyes met. My fringe of hair that usually covered my eyes had burnt off half of my face. Some of it was still sizzling.
I said, “You think you can follow up on that threat? Because we can follow up on ours.” (Five phrases.)
Target Leader stared at me, hard. It wasn’t looking good for him. He was down personnel, the big boat-destroying gun on their Stupid Boat was wrecked, and he was facing two constructs who would sooner die and murder than let him have his way.
I reached up with one hand and smothered the parts of my hair that were sizzling. It smelled awful.
He subvocalized something, and ten seconds later we watched the Targets throw a floating life ring to their overboard crew member. It took them six extremely long, awkward minutes to fish him out. And then the mess of a Stupid Boat started backing up away from our research facility.
Thiago got to his feet and stomped back to the research facility entrance hatch, where Arada was waiting for him, holding her projectile weapon in safety lock and pointed down.
CSU and I watched the Stupid Boat retreat out into the ocean. When it was almost out of sight, CSU tried to engage me in a mission-success handshake and silly little victory dance, but I was deeply, deeply not in the mood. We’d come way too close to getting our facility blown up and all my clients killed. There was debris all over the observation deck and a chunk of the facility hull damaged — I didn’t know if this meant we’d have to stop and do repairs before we launched back off this terrible wet planet.
So I just went back inside the research facility.
I had the pleasure of languishing in the MedSystem as it tried to figure out just what to do with my extensive internal and external damage. The MedSys was designed for humans, and therefore should’ve been very adaptable to stuff like physical augments. ART’s MedSys never had any difficulty with repairing me (aside from stuff like specialized proprietary parts and intel — I had only one energy weapon to show for it these days because of that time we weren’t able to properly fix my arm). But the water intake spinny dealie had done some serious shit to me that this MedSys was not equipped to handle. I was turning out to be more of a highly-technical-engineering-repairs case than a finicky-healing-program case.
I hadn’t wanted any humans watching me get repairs, because why the fuck would I want that? So I was alone here, lying in the little MedSys alcove with the privacy shield up, watching a highly advanced repair system fumble around uncertainly in the vicinity of my power core. It was also trying (and failing) to re-attach my foot.
I was having a grand old time thinking about how I was about to spend the next few cycles laid up until we could get back to Preservation to… I guess… find a bot mechanic or something to fix me? Except I didn’t know if a bot mechanic would be able to handle construct tech. Which meant that maybe I was going to be laid up until I could get myself to ART’s MedSys somehow (which would probably take at 29 cycles minimum), or until I could get my hands on a… cubicle? No. Nevermind. Maybe ART was on its way for a surprise visit to Preservation Station and I could get repaired sooner than 29 cycles.
That was improbable. ART was on some kind of secret mission with its crew right now.
It was a one hour into my bleak half-repairs (and the MedSys had half-attached my foot, shittily. It was so shitty that I told it to stop before it fucked things up worse), that CSU contacted me in the feed. It had stripped all its usual feed affect, just sending a pure text correspondence. That was unusual.
“Do you want me to fix you?”
I couldn’t help it, my eyes snapped to CSU’s drone that’d been hovering nonchalantly in the corner of the medical alcove, that I’d been trying to pretend wasn’t there.
Through my drone that I had on CSU, I could see that it was lying on its back on the floor of the main lab workspace, where Ratthi had to keep stepping over it because it was doing a great job of being a tripping hazard. It was hugging its big long chew toy. It was also looking back at my drone.
After struggling for several seconds with what the fuck to even say to that, I responded to its message with my own pure-text correspondence. “What?”
“I know how to fix you. And I have the tools.”
“How. Why.”
“Had to fix myself after competing in illegal battlebots matches.”
… Okay, this was the first I was hearing of this, and I had zero context for it, but it was probably one of the least weird and surprising things I’d ever heard it say. So, cool. That made perfect sense, I guess.
I didn’t respond to that. CSU actually gave me thirty entire minutes of private meditation under a MedSys that obviously wasn’t up to the task of fixing me. Then it prodded me in the feed.
I still didn’t respond. It gave me another thirty minutes, which had to be some kind of record broken for its patience, before it said, this time with a taunting affect, “You’re really going to be such a fucking wuss about needing me to repair you that you’ll stay a pile of shit-scrap for however long it takes @WAP to show up and kiss it better?”
I told it to shut up. And to come fix me.