Exit Strategy

This time it was anxiety, and I did what I always do, which is watch media. One of the new shows I’d downloaded randomly at HaveRatton turned out to be a long historical drama about early human exploration in space. It was listed as a fictionalized documentary (I’m not sure what that means, either) but there were attached sidebars throughout with info about the real history, which were supposedly accurate. It was odd to see that there had been a variation of SecUnits back then. They didn’t use cloned human parts, but actual human parts from humans who had catastrophic injuries or illnesses, and had decided to have their parts used for what they called Augmented Rovers. Some of the humans in the primary story line had actually known one of the ARs when it was a human, and they were all still friends. The ARs weren’t humanform, but got to choose their assignments and which humans they worked with. They talked back and forth with the humans, gave advice, sometimes led rescue parties, and saved the day a lot. Despite all the convincingly informative sidebars, I had trouble believing it was true. I stopped in the middle of the second episode and switched to a musical comedy.

Anyway, there was a difference in watching media because I was safe on a transport with no one making me do anything, and watching media because I was trying not to think about all the ways I’d screwed up and what might happen next, a future that was bound to include even more creative screw-ups on my part. I had gotten used to the former and I hated going back to the latter.

I did try to prepare. I pulled everything the transport’s feed had on TranRollinHyfa, which wasn’t much more than an updated version of the standard tourist packet that I had already downloaded from HaveRatton, but it did give me the names of a lot of the corporations that had bases or headquarters there.

The security company Palisade had a large office there. Why was that not a surprise?

I also did a lot of work on my code for beating security cameras. I had developed it on RaviHyral right before almost getting my client Tapan killed. It was a method for deleting me from the camera’s recording and replacing me with images before and after I walked past. It wasn’t perfect, and I worked on making it better, adding code to work with different types and brands of SecSystems, and a greater number of cameras and angles.

When we came through the wormhole, I was just glad the first leg of the trip was over.

Nobody was waiting for me when we docked at the transit hub so at least that told me that Wilken and Gerth’s IDs were good. I only spent ten hours there, all of it in a tiny room in a transient hostel. I downloaded some new shows, but I spent most of the time pulling files from information bases for anything on TranRollinHyfa. This took longer since most of the bases I needed access to were proprietary corporate ones and I had to hack my way in before I could even tell if they had what I was looking for or not. I also ran my usual searches on newsbursts. (Nothing new on Mensah except lots of speculation that didn’t help my anxiety level.)

When it was almost time to go, I traded out the Jian ID for one with the name Kiran. I had contemplated one more obfuscating hop, but I didn’t know what was happening with Mensah and the thought that I might already be too late wasn’t helpful. So I booked a passage on another fast passenger transport direct to TranRollinHyfa.

I hesitated over my memory clips from Milu, the ones still hidden in my arm and Wilken and Gerth’s clip. I didn’t know how useful the information was anymore.

But Miki had died for that information, whether it knew it or not.

Taking it into GrayCris territory with me would be stupid. In the transient room, I removed the clips from my arm, then left for the embarkation zone. On the way, I stopped at a shipping kiosk and bought a small parcel package. I rolled the clips up in the protective wrapper, included Wilken and Gerth’s clip, and sealed the container. I addressed it to all of Dr. Mensah’s marital partners on their farm on Preservation. (I had all the info for the shipping form, lying around in longterm memory storage, from my old company’s records of PreservationAux. Wow, that seemed like a long time ago.)

I’d boarded my next passenger transport and was hiding in my private cabin when I caught a new newsburst, relayed from a ship that had just come in to dock. It was a brief statement from the Preservation Alliance by Dr. Bharadwaj.

It was unexpectedly odd to see a familiar human, even if she looked really angry. All she said was that Preservation was “taking steps” to resolve the issues with GrayCris.