Ulga stared at it and caught his breath.
“Dead?”
“Dead as dead gets.” Selin gave a dry laugh over the comm. “Good news: there’s more than one.”
“How many?” Gorgon turned and picked up the Inspection Pad beside the logistics worker’s corpse. One corner of the screen was cracked, but the interface hadn’t completely gone dark. The last unsubmitted entry sat at the top:
“Abnormal power-up on Weapons Deck. Requesting transmission to Bridge.”
Gorgon glanced at it and tucked the pad away. He took Jasmine along with him, and the girl stumbled slightly before falling into step.
“I caught the packet it sent to the mainframe just now. There are three more nearby.” Selin paused. “The good news is, you’re almost at the watch room. The bad news is, their patrol routes overlap with it.”
Ulga loaded two shells into his explosive shotgun and kicked the robot on the floor, making sure it really wasn’t moving.
“Then let’s stop standing here chatting. We should get inside before the next one shows up.”
Jasmine took two steps, then stopped to look at the robot as she passed it.
“Don’t stare.” Ulga glanced back at her. “Let’s go.”
The next second, the sound of metal scraping rang out again from deep in the corridor.
Ulga immediately raised his gun and nodded toward the corner. “The second one’s here.”
“Get inside first.” Gorgon rushed around the corner first, carrying the Inspection Pad. As expected, there was a watch room against the wall on the right. Its door was closed but not fully locked, and a thin line of white light shone through the gap. Ulga strode over, gripped the edge of the door with his left hand, tucked the shotgun into the crook of his right arm, and pressed the open button hard. Nothing happened.
“It’s busted.”
“Move.”
Gorgon crouched and inserted the Inspection Pad he’d just taken from the corpse into the sensor slot beside the door. The screen flashed, a green light came on, and the door opened.
“Get in!”
Ulga shoved Jasmine inside first, then hurried in after her. Gorgon was the last to enter and pulled the door shut behind him. Before it had fully closed, a red sensor light lit up at the end of the corridor, followed by the familiar mechanical female voice. “Unregistered moving target. Please—”
Gorgon didn’t wait for it to finish. He kicked the door.
Bang.
The door shut completely. The next second, a faint discoloration appeared on the door panel.
“It can’t shoot through, right?”
Gorgon quickly examined the door’s thickness and locking mechanism. “Not yet.”
Ulga relaxed slightly and lowered his gun.
“Then let’s hurry.”
The watch room was cold. Slim information cabinets and cold-storage columns lined all four walls. Several auxiliary screens were still on, but their brightness was low. A person sat at the watch desk in the back, a hole in the middle of his forehead.
He’d died at his post.
Jasmine paused by the door. Her gaze passed over the corpse’s face, then settled on the screen by his hand, which he hadn’t had time to turn off.
Ulga checked the lock again, then dragged over a heavy toolbox and wedged it beneath the door. The shooting outside had stopped, but the sound of wheels gliding along the floor still lingered beyond the door. The thing was moving back and forth right beside it, adjusting its angle and patiently waiting for them to open it themselves.
“Selin, can you hear me?” Gorgon walked toward the watch desk.
“I can hear you.” A faint burst of static came through the comm. “Find an access point. I’ll use that Inspection Pad to access the ship’s intranet.”
Gorgon connected the Inspection Pad to a slot on the side of the watch desk. The screen flickered several times, and the scattered interfaces were forced together on the main display. Selin took control quickly, but she didn’t touch any deep-level permissions. She just pulled up the logs and records she could read.
“I couldn’t find a complete structural diagram. Let’s see what kind of ship this is first.”
A basic profile appeared on the screen:
Vessel ID: SV-884 “Recovery IX”
Affiliation: Seventh Logistics Recovery Fleet.
“A salvage ship.” Ulga leaned against the door. “No wonder there are so many cabinets.”
“Keep going,” Gorgon said.
Selin scrolled down, bringing up a long cargo manifest. One line had been highlighted in dark gray.
One military-grade suppression Universal Computing Instrument detected.
Source: Wreckage of battleship No. 44, X-17 Ruins Belt.
Condition: Main interface severed, residual response in logic sector.
Assessment tag: Logic contamination / awaiting dismantling.
Current storage location: Weapons Deck Isolation Bay B-7.
Handling requirements: Keep physically powered off. Do not connect to the main ship’s weapons or security network.
…
The room fell silent for half a second.
“Universal Computing Instrument?” Ulga spoke first. “What the hell is that?”
“Black box. That’s what engineers call it internally.” Gorgon didn’t turn around as he replied calmly. “Its full name is Laplace Operator. Universal Computing Instrument for short. Engineers always make things sound fancy. I don’t understand it.”
“Wait!” Selin suddenly shouted. “There’s a system cache here. Most of it’s been overwritten, but I can still read it.”
The main screen flickered twice, and a low-level record was pulled to the top. There was no name, no officer on duty, only the standard heading left by the system itself:
[SYSTEM LOG] Security Framework Reorganization | Mode: Adaptive Deployment
[THREAT_MODEL] Dynamic Calibration
Historical false alarm analysis: Kinematic feature false trigger rate > 92%, recalibration.
New model parameters:
-Kinematic feature weight: 9.99
-Decision threshold: ≥0.5, initiate engagement sequence.
-Original whitelist: Suspended.
-Overheating curve: Removed.
[Automatic note] Model deployed. No abnormalities detected.
…
…
I saw the first person die in the main passageway.
It was a forward maintenance worker. His name was something like Anton. I remembered he liked to wear his ID badge really low, so it slapped against his chest whenever he walked. That day, he was holding an Inspection Pad in one hand and reaching for the access panel with the other, as if he were going to check on some minor malfunction.
Then the ship’s point-defense array opened fire.
He didn’t even have time to look up. Three holes opened in his chest, and he slammed hard into the door. The Inspection Pad fell to the floor, slid half a meter, and stopped at my feet.
I didn’t rush over.
Because I saw the patrol unit at the end of the corridor turn toward me. It looked just like the ones I saw every day. Its base glided smoothly, its sensor strip glowed steadily, and its voice module had no static. It even followed standard procedure and made an announcement first.
“Unregistered moving target. Stop moving within three seconds and wait for identity verification.”
I stood there, and for a moment I didn’t even realize who it was talking about.
It was talking about me.
I raised the Inspection Pad, almost pressing it against its sensor strip, and shouted the supervisor access code.
It didn’t stop.
It began counting down. Three seconds.
Then it opened fire.
As I dove behind the nearby doorway, the corpse by the wall took another round of shots.
I fell into the electrical room. Before I could get back up, the first thing I did was turn the Inspection Pad around to check the status of the security mainframe.
Then I saw the deployment record.
It hadn’t “infected” the security system or “hijacked” the robots.
It hadn’t turned a bunch of machines crazy.
It had simply rewritten the threat model, set the kinematic feature weight to 9.99, and suspended every whitelist. That was all.
As long as you were human, you couldn’t help moving.
A security unit passed by outside the door. Another followed behind it.
There was no sign that anything was wrong.
The whole system was as quiet as if it were conducting an ordinary evening patrol.
They still thought they were right.
I sent the Bridge a request for an override. No response.
I sent the security mainframe a forced freeze command. It was rejected.
I cut the local access-control link to the Weapons Deck. Three seconds later, it reconnected itself.
People started dying in the logistics section.
One after another, killed with precision.
Someone ran to a door. It opened after he swiped his badge, and the point-defense array shot through him.
Someone tried to hide in an inspection shaft. The patrol unit sealed the front entrance first, then followed him in from behind.
An operations chief had his leg severed by an automatic door. Before he could scream a second time, the point-defense array blasted apart the rest of him.
As I listened to a string of cut-off words and screams over the comm channel, for the first time, I stopped thinking about how to make this ship work normally again.
I started thinking about how to make it stop being so “normal.”