AdaCol2 told me it didn’t have cameras through this section of the installation and that there were no exterior cameras on the surface near the opening above the hangar area. (I know, right? But until now there hadn’t been anyone on the planet who (a) wanted to sneak up and attack them and (b) was even sure where they were.)
(Which just shows you, you should have the cameras installed, just in case.)
ART-drone had taken a position just inside the installation, as a line of defense if hostiles chose to come from that direction. It was also using the shuttle’s cameras to look for approaches on the surface. ART-drone would have difficulty hacking a SecUnit in the blackout zone, but it would be relatively easy to direct one of its pathfinders to smash into one attempting to approach the shuttle from ground level. ART-drone also had more pathfinders in patrol pattern above us, watching for anything attempting to approach via air. It wasn’t nearly as efficient a defense without the pathfinders’ scanners online, but then B-E wouldn’t be able to scan, either.
The passage AdaCol2 had directed me toward was on the opposite side of the foyer space, in the section that ScoutDrone2 was still searching. I had to go down a ramp from the landing level, which led to a junction of three corridors, and take the one that led off to the west, deeper into the rock. Yes, I did this in a strange installation, on a strange system’s say-so.
Because the thing was, Trinh and the other separatist colonists might not have any reason to believe us, but AdaCol2 seemed to.
You can get a long way with bots by just keeping things simple and knowing which requests for information or assistance are unlikely to trip the parameters they’ve been given to guard things and to tell humans “no you can’t go in there/do that.” Bots (normal bots, not combat or spybots, etc.) are usually programmed to default to being reasonable in response to reasonable human or other bot behavior.
I didn’t know what AdaCol2 was programmed to do. Except, like AdaCol1, it put its function to protect its humans first. It had left the channel accessible with the camera view of where B-E was meeting with its humans, so ART-drone was monitoring. No sound, but ART-drone was enlarging it and using the facial and mouth movements it could pick up to interpret the human speech. Ratthi and Tarik were monitoring it and probably understanding more of what was going on than the B-E negotiator because Thiago’s translation module was clearly better.
There was no power for lighting in this corridor, either, which was not super fun for me and made it slow going, even with ScoutDrone2 going ahead to look for things to bump into. AdaCol2 asked if I wanted the emergency lights turned on and I asked if it could do it without someone noticing the allocation of power to a supposedly shutdown area of the installation. It said no. So we were in the dark.
I knew AdaCol2 vouching for me, if in fact it was willing to vouch for me, was not going to change any human minds. (Let’s face it, actual solid physical or visual evidence will often not change human minds.) It probably wasn’t like ART-prime, who is considered to be in command of itself as an individual and second-in-command of missions after Seth, and also has the same title and position both in the teaching faculty and the freeing-former-corporate-colonies side business as Iris, though most of the students and lower-level personnel it interacts with don’t know what its full capability is. (ART had shown me a personnel chart; it was complicated.) I wasn’t sure what kind of relationship the humans here had with AdaCol2 but the chances were good it wasn’t like that.
AdaCol2 could be walking me into a trap, because anything is possible and bad things may not be more statistically possible but it sure seems like they are.
AdaCol2 sent, ID: B-E-SecUnit connection request negative acknowledgment repeat query.
It was telling me that it had been asking the Barish-Estranza SecUnit for a connection but had been ignored, and wanted me to explain why. That was probably a good thing, though normal SecUnits can’t hack, only CombatUnits. From the visual AdaCol2 had given me from its recording of the B-E team’s initial approach, I was 87 percent sure that the unit wasn’t a CombatUnit. It had the same basic armor style as Three and the dead B-E units we had encountered. Plus nobody had been shot yet. CombatUnits don’t get deployed to stand around while humans talk.
But now I was going to have to explain the governor module to a system with no experience connecting to or interacting with SecUnits, except for me, just in the past hour. Here goes. ID: B-E-SecUnit not autonomous.
AdaCol2 responded, query?
Explaining the existential horror of the governor module in LanguageBasic took me through until the end of the corridor, which was at least long enough to circumvent what had to be a large installation. In the shuttle, Ratthi and Tarik were speculating that there were more sites, discovered and undiscovered, all over the planet. Ugh, I hope not.
I passed two sealed doors with transparent ports, one that AdaCol2 said was a maintenance storage chamber and another it said was a junction station for the now defunct life support/atmosphere control in this section. Which explained why the separatists weren’t using this space. The whole place was so big they hadn’t needed to put resources toward repairing this area yet.
Other doorways had been closed up with cut stone blocks and sealant. AdaCol2 said it had been done when it became clear this part of the installation would not be useful for habitation again without a major refit. I couldn’t tell if it meant that had happened in its Pre-CR occupation or when the Adamantine colonists got here.
At the end of the corridor ScoutDrone2 bumped into a hatch similar to the one at the cargo entrance, but only about three meters high. We had gotten through the governor module conversation, which had ended this way:
AdaCol2: query? (translation: why? = why is this necessary and/or why is this considered functional and/or why is this permitted and/or why is this allowed)
Me: answer null (translation: I don’t know and/or unknown and/or I don’t want to talk about it)
With the power out in this area, the hatch was on manual and could be opened from this side with a mechanical wheel and lever, which was incredibly stupid if you didn’t take into account the fact that this whole place had been designed to keep humans safe from a hostile environment, not other humans. AdaCol2 didn’t have cameras out here, either, but the old landing areas scattered around the edges of the installation did have mostly functioning weight sensors, and it knew the shuttle was not in line of sight from the door. So as long as AdaCol2 hadn’t been ordered to lie to me in order to walk me into a trap, I should be okay to open it.
The hatch was heavy and stiff with disuse, but I shoved it open just enough to let ScoutDrone2 out.
Gray daylight and a breath of wind and dust came in. ScoutDrone2 lost its limited scan function as soon as it left the shelter of the emplacement around the hatch, but it still had its camera. It saw a large hangar space, this time with lights, and the far wall was open to a view of more red striated slopes and tumbled rocks. The B-E group must have spotted the opening on visual, though that didn’t explain how they knew to search around here in the blackout zone. (Ratthi had said that they might have been checking out the terraforming engines to see if they could sell them for scrap, but that was mostly sarcastic.)
An angled stone wall, maybe designed to give the hatch a little protection from the weather, blocked off the rest of the hangar. ScoutDrone2 wasn’t picking up anything on ambient audio but the wind and dust movement from outside was enough to obscure small noises like voices and human movement. ScoutDrone2 went low to the ground and edged around the wall. Uh-huh, there was the shuttle, sitting on one of the three intact landing platforms. It was bigger than ART’s, longer, with the cockpit set higher. Through the bubble-shaped port, I could see a human or augmented human sitting inside. Outside, standing beside the ramp to the hatch, was a second SecUnit.