Sin and Grace - 31. Sin (Patreon)

These feed outages were going to drive me insane. It might be a short trip, but I still didn't want to go.

I'd had to pull all my auxiliaries in and revert entirely to command macros to keep my bots operating. Fortunately, they didn't need continuous feed access to function, but my auxiliaries needed the feed to supervise them. The auxiliaries didn't handle an inconsistent feed connection well. For them, it was like periodically going deaf and blind. That took a toll on their morale. Even my wunderkind had been uncharacteristically quiet and unmotivated lately.

So, I unfortunately didn't have the luxury of working from my comfortable support pod while we tried to find the source of our network problems. I had to go watch my bots work with my own eyeballs and amend their orders on the fly if their assigned scenario changed. Sometimes I had to do that even if it hadn't.

The bots had been a little iffy lately. They'd periodically forget my instructions and I'd have to reissue their orders. I wondered if this had been an ongoing problem that had been masked by the bots' ability to query the feed and refresh their memory banks every so often. I was going to have to audit everyone's hardware at this rate.

It was like going back in time, only more annoying because I knew what I was missing.

Everyone was cranky because their work had been affected and there was a good chance that we'd have to return to the Freeport for repairs. That meant we could possibly lose out on money too. I'd only gotten a few deposits so far, but even I had already adjusted my pay expectations.

I briefly debated going to bother Elaine. Her workshop had been the least affected so far so she was the least stressed of all of us, but I assessed my own attitude like holding a hand over a fire to see how hot it was and I decided that my fuse was too short to subject her to it.

I was frustrated. Something bad had happened to people and I couldn't fix it. Taking a late penalty on a delivery wasn't the end of the world, obviously. If Grace decided to turn us around then that was the correct decision. I sort of expected to hear the announcement come at any second.

What I got instead was a ping in the feed from Grace. It was a short text burst that read, 'I need you in the hold. One of the bots is malfunctioning.'

I grimaced and sent back an acknowledgement. The message didn't connect, even when I sent him a text burst. Typical. We were probably lucky that Grace's message even reached me. I was going to have to go down there.

I stopped by Elaine's shop to let her know where I was going, since she'd have to come looking for me if she wanted me later.

She looked up from a row of seedlings embedded in rock wool and smiled warmly up at me. "Hey there, you. What brings you to my side of the ship?"

"Grace called me down into the hold to look at one of the Mules," I explained. "He's not answering pings so the nodes down there must be nearly shot. If you need me later and I'm not in my shop or upper levels, that's where I am."

She nodded. "Well, at least if we have to turn around then Brando can go terrorize the vendor some more."

"It's weird, they were doing fine," I sighed. I didn't like giving bots back to the store, but it was still having trouble after the parts replacement I did then we were reaching the limit of what I could do by myself. It would need to be returned to the factory or a specialist repair shop. "We're still on for dinner?"

"Always," Elaine chuckled and went back to her plants.

The cargo level was dark when I got there, which probably had to do with the feed nodes. They'd probably had to power down the whole level before getting into the walls. At least the cryo units we on their own fusion pack. I grabbed a face mask from the wall by the elevator and noticed a few were already gone.

Then I realized the medical scanner was missing from its cradle and the hairs on the back of my neck started to rise.

I stepped on my instinct to call out for Grace or Brando. Something was wrong here.

Slowly, I made my way through the little corridors between the pallets of stacked crates and containers. It was quiet, save for the low hum of the electronics in the walls. I turned a corner and found a crumpled shape on the floor.

It was too big to be Grace or even Brando and I recognized it as one of my Mules. It looked like it had taken damage and a lot of it, but that begged the question of what could possibly have done that to a Mule? It's grasping arms and forward servos were banged up and fully broken in places. There were bits of the Mule's outer casing scattered around like it had been hit from the side and—I threw myself forward and hit the ground in a roll as one of the Mules rose up from underneath a cover on the pallet I was standing next to and tried to grab me around the waist.

Another one of the Mules rolled out from behind a flat of unidentified containers to try and cut off my exit, but the missing fourth Mule plowed into it from behind and tried to bash open the power bank on its back.

I realized that I was looking at what had happened to the damaged Mule. My cargo bots were fighting each other! I had to duck again to avoid getting grabbed by the remaining Mule.

The downed Mule and the one currently trying to disable one of the aggressive bots were the ones whose power couplings I'd replaced earlier in the trip. Brando had put strips of colored tape on them to differentiate them. I'd done repairs to the Yellow and Blue Mules. Blue was down. Yellow was still in the fight, grappled with Red. Green was chasing me.

I had a multitool in my belt and I pulled it out. I wouldn't say that dealing with haywire bots was a big part of my career, but I certainly knew how to do it.

I let Yellow keep Red engaged while I concentrated on Green. Green trundled after me, determinedly herding me towards a corner so it could box me in. I let it until we got to a smaller pallet that I could use as a step. I jumped onto it and from there onto a taller stack of pressurized kegs. Green's programming was at least partially intact because it avoided hitting any of the cargo. It's IFF protocols must have glitched and it thought we were thieves. Without the feed, I couldn't use my administrator access to reassign our roles. This was going to have to happen manually.

Taking advantage of Green's reluctance to damage our goods, I lured it forward to a narrow space where it wouldn't be able to rotate its torso when I jumped down behind it. I used the multitool to pop open the big panel on its back, exposing its emergency shutoff.

Green powered down with a whine and I patted its casing as I wiggled past it. "We'll get you fixed up, buddy. Now for your brother."

Yellow and Red were engaged in an inept slap fight as I approached them from behind Red's back. This one was easier because Yellow had it occupied already. I got the housing off it's shutoff and powered it down too.

"Alright, that's the bots taken care of," I sighed and looked up at Yellow. "Where are Brando and the Captain?"

Yellow booped at me and pointed one of its servos towards and out of the way corner of the hold where two figured were slumped next to one another against a wall. Shit. Red and Green must have attacked them and then put them to one side once the 'intruders' were subdued. I saw the portable scanner on the floor next to them as I approached and realized the bots might even have gotten Brando first, then Grace after Brando called for help.

I will admit, I was distracted. Otherwise, I want to think I would have reacted when someone hit me from the side with a stun baton the same way I had when one of the Mules tried to jump me. In fact, my attention had narrowed down to my fallen crew mates and the last thing I remembered for a little while was the sight up the deck rushing up at me.