Exit Strategy

“Yes. But by the time I returned to HaveRatton Station, a Palisade security squad was waiting for me. Then I saw on the Port FreeCommerce newsfeed that you were missing.” I added, “I shipped the data to your home on Preservation.”

She nodded again. “I see, right.” She hesitated. “The GrayCris executives who questioned me about this said you destroyed some combat bots?”

“Three.”

She took a sharp breath. “Good.”

I didn’t know what I was going to say next until it came out suddenly. “I left.”

She was looking at my face, and suddenly I couldn’t look at hers anymore. She said, “Yes. I handled the situation very badly. I apologize.”

“Okay.” I was definitely going to need to just stand here and stare at a wall. ART and Tapan had both apologized to me, so it wasn’t like it had never happened before, but I still had no idea how to respond. “Pin-Lee said you were worried.”

She admitted, “I was. I was so afraid you’d be caught by someone before you could leave the Corporation Rim.” There was a little smile in her voice. “I should have had more confidence in you.”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” I said. My backburnered map-monitor alerted me and it was a relief. I’d had all the emotions I could handle right now. I said, “We’re coming up on the port.”

Chapter Six

WE’D GONE AS FAR along the backbone as we could go without hitting the port security barriers. I didn’t know how tight those barriers would be, but from the signal leakage I was picking up, it wasn’t worth the risk.

It was the walk through the embarkation zone I was more worried about.

I stopped our carrier at the cargo access to a large multi-use shop in the station mall, and we stepped out. I released the carrier and it slipped into the dark, heading back up the backbone. We took a maintenance pod to the port level.

In the pod, I used the security camera to evaluate us. No blood, no projectile holes, check. Nervous, check. Mensah looking like a human who had been through a traumatic experience, check. My shoulder bag with my weapon hidden in it, check. “We have to look calm,” I told her, “so station security won’t alert on us.”

She took a deep breath and looked up at me. “We can look calm. We’re good at that.”

Yeah, we were. I did a quick review to make sure I was running all my not-a-SecUnit code, then thought of one more thing I could do. As we stepped out of the pod, I took Mensah’s hand.

We crossed through the busy mall area and the milling humans around the vending and booking kiosks. The crowd was about the same as when I’d arrived, with an approximately 5 percent increase. I’d never done this while walking with a human and it made the process more complicated and somehow, strangely, more natural.

I deflected multiple scans as we entered the embarkation zone. I avoided the lift pods again because if there was an alert, the pods would freeze in place, and if I was hacking one it would become rapidly obvious where we were. I guided us down the ramp that would come out above the private shuttle docks on the first ring level. As we went along, the crowd thinned out, and I estimated a 50 percent reduction by the time we reached the walkway. A check of the stupid advertising garbage-filled port feed said that this was a normal lull in scheduled arrivals. (For once I missed being stuck in a crowd of humans.) There was no lull in the security checks, and I picked up multiple drone swarm traffic over the embarkation floors on all three rings.

I needed more intel. Normally I wouldn’t risk hacking the upper-level security feeds, the ones where the human supervisors communicated, but there was nothing normal about this. Using the drone feeds I’d already infiltrated, I started a careful hack of the top-level security feed, which I was tagging as StationSecAdmin.

I was sure GrayCris would manage to pay off or otherwise convince the StationSecAdmin and Port Authority to issue an alert and let Palisade into the port to search for us. But we had gotten here fast, and GrayCris would want to search the hotel and surrounding area first, since that was a cheaper operation than paying to search the port. If the rest of Team Preservation had made it here, we should be fine. (Yes, I know. I shouldn’t even have thought it.)

Once I was into the StationSecAdmin feed, I didn’t try to pry any further, just set some internal alerts and backburnered it.

“Will it be better if we talk?” Mensah said. I knew her well enough to hear the forced calm in her voice, and to know that the forced part wouldn’t show on her face.

We were near the public docks and I turned onto the next ramp down to the embarkation floor level. The crowd had dropped another 20 percent, to where it couldn’t actually be called a crowd anymore. I said, “That depends on what we talk about.”

As we reached the floor level, she said, “Why is Sanctuary Moon your favorite?”