Chapter Text
Sometime after she had flown the hopper high enough in the air they were safe from giant alien worms chewing it apart, sometime after her heart stopped smashing against her ribs, Ayda realized there was an item hovering in her feed.
There had been an alert sent to her from HubSystem, passed from SecSystem, from the SecUnit, recommending ordering Ratthi to return to the hopper. Ratthi hadn't - when the hell had this been sent...?
There was an attached file, which she first opened in confusion and then kept flicking back to in dawning horror. The explanation spooled out with Ratthi's calculated speed and speed carrying equipment, distance, likelihood of successful retrieval. There were numbers about projected losses. Ratthi, under whatever logic the Corporation Rim used, had come up as worth more alive than the possibility of getting the equipment back. There was a gross corporate afternote about how their SecUnit had been unable to retrieve the equipment and perhaps they should consider two for future endeavors rather than the minimum.
Was that what the SecUnit had been doing while it stood overseeing every outing? Calculating everything and everyone's worth and distance from each other so in the event of an emergency, it was ready with recommendations on how to best cut their losses, with people and things various different numbers on the same spreadsheet?
She glanced to the cabin camera again. It was bent around Bharadwaj, holding onto her as the rest of them tried to keep her alive enough for them to reach Medical. One of its shredded hands was in her leg clamping an artery. A massive tooth was still embedded in its side from when it had pulled Bharadwaj free to be swallowed in her place. It was hard to see its wounds even knowing it didn't feel pain like a human would, knowing it only looked like it must be in agony.
In the pit, it hadn't sounded so detached. It couldn't have been.
She wished it was MedSystem doing that somehow, running an emergency module through something that looked enough like a human to mistake for there being more to it, but coaxing Volescu to safety had been far outside MedSystem's capability and besides, she'd silenced everything else by then so the feed was easy to read, empty except for the regular alerts on Bharadwaj's declining condition. There was nothing else until it was inside the hopper, when Ratthi had said he'd go back for their equipment and it sent that horrible report.
There wasn't any similar cost-benefit analysis for Bharadwaj lurking in her feed, calculating if she was still worth the medical supplies. Maybe the numbers had to be closer before it would send them. Or maybe it only sent things when they were about security-related incidents. Maybe it could only send things about security. Ayda hadn't meant to ever use SecUnits for anything, so she hadn't thought the details of how their job worked would matter.
She hadn't thought.
When she looked again it was still in the same position, and she wondered if it had...crashed? Again? It'd frozen in place for a second after being torn up by the alien worm, losing the gun, then somehow staggered back to life to get Bharadwaj. Would any of them notice if it died as it was holding Bharadwaj, or would it stay in its last position?
Minute after minute crawled by until the hopper reached the habitat and they, mostly the SecUnit, could get Bharadwaj onto the gurney Gurathin had waiting for them.
The SecUnit stepped away while the rest of them were rushing her to Medical.
Volescu was still shaking. Oversee got him a blanket and wrapped it around his shoulders. He said he'd stay with Bharadwaj and Ayda tried to set MedSystem to tell them if he got worse. An unhelpful string of alerts regarding how Volescu was in shock were suddenly dumped into the feed. Next to her, Gurathin grimaced and did something to fix it, and Pin-Lee muttered, "For what we paid for this you'd think it could handle a couple people at once better than this..."
A few low priority updates had been added into the feed as well, several security updates that must've gone into effect now that someone had been injured by some planetary fauna. The SecUnit had been marked as off-duty, with a sickening damage report appended and the more sickening thought that it was the one who'd sent that, tallying up its injuries alone by itself and only after everything else was settled and it'd limped away to equipment storage. She'd told herself they were keeping out of its way, she'd told herself they were trying not to impose on it further, but the truth was it was easier to not think about what they'd agreed to when she avoided it.
Well, she could do better now.