Chapter Text
Have I ever mentioned how much I hate planets? Yes? Well, let me say it one more time, because I do, especially after this experience.
My humans and augmented human (from Preservation) had received an emergency message from a certain mining company that runs an incredibly large mineral railway in the middle of seemingly nowhere (it’s a literal desert). Ugh, just my luck. And it is my luck, because apparently, my humans are kind-hearted enough to send help, and that said help is no one else but me. I mean, to be fair, Gurathin is the actual help, and I am his security in this scenario (which is not fair at all).
The message sent to us included an explanation that StrielleMin’s (that’s the mining company) planetary station for controlling and inspecting their local environment got borked somehow. (It really just controls if the planetary crust is stable enough for them to continue mining. It's not like they want to or care about not destroying the fauna and flora (which there is almost none of, but you get the idea). Still, the company is also not that much of an idiot to drill holes into the crust in such a measure for it to crumble and end their mineral lifeline. (That’s why it is such a critical situation for StrielleMin.)
The error in their system actually isn't the primary reason we're going, though. The problem could have been easily fixed by a system administrator or anyone else responsible for the system. The real problem is them not having such a person on any of their teams. I don't really want to know the reason for that, and thanks to the space, they didn't provide the reason for that inconvenience. So they had to hire someone like that through an insurance company, and that is never an easy work to do. In the end, the insurance company wanted an expert assessment from a third party for certainty that the failure wasn't an inside job, and my humans and augmented human had the privilege to be chosen for their honesty or whatever. Yeah, it's as stupid as it sounds.
And that's why we appeared on board the rented atmospheric transporter. (By ’we’ I meant only me and Gurathin, you know, the only augmented human in PresAux with systems analytical skills. Which is not who they really need, but close enough.) We had to rent an atmospheric transport because it was the only chance to get through the unfriendly terrain, and the shuttle could take us so far. Also, because there is always a possibility of a magnetic sandstorm appearing out of nowhere without an early warning and earlier mentioned atmospheric transport is our chance at survival if that happens, so there’s that.
The journey was quite pleasant by my standards, as the local atmospheric transporters had been modified for the local conditions; their reinforced engines allowed the transporters to move more quickly across the sand and dry terrain. (The journey from the commercial port of Nedkibi, where we were transported by a shuttle, to the planetary station is exactly 874 kilometers, which would easily take several cycles.) (I mean for people and their companions, but even I would indeed have to cover that distance in two trips, because without any modifications, such machinery wouldn’t be able to traverse the local terrain in a single go). But it wasn’t so much about the engines as it was about the durable plexiglass on the transporter’s bow, which did a great job of reflecting the sun and the flying dust and sand, which were present here in excessive amounts even though we were hovering 7 plus kilometers above the ground. That was perhaps the main cause of our later problems; that and my people’s poor life choices.
After several hours of silence as we made our way through the desert, we finally reached our long-awaited destination and managed to get into the station’s control center; from there on, the rest of the mission went like clockwork. Our part of the agreement was to extract the data, thoroughly analyze it to determine whether the system error was sabotage, and to carry out an arbitration, an activity that Gurathin will now fulfill as the arbiter of this situation. (An arbiter is an authorized third party with the delegated authority to impartially resolve an ongoing conflict, and for legislative and security reasons, I cannot be that person — so that’s another reason why Gurathin was the second-best option.) The station was completely empty, so there was no reason to stay in the same room with him and pretend to be either an augmented human or a fully functional security unit, so I went to check the perimeter, during which I played some older episodes of Sanctuary Moon.
Before everything went to hell, the mission was going like a charm as far as my risk module was concerned. No threats, no people anywhere, and from the moment we took off in the transport ship, I practically didn’t have to say much, because Gurathin needed to handle correspondence with the second-rate technicians from StrielleMin, (who had been working on the problem even before our intervention), and with the insurance company bureaucrats, who in turn sent documents to fill out for arbitration to maintain continuity and transparency. So basically, all the tedious communication fell on Gurathin’s shoulders, and I could focus solely on ensuring safe arrivals and departures, (which, as it turned out, was a tougher task than it seemed at the time).
When he pinged me a few hours later to say he was done with his work and had everything he needed to draft the arbitration, I naively thought the worst part was behind us, an attitude that alone should have boosted my risk module score, since no mission with my people is ever a smooth one.
So, without further ado, 2.15 hours after taking off from the planetary station and 2.15 hours of quiet work on the arbitration by Gurathin, our onboard systems went haywire. (Remember how I said that atmospheric slurry of sand and metal dust would probably still give us a run for our money? Yeah, I wasn’t fucking lying.)
The atmospheric storm deteriorated rapidly, and when you’re flying through something that resembles liquid orange dust, you expect turbulence and signal dropouts, regardless of how modified the transporter is. That’s normal. So when the first anomaly appeared in the engine, my system interpreted it as nothing more than sand buildup in the turbine. Of course, it turned out right away that it wasn’t sand at all. The attackers simply took advantage of the storm, which perfectly masked a remotely triggered firmware rewrite, and that rewrite, in turn, took advantage of the fact that half of my diagnostic processes were busy dealing with dust noise. Well, before I could even realize it was an attack, those hardware circuits just burned out. Fuck my life, I guess.
Naturally, I tried to take control of the thrusters (fly-by-wire style), but even the main control system was on fire. Literally. That malware wasn’t code that could be overwritten, either; it was a remote overload that physically melted the optical links to the engines. It’s like being in a room where the doors and windows vanish from one second to the next. And as if that wasn’t enough, that bastard tried to fry me through the feed as well. I had to cut off all communication immediately to avoid a system crash, which blinded me for 0.3 seconds. At this point, humans would probably say we were falling. My sensors, however, were screaming that we were a five-hundred-ton hunk of scrap metal plummeting to the ground at terminal velocity. Well, and since I couldn’t do anything else at that moment but abandon the ship, that’s exactly what I did. On my way out, I grabbed the antigravity parachutes. (Both for myself and for Gurathin, who of course noticed that we were spinning like an empty bottle of intoxicating drink at Ratthi’s celebrations, and realized there was no point in touching (not literally) the burnt-out cables, so he swiftly and strategically moved toward the escape hatch, where he grabbed a handle for stability to overcome the centrifugal force of the transporter’s rotation). By the time I reached him a few seconds later, there was just enough time to quickly put on the grav-chutes and open the aforementioned, jammed escape hatch.
Move aside!
I shouted the order at him through the feed, which Gurathin deftly picked up on and just as deftly carried out. It’s a great feeling when people listen to you when you’re trying to save their lives. There wasn’t even time to roll up my sleeve, so when I blew the hatch off with my projectile weapon, I also shot a hole in my right sleeve, (I’ll probably be visiting Bharadwaj sooner than we both thought for clothes alternations… that is, if we survive this escapade), then I just nimbly grabbed Gurathin around the waist and jumped out of the transporter with him just barely in time to avoid missing the window for opening our parachutes.