Exit Strategy

Pin-Lee must have been taken aback, but she said, “GrayCris attacked us first. GrayCris started this. All we want is the return of Dr. Mensah.”

In the feed, a baffled Ratthi said, Milu?

With his augment, Gurathin had some information storage. He said, That was in a newsburst, they asked Mensah about it. It’s an abandoned terraforming platform.

I got the hotel’s relays back up and the activity on the hotel’s management feed began to drop immediately. The two GrayCris targets in the lobby still hadn’t noticed anything wrong. Still nothing from the implant.

They weren’t bringing her. This had all been for nothing. All of it, Milu, Miki’s death, the trip here, everything. I said, “Milu was my idea. I’m a rogue unit.”

He ignored me, but he said to Pin-Lee, “A rogue unit would have left a trail of dead bodies across this station.”

I said, “Maybe I wanted the trail to start here.”

He made eye contact with me, and his pupils widened slightly.

I added, “You people are so naive.”

It was a really good thing that right then Mensah’s implant pinged. I hadn’t completely decided to crush Serrat’s windpipe, I was just entertaining the idea. Instead I pulled him away from the wall and choked him out.

From the humans it was all “Wait!” “No!” “Um—”

“I’m not going to kill him,” I said, and dumped him on the couch. “I know what I’m fucking doing.”

Pin-Lee had tuned her feed to the implant and now clawed the key out of her jacket to check it. “She’s moving, she’s—Can you tell—”

I was already matching the ping to my station maps. “They’re on a transit pipe.” I had to go, now. I told them, “You need to get back to your shuttle. Leave him; by the time he’s conscious GrayCris will already know what we’re doing. Don’t take his comm or his gun with you, StationSec can scan for them. Go down to the hotel’s first-level garden court and take the bubble transit to the next shopping complex, then take pipe transit from there.”

I was out the door before they could do more than take in enough air to object. The corridor was clear so I sprinted to the pod junction. In the feed, I sent, The GrayCris group with Mensah is less than two minutes out and counting, you need to be out of the hotel before they get here. She’ll meet you at your shuttle. Do not try to contact me on the feed. If they buy off StationSec, they could trace us.

We’re going, we’re going, Ratthi sent back, and hotelSecSys told me the room door had just opened and closed. Be careful—

I’m breaking contact, Ratthi, I told him, and stepped into the pod.

I shut my risk assessment module down.

Chapter Five

WHEN THE TRANSIT PIPE with GrayCrisSec and Dr. Mensah arrived, I was in a pod, paused and ready.

The hotelSecSys cams showed me the GrayCris group exiting the pipe onto the platform as waiting passengers scattered out of the way. The hostiles were in plain clothes but with visible weapons; this obviously wasn’t a covert operation for them, so that meant StationSec as well as hotelSec had been paid for access.

And they had an armored SecUnit with them.

This was still doable. (My wonky Risk Assessment Module would probably have informed me that everything was great.) There was a pause while the group encountered the hotel’s choked feed and got someone to authorize a payment. (I guess you could pay off the management to let you bring in a SecUnit and weapons and do a hostage exchange, but they drew the line at giving you free feed access.)

The hotel’s transit station was three levels tall, with one open level above the platform where the pipe stopped and one below. The one above was currently running a holographic thunderstorm display, and the one below was cycling through overhead views of various art installations, or at least that’s what the feed tag said it was doing.

I just had an idea, which I filed under save-for-later.

The hostiles took Mensah along the platform walkway toward the pod junction. She wasn’t wearing any kind of restraints, but there were six of them plus the SecUnit. Two peeled off to take up positions in the transit station. That left four targets plus the SecUnit, the primary target.

SecUnits who haven’t hacked their governor module like me can’t hack feeds and systems like I can. Well, they could try, but their governor module would punish them and their Sec or HubSystem would report them and they would end up with a memory purge. (So if you decide to hack your governor module, you need to do a good job and get it right the first time.) The unit GrayCris had with them was your basic killing machine.