Slapdash Neural Wiring | The Murderbot Diaries | SecUnit Nine #2 [✓]

12. Blow them all away

I had already set coordinates. When Ed Sandale entered new coordinates, the portal device recognized that he wasn't me and ignored his input, but it didn't ignore the trigger to open the portal. It was a bug; I hadn't finished reprogramming the portal device yet. So the device opened a portal at the coordinates I set. But Moiety was corkscrewing through space. And humans were so, so slow. So it wasn't quite what I intended.

The portal blossomed inside Supervisor Bailer's body. He imploded. Blood and internal organs spewed just outside Moiety's hull, where the other end of the portal had opened.

Space inhaled and bent Bailer inside himself. The portal grew to its maximum diameter.

I felt strangely calm even though it was objectively the wrong emotional response.

The room became a wind tunnel. The black sphere consumed all untethered things. Atmospheric pressure blew out Ed Sandale, then my drones. The nonstruct grabbed two of the three humans in powered armor. All four were blown out.

Distance had an inverse relationship to the portal diameter. Inside, the blackness was giant, massless. Outside, a geyser of light spewed death.

The elaborate knots held me.

It was cold and it was violent. The timer expired and the void vanished.

Air blasted into the room to reverse the depressurization. The air had been ripped from my lungs. I felt unsteady.

(Protip: If you threaten a SecUnit with its own portal device, and you press the button to make the SecUnit explode—well, you pressed the button because the SecUnit let you press it.)

The stupid ass wormhole proximity alarms went off again, which was annoying. Cy tried to squash the alert from HubSystem, but the feed was down so it went to the sound system and manually ripped out the electronic circuitry that caused the noises.

My stuff was gone.

Three of my drones had survived the blowout. I was weirdly relieved. I don't know why—maybe I was so lonely that I'd become attached to ramshackle machines running on legacy software.

Cyan came through the door from HubSystem and locked it. It hadn't needed to use the pistol, which was a relief. But I didn't ask for the weapon back.

After it was done, it smiled at me. I told Cy about the sharp object near my ankle and Cy used it to cut me out of the tether.

The portal device had been in Ed Sandale's hand when Supervisor Bailer exploded.

I thought to look through Moiety's security footage, but I didn't have it in my downloads. If footage of the blowout existed at all, it was inaccessible.

Had I...spaced three innocent humans? Had I spaced a nonstruct who had been trying to help me? There was no way they could have reasonably been expected to know what I was doing. Shit, just because I'd known what was going to happen didn't mean that the nonstruct would know what to do.

Oh.

Shit.

Cyan finished cutting me out of the tether and I had to lie on the floor to stare at the ceiling.

The nonstruct had demonstrated compassion. I had never considered that could be an option—that someone who worked in my role, someone who wasn't me, was capable of something more than a job. I had never considered that could be an option—that I wasn't alone in the universe, that my beliefs about what people who weren't either humans or bots were—or what we could become—had been shaped by media that had never been interested in portraying us. And for their compassion, I had rewarded them with a horrific death in the vast empty nothing.