Exit Strategy

Chapter Two

I NEEDED TO GO, and go fast. And not on a bot-piloted transport. Not finding me on Ship would throw off Palisade’s pursuit, but not for long, and if they had any brains at all they would be checking automated transports. I pulled schedules for extra-fast crewed passenger transports (No, not a direct trip. I’m apparently an idiot, but not that big an idiot.) and found one leaving in four hours heading for a major hub. From there, I could get where I needed to go.

I hadn’t traveled like this before, mainly because I hadn’t wanted to. At first, I’d doubted my ability to hack weapons scanners while I was hacking the ID and payment systems. But now I had no excuse not to, thanks to Wilken and Gerth.

I had ended up with their emergency go-bag, filled with hard currency cards and a variety of ID markers. The markers are meant for subcutaneous insertion and contain identifying information. Normally they wouldn’t be readable by anything but the scanners designed for the purpose, but with a little fine-tuning my scan had been able to view the encoded data, and I had examined them all on the trip back to HaveRatton.

Identity markers in the Corporation Rim usually had a lot of information on the bearer, but these were temporaries meant for travelers from outside the Rim. They had a string of numbers from a non-corporate political entity authorizing travel, place of origin, and a name. Obviously this was why Wilken and Gerth had them, so they could switch identities at need. Corporate political entities are more interested in keeping track of their own humans than anybody else’s. I had seen on the media that travel was easier for non-citizens inside the Corporation Rim than citizens, sub-citizens, and all the other categories each different political entity had to keep track of their humans. (It could be worse. At least humans could cut out their ID markers; I had corporate logos etched onto parts of me I couldn’t get rid of.)

I went to a public rest area, paid for an enclosed cubicle with the hard currency card, and picked an ID with the name Jian from Parthalos Absalo. I peeled back the skin around my shoulder joint and inserted the marker under it. I had to dial down my pain receptors in that area, but there was no inconvenient leaking.

I’d been pretending to be human off and on since I left Dr. Mensah, but this was the first time I’d had anything on me that officially labeled me as human. It was weird.

I didn’t like it.

I paid for passage at a kiosk at the edge of the embarkation zone and had my new ID scanned there and at the transport’s lock when I entered. I had to hack two weapons scans, and adjust the personal scan results at the lock to show a less excessive number of augments. I’d paid for a private cabin with an attached restroom facility and automated meal delivery. (I didn’t need the meals but it would give me something to dump in the waste recycler so the levels wouldn’t look off to anyone who checked.) The ship’s feed led me to the cabin and I saw only four humans in the corridor and heard five others as I passed a lounge. My goal was to not see them again the rest of the seven-cycle trip.

The cabin was nicer than the one I’d had on my only other passenger transport. It had a bunk with a bedding packet and a small display surface, a door leading to the tiny restroom facility, a storage cabinet for personal possessions, and a meal distribution receptacle. I sealed the door, didn’t bother to sit down or even drop my bag. I had feed searches to do while we were still attached to station.

I set one for TranRollinHyfa and expanded my newsburst searches with new keywords and time limits. I had already grabbed new media downloads on my walk to the embarkation zone. I knew I was going to need the distraction.

I thought I knew at least part of what was going on, and it wasn’t good. From GrayCris’ perspective, these things had happened in sequence:

1) Dr. Mensah had bought a (used, somewhat battered) SecUnit, which had then disappeared, no one knew where. 2) Dr. Mensah had said, in an interview sent out in newsbursts carried by transports all across the Corporation Rim, that someone needed to investigate Milu because GrayCris abandoning a terraforming facility was suspicious. (Never mind that the journalist had brought up Milu, not her.) 3) A SecUnit had shown up on Milu and helped an assessment team contracted by GoodNightLander Independent to a) save the facility from falling into the planet, and b) acquire proof that it was an illegal mining operation and not a terraforming facility at all.

The news of 3a and 3b was already in newsbursts making their way through the Corporation Rim, along with Abene and the others’ eyewitness accounts and Wilken and Gerth’s testimony about who had hired them.

Obviously, GrayCris thought Mensah had sent me to Milu to fuck them over.

Oops.

This was a stressful trip, right up there with the one where ART introduced itself to me by implying that it might delete my brain and the one where I kept thinking about Miki. And the one with Ayres and the other humans who had sold themselves into contract slavery.

I guess most of my trips so far had been this stressful.

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.

Huh. I lay down on the bunk and stared at the metal ceiling. There was a background buzz of traffic in the ship’s public feed as the docking clamps were released. I was monitoring the private activity to make sure no one was chatting about the SecUnit hiding in a passenger cabin incompetently pretending to be human. I replayed Bharadwaj’s statement seven times.

I might be wrong. I knew interpreting the emotional subtext in the speech and appearance of real humans was completely different from interpreting it in shows and serials. (For one thing, the shows and serials were trying to communicate accurately with the viewer. As far as I could tell, real humans usually didn’t know what the hell they were doing.) But the interpretation I wanted to make of Bharadwaj’s vid statement was that Mensah was being held by GrayCris, who had threatened her life if Preservation didn’t make a formal statement at least implying that they were in amicable negotiations to settle with GrayCris.

I looked back over the newsburst that had accompanied it and found there was still no statement by DeltFall, whose survey team GrayCris had slaughtered. Or my ex-owner the company, which was probably torn between fury and shitting itself over the amount of equipment and bond payments lost in the debacle and desperate to have someone pay for it. I mean, literally pay for it. GrayCris could buy the company off for a big enough credit payout but so far it hadn’t done that. But maybe GrayCris couldn’t afford that payout.

GrayCris had done all this to acquire strange synthetics, alien remnants. Now that everybody knew that, they couldn’t sell them, or develop them, or whatever they had been planning to do with them. It meant they were desperate, too.

That wasn’t good.

After four cycles by ship’s local time, the passenger transport came through the wormhole and I picked up the edge of the TranRollinHyfa Station feed.

It looked bigger up close. The station itself was larger than Port FreeCommerce, with three interconnected transit rings below the main hull. Usually the transit ring circles the station, with the main part where humans and augmented humans live or do whatever in the center. Or, I guess, I’ve never been in those parts except for the deployment center on Port FreeCommerce, which was near the transit ring.

I picked up the feed but it was crammed with advertising, with the transit schedules and service listings swamped by corporation ads that were dissolving into static because other corporations had paid fees to drown them out. Well, that was all useless. I dropped it and picked up the ship’s comm, which was monitoring the Port Authority’s feed. There were still ads, but at least the PA was able to get a word in edgewise every now and then. One of those words was a navigation alert and—

Huh.

I pulled it up on the transport’s feed, where the scan and nav was running for the crew. There was a company gunship hanging off the station.

Not on approach, not waiting for a docking slot. Just maintaining position.

There was no mistake about who owned it, the navigation alert included the stupid logo the gunship was broadcasting in its otherwise blocked feed, the same logo etched into my non-organic parts. I checked the alert’s timestamp. Converted to my local time it equaled twenty cycles, give or take.

It could have been here for another contract, but that seemed like a big coincidence. Gunships don’t have any other purpose except to go fast and blow stuff up, and contracts for them are tricky, because of the treaties between corporate and non-corporate political entities.

I had thought that if Mensah had actually gone to TranRollinHyfa voluntarily to negotiate with GrayCris, then the bond might have been high enough to require a gunship. But then why wasn’t it docked? Did Mensah need rescuing or what? I needed intel, and there was one way to get it.

The station approach traffic was heavy, and we were showing a twenty-seven-minute docking delay. Twenty-seven minutes was more than enough time for me to do something stupid.

I sank into the ship’s comm. The approach protocol the PA had managed to slip out between ads stipulated that comms be set to monitor all signal traffic, voice and feed. This was so ships could bypass the choked station feed and pick up any alerts or alarms the other ships might broadcast.

It was harder to sort and separate them without the comm system assisting but I knew what I was looking for. After six minutes I found it: the company gunship’s encrypted feed, twined around its comm signal like the melody in a music sample. I pulled the feed in and applied the key, and—this could be a mistake, did I need intel this badly? Yeah, yeah, I did. I needed to know if Mensah was here on a mission or under duress—I sent the gunship’s bot pilot a ping and added the code that would tell it I was in stealth mode.

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.

I didn’t spot any armed security patrols but there were extra drones, small ones, a different brand and configuration than the ones I was used to. After I modified my queries to block the stupid ads, I got a download and search of the news feed started, as well as the port’s public dock assignment list. I checked the port map that had managed to fight its way through the advertising chaff, and took the walkway heading up into the station mall.

My transport had docked on the second transit ring, so there were a lot of ramps to walk up, if you didn’t want to take the lift pods, which I didn’t. I wasn’t catching pings, but a check of the station directory showed two security companies based here who had SecUnits available for rental, EinoArzu and Stockade Kumaran. Palisade was listed as a security company, but not as a company that supplied SecUnits. That didn’t necessarily mean they didn’t have them, it just meant they didn’t advertise them.

I wasn’t too worried about SecUnits being used against me at this point. SecUnits would be able to identify me as a rogue unit on sight (or on ping, more accurately) but we were never used on transit rings. The security companies would ship us (them) through the port as cargo, to keep from panicking the humans. I mean, there’s a first time for everything, but it just wasn’t likely, maybe a fifteen percent chance at best.

Even if they did deploy, they still had to find me. The governor modules wouldn’t let the SecUnits hack systems or search for my hacks, not on their own without human direction. (And I didn’t think GrayCris had any idea how much hacking I was responsible for.) Only combat SecUnits could detect or counteract my hacks without a human supervisor.

Still, my human skin was prickling with nerves. The extra security seemed to support a theory I had. Or maybe I mean a hypothesis. Whatever, the idea was that if Bharadwaj’s statement in the newsburst had been a message to GrayCris, a sign that Preservation would cooperate to save Dr. Mensah, then the stories about Mensah being arrested, about her going to or somehow being taken to TranRollinHyfa were messages, too. Messages to me.

GrayCris thought the newsbursts were how Mensah had ordered me to go to Milu, so it stood to reason they would use newsbursts to lure me here.

It wasn’t a great theory/hypothesis. They had Mensah, so I don’t know why they would want me. They knew I’d been on Milu, did they suspect I had left with an armful of incriminating data? But GoodNightLander Independent had Milu now and would hopefully be mad enough to look for incriminating data of their own, so they could publicly complain about it on their own newsfeeds. GrayCris going after me and Mensah wasn’t going to stop that.

But they were humans—who knows why they did anything?

It made it all the more obvious that now that I’d gotten in here, I needed to make sure I could get out. Speaking of which, I pulled specs and info from the security feeds I’d accessed, and tagged it to work on later.

I walked up the last ramp surrounded by a crowd of humans and augmented humans, and on into the station mall. There was no fringe travelers’ area, with cheap transient hostels and vending kiosks. It went straight into multi-levels of expensive shops and offices, most in spheres, stacked into looming towers or hovering overhead. The feed was a maze of vids and ads and instructions and music, competing with the floating display surfaces and the holosculptures of giant waterfalls and trees and abstract art things. I’d seen similar, and better, on my shows, but seeing it in person was different. My camera angles weren’t as good, for one thing. And the humans and augmented humans wandering around randomly were distracting from the view.

Oh, and there were downloads, sweet downloads, multiple entertainment feeds, way more than HaveRatton and Port FreeCommerce, hanging temptingly in the air. I picked a couple at random and started downloads. One of my queries had pulled up the station’s actual index for residents, not the abbreviated one for tourists and transients, and I needed a place to stand still to review it. I headed toward one of the lower-level spheres.

It was a big shop, with lots of humans and augmented humans going in and out. I could do a shop. I’d done shops (one shop) before. No problem.

I tried to relax and look preoccupied as I took the ramp up to the entrance. The shop’s feed ads said it sold advanced lifestyles. I don’t know what that is and the explanations in the feed weren’t helpful. Even some of the humans wandering around looked confused. I wandered with them into a central area where humans were watching a hovering display of products? Art and music inspired by products? It wasn’t the enclosed booth I was hoping for, but it gave me a reason to stand still and stare while I reviewed my query results and the station index.

Not a surprise, I had turned up a dock listing for a shuttle with a company ID code, the only company code in the arrivals index. That was the shuttle the Preservation team had used to get here from the gunship.

It was … strange, knowing they were so close. Considering the size of the shuttle, they probably weren’t staying on board. After a little delicate unraveling of the Port Authority’s protected systems, I got a download of the docking contact index and matched the shuttle’s entry with a physical address in a station hotel.

Three newssearch results popped up while I was deleting any trace of my intrusion from the PA’s system, but they were old newsbursts from Port FreeCommerce. Just more useless speculation on where Mensah was and what she was doing, why she had disappeared.

None of my queries had turned up any mention of her.

I didn’t have a lot of choice. The team from Preservation must be here to negotiate for Mensah’s release, the only way they could proceed until Preservation scraped up enough currency to pay the company to violate TranRollinHyfa’s docking ban. I needed intel before I could do anything, and they were my only potential source.

I left the shop, first making sure to do one loop of the aimless wander around the displays that the humans were doing.

I had to go meet some old friends.