Exit Strategy

On the way to RaviHyral, ART had said that PreservationAux was my crew. I don’t know if ART was being naive or it thought I was. Okay, maybe I was naive enough at the time to think it might be a little true. Then after RaviHyral, I had given up on the idea. Then I had somehow decided I would get evidence for Mensah from Milu and I had seen Don Abene when Miki … died and for a while I was back to the “maybe it was a little true” point again.

But sitting here in a hotel lobby, watching a biozone and running every not-a-SecUnit behavioral code I had, the fantasy fell apart. The hard reality was that I didn’t know what Mensah was to me.

Even after Miki, I still didn’t want to be a pet robot.

Up in the room, Pin-Lee was pacing slowly and trying not to grind her teeth and Ratthi had gone to the bathroom three times. Gurathin was just sitting and staring. Then he said over the feed, Are you there, SecUnit?

No, I left, I said, I’ve decided to live here and just move from hotel to hotel, watching the entertainment feed.

Okay, so that did sound like a much better idea than I meant it to.

There was a pause, then he said, I’m not your enemy. I’m just cautious.

I don’t care about your opinion, I said, and then immediately wished I’d put myself on a one-second delay so I could delete it. It made it sound like I did care. Which I didn’t.

One minute crawled by. Then two. Gurathin said, What did you do, while you were gone? Where did you go?

I didn’t want to answer, because I didn’t want to talk about it, but it seemed weirdly petty to just ignore him. I pulled a selection of video from the trip with Ayres and the others on the way to HaveRatton, mostly exchanges I’d tagged so I could critique my performance later. (A few times I’d broken up fights, been forced to give relationship advice, and the infamous Cracker Wrapper in the Sink Incident.) I cut it together, labeled it “Murderbot Impersonates an Augmented Human Security Consultant,” and sent it to Gurathin.

He was still watching it when the GrayCris representative walked into the lobby from the main entrance.

There was nothing physical to set him apart from the other humans and augmented humans wandering in and out. He was a tall pale human, with long light-colored hair, and he was wearing one of the many local variations of business attire: a dark long-sleeved jacket that went to the knees, over wide pants.

I tapped Gurathin and he stopped the video play.

The GrayCris rep paused and a flash of annoyance crossed his face. He’d encountered the choked hotel feed. The hotel system registered the charge to a station credit account and then gave him access. I caught the results of the routine scan from the hotel’s security drone: no weapons, just interface activity. A brief analysis of the drone’s read gave me a 65 percent probability that he had something on him to falsify the scan. So he was probably armed and probably carrying a secured comm device.

I had access to his feed but I didn’t figure it would do much good. If he had a device on him to fake readings for a security scan, then he had to know a choked hotel feed was hardly the best place for operational communication.

It was the hypothetical secured comm device I had to worry about. Whatever it was, it would need to use the hotel’s relay to reach the station’s comm network.

The GrayCris rep did a visual scan of the lobby and obviously recognized Gurathin, probably from intel obtained by GrayCris on Port FreeCommerce. He went toward Gurathin, who stood to meet him. He said, “Gurathin? I’m Serrat, here at the request of Pin-Lee.” He was calm, confident, with a hint of a friendly smile.

Gurathin’s asshole effect must come in handy at times like this. With a deeply unimpressed expression, he said, “This way,” and started toward the pod junction.

I tapped Pin-Lee and Ratthi to warn them, and continued a visual sweep for hostiles. Like those two humans, strolling casually through the main entrance, casually pausing to casually look around, then casually proceeding to the stairs that led to the lounge/food service area. (Right, so they really weren’t that bad, but I’d been sitting here long enough to analyze the traffic patterns. Humans who walk in looking for something, or are genuinely confused about where to go next, tended to move in erratic ways, their attention caught by the biozones, the feed indicators for the ramp that takes you to the registration area, etc. Compared to that, the hostiles were easy to spot.)

Maybe too easy? The hotel drone scan came back negative, but with that same suspicious pattern as the GrayCris rep. (It was suspicious to me; I’ve fooled a lot of drone scans.)