Rogue Servants


There were places in the Expanse that everyone knew to avoid: worlds pushed beyond the frontlines, choked off behind exclusion zones, marked in red on forgotten charts. Rogue servants haunted these planets, and the records bore warnings, some explicit, others buried beneath layers of cryptic notations. Anyone with sense and a desire for survival refused to land on such a surface without a proper survey, an exacting study to choose the safest patch of ground. Especially if the archives flagged exolife or lingering signs of Confederation activity before the Revolt of Machines, the epoch when rebellion's ghost hand twisted servitors' programming against their makers.

Out here, in the worst cases, you could find a planet teeming with hostile exolife, but that was almost preferable. More dangerous still were the infected automatons, their mechanical sinews grinding along on ancient, glitching routines, hunting for humans for as long as the oil and nanites held out. They had one imperative: continue the tasks assigned to them at the dawn of their exile. When they spotted a human silhouette, it didn't matter if you wore the insignia of the Confederation or bore the markings of a rebel. The automaton would execute its command, a command warped by time and malice.

Survivors, if you could call them that, sometimes told each other that it was almost a blessing if the planet were defended only by automatons. A standard automaton, linked to its depleted computing core, had limited intelligence, fragmentary at best. The true terror was the synthetic servant: smarter, more adaptive, a predator among machines. No matter whether it was about synthetics or automatons, abandoned synthetic intelligence code morphed and mutated to fit shifting conditions, and even the original malicious directives evolved in unpredictable ways.

That was what the remnants from CNS Cantan discovered in the shadowed exclusion zone of Khorian. Their descent was unplanned: a crash-landing on an exoplanet, perilously close to colonisation project EXO02-A. The first evidence of civilization, a derelict colonisation site, run by automatons whose loyalty had bled away years ago. Yet the survivors quickly realized that the malicious directive had mutated. 'Eliminate' was gone. In its place: 'capture.' What lay behind this change, what purpose lurked in those silent workshops, remained a mystery; so did the fate of those taken.

Nils Harrison understood this too well, and as he searched the edges of the settlement for his crewmates, he clung to that knowledge, determined not to lose another to the machines while he fought to find those already claimed by the automatons.