Sin and Grace - 34. Sin (Patreon)

The heat vents cycled on at full blast as soon as the lock sealed behind me, buffeting my cold sore body with warm dry air. Reports flooded in through my restored ShipNet feed as I discovered that our intruder hadn't managed to suborn every bot on the ship.

Upset, confused reports came from all over the ship from bots with no backup procedures for a boarding action as they cried out for direction that was swiftly provided by my auxiliaries. All that mental noise slacked off within a few seconds as the bots the intruder hadn’t jacked received orders and set off to execute my hasty counter offensive.

First order: find the invader.

My cleaning bots found him on the deck, alone, and sent me a few still of his face and my jaw tightened. It was a face I knew. No wonder I woke up floating in the darkness.

Wasp had come after me once again. Not only that, but he'd come for my ship and my crew.

That didn't quite track. If Wasp knew that I was alive and had come for me, specifically, then why did he try to space me again if it hadn't worked the first time?

I set that question aside for when I could beat it out of him. I had other concerns at present.

I squinted at the heat vents overhead and wondered who was controlling them. It couldn’t be Wasp. He wanted me dead for one and for another he didn’t interface directly with his synthetics. He was an organic purist that way.

Was it an automated procedure for Cassandra? Usually anyone coming in from an EVA would be in a suit with its own heater. There was no time to look into it now, but that seemed weird.

There was no time to worry about it. I was in full view of the cameras.

I squinted at a level map set into the bulkhead next to the interior lock. According to it, I’d just come in through the starboard side on the works level. That meant Brando’s emergency napping spot that I wasn't supposed to know about was located down the corridor to port.

My hands shook as I pried up the false panel, keyed in his code as my auxiliaries fed it to me from memory, and slipped inside the hidden closet. The air traps and filters activated. I actually did not mind. The benign mechanical noise would further mask my presence. There was a chair in there still, but I ignored it. Instead, I put my back to the wall and slid down into a crouch.

I hurt all over so it was hard to tune out the distractions of my body. The support pod had spoiled me, but I fought my way down.

“Crew status report," I coughed on the tail end of my command as my confused lungs spasmed. No sound emerged from my working mouth.

Stupidly, I realized I hadn’t started breathing yet so I sucked in air and held it. After a moment, I felt feel the cool spread of oxygenation spread through my chest and my autonomic reflexes caught onto the fact that they were needed once more.

All right, so it apparently took me a minute or two to transition between states. I didn’t remember much of crawling in through the airlock of Fjord; just lying on the floor between the interior and exterior locks gasping like a landed fish. I must have made the switch then. By comparison, this time was almost nothing.

Oxygen suffused me. My aches eased, my vision cleared, and my thoughts steadied.

My first order of business was to reassert control over ShipNet. That was less difficult than one might think. I’d spent some time considering how our intruder had taken over in the first place during that long, cold EVA and knowing it was Wasp now gave me more insight into his attack. Wasp wasn’t a technically minded sort of person so this wasn’t cyberwarfare, which was good because I was badly equipped to counter that.

He had to have used a gadget of some kind; something he could have slipped aboard during one of our port of calls.

My mind immediately went to the bug we'd spent weeks hunting. It had shown up around the time we took on the Mules, right? That must have been when Wasp began planning his entrance onto the ship.

My auxiliaries had already seized control of a few of his patrol units as cleaning units hiding in the walls suddenly flanked them and pinned them down while my auxiliaries hijacked their feed access. Wasp’s warbots had some security hardware but the firmware it hadn’t been maintained and had missed a few crucial updates.

Typical, he had been too afraid of bricking his bots to take the risk of patching their security weaknesses.

That said, given phase one of his plans, I could understand why he hadn’t made it a priority. By the time his crews were moving in any opposition capable of subverting his bots would be dead.

That was all right. I could make that work in my favor.

As it turned out; all the enemy bots were networked—a security flaw my auxiliaries took full advantage of. Taking just one bot gave us a backdoor into his entire war band.

My influence radiated outward led by a wave of irritated auxiliaries. I elected not to change too many of Wasp’s master commands beyond limiting the damage they could do to my crew and my ship. I needed to go undetected a little while longer.

As my control of the enemy bots spread, so too did my view of the ship. Wasp had every warbot not on patrol clustered outside the observation lounge. I found my crewmates being contained inside. They looked all right, from what I could see, albeit scared. Brando had clearly gone down fighting, judging by the blood on the side of his face. Amanda was laying on one of the sofas with Doc in attendance. I could see her talking, but I wouldn’t know how hurt she was until I dared to access MedNet and could view her biomonitor.

Wasp was lounging in the captain’s station with a bottle of wine that someone aboard was going to miss and looking relaxed. He thought I was dead. The battle was over as far as he was concerned. He’d have signaled Mimir for a rendezvous by now, which meant I was on a time crunch and I still hadn’t found Grace.

A filter superimposed itself over my HUD once I had enough aggregate data that I couldn’t just jump from feed to feed anymore. Crew members were represented as blue dots. Hostiles were red. Command was gold.

The gold dot was in the crew level head, surrounded by formerly-enemy bots and the signifier for ‘crewmate in distress.’ Whatever the bots had been doing had stopped when I amended the war band’s master orders. They were throwing up error codes that would have attracted Wasp’s attention if he’d been watching instead of drinking. Then again, I realized that the software that should have been networked to Wasp's implant computer was pointing at—nothing. He wasn't networked with his bots. There was a little command node in their network where he should have been that was receiving macros.

Right, organic purist. He might not even have an implant computer. Idiot.

I accessed the error flag and sure enough, their current orders were now in conflict with the master commands so they were flailing around in confusion, while obeying neither.

That meant they’d been hurting Grace, although why they were doing it in the head…

An old memory seized me; different toilets, a small cold body, my hand on Wasp's ugly face as I repeatedly bashed his head into the hard tiled floor, and a haze of red hatred that crossed out of memory into my present.

Up until that moment, I’d been planning to leave Wasp alive for a formal trial. All my good intentions evaporated, leaving behind only a hot ember of fury in my chest.

This time there would be no Proctors around to pull me off him. It was just me, Wasp, and all the debts between us.

Two of my auxiliaries diverted from their subversion efforts to wipe the enemy bots; there could be no half-measures in this situation. I couldn’t risk Wasp getting control of them again.

The red dots were replaced with cool green as the bots were overwritten with new programming from my personal software archive. The distress icon winked out. I sent orders to my new forces to remain in place, administer first aid, and have Grace play dead. I wasn’t the only person who could see him and until I had control of ShipNet I couldn’t control what Wasp saw.

Grace’s identifier stayed still. The bots reported he was breathing and out of distress. I let out the breath I'd been holding.

Then one of my auxiliaries flagged me with good news. To my delight, it had already found Wasp’s gadget. There’d only been so many potential placement sites. It got lucky and found the enemy's trojan bot within the first few options.

It was an innocuous-looking disc affixed to the bottom of a comm console just within the main lock. There were little nubs on the edges of the disc that I recognized as retracted legs. That explained how it had gotten aboard. It had probably scurried in as someone came aboard, using them as cover.

I cross-referenced what I could see of the thing plus what I'd guessed it had done with my private database. It was a Stowaway-class Node Spider. It had physically cut into our network cables and impersonated a ShipNet feed node.

We'd been catching glimpses of it for days as it looked for a good place to anchor itself and suborn our ShipNet. The spot it chose was between the cargo and works levels, which explained why our hold had been isolated from the feed.

I checked the specs on the model closest to what I thought we were dealing with. It had an armored shell that meant my bots couldn't deal with this for me.

I was going to have to go out there and deal with it myself.