SecSystem lost another wall and the main airlock started to cycle. I slipped into the ship’s control feed and caused a heat surge in all airlock hatches, fusing everything but the manual controls. I tried to cut all non-manual access to engineering but I was too late, the drive started to fail, our engines were cycling down. Sensors showed the Palisade ship on approach. On the flight deck the captain had given two orders to fire main weapons but the bot pilot no longer had access. Gravity ceased abruptly in a backbone tube, trapping the humans trying to get manual access to systems. The captain was trying to assemble the armed retrieval team to repel boarding, but half were augmented humans who were now incapacitated by the attack on their augments and the other half were fighting sealed doors to reach their defensive positions.

I flailed. I tried to help SecSystem but it was dissolving under my hands.

The bot pilot couldn’t speak in words like ART, but in my head I felt its terror. It sent Code: System System. Assistance. Endangered.

It was trying to ask me for help using the company codes, the way I’d asked for help for my clients.

Fuck this. GrayCris is not going to win.

I slipped all the way into the ship, into the pilot bot’s hardware. I’d seen ART do it.

(Yes, ART’s processing capacity is much larger than mine. I’ll address that issue when it comes up, which is real soon now.)

I suddenly had a different body, hard vacuum on a metal skin, I saw the approaching ship with my eyes, not just sensors. It had dispatched a boarding shuttle that was coming in fast, heading toward the gunship’s main docking lock. I pulled back in; there was no time for sightseeing. The bot pilot wanted to know what we should do. It was a good question.

Inhabiting the same hardware like this, the bot pilot and I could communicate almost instantaneously. I pulled SecSystem’s analysis of the attacker so we could both examine it. It wasn’t just a code sequence like malware or killware. It was a conscious bot, moving through the feed like I did, like ART, but with no physical structure to go back to; that was why it was so fast. It was like a disembodied combat bot.

The bot pilot asked if the Attacker was a construct created from human neural tissue, rather than a bot, and indicated points in the analysis that would confirm that theory.

I told it that was worse, and better. A disembodied construct would be more vicious, but it would also be easier to trick.