Exit Strategy

It acknowledged. It recognized me as also company property, since I had the decryption key and I was using the right salutation. I didn’t think it would notify its crew that it had been contacted by what it had every reason to identify as another company bot, not unless someone had told it to. Another SecUnit would have reported me immediately, but then a SecUnit would have known what I was and that I shouldn’t be out here.

I waited, listening in to make sure no one had noticed the offsite connection. No alarms were raised. I could tell feed traffic aboard the ship was light, and mostly in standby mode. They were waiting for something.

I mentally braced myself and sent the bot pilot Status: update (stealth). After a long three seconds, it returned a databurst. I sent an acknowledgment and broke free of the connection.

I focused on the ceiling of the cabin again. If I was lucky, nobody would check the bot pilot’s contact log. The company had been paid for me and taken me off inventory, but I had no legal status in corporate territory without Mensah. If they realized I was here, they could report me to station authorities, or decide to catch me and forcibly separate me into my component parts, or anything in between.

I checked the databurst for tracers and malware and then unpacked it.

Well, this was … potentially a disaster. Shortly after the gunship had arrived at TranRollinHyfa, the contract status had gone from Retrieve: Active to Retrieve: Suspended Due to Neutral Party Access Denial, Escalation Out of Contracted Parameters. That meant that the gunship had been sent to retrieve an endangered client, but the operation had been halted because the retrieval had been blocked, and by something other than just being beyond the range of the client’s ability to pay. The client ID code was Mensah’s, the same one from my contract, which meant this was an extension of her original safety bond for the planetary survey. Which, okay, I didn’t know it worked like that, but it was confirmation Mensah was here, or at least that the company’s current intel thought she was here.

And the fucking gunship was sitting out here not doing anything about it. I’m guessing GrayCris had somehow gotten TranRollinHyfa to refuse docking and operational permission, meaning the company couldn’t land its armed retrieval team without fighting TRH station security and the company hadn’t been paid enough to do that.

The other code in the status was Secondary Clients Status: Recognizance. That was almost worse—it meant someone else named in the bond (probably Pin-Lee, Ratthi, or Gurathin, since they hadn’t been listed in the newsburst as returning to Preservation) had left company protection and were in the wind. There was only one way to be in the wind between a gunship and an armed station: they must have taken a shuttle, certified themselves as unarmed to get past the operational prohibition, and been allowed to dock.

So that was four of them I had to worry about.

* * *

Waiting was stressful, and I watched an episode of my favorite, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, while the transport finished its approach and went through docking procedures. Then the ship’s feed signaled that it was time to disembark.

One reason I’d picked this particular fast non-bot-piloted transport out of the others heading here was because there were 127 passengers, forty-three of whom were traveling together. They didn’t disappoint me and disembarked in a single noisy confused mob. I walked out surrounded by them and was across the embarkation floor and up into the transparent pipe of the elevated walkway before they became distracted by the vending and advertising bays and started to thin out. I kept walking.

By that point I’d deflected three weapons scans and had hacked the restricted feeds for the various drone security cameras. The security was tighter for disembarking passengers than the other transit rings and stations I’d visited. Unusually tight for a station that sold its public feed for ads that drowned out the safety info and official announcements. (You could tell which humans and augmented humans were trying to use its mapping function because they kept walking up to blocked exits and walls.)

I had also been hit by at least four different recognition scans. These scans are usually searching for known humans or augmented humans that the station security is keeping tabs on, not random escaped SecUnits. (Random escaped SecUnits is not nearly as prevalent a problem as the entertainment feed would have you believe.) But I was glad I’d listened to ART and let it change my configuration. I was glad for every single precaution I’d taken, even the ones that had seemed paranoid at the time.