Exit Strategy

I was beginning to think Gurathin’s asshole expression was some congenital condition he had no control over. I said, “The more guards the better.”

He lifted his brows. “Are you going to kill them?”

Scratch that, Gurathin’s asshole expression is due to him being an asshole.

I could lie, I could say oh no, I won’t kill them, I’m a nice SecUnit. I think I was going to say that, or the more believable version of it. Instead what came out was, “If I have to.”

There was a little silence. Pin-Lee had her lips folded in and didn’t say anything. But I recognized her committed expression from my archived video, from the moment in the hopper when the satellite connection dropped, and she voted to keep going to DeltFall. Ratthi’s face was a study in conflicted resolution. Gurathin just said, “You feel you’re qualified to make that call.”

I said, “I’m the security expert. You’re the humans who walk in the wrong place and get attacked by angry fauna. I have extracted living clients from situations that were less than nine percent survivable. I’m more than qualified to make that call.”

Gurathin sat back, slowly. I stood up. “I’m going to wait in the lobby. Contact me when you make your decision.”

Pin-Lee held up a hand. “Wait, we’ve made our decision.” She looked at Ratthi. “Right?”

He set his jaw. “Right. This is GrayCris we’re talking about. They mean to kill Mensah and us, too, if they can.”

Gurathin said, “We’re agreed.”

I was already standing up. I said, “I’m going to the lobby anyway,” and left.

* * *

I wasn’t sulking or hiding. The lobby was a better strategic position.

This lobby was on multiple levels and had large square biozones depicting different ecologies, with furniture arranged around them. It looked nice, inviting humans to sit around and discuss proprietary information in the hotel’s choked feed so the hotel could record it and sell it to the highest bidder. I also had inputs monitoring the upper-level plaza entrance and the transit lobby.

I found a place to sit where a biozone showing a storm on a gas giant blocked me from the view of the other seating areas.

On the feed the humans settled some details of what I was designating as Operation Not Actually A Completely Terrible Plan.

I sent Pin-Lee a note saying they should arrange to meet the contact here, as their hotel already had GrayCris crawling all over it and so far this one was clear. Pin-Lee forwarded it to the others and they agreed. They didn’t even have anything to collect from their old room. (They were traveling light, with only a few hygiene items, Pin-Lee’s medication, Gurathin’s specialized tool kit, and Ratthi’s lucky spare interface, all of which Gurathin was carrying in a shoulder bag.)

(I thought how odd it was, that I didn’t have to worry about human stuff anymore. It felt like I’d been carrying/stepping over/climbing around human stuff in human habitations for my entire existence. Probably because I had.)

Again, it wasn’t a bad plan given our circumstances. Timing was going to be tight. I didn’t know the route GrayCris would use to bring Mensah to the meeting point. I would have to wait until they moved into range of the hotel’s security cams. Which was fine, except it didn’t leave us much time for our exit strategy, such as it was.

Then Pin-Lee said, “Are we ready?” The other two agreed. Then she called up the hotel’s in-room comm access on the display surface and made the call to their GrayCris contact.

With the comm active, I got a visual from the display surface even though I didn’t have a cam view in the room. Not that there was much to see: the GrayCris contact had the visual blanked on their end. Pin-Lee stated that she had the ransom and where she wanted Mensah brought for the exchange. GrayCris said they wanted the ransom now and would then release Mensah, blah, blah, blah, but it sounded perfunctory to me, compared to other hostage exchanges I’d witnessed. GrayCris really wanted this payoff. Pin-Lee argued for two minutes with them before they gave in, though they wanted to send a representative in first to look at the funds authorization.

After Pin-Lee closed the comm, Ratthi said, “Oh, I hope we’re doing this right.”

Gurathin said, grimly (the way he said everything, basically), “We’ll find out soon enough.”

Pin-Lee said, “It’ll be all right.” (Mensah would have made it sound reassuring; Pin-Lee obviously meant it to sound reassuring and it came out like she wanted them to just shut up.)

Gurathin came down to the lobby to wait for the GrayCris representative and took a seat in plain view on a lower platform, so stiff he looked more like a SecUnit than I did.

Well, in his defense it was a nerve-racking situation. I couldn’t risk the distraction of watching media, but I checked my storage space, and noted that I still had a comfortingly high number of episodes left in the new show I was watching. It helped, a little.

One reason I was nervous was because if this went well and I wasn’t shot to pieces, I would be seeing Mensah again.