Exit Strategy

I marked two more potential hostiles exiting a pipe capsule in the transit lobby, and a check-in with my friends the plaza drone cams showed more outside the hotel’s plaza entrance.

Yeah, I had a bad feeling about that, too. But I was still monitoring the security system, and there were no alerts, no anomalous signals.

I meant to stay here until the exchange was arranged, but now I got up and headed for the pod junction. I had one input riding Gurathin’s feed. He and Serrat had just stepped out of the pod. Gurathin had made the whole trip awkwardly silent. I was reluctantly impressed.

I was in the pod and at the right section by the time Gurathin and Serrat reached the room. There was no cover in the corridor, so I told the pod to hold and notify hotelEnvironmentAccessAndMobilitySystem (MobSys for short) not to take action on any maintenance requests. (It sounds like a lot of trouble just to stop a pod, but if I didn’t do it that way it would have crashed the system. Literally, if I interfered with MobSys’ pod traffic control. And by literally, I mean pods full of humans and augmented humans crashing into each other.)

They were in the room now and Pin-Lee was saying, “We have the currency your corporation asked for. Some of it had to come from liquidated assets, and I’ve received notice that they’re ready to transfer. I won’t produce the list or send the authorization until we see Dr. Mensah.”

Serrat answered, “I assure you, she’s already on her way here, escorted by a security detail. I do need to see the transfer authorization.”

I had one input monitoring Mensah’s implant, but it wasn’t pinging yet. I also had a couple of analyses going, estimating distances and potential routes between here and the upper torus, and I was working on a contingency for the port in case they had real security (i.e., SecUnits from Palisade or one of the other local bond companies) with them. It could potentially get disastrously complicated, but I still thought it was doable.

Then it got disastrously complicated.

In the feed, Ratthi said, Uh, SecUnit? Please help.

Like an idiot my first reaction was to try to switch to the helmet cam Ratthi wasn’t wearing. I had no camera in the room, just audio, and all I could hear was breathing. (This was the flaw in Plan 1A. There had been no way to get a camera in the room in the time we had, or at least not one undetectable to the security screen the GrayCris rep would come prepared to make.) Then Pin-Lee said, “That won’t get you the money. And money is what you need, right? What GrayCris needs right now to call off the bond company.”

Serrat said flatly, “That is not a transfer authorization. That is just a list of assets. What are you playing at?”

Scrambling for my inputs, scrambling to make sure I had control of hotelSecSys, I caught the signal Serrat had just used his comm device to send. It had to be an emergency abort for the hostage release, and possibly a signal for his backup to come in shooting. With zero time for finesse, I killed the main hotel relay, then had to take down two secondary relays that tried to activate to pick up the traffic. Then I found Serrat’s connection to the hotel feed and blocked it. I was busy, so my buffer said, Dr. Ratthi, please describe the problem.

Ratthi’s feed voice was nervous. He has a gun. It’s small, um, palm-sized. Energy weapon, I think too small for projectiles.

On audio, Gurathin said, “That’s the transfer document we were given—”

“And that’s a ridiculous lie,” Serrat said.

Keep him talking, I sent to Pin-Lee. I didn’t want him wondering why his backup hadn’t sent an acknowledgment. I’d just discarded Plan Actually Not All That Terrible and shifted to Plan Approaching Terrible. I stepped out of the pod, and released it back to MobSys as I strode down the corridor. My scan picked up a moving target around the curve and I slowed down to a casual stroll that looked just as fake and awkward as the version performed by the GrayCris reps in the lobby. But my connection to hotelSecSys showed another room door had opened in this section twenty seconds ago and the chance that the approaching humans were hostiles was less than ten percent.

Two small humans rounded the curve of the corridor, very occupied with adjusting shoulder bags and head coverings. They passed me but it slowed my progress to target and I had to walk past the room door until they were out of sight, then wait for them to reach the junction and step into a pod. Then I moved.