Chapter Text
[SecUnit_Murderbot_Log]
For the record, I didn’t want to go.
It’s not that I have anything against saving humans. I do it all the time. I’m the best there is at saving humans, whether it’s from hostile fauna, shitty planet weather, or their own stupid decisions.
But the distress signal was tagged with a time counter indicating three weeks since it was initiated—most corporate ships and stations have this feature, so anyone on the receiving end can make accurate cost-benefit analyses when deciding whether to answer them. Three weeks is a long time for a station to be in emergency mode without help. I knew what it would probably look like, and I didn’t want my humans putting themselves through that.
But Arada kept looking at me with sad eyes while I explained this, and she was the survey leader, so it was her call in the end. No amount of warnings about stations full of corpses could convince someone from Preservation to ignore a call for help.
At the very least she agreed to let me do a sweep first before any of the humans set foot on it, so even if this was a bad idea, it wasn’t a terrible idea.
“Do we know what kind of station it is?” Arada asked, as we were about to exit the wormhole. “It can’t be a transit hub, it’s too remote.”
“It’s not,” Gurathin said. “NuraVanel used to be a mining colony, but the corporates eventually drained it of resources. It’s an empty, barren rock now.”
“So why is the station still in use?” Overse asked. “Don’t corporates love cutting their losses and moving on?”
Gurathin paused, checking something in the feed. “Another company decided to buy it and use it as a remote R&D facility,” he said.
“What company?” Arada asked.
Gurathin paused again, much longer this time.
“Gurathin?” Arada prompted.
Gurathin sighed deeply.
“It’s not the Company, is it?” Overse said tightly. “Or Barish-Estranza?”
“No,” Gurathin said.
“Tell me it’s not GreyCris,” Ratthi piped up.
“It’s called Schart & Semin Engineering,” Gurathin said flatly.
There was silence.
Ratthi snickered.
“People may have died,” Gurathin said, sounding tired. Ratthi immediately stopped laughing, but his mouth was pressed shut like he really had to work at it.
“A name like that can’t be good with investors,” Arada said incredulously. “Can it? I’m still not clear on what an investor is."
“It looks like most documents shorten it to ScharSem,” Gurathin, sounding almost relieved as I felt. “So that’s what I’m calling it from now on.”
I felt a lot less relieved when our ship docked on the stupid station. Not for the first time I wished ART was our ship. We even had Kaede with us as part of Preservation and PSUMNT’s research exchange thing—she’d swapped with Thiago so he could help the university with, I don’t know, language problems or something. But ART was busy with whatever mission needed a linguist, so here I was, about to board a compromised station without having it around to protect my humans while I was gone.
NuraVanel Station hadn’t responded to our hailing, and the feed was down. Just for fun I pinged the station’s SecSystem, and got no response. Great.
The hangar bay was still intact, so disembarking wasn’t an issue, at least. I didn’t let any of my humans off the ship, obviously, but I also didn’t get off the ship until I’d sent out five scout drones to do a quick pre-sweep before my actual sweep.
Someone had made it off the station in a hurry; the hangar was wide open when we got there, and the scorch-and-skid marks on the floor were pretty unmistakable for a clumsy hot exit. But other than that, the hangar was clean. The airlock was shut tight, and with StationSys completely shut down, I couldn’t open it remotely to let my drones through.
“Stay here,” I told my humans as I suited up. “This shouldn’t take long.” NuraVanel was tiny; most of the old mining operation was on-planet, with the station used for research and admin. ScharSem’s main focus was innovative robotics, and its company policies heavily emphasized secrecy, so it made sense for them to set up somewhere small and remote.
Small enough that anything going wrong was a station-wide disaster, and remote enough that help wouldn’t get there in time.
Past the airlock, it was probably safe to breathe, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I sent my drones ahead, spreading out through the dark, silent corridors. One of them reached the escape pod bay, which was where I found the first body, among other things.
I wasn’t surprised about the body, but the “other things” were worth a closer look. When I reached the pods, I found every one of them destroyed.
There are a lot of ways to destroy escape pods. You can simply disable them: cut a few connections, and you wind up with very expensive human boxes. You can blow them up. You can blow a hole in the right spot—or any spot, really.
These escape pods were melted.
I have no idea how else to describe it. The pods were misshapen and caved in as if they’d been thrown in an industrial furnace, then scooped out and dumped back into their launchers. Worst of all, some of them must have had people in them when it happened, because the mixed-up glass and metal was covered in something nauseatingly organic.
I poked at it with my glove. Still moist. Weird, because temperatures that would turn metal liquid would turn a human to ash. If a human had burned alive in a melting pod, it wouldn’t still be wet.
I glanced at the body, and realized abruptly that I should have examined it first. This was because the human hadn’t burned to death, or exploded, or even just been shot.
The body was bent fully in half, backwards, as if someone had picked him up and snapped him over their knee.
A malfunctioning bot or SecUnit could also probably manage it. The body was dressed in a senior director’s uniform, so it was unlikely that a functioning SecUnit could get halfway through the process before the governor module kicked in. And neither option explained the melted escape pods, or the weird meat, or why only the escape pods were melted and the surrounding ship was unharmed.
I moved on.
“How does it look, SecUnit?” Arada asked in the survey team’s feed.
“Bad,” I said. “There are bodies.” Another one of my scout drones had made it to NuraVanel’s central command.
She pinged in acknowledgment.
The doors to central command were wide open, held there by three dead humans in power armor. One had its head fully twisted backward. Another’s armor had been crumpled up like a metal can with the human inside. One almost looked intact, but blood had poured out of every seam and joint in the armor, staining it like rust.
This is normally where I think something like, ‘This is why humans shouldn’t do their own security,’ but honestly, what the fuck.
The rest of the command center was… bad. A bloodbath. Five more dead humans lay draped over destroyed machinery. When I moved in for a closer look, I found more metal, glass, and plastic melted and resolidified in unrecognizable piles. More wet organics splattered everywhere, too, but with all the dead humans around, at least it made sense to be here.
No use trying the control panels, because they weren’t controlling things, and weren’t really shaped like panels anymore.
As I inspected the room, my drones finished their sweep of the station. It was all abandoned, except for the odd corpse. These bodies were clean, at least; I suspected that whatever happened had caused life support system systems to fail, including oxygen. Hopefully, it had been quick.
But ScoutDrone 4 found three bodies that hadn’t died so cleanly, and what was more, there were footprints leading away from them. I pinpointed its location and went to see.
As I turned away from the destroyed controls, something flickered in the corner of my eye. It shouldn’t have— couldn’t have, not with everything left in melted pieces. But there it was, lighting up on one of the destroyed screens: a white, three-pronged symbol. When I turned to look at it properly, it vanished.
Probably a company logo. The last gasp of the dying StationSys.
I met up with ScoutDrone 4 and discovered that ScharSem did have SecUnits, apparently. It hadn’t done them much good, because this one was just as dead as the two security humans beside it. All of them were beaten to a pulp, though that wasn’t what had killed the SecUnit. Pulling off its helmet confirmed my suspicions. Its governor module had killed it; either its registered client had escaped and left its range, or had triggered it with their death. A lot of companies installed that feature, especially the ones with proprietary tech like ScharSem.
Bloody footprints led away from the bodies, but also to them. The stride was too small to be a SecUnit, so either a very short human or very short bot had left them. I followed them down two hallways until they faded; the human or bot had been heading toward the command center.
Tracking them backward in the other direction, I followed them to a workroom at the other end of the hall. Cautiously I sent ScoutDrone 4 in first, grimaced at what I saw through its camera, and stepped inside myself.
Four more SecUnits lay dead on the floor around the worktable. At least, I think there were four. I counted about eight arms and eight legs from what I could see in the pile. The worktable itself lay in pieces; something had burrowed through metal and machinery and torn it apart just as easily as it had torn apart the SecUnits. And just like the command center, every piece of tech was completely destroyed and covered in gore. It was a bloodbath.
It was…
Not human. Or human-bot construct. It couldn’t be.
I moved closer to the remains of the screens. At first glance, it looked like pieces of dead SecUnit had landed on them when they were killed, but that couldn’t be right. I had been torn apart enough times to know what gross SecUnit bits looked like. These were dark and wet with long tendrils, like vines on alien flora. And they hadn’t landed on the destroyed tech.
They were growing out of them.
I then did a very stupid thing that I thought was a very smart thing: instead of putting my face close to the unknown meat, I stood back and let ScoutDrone 4 do it instead. I was looking through its cameras when I did, so I saw when the meat-vines lashed out, grabbed it, and punched through its metal shell.
My vision went dark, and my performance reliability plummeted.
At some point I realized my humans were pinging me frantically over the feed, and Arada’s voice yanked me out of whatever weird brain space I was in.
“SecUnit, please answer.” She was doing a very good job at not sounding afraid even though she was. “Do you need help? Overse is suiting up.”
“Don’t,” I said. “I’m alright, I just—”
I tried to think of a way to say I was just attacked by meat growing out of a broken computer, but then I looked at the broken computers again, and there was no meat.
They were just broken and melted the normal way. The only gross, wet organics I could see were the pieces of dead SecUnit on the floor. I replayed a recording in my memory of the last minute, and yeah, no weird meat-vines, just obliterated equipment.
“There’s no one to rescue,” I said. “We can alert the Port Authority at the nearest wormhole station.”
“Alright,” Arada replied, sounding calm. “Thank you, SecUnit. Come back to the ship.”
“I’m on my way.”
I left the room. I followed the footprints down the hall, then took the straightest path to the command center. It was almost completely straight, actually; something had carved through a few hallway corners along the way as if to make it shorter. I then passed the escape pods and the poor human folded in half in front of them, then made my way back to the hangar from there.
The weird viscera was gone, both in real life and in video playbacks in my memory. Only the dumb, unreliable, wet organic parts of my brain still remembered hallucinating it in the first place.
I was going to have to talk to Bharadwaj after this survey. I was having weird hallucinations again, which I couldn’t afford to have when keeping my humans safe. I would let Arada know in private, and if it happened again I could cut the survey short. I hated having to do that, but keeping my humans safe was more important than not disappointing them.
I didn’t tell them much about what I found, besides that the humans were dead but a lot of them had probably escaped. Everyone seemed to get that they shouldn’t ask any more questions.
"It sounds like whatever innovative robotics project they were working on went wrong," Gurathin said.
Ratthi said, "Or they were trying to soup up their CombatBots and it went very, very right."
“Either way, if most of them escaped, then we probably don’t have to deal with the port authorities,” Gurathin said. “Their company will send a salvage crew, and they probably won't like finding out a passing ship stumbled upon their failed project.”
“We should let someone know anyway,” said Arada. “So more people don’t land here following the beacon.”
“They probably won’t,” Gurathin said grimly. “Not after three weeks.”
We would, no one said. But most ships that would pick up the signal weren’t from Preservation.
“The nearest hub station is ShayTanna,” said Kaede. “But we’ll have to head for Port Lorem instead.”
“What’s happening at ShayTanna?” Arada asked, joining her at the screen.
“Total lockdown,” Kaede replied. “Some kind of security crisis.”
Later on I would wonder why I didn't put the two together. But it’s not weird for a remote little station doing secretive corporate research to have a crisis, and it’s not that weird for a transit hub to have a completely unrelated crisis at the same time, and reports weren’t clear on exactly what was happening at ShayTanna.
There was no reason, at the time, to connect a dead station to an incident happening on the other end of a week-long wormhole ride.
[/end_SecUnit_Murderbot_Log]