I turned back and had a perfect shot at the ag-bot’s fifth knee joint. Hah, this is over. I fired and the joint blew out.

It was over, because that was when the ag-bot collapsed on top of me.

It hurt because apparently those things weigh a lot more than they look like they do. It was a good thing I don’t need that much air. I shoved and wiggled and lost my primary weapon, but I managed to get out from under its body.

But by then the Targets were there, and they all started shooting at me. I couldn’t get up. I shielded my head with my arms, and felt the projectiles going through the enviro suit but not the deflection fabric of the uniform ART had made for me. Then the fabric started to fail under all the impacts and this could be—

Performance reliability catastrophic drop.

Forced shutdown.

No restart.

16

Murderbot 2.0

Deployed aboard Barish-Estranza Explorer

Mission Status: Delayed

TargetControlSystem knew me. I’d killed a part of it, the part that had taken over ART.

I said, Did it hurt? Tell me all about it.

It was resident in the explorer’s systems where the poor bot pilot had lived. I got a brief glimpse before it walled me off, but all that was left were random sections of code; the bot pilot’s kernel had been deleted. TargetControlSystem would like to haul me out of the SecSystem so it could kill me, but it had access to the bot pilot’s archives and it knew what killware was.

I told it, Come in here and get me. (Yes, I was stalling. I had code bundles in place and there were a lot of destructive things I could do to the explorer, but no way to get the humans off the ship or get a message to ART.)

Then something else established a connection, an off-ship connection through the comm. From another ship? The space dock? Or wasn’t there a planet around here somewhere? And whoever was making the connection, it must be a Target, because it was using their language. I was reading its communication through targetControlSystem, but I could still see the original, untranslated signal.

TargetContact wanted targetControlSystem to find out what I was, so they could use me. I might be just what they needed. TargetControlSystem told them I was a SecUnit. TargetContact said that wasn’t possible, a SecUnit is a kind of bot, like the ones on the captured ships, easily dealt with when you had control of the humans.

(Yeah, it said “the humans.” But if this was an alien intelligence then all the horror media I’d watched had really gotten it wrong. Which is not impossible considering how wrong the media gets everything else.)

(You know, I don’t think this is an alien intelligence.)

The targetControlSystem said, no, I was too dangerous.

I said, It’s right.

TargetContact heard me. They were startled. They said, What are you?

A SecUnit. Killware.

TargetContact said, A software ghost.