Network Effect

I try to avoid asking humans if there’s anything wrong with them. (Mostly because I don’t care.) (On the rare occasions where I did care, it would have meant starting a conversation not directly related to security protocol, and that was just a slippery slope waiting to happen, for a variety of reasons.) But humans asked each other about their current status all the time, so how hard could it be? It was a request for information, that was all. I did a quick search and pulled up a few examples from my media collection. None of the samples seemed like anything I’d ever voluntarily say, so before I could change my mind I went with, “What’s wrong?”

She was surprised, then gave me a sideways look. “Don’t you start.”

So there was something wrong and even the other humans had noticed. I said, “I have to know about any potential problems for an accurate threat assessment.”

She lifted a brow and opened the vehicle door. “You never mentioned that on our survey contract.”

I got out of the vehicle and followed her toward a group of chairs next to the house, scattered around in the grass under the trees. The shadow was deep so I had to switch to a dark filter to see her. “That was because I was half-assing my job.”

She took a seat. “If that was you half-assing your job, I don’t want to see what you’re like when…” The smile faded and she trailed off, then added, “But I suppose I did see you when you were doing your best.”

I sat down, too. (Sitting down with a human like this would never not feel strange.) Her expression wasn’t upset, but it wasn’t not upset, either. But I could tell my smartass comment had taken us down an awkward conversational avenue where I hadn’t wanted to go. I wished I was ART, who was good at this kind of thing. (The thing being getting you to talk about what it wanted you to talk about but also making you think about what it wanted you to talk about in different ways.) (I wasn’t kidding when I said ART was an asshole.) “You didn’t answer the question.”

She settled back in her chair. “You sound worried.”

“I am worried.” I could feel my face making the expression whether I wanted it to or not.

She let her breath out. “It’s nothing. I’ve been having nightmares. About being held prisoner on TranRollinHyfa, and … you know.” She made an impatient gesture. “It’s completely normal. It would be odd if I wasn’t having nightmares.”

I hadn’t seen much of the recovery phase of trauma (my job was to get the client to the MedSystem before they died; it took care of all the messy aftermath, including the retrieved client protocol) but in the shows I watched, recovery was featured a lot. There was a trauma recovery program that Bharadwaj had used in the Station Medical Center, and the big hospital in the port city had one, too.

I wasn’t the only one who thought Mensah should go get the trauma treatment. I was probably the only one who knew she hadn’t. (She hadn’t exactly lied; it was more a way of letting the other humans assume she had.) But the treatment wasn’t like a one-time thing with a MedSystem; it took multiple long visits, and I knew she had never made time for it in her schedule. I said, “Is that why you’re afraid to go off-station without me?”

So there were two positions on whether the Preservation Planetary leader needed security. The first was the one 99 percent of the population shared, that she did not unless she went on a formal visit to somewhere like the Corporation Rim. And to a large extent, they were right.

The crime stats on Preservation Station and the planet were pitifully low, and usually involved intoxication-related property damage or disturbances and/or minor infractions of station cargo handling or planetary environmental regulations. Mensah had never needed on-station or on-planet security before this, except for the young Preservation Council–trainee humans who followed her around and kept track of her appointments and handed her things occasionally. (And they did not count as security.)

The other 1 percent was composed of me, Mensah’s survey team, all the humans working in Station Security, and the members of the Preservation Council who had seen the GrayCris assassins try to kill her. But that incident had been kept out of the newsfeeds, so hardly anyone thought Mensah needed a security consultant let alone a SecUnit.

But GrayCris was not doing so hot now due to their hired security service Palisade making an extremely bad decision to punch my ex-owner bond company in the operating funds by attacking one of its gunships. (The company is paranoid and greedy and cheap but also ruthless, methodical, and intensely violent when it thinks it’s being threatened.) Relations between the two corporates had deteriorated since what we call The Gunship Incident, with GrayCris assets getting mysteriously destroyed a lot in supposedly random accidents and its executives and employees getting blown up or found stuffed in containers way too small for intact adult humans and so on.