Exit Strategy

I muted my feed audio, which was Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin loudly objecting to the gun and protesting their innocence and that the funds transfer bank must have made a mistake and Ratthi was a biologist and he didn’t understand all this esoteric financial stuff and etc. I pressed my ear to the door and upped my hearing, and managed to pick up Serrat saying, “I don’t have time to teach you the facts of corporate relations.”

That gave me his relative position. Then I hit the door release.

As the door slid open, Serrat started to turn toward me. I crossed the room, grabbed his wrist and forced it down, and sent a targeted pulse through my arm to fry the power cell of his tiny, cute little gun. Then I used my other forearm to pin his throat to the wall. This all happened really fast.

Serrat made a strangled noise and tried to shoot me. Even if the gun had still worked, it would have hit me in the shin, which would have just made me that much more pissed off. I squeezed his wrist and he dropped the gun. He was still holding the comm device.

Ratthi had fallen over a chair trying to get out of the way, and Pin-Lee lost a few seconds getting around him. Gurathin staggered but lunged forward and grabbed Serrat’s other hand. He pried Serrat’s fingers open and Pin-Lee plucked the comm device out.

“It’s activated?” Ratthi asked, struggling to his feet.

I said, “I’ve blocked it and his feed.” One of my inputs was the management channel on the hotel feed, which was already filling up with complaints about the comm failure. I had also taken out the connection between the hotel’s choked feed and the station feed. (Which implies I did it intentionally, but I had been in a hurry and just slammed down everything with a signal.) (Yeah, so much for making this a stealth operation.)

Serrat breathed hard, and this close my scan picked up elevated pulse and sweat gland activity. He said, “So this is the supposedly missing SecUnit.”

I checked hotelSecSys’ view of the lobby and spotted the two GrayCris backups. They hadn’t reacted yet, still pretending to be casual around the vending machines, but oh shit did I need to get the hotel feed’s connections back up before they noticed.

Pin-Lee leaned down to grab the gun off the floor. “Is Mensah really being brought here? Was that a lie?”

No response from the implant yet, I told her on the feed. I could still access the station feed, and that’s what would carry the implant’s signal. If GrayCris was really bringing her here, they hadn’t crossed the main station security barrier yet.

So the plan wasn’t a clusterfuck, it was just circling the clusterfuck target zone, getting ready to come in for a landing.

Serrat said to Pin-Lee, “You’re the liars, thinking you could fool us with that ridiculous fake document. Order this thing to let me go. You’re violating station law, threatening me with a deadly weapon.”

“What deadly weapon?” Ratthi demanded. He gestured to the gun in Pin-Lee’s hand. “You threatened us with a deadly weapon, we could call station security on you!”

In the feed, Gurathin said, We can’t call station security.

I know that! Ratthi sent back. I’m bluffing.

Pin-Lee said, “He means SecUnit. SecUnit is the deadly weapon.” She hesitated, then sent to me in the feed, I’m going to touch you, don’t freak out.

Uh, okay. I tapped back an acknowledgment because I was frantically working to bring the hotel’s main and secondary relays back up and I had to get in ahead of the repair techs.

Pin-Lee put her hand on my shoulder and I did not freak out. She leaned in toward Serrat and said, “This is not a deadly weapon. This is a person. An angry person, who wants you to answer the question. Are you bringing Mensah here?”

He smiled at her. “I was. I’ve signaled our security officer to cancel the exchange. They know where I am, and they’ll be here soon. Since you’ve violated station law by bringing in a privately owned SecUnit, no one will help you.”

“You need the ransom to pay off the bond company, right?” Pin-Lee said. I hadn’t looked away from Serrat, though most of my attention was on the admittedly rough job I was doing on the hotel relays and still listening for Mensah’s implant. She added, “Surely GrayCris has assets it can sign over. Or is it revenge?”

Serrat’s face slipped into a skeptical sneer. He didn’t take them seriously, which, sure, I can see why. If you were GrayCris and regularly murdered humans as part of your job, the wrath of three research surveyors from a non-corporate backwater planet probably didn’t fill you with fear. And he was certain they were controlling me somehow. He said, “Revenge? You buy a SecUnit and send it to Milu to expose an essential GrayCris asset operation. You and your little planetary polity have the audacity to think you can compete with a corporation—what did you expect to happen?”