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I knew I didn’t look ridiculous, from the odd reflections I was able to catch in gallery windows as I sped through the art district. I looked just like any other part-time Preservation ranger, as a matter of fact, excepting the dark grey facemask. People will be intimidated by the helmet Mensah had said. They won’t want to talk. I told her I would be intimidated without the helmet, and this was our compromise.
Not looking ridiculous did not keep me from feeling ridiculous; The thing about part-time Preservation rangers (which I regrettably counted as for the duration of this mission) is that they ride bright yellow standard-issue pedal-powered Bureau of Wilderness Safety bicycles. The stupid, rickety toy squeaked underneath me the whole six boring miles of dusty dirt roads it took to cross from the mixed usage district to the industrial district. The bare wireframe seemed barely sufficient to support my weight, every odd pothole threatened to send me flying off, and the constant sensation of wind suggested a hull breach on all sides. Fortunately, the machine’s design was so inefficient it would not be physically capable of propelling me to the velocities necessary to snap my neck until someone added three or four additional gears. Above an agonizingly low threshold, faster pedaling gave no additional speed.
The industrial district was up ahead, the closest buildings stretching up to cover more of the view as I approached. While the factories and warehouses were all basically interchangeable with any other industrial zone I’d visited (it’s hard to improve on “cement smokestacks,” “enormous boilers” and “mazelike exterior piping”) the air was remarkably clean. Corridors of wildflowers grew on either side of the road, and a meticulously undisturbed stream ran between some of the buildings. On my left, a tall, boxy building with old red paint and high windows; the rebottling plant. I pushed the brake-levers a little too hard, in the wrong order. The front wheel stopped instantly, and the back wheel kept going for long enough to give me a faceful of dirt.
I left it leaning against the side of the building and (once I’d brushed the mud off my facemask) headed inside.
The floor was clear on the right side, save for a few stacks of pallets. Large vertical doors on the right wall, with coils of synthetic rope on hooks beside it; probably hopper access and loading equipment. The various conveyors and pipes were too low to serve as cover, but there were two large machines near the center of the room that obscured vision completely and were well over 10 feet. Boilers, maybe. I quickly made a note of every exit (including accessible windows and the hopper entry,) then strode toward the humans.
One of them (dark brown skin, wavy hair, glasses) was working at an old computer terminal. Clerical work? I designated them Civilian1. The other (medium brown skin, straight hair, short beard) at one of the conveyors; probably quality assurance. I designated them Civilian2.
Civilian1 and Civilian2 shared a long glance. Eventually, Civilian2 broke the silence.
“Uh, hello ranger, Xir. You’re here about…”
“Yes. You refused over the feed, so I came in person; please go home.”
Another glance between them. This was strange, and they knew it. The BoWS exists to get cats out of trees, not to investigate strange sightings of armed men. Civilian1 spoke up next.
“I’m still not sure I actually saw anything last week, it’s easy to make a mistake - this sort of thing just doesn’t happen on Preservation! And it’s important to keep the plant running, the vegetables go bad if they’re left for too long.”
I stared blankly at her. This was the kind of thinking that got people killed by strange armed men.
“Pretend there’s… I don’t know. A bear? Is that what you have here?”
“...No? Did you even complete-”
“It doesn't matter. There is an unpredictable unknown element with some level of interest in this factory. You would be safer elsewhere, and I need to access that terminal anyway.”
“No, absolutely not. You are definitely not trained as a plant overseer, and I’m not even convinced you’ve been properly trained as a ranger. Why don’t you tell me what you need?”
This was becoming aggravating, but Civilian1 clearly wasn’t aware of my construct status and I didn’t see much to gain from revealing it.
“Fine. I need to know the time they left this building, the serial number of the hopper they were on, and its destination.
—------------------
I followed the target hopper’s (serial number ID3-088) trail to the distillery, the aluminum foundry, the assembly plant, the microchip manufactury . I unfortunately wasn’t able to give any site a thorough search (the BoWS had said that I did not possess the same emergency powers contracted security might have in the rim; normally I would ignore them completely, but Mensah had stressed the importance of abiding by Preservation law while my legality as a citizen was still under question) but after crawling a few of the terminals for a handful of frames of grainy security footage (they really needed to upgrade these) and infrequent but consistent departures from the regular hopper schedule across the entire district, I was able to gain an understanding of the bigger picture:
Once a week, an otherwise unused hopper (serial number ID3-088) arrives at the rebottling plant between 0200 and 0300 hours. It makes the rounds between a handful of end-of-production buildings (all of which coincidentally recorded low productivity the preceding day which did not line up with human testimony ) then disappears. In the security footage, it appeared to be carrying a number of large, odd shapes as it arrived at the rebottling plant despite being logged as empty. Probably Citizen1’s gunmen.
I checked the lines of sight around me as I exited the microchip manufactury. I was in the district’s central plaza now, paved with colorful stones in geometric patterns. I spotted two potential sniper nests with vision over the whole area, one in a decorative bell tower over the workers’ mess hall and one out of the aluminum foundry’s fifth floor window. Given the increasing probability of an organized conspiracy (presently roughly 3.24%) and the length of time word that a suspiciously surly ranger was poking around had had to spread (about 3 hours now) I elected to slip around the side of the manufactury and dash between two large electrical transformers. From there I was out of sight and could maneuver behind equipment and between buildings back to where I’d left the BoWS’s terrible yellow bike.
—------------------
The goods transport hoppers used in the Preservation industrial district use and can only move along preexisting tracks. If hypothetical targets were skimming supplies off public production once a week, I doubted they had the resources to put in a new maglev track - let alone a camouflaged one. Moreover, their serial codes and arrival times are logged at their destinations. Back in the Rim, this sort of midnight discrepancy would have set off alarms long before it could become a weekly occurrence… But on preservation, shipping records were kept merely for logistical purposes; there would not be an algorithm to do my job for me today.
Still, it was easy enough to send a short ping to a council tech in Preservation Station requesting logs from the four adjacent settlements’ public depots. Imagine my displeasure when, twenty minutes of waiting and fifteen minutes of file-crawling later, I did not find ID3-088 logged a single time among any of them. Between the time wasting spreadsheets and the constant biking, the mission was grating on me. Until/unless the stakes became higher, I decided to direct 15% of my attention to some preservation-produced media I’d recently acquired - just to take the edge off. I selected an episode of Bonding Agent, a serial comedy about a paranoid indentured spy from the Rim who ended up a Preservation citizen after the company holding her contract bonds accidentally traded them instead of a shipment of wood-bonding glue.
My threat assessment module was 90% confident by now that there was an organized, armed force present on Preservation. On the upshot, from the rough amount of food consistently stolen from the rebottling plant it was 65% sure there were only around a dozen potential hostiles. I suspected they had some base of operations between the industrial district and one of the residential or mixed-use districts it serviced - though I still didn’t have any way to guess which direction it was in. There would be only one way to figure that out.
—------------------
Nine episodes of Bonding Agent later, it was the middle of the night and I was on top of the aluminum foundry. I’d written a short script to check each maglev track leading out of the industrial zone for activity, and it was instructed to alert me if it noticed any movement that deviated from the regular automated hopper schedule. Twice it alerted me over stray cats crossing the track. Once over random atmospheric fluctuations. Every single time I had to stop my media for a manual visual check.
The false positives annoyed me, so I decreased the script’s sensitivity somewhat. I wasn’t getting paid for this. But then again, I never got paid anyway (except the time I got paid. That was strange). A few minutes later the script alerted me to unusual movement once again. I decided I wasn’t going to bother pausing anything this time, because it’s not like it takes my full attention to confirm visuals. It’s not as if I would be pursuing them, anyway; I’d been planning to take my evidence back to the orbital station so I could spend some me-time alone in a small dark room while the councilors argued over how a pacifist civilian government was supposed to hire mercenaries. So when I saw an unscheduled hopper carrying a couple of oddly lumpy shapes from the northeast, I didn’t didn’t bother to set aside my show; there was little danger because nobody was here . The few civilians with night-shifts had eventually gone home once I’d gotten exasperated and made up a story about a raging wildfire.
It was still best practice to hold at least some attention on the Targets. I had a good view of them approaching the rebottling plant, and at this angle I’d be able to get some footage of the stray hopper entering and exiting. I must have forgotten to deactivate the lookout script because it pinged me again. Still mostly watching media and already staring straight at what was obviously hopper ID3-088, I ignored it. This was extremely stupid, and I figured that out thirty one seconds later - when I noticed a personnel transport shuttle coming in from the other direction.
After descending five ladders in about fifteen seconds, I hopped over the side and dropped the last two stories. Landing on my feet, I quickly mounted the awful bike (which I hate). After crossing the industrial district, I burst into the rebottling plant with my on-board energy weapons ready to fire expecting a shootout with the added annoyance of an idiot human to protect - but there was no-one inside. There were a few shoe skidmarks and muddy footprints on the floor clearly indicating a light scuffle. More importantly, the rope was missing. Great. Now the confirmed hostiles had a civilian hostage.
—------------------
Their base was easy to find, because as dawn broke it was the only building I could see within 5 miles from the spot where they’d haphazardly hauled ID3-088 off the maglev track - an intersection with a simple dirt road. The building was squat and brown, with an antenna six times its height to its right; some kind of abandoned weather station? Radio station? I didn’t know much about long-distance communication specs and so decided to go ahead and assume the worst case scenario; namely, that the hostiles could contact allies off planet with this thing.
The windows were lit up and the early morning was still dim, so as I crept toward the building I could see dark shadows passing in front of the curtains. I decided to go around the side. True, with the gloom out here they’d just be staring at their own reflections if they pulled back the curtains - but I didn’t want to take my chances; they still had a hostage.
Around the east side of the building, they had a commercial private-use groundcar. The paint looked old, though some of the panels were newer. Probably recently repaired. I vaguely wondered what you actually had to do to get your hands on a vehicle like this on Preservation as I’d only seen one in the BoWS garage, marked for “emergency use only.” I still think sightings of mysterious gunmen count as an emergency - but what would a murderbot know about armed hostiles.
I brushed my hand over the vehicle’s hood, then reached in through the open window and (after a few wrong guesses) flicked the switch to turn on the computer. I let it know I was an automated tollbooth and asked for some basic information It was happy to tell me the groundcar’s designation (MTRM-10-5592), where it had been, and when. Deceiving simple computers like this always made me feel a little guilty, but I did have a job to do. Apparently it had made a half dozen trips to and from the launch facility. Hm.
Around the south side I found another entrance. The old lock broke easily and silently, and the hinges had more or less rusted off - but heat warping had wedged the old door firmly into the frame. By the time I was done shimmying it out, I had come to the conclusion that no building of any kind should ever be made out of whatever type of wood this was ever again.
I set the door aside and crept inside. My eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. I saw rows and rows of boxes , all packed into one tiny room, and I also saw the hostage. Wavy hair, dark brown skin, broken glasses. Here was Civilian1, who I realized needed to be redesignated as “SecurityRisk1.” As I set to work untying the shoddy knotwork I heard voices from the other side of the wall. Not in any language spoken on Preservation. The muttering was too quiet to make out anything but snippet, but I caught “Okay, what do you think we should do with them!?” It seemed taking a hostage had not been their plan.
I’d more or less figured out the operation at this point. Some small-time smuggling ring was using Preservation’s lax security and good reputation to jump past normal import checkpoints, and they were stealing from public production to lower operational costs. These boxes all had to be contraband, and they’d been using the groundcar around the side to ferry them into and out of the Preservation launch facility. SecurityRisk1 walked in on them lifting food out of the rebottling plant for the second time and they panicked.
The knots came loose. SecurityRisk1 tried to speak, but I clamped my hand over their mouth and gestured toward the exit. They gave a wide-eyed nod and slipped out of the building. Then, one of the boxes buzzed at me.
I turned toward it, instantly on edge. It was roughly cubic, a foot and a half on each side. About the side of my chest. Each wall was thick, insulated, airtight nanocomposite - it was definitely sealed such that no air could get in or out. It could be some sort of expensive satellite computer inside, designed for use in deep space. Or…
It buzzed again, so I picked it up. The response was immediate - another buzz, but this time in a high sustained whine. As I went to press my ear against the side, I realized that only five of the faces were vibrating. On a hunch I oriented the box to point the still-side face-down, and the sustained buzz stopped. I tapped the side twice, and the same side buzzed twice. I tried three times, and it immediately jumped way ahead of me; It buzzed five times. Pause. Seven times. Pause. Eleven times. Pause.
I stood still for a moment while I thought this through. It’s not that hard to spit out primes, especially the first handful - but there was a chance that whatever was inside the box (or possibly the box itself) was trying to communicate with me. I tapped out the beat to the Bonding Agent credits (What? It was still stuck inside my head.) It took a few moments, but the box was vibrating again - and it was modulating the pitch, improvising an eerie melody to match the provided rhythm. I stopped tapping, and the box fell silent. Whatever was inside this thing - fancy computer, exotic, brain-in-a-jar - it was intelligent and it was trying to talk to me. I decided I would not be allowing it to be auctioned off in a rim black market and designated it C ivilian3 . That’s when the door to the other room opened.
I designated the bewildered human Hostile1. He spent just long enough fumbling for a weapon at his belt for me to prime an onboard energy weapon and shoot both of his knees. He collapsed to the ground and I began walking backwards - Civilian3 under one arm, the other trained on the entrance. I heard a shout;
“Gevon? You okay?”
Then footsteps. A bulky human with a bigger gun (Hostile2) appeared in the doorway, prodding her fallen ally with the toe of her boot. Then she looked straight at me and managed
“Holy shit! Who the fuck are-”
I answered her with three pulses to the chest, and she staggered backward and out of sight. Why must humans always waste my time with stupid questions? Unfortunately (and unlike Hostile1) she seemed to be wearing some sort of armor that could absorb some of the heat from energy pulses; shortly afterward she was positioned just behind the door frame, taking potshots from cover. I could see her jaw subvocalizing from here; she was giving commands. Or possibly receiving them.
A shot from her energy rifle struck my shoulder. The pain would have incapacitated an unarmored civilian, but I had already turned that down in anticipation of a fight. I still didn’t know exactly how many hostiles I was dealing with, but they did not effectively prepare for a S ecUnit . (You should always prepare for a secunit). I strode forward, another few shots striking random points on my body. I wasn’t sure how the box containing Civilian3 would respond to energy fire or Civilian3 to air, so I endeavored to keep it behind me as I moved. My arm flashed around the doorframe corner and neatly broke both of Hostile2’s arms.
Someone must have been covering her from the other room, because a pulse of energy struck my arm. Still no kinetics. Maybe they were harder to get past customs? I turned on my heels and jogged out of the building to catch up with SecurityRisk1, who was curled up behind an electrical box outside.
“Th-they said they were going to kill me, unless-”
“Look. I’m not actually a ranger. I’m a mercenary the Bureau hired on to take care of this situation, and I’ve handled worse than this. I need you to calm down and do exactly as I say.”
It was close enough to the truth. SecurityRisk1 nodded and shakily rose to their feet. I guided them to the groundcar, set Civilian3 into the passenger side wheelwell, and quickly hacked past the autopilot’s firewall.
“Alright. This should hold up to energy fire. I’ve instructed it to take you back into the mixed use district, where I want you to find a crisis response center.”
Hostiles three through five came around the corner then, sprinting and shouting at one another.
“Oh my god, they’ve got the car.”
“It doesn’t matter, we can just take the hopper”
“The hopper is slow, and we fucking kidnapped them. If they get anywhere before we do…”
“Calm the fuck down. The package is blast impervious, right?”
“Uh…”
“Awesome.”
Hostile5’s arm wound back. One perfect parabola later, a shrapnel grenade landed squarely in SecurityRisk1’s lap. I grabbed the grenade and sprinted 10 feet out, shouting behind me as I did.
“Forget about the groundcar. Run.”
I dropped the grenade and dropped to the ground, but there wasn’t enough time. As I fell I felt the reinforced bones in my ankle shearing and twisting, serious burns racing up my leg, three shards of metal digging into my body. I could deal with the one in my left shoulder and the one puncturing my lung, but the shard to my gut severed the main power supply cable to my central processor. I instantly shut down.
Ninety seconds and one stuttering emergency boot later, I was abruptly reacqua inted with suffering; running half my systems off organic components at this point, I was unable to adjust my pain sensors properly. I took stock of my body first. My combat efficacy was at an abysmal 19% and it was easy to see why; my right foot had physically left the ankle. I was not looking forward to riding that bike like this. That wasn’t my only wound, of course; I had blast burns all the way up one leg, three large pieces of shrapnel wedged in my body, the range of motion on my damaged shoulder was extremely limited, and there were also five plasma bolt burns in various places which weren’t so much an issue but were still smarting. I moved to survey my surroundings.
Civilian3 was nowhere to be found, and the groundcar was gone. I could see footsteps leading away, and didn’t see any trace of blood; hopefully the hostiles allowed SecurityRisk1 to escape on foot under the assumption that if they drove straight for the launch facility, they’d be off planet before SecurityRisk1 got anywhere. I hobbled out of the building and made a resigned beeline for the bushes where I’d stashed the BoWS’ bike… When I heard something. I whirled around. There was a dust cloud in the distance, to the southwest along the dirt road, and the roar of an engine echoing over the plains. Once it came a little closer, I could make it out clearly; a real bike. A motorbike. There was also a human riding it. I was 90% sure part-time Preservation rangers did not have the power to seize civil vehicles, but then, I was 100% sure they also did not have the power to break smugglers’ arms. Oops.
I limped to the side of the dirt road and waved the cyclist down. It was pretty easy - probably because I was missing a foot and leaking fluid from multiple distinct holes.
“Holy shit. Are you even… Can I help you to uh, a… I mean, would a hospital even-”
“Yes. A hospital.”
She very graciously helped me onto the back of the vehicle, and explained how I’d have to hold onto her and position myself. Then she moved to mount the bike herself. I pushed her back to the ground as gently as possible.
“Thanks. Sorry.”
The engine roared to life and the wind whipped past me as I made for the launch facility as fast as the bike would take me. I still felt exposed, traveling without walls - but it was on the whole a much better vehicle.
—------------------
It wasn’t difficult for me to duck and weave past the hoppers and shuttles, which slowly grew denser as I approached the planet’s largest mixed-use district. It wasn’t even hard to dodge the BoWS groundcars that frantically pinged me; I guess I counted as an “emergency” now, which felt a little unfair. I ignored them; the task at hand required my full attention.
I could see MTRM-10-5592 up ahead. The bright and dark patches where panels had worn down or been replaced made it unmistakable - but so did the fact that it was (I assume) the only normal groundcar on the entire planet. As I approached, the groundcar’s back window pulled down and a rifle muzzle nosed out. I wasn’t too concerned; I could take another dozen energy blasts before I went down. No such luck; a kinetic round whizzed past me and scared me half to death. I doubted I could take a bullet at this point, and if it hit the fuel tank… Another shot, another close miss. I couldn’t afford to get any closer, or the rifleman would have a real shot. I couldn’t afford to wait, or he’d just get lucky. I needed to close the gap now! That’s when I remembered another reason I hate bikes.
I ran a few calculations to confirm. I steeled myself, smashed my good foot into the brake’s safety mechanism, and triple checked my visual calculus. I twisted my wrist and the front brake came down hard. For the second time today, I was flying over the handlebars of a bike - but this time with a very particular trajectory… At 112 kph. I immediately sailed out of the rifleman’s visual range and landed with a heavy thud on top of the groundcar. It immediately swerved, trying to throw me off, but I’d left a pretty significant dent in the thin aluminum frame on impact so even on my last legs it wasn’t that hard to hang on. I pulled my arm back, slammed my fist through the roof, grabbed the rifle’s barrel, and twisted it into a fucking pretzel. I discharged an onboard energy weapon into the cabin, which I hoped would serve as a clear instruction to stop driving. One of the hostiles screamed; another one slammed on the brakes. The groundcar screeched to a halt. The sudden deceleration whipped me around and almost sent me to the ground, but my arm was still wedged through the roof. The joints in my good shoulder and elbow did both end up dislocated , which was enough for my long suffering emergency power system to give up the ghost. The last thing I saw before I lost consciousness was a half dozen different emergency response vehicles pulling up nearby.
—------------------
I awoke on a simple medibed. It had removed the shrapnel, closed some of my wounds, and restocked the lost fluid - but I was still missing my foot, and it clearly didn't have the ability to repair my internals. Mensah and SecurityRisk1 were both there. They were talking with one another, until they realized I was awake. Mensah’s face adopted the expression which she had explained meant she was put out with me, and then she began telling me off.
“What were you thinking? Once you’d tracked these people down, you should have contacted emergency response services and waited for backup.”
“None of them are trained for a hostage situation. No-one on this planet is. You think I should have involved more civilians?”
“It doesn’t matter. We don’t have a cubicle for you, you cannot get yourself half destroyed and just walk it off anymore!”
There was a tense stretch of silence, broken by SecurityRisk1.
“W-well. I, for one, am very grateful for your heroism. And anyway, you only even had to-”
“I only had to put my life at risk and suffer tremendous damage because you couldn’t obey a simple order?”
They visibly withered, but I didn’t feel guilty. Hopefully they would remember this the next time they were in danger. I turned my attention back to Mensah.
“Mensah, is the box safe?”
“The… Box?”
“An airtight box, white composite walls. It was in the smugglers’ stash of contraband and should have been in the groundcar.”
“Do you know what’s inside?”
My speech began to slur somewhat; I needed to spend more time powered down.
“No, but I think it’s intelligent.”
Mensah seemed taken aback - but not entirely disbelieving.
“Please rest. I’ll have someone take a look.”