The Best of Us (Galaxy's Edge: NOMAD Book 1) by Karen Traviss

Author:Karen Traviss [Traviss, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Galaxy's Edge Press
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

10

We’re in a strange limbo between knowing that nobody’s going to hear us and that everything we say and do is observed and recorded by a sentient AI. What will he do with the archive? Will he redact it, broadcast it sometime in the future, or just file it? We always think technology moves us forward, but events are just as likely to be lost to time now as they were when we scratched pictures on cave walls. Something of the reality might remain, but mostly it’ll be replaced by myth.

Captain Bridget Ingram’s log, written by hand off-site and on non-networked paper

Level U4 Storage, Ainatio Park Research Centre:

Mid-May, 20 Hours Before the First Landing on Opis

I might try a combat engineer unit today.

Who knows when I might need it?

Solomon knew exactly where every piece of experimental equipment was mothballed, its service status, and all its movements and activities during its operational life. Today he decided to get more experience of moving in a much larger bot than the battered red utility quad that he’d come to regard as his alter ego.

Level U4, deep in the underground storage area, was almost a museum of mobile autonomous robotics. Solomon wandered up and down the rows, admiring the collection of industrial and military prototypes that Ainatio had developed over the last one hundred and fifty years. From intelligent mobile artillery units to survey snakes to restraint bots that could scoop up an injured human or immobilise a suspect, they stood in ranks like a metallic version of Qin Shi Huang’s terracotta army.

One of the combat units caught his eye. It wasn’t the most elegant machine, more of a roadblock on legs, but it was definitely a useful one to have in a hostile environment. He looked up at it as it towered more than a metre over his quadrubot. It was a combat engineer that could excavate, build, demolish, smash openings, and defend itself under fire with its own armaments. The only aspect that didn’t fit its rugged image was its extra pair of limbs — delicate precision manipulators for EOD and other fiddly jobs.

Solomon settled into it, flexing and turning the manipulators, and learned what it felt like to have six limbs instead of four.

No, he probably didn’t need this battlefield frame, but it made him feel... safer. Trinder had told him to watch his back with Erskine, because she’d had an odd conversation with Marc and Tev. But the chat was equally plausible as the housekeeping concerns of a CEO faced with shutting down a site full of secrets, chemicals, and pathogens.

Nothing to worry about at all.

Really. Nothing.

So this was what paranoia felt like. It wasn’t pleasant. Doubts piled up and forked off of each other, threatening to trap his thoughts in a loop. He considered where the line lay between readiness for any danger in a world full of risks and letting himself be warped by imagining that Erskine was out to get him.

Are we friends again? Of course we are, Director.

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