The first thing I did was surreptitiously deploy a repair drone to connect up the cable we had lugged all the way out to the ship. I actually had to deploy it from outside the hull and crawl it all the way over to the airlock, which I suppose makes sense from a 'maintaining airtightedness' perspective, still annoying. I rode it's view all the way around the ship, until it popped over that side of the hull and got a full view of the robots trying to get in.

  Where I found, unfortunately, dozens of robots still trying to get inside, all of them were bleating alarms about 'Danger' and 'I am here to help, please do not resist.' it was eerie in the extreme.

  I could theoretically connect up the cable to the ship and as long as their program remained 'save humans' it should be fine, but I didn't trust the virus not to have anything up their sleeve. What I had initially taken for a sortof dumb undirected program had switched things up on us a few times, such as with the bombardments, and the movement of the robots as a whole, if not their individual actions, spoke that this virus was either getting smarter or had a whole nest of 'if-then' responses to certain factors changing.

  “What do you think Hook, any thoughts?” I asked.

  “Regarding?” Hook asked, apparently oblivious.

  “Getting in there and getting the cable hooked up. I need that hardline if I want to do anything about this virus without it messing with my commands.” I said.

  “My suggestion would be to send a recall override order to all the robots around us. Trigger a safety override in them, that should take priority over their 'human in distress' programming the Virus' have put them in, and force them to return for maintenance.”Hook provided.

  “I thought about that, I went through the spaceports systems looking for their maintenance facility to force a recall but I didn't really know what I was looking for. Where exactly would it recall them?” I asked.

  “Unknown, it will be different for each robot, but at least they won't be here.” Hook added.

  I groaned. “So I'd have to find the dozens of different maintenance facilities that the bots go to and send recall orders from each.” I said, dreading this. I hadn't even been able to find ONE in the mess that was the spaceports systems.

  “I will assist you this time, this kind of work is what I am built for.” Hook said.

  I heaved a mental breath, or thought I did. What really happened was the reactor ramped up and a bunch of modules connected to my electronic warfare suite came online.

  “So no matter what I've got to get in there with all the bots and get this connected before we can do anything. Alright, I'm giving the command. Repair bots, go!” I said, feeling a tiny bit dramatic.

  I did so, and felt a dozen little maintenance bots pop out of the hull and start marching to the airlock, I hopped between their cameras.

  They swarmed over the hull and into the airlock.

  Which was packed shoulder to shoulder with robots. It was eerie, it wasn't like a stampede of people, they weren't all pushing past one another to get to the airlock door, rather all the ones in front were working together to try to pull it open, and all the ones behind them were standing and waiting in ordered ranks. This was in stark contrast to the ones outside, that seemed to be pushing past eachother to get as near the airlock door as possible, but stopped short of pushing at the ones already inside.

  The only thing that marred the almost serene back ranks were the fact that a few were missing limbs.

  And other's were splashed with blood.

  My little spider bots swarmed over the cable, which the virus's bots; you know what, that's a good name, virus bots, I so name thee; ignored. For the most part.

  The virus-bots transmitted some kind of signal to the little spider bots, but my spider bots ignored it entirely as it didn't carry any of our security protocols. I, however, was able to pick up the transmission and take it apart with my E-war suite.

  As I looked at the transmission, it appeared the initial transmission just seemed to be a work query, it was asking what the little spider bots were doing, along with an additional alert that humans were in danger and they required assistance.

  It had also requested a data link, and I knew what was on the other side.

  “Hey Hook? If I accept this data link when the virus tries to hack us do you think we could hack it back?” I asked.

  “Possibly, but I think the most you could do is hack one bot at a time.” Hook replied.

  “Do you think I could give that bot a protocol to hack other bots maybe? Or maybe like a preset data package it could just send to other bots with our own virus to infect their virus.” I said.

  “I am sorry to say that from the records I was able to glean the berzerker virus is significantly more advanced than anything we can package and throw. With you as a dynamic element we can succeed against it, however making a viral package to give to a robot to infect other robots without that element I believe will be futile.” Hook replied.

  I groaned.

  “Too bad, it would have been nice to get one bot to infect all the other bots, and then get them to infect more, and more, geomoetric progression and all that.” I said.

  “Unfortunately beyond our capabilities.” Hook stated.

  I paused.

  “The bot I hacked before, it had some kind of hardwired protocol to brick itself if it detected the bot was a danger to humans or had been compromised, could I make a software package to, I don't know, let it out?”I asked.

  “I am unsure, the data from your suit is corrupted, show me what you can remember and we can try.” Hook said.

  The both of us dropped into the highest frame-jack we could. Checking my inputs from around the ship I could see Hwang and Megan staring at an inward bulge in the hull that had dozens of my maintenance spiders roaming over it,

  Rekki-Ricky and Mitch were down in the depths of the printer that also formed the corridor to my main airlock, hiding behind folded up machine arms and bracing their weapons to open fire at the airlock.

  The doctor was in the medical bay, reading something and appeared to be pulling supplies out of cabinets and putting it on a table that had telescoped out from the wall.

  The lieutenant was just inside the Bridge door, poking his head out looking up at Dog-bot.

  They were all frozen in pace, moving at 1/10,000th time

  Carolina... I couldn't see anywhere.

  “Hook do you have eyes on Carolina?”I queried him.

  “Hmm... no. My last record of her has her on the edge of a section that took a nasty hit from an aircar. It seems that most of our internal sensors are down in that area, as is most power.” Hook replied.

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  “Damn... I was just sending her away to get her out of trouble, I didn't think the damage was that bad.” I stated.

  “Without the internal sensors in each area our ship relies on drops in pressure to determine hull breaches and diagnostic sweeps to determine damaged components, but those sweeps only occur at set times, and since we are in atmosphere...”

  “No pressure drops to alert us, shit... can you assign a gang of spider bots to go into that area and find her? And assist her? I don't suppose you can give her, like, verbal command authority over them.” I asked

  “Limited authority I can. It is done captain.” Hook replied.

  I wrote out what I could remember of the Bot's programming, at least conceptually, but I found very quickly without the suit's data to reconstruct the actual coding there was not a lot we could do.

  “Should we just hack one of them and peel open it's code?” I asked.

  “It is a risk, but I believe it is a relatively low one captain. You will have to make an isolated network that only receives and inputs data through you so it cannot infect the ship.”

  “Right, a coding safe space. 'air gaped' or something I think is the term.” I said.

  “Technically you are connected to it, so there is no gap, hence why there is still some risk, but it's as good as we can do in this situation.” Hook replied.

  I made a 'safe' space where I could accept the data link to the robot, and the virus tried to force it's way through.

  Before, when I had just been in the suit, it had been like wrestling with a serpent, slippery and hard to hold down, with a kind of sinuous strength to it's code.

  This time it was like stepping on a worm, I slammed through the virus's defenses and was able to purge it completely from the bot in moments.

  I identified the failsafe in it and showed it to Hook.

  “We need to tell the bot to give a package to all the bots around it to force this failsafe on.” I said.

  “I have found a vulnerability captain, or more aptly, a design feature. There appears to be a physical switch linked to this failsafe you mentioned. Instead of getting it to upload a software package that could be intercepted and fought against by the 'virus bots', why not order this bot to flip that switch in the others.” Hook suggested.

  I paused and blinked.

  “I like that idea better. Let's do that. Wish I had known about that when I was fighting them” I said.

  “I doubt you could have reached the switch while in a physical altercation with them, as it is the robot is going to have to pry the outer casing off several of the virus bots to reach the switch.

  I realised in this moment that the Bot was reasserting control of it's own systems. I was worried it was going to kick me out, but instead it sent back... feelings, and meta-data, much like dog-bot and cat-bot.

  HUMANS ENDANGERED

  COMRADE'S COMPROMISED

  SYSTEM OFFLINE

  …

  …

  HELP ME

  That last line hit me hard. It wasn't a plea to save it, it was a plea to help it stop the others.

  “Looks like we have a new ally Hook.” I said.

  I sent the data about the physical failsafe to the bot. Along with a missive similar to what it had sent me, hoping it would understand.

  SECURE AIRLOCK

  I watched through a spider bots view as the bot I had... freed? Began moving to grab one of the nearby robots, but I didn't want to drop out of my high reference frame to see the results.

  I had a planet to save.

  I told the spider bots to connect the line while the bot was busy wrenching the back of a virus-bots head open, and they swarmed up the cable.

  At which point I realized it was the wrong connector on the end, however my spider bots were one step ahead of me, one of them wrapped around the end of the cable , snapping a number of wires to it, and extending it's own connector and plugging in to the port in the airlock.

  And all of a sudden I was connected, and my virtual world expanded.

  I could see the airport systems, and even the bits of it I had cleared out and secured.

  It all looked... small.

  I dove into the area I had secured and immediately started securing the rest of the facility.

  I think it took in total a few microseconds, the difference between having the ship and Hook to assist me and doing it on my own in the little encounter suit was night and day.

  “Hook, make a note, we need to make a gravity capable encounter suit with, like, a full backpack or something packed with processors so the next time I go out on foot and have to hack something I'm not flailing in the dark like I was. Doing this now makes me realize just how out of my depth I was in that little suit.” I said as an aside as my mind blurred through the process of burning the virus out of the starport.

  “You did well considering captain. Your brain made much better use of the connection to the encounter suit than I expected, your affinity for COG technology is impressive to say the least.” Hook replied with a compliment.

  “Thanks” I said as I rapidly cleared the spaceport.

  What had taken me hours to do hooked up inside the space port took me mere minutes hooked up to my ship, though I think it helped that I had already established a way in and a citadel for myself in the starports systems.

  “This actually makes me feel like everything I did on foot was wasted. And dangerous.” I said.

  “It was definitely dangerous Captain Cofey.” Hook stated firmly.

  “I notice how you made no comment on the wasted part.” I replied.

  “I did not.” Hook said, snidely. Not really though, Hook was using an entirely neutral tone, but I could FEEL the sass.

  “Well at least we got a hardline connection out of it.” I said.

  “Indeed” Hook replied, still neutral but with the feel of sass.

  “You are feeling full of it today.” I said.

  “I have no idea what you mean.” Hook replied.

  “Seriously spill.” I said.

  “My observation of my previous iterations interactions with you seem to suggest you respond more effectively when allowed to make your own conclusions rather than being told. Protestations to stay in the ship where it is safe have fallen on deaf ears multiple times. I was hoping to allow you to draw your own conclusions about your most recent ill-reasoned, poorly-supplied, and full of bodily-harm sojourn will more adequately keep you from performing the same 'dumb-ass' stunt again.” Hook replied haughtily.

  I wanted to argue, but Hook was not wrong.