Exit Strategy

Chapter Five

WHEN THE TRANSIT PIPE with GrayCrisSec and Dr. Mensah arrived, I was in a pod, paused and ready.

The hotelSecSys cams showed me the GrayCris group exiting the pipe onto the platform as waiting passengers scattered out of the way. The hostiles were in plain clothes but with visible weapons; this obviously wasn’t a covert operation for them, so that meant StationSec as well as hotelSec had been paid for access.

And they had an armored SecUnit with them.

This was still doable. (My wonky Risk Assessment Module would probably have informed me that everything was great.) There was a pause while the group encountered the hotel’s choked feed and got someone to authorize a payment. (I guess you could pay off the management to let you bring in a SecUnit and weapons and do a hostage exchange, but they drew the line at giving you free feed access.)

The hotel’s transit station was three levels tall, with one open level above the platform where the pipe stopped and one below. The one above was currently running a holographic thunderstorm display, and the one below was cycling through overhead views of various art installations, or at least that’s what the feed tag said it was doing.

I just had an idea, which I filed under save-for-later.

The hostiles took Mensah along the platform walkway toward the pod junction. She wasn’t wearing any kind of restraints, but there were six of them plus the SecUnit. Two peeled off to take up positions in the transit station. That left four targets plus the SecUnit, the primary target.

SecUnits who haven’t hacked their governor module like me can’t hack feeds and systems like I can. Well, they could try, but their governor module would punish them and their Sec or HubSystem would report them and they would end up with a memory purge. (So if you decide to hack your governor module, you need to do a good job and get it right the first time.) The unit GrayCris had with them was your basic killing machine.

The SecUnit had a Palisade logo on its chest. The armor was a proprietary brand, a different configuration from company armor. No drones, though. (GrayCris should really have paid that extra bribe money to get the drones in.)

(Yes, I thought about hacking it. I had never hacked another SecUnit. I’d hacked a ComfortUnit, but it hadn’t been trying to stop me. I couldn’t afford the experiment. If I tried and failed and it reported me, Mensah and the others would pay for it.)

They reached the junction and I delayed the pod’s arrival to give me a little time. The SecUnit was scanning, checking for weapons on the humans in the transit station and for unauthorized comm and feed activity. I was too deep in the hotel feed for it to find me. (If I hadn’t been able to hide my feed activity from other SecUnits, I would have been spare parts a long time ago.)

I made the connection to Mensah’s implant and pinged her feed to test the security. None of the targets including primary reacted. Then I sent, Hi, Dr. Mensah. It’s me. Her chest moved with a sharp breath and her head made a slight aborted motion. She had just conquered the urge to look around. One target glanced at her but the others didn’t react. I added, Try to answer me without subvocalizing.

She didn’t respond for 3.2 seconds and I had that long to wonder if she didn’t want to talk to me. That would make this rescue 100 percent more awkward.

Then she said, Prove you’re you. Tell me your name.

Okay, not that awkward. That was a relief. It also told me how bad her situation was, if she was worried about someone trying to trick her by posturing in her feed. I said, It’s Murderbot, Dr. Mensah.

That conversation had been permanently deleted, so no one knew about it except the PreservationAux team. Assuming they hadn’t told anyone else about it. Mensah obviously assumed it.

She responded immediately, What are you doing here? You weren’t captured?

They must have told her that, because there was nothing like that in the newsfeeds. Disinformation, which is the same as lying but for some reason has a different name, is the top tactic in corporate negotiation/warfare. (There had been a whole episode about it on Sanctuary Moon.) I told her, I came to help you, to get you to the port where Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin are waiting with a company shuttle. It’s dangerous, but less dangerous than staying where you are. Do I have a go to proceed? I know, but somehow it was easier being formal about it.

She answered immediately, Yes.

I tapped her feed to acknowledge and backburnered it so I could concentrate on my ongoing relationship with hotelSecSys and my new best friend, MobSys. I checked the schematic I had pulled earlier. My operation had to take place in this section, at one of the junctions, because once the pod moved into the hotel’s main network, it would be going too fast. Even if I could pull its direction info, I couldn’t get ahead of it.

Splitting my attention between all the security camera feeds I was monitoring was tricky, but not much trickier than listening to HubSystem, SecSystem, various client feeds, and vocal commands from confused and impatient humans while watching entertainment media. At least that’s what I was telling myself. I’m not sure I could have done it before all the work on Milu had increased my processing space.

If I screwed this up … I couldn’t screw this up.

I selected what the MobSys told me was the most common destination, the hotel’s club section. My pod started to move and two seconds into the trip, I asked MobSys for an emergency halt and hold in a low-traffic junction, but not to trigger any alarms for bot or human supervisors.

The pod stuttered to a halt. Part of the emergency protocol is to redirect any pods headed toward the site of the emergency call. Through MobSys, I felt pods all over the structure swooshing safely away through alternate passages.

I stepped out of my pod into the junction. It was an empty platform with two corridors curving away. I made sure the security camera would hold the image of an empty platform for the next six minutes. Then I got my projectile weapon out of my bag, loaded it, and held it down and to my side, angled back.

On the walkway camera feed, I saw the targets and Mensah get into their pod. I asked MobSys to please bring that pod here to the junction to assist with the emergency. As it arrived, I stepped into the waiting area and hit Dr. Mensah’s feed again. Dr. Mensah, at my signal, please drop to the floor of the pod in a crouch and cover your head.

The doors slid open. Pod trips are so fast, I was figuring the humans would have a couple of seconds of confusion thinking they had reached their destination. I used those two seconds to snap their connection to the hotel feed, then I stepped forward like a normal dumb human wanting to get in the pod, careful to be at an angle where the SecUnit wouldn’t see me. (The human operatives had helped by making it stand to the left side of the pod, instead of in the front where it should have been.)

A human target pushed forward. (In a completely unnecessary aggressive way; this is why humans suck at security so much even other humans don’t want them to do it.) He snapped, “Back up, this is a corporate securi—”

I tapped Mensah’s feed and she dropped. I already had the tough-with-apparently-unarmed-citizen target by the arm. I fired the energy weapon in my arm into his shoulder, pulled him toward me as he slumped, then lifted him up to shield my body.

Primary Target (the other SecUnit) was already in motion and shoved two human targets aside and brought its projectile weapon up. It couldn’t fire because of my human shield and that bought me the extra second to fire three armor-piercing projectiles point-blank into the neck joint of its armor, then down into its knee joints.

(The neck joint was the kill shot, the knee joints were to make it drop, otherwise the armor might have made it freeze in place.)

I dropped my projectile weapon because I needed both hands, and tossed my human shield into the two targets on the far side of the pod hard enough to slam them into the wall. The fourth target shot me, but her weapon delivered an energy pulse that would be incapacitating but non-lethal to a human. (A healthy human, at least.) Me, it just pissed off. I grabbed her hand and pulled her in, twisted her so her weapon pointed at the other two targets still struggling to stand, and triggered it five times. They dropped, I snapped her arm (she was fast enough to be a potential future threat), and then pressed her artery to make her pass out.

As I lowered her to the floor, Mensah shoved to her feet and staggered. I think she got clipped by a flailing boot. I said, “Let’s go.”

Mensah took a sharp breath and stepped over the twitching bodies, then edged past the slumped SecUnit. I picked up my projectile weapon and followed her. (I didn’t want to risk taking the SecUnit’s projectile weapon. It might have a tracer. Mine fit better in my bag, anyway.) I rolled the SecUnit back into the pod and asked MobSys to hold it with the door shut while it ran a full diagnostic cycle.

I ushered Mensah into my pod and hit a new destination. As I reloaded my projectile weapon and tucked it back into my bag, I asked the pod to hold while I checked the transit lobby security cam again. Yes, the two GrayCris targets were still there, though they both looked worried and were speaking into their feeds. There were nine other non-target humans waiting in two loosely clustered groups.

What was that idea again? Oh, here it is, right where I filed it.

I said, “I have to take out the two targets on the transit pipe platform. When we arrive, step out of the pod, move away from the entrance, and wait for me.” I hadn’t been able to look at her face yet, not even with the pod’s camera.

She said, “Understood.”

I let our pod arrive at the platform, and as the doors opened, I had MobSys, which also controlled the hotel’s active decor, drop the holographic thunderstorm to the platform level.

I stepped out of the pod into dark purple clouds, lightning, simulated rain, and the startled yelps and laughter of the waiting passengers. Visibility was down to fifteen percent, but my scan found the two armed targets. I reached Target One, blocked her feed, and delivered an incapacitating pulse with the energy weapon in my right arm.

I caught her as she fell and turned to sling her into the pod. Target Two knew something had happened (probably when he lost feed contact with One), and I had to duck sideways and trip him. He hit the platform and I leaned down to give him just enough of a tap on the head to make resistance unlikely.

I dragged Target Two to the pod, where Target One was still twitching. When the doors of their pod closed, I directed it to the club level and told it to freeze in place and notify hotelMaint. Then I let MobSys, which was getting impatient, lift the thunderstorm back to its assigned position.

The other humans and augmented humans on the platform looked confused or relieved, with a few expressing disappointment. No one acted like they had seen a SecUnit take out two corporate security agents. I nodded to Mensah, and we stepped into the waiting area. I was already removing us from the platform’s cam, but this wouldn’t delay pursuit for very long.

I led Mensah down the platform toward where the last pipe capsule would load. The platform camera showed I was doing pretty well on looking casual. (It surprised me, too.) Mensah had her expression under control, her shoulders relaxed. Her clothes, a long caftan over pants, looked more rumpled and creased than they should, but not enough to draw attention. In our feed connection, she said, You said the others are here with a company shuttle? Is the company helping you?

I said, No, GrayCris paid off the station to keep the company out. Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin came anyway.

The pipe slid into the station and we boarded the empty capsule at the rear. (This part was mostly luck, but while I was waiting in the lobby, I had done a quick review of the pipe activity from this platform, which wasn’t very active through day cycle. It wasn’t part of the main pipe circuit, but a side route paid for by the hotel.)

As the pipe door slid shut, the platform security cam showed a set of pod doors opening and three humans in hotelSec gear rushing out. Well, shit. There went my timeline.

I had control of the cam in the pipe capsule and now I slid into the pipe’s control feed. I told Mensah, “Change of plan, they know where we are.”

She nodded, her expression tight.

This was a direct transit to the port and I needed a stop, before GrayCris persuaded station security to stop us. The map said that the pipe was approaching a platform in an office building. A quick check on the local security camera showed the platform was empty, which made sense, as there were no pipes scheduled to stop there for another thirty-three minutes. I had to be quick because this pipe was due to merge into the main access track not far past the office building and its window was tightly scheduled. (Causing a major accident by delaying this pipe too long would not only encourage station security to act against us with all its resources but also be kind of a shitty thing to do.) I sent Mensah an alert in her feed—this was happening so fast I didn’t have time to verbalize it to myself, let alone tell her what I was doing—and wrapped an arm around her waist. She knotted her hands in my jacket and buried her head against my shoulder. I folded my free arm over her head. Then I sent the slow command.

The capsule dropped speed as it entered the station and I was already moving as I gave the doors an emergency signal to open. The pipe door made it open in time but the inner station door didn’t. Fortunately I only clipped it and it just altered my trajectory as I spun across the platform floor.

The capsule had already slid its door shut and accelerated to the speed needed to make its merge window. I deleted us out of the recordings, deleted various buffers and logs, and removed the capsule’s memory of the incident.

I’d managed to roll to a stop with Mensah on top, but that couldn’t have been comfortable. The last time we’d done this, I’d been in armor and also jumping off a steep slope, and this was a smooth synthetic stone floor and nothing was exploding at close range. So this was better, is my point, I think. I lifted her off me, shoved upright, and then pulled her to her feet.

She waved me off. “I’m all right.”

I let go of her cautiously, but she stayed up. I pulled maps from the building’s feed to look for transportation options. Aha, there was a good one.

I led us off the platform and down the ramp to the building’s pods, using my code to delete us from the security cams. At the junction we stepped into the first pod to arrive, and I told it to override its rules and take us all the way to the maintenance level, which was listed on the map as a closed floor and wasn’t an option on the pod’s normal menu.

We stepped out into a low-ceilinged space, and once the pod shut behind us it was completely dark. I could see via infrared and used my scan to create a physical map. Mensah couldn’t see at all. She grabbed my jacket and shifted behind me, letting me pull her forward.

The air circulation and quality wasn’t great but at least there was air. I navigated a path through currently offline maintenance and hauler bots over to an open ramp that led down. We hit two changes in gravity, one gradual, and one not so gradual, when the wall to the right abruptly became the floor.

We were headed toward a branch of an access backbone, which was a space for moving cargo to and from the port and between station levels, and was also an access and transport system for station engineering bots and teams. There were strips of emergency lighting here and lots of marker paint, giving off bursts of light and feed signals, mostly temporary instructions and guides for bots and human workers. Mensah’s grip on my jacket relaxed and I could tell from her breathing the light was a relief.

We walked into a strong breeze coming from the access backbone. I picked up human voices on audio not far away. From the feed activity, there was a lot of traffic about two hundred meters to the right, toward the plaza and the hotels. None of it sounded like emergency or security operations, just normal support system work. In six more steps the ramp reached the backbone, a shadowy cavern lit by low-level navigation beacons. Things whooshed by in the dimness, mostly lift platforms and automated carriers coming from or heading back to the port cargo depots.

It wasn’t like there was no security, since if you were going to steal cargo or do something terrible to a competitor’s station structure, this was the place to do it from. I was deflecting the scans for weapons and power sources, and we had five minutes and counting before the next drone squad came through.

Mensah had gripped my jacket again, maybe nervous at the height and depth of the backbone. Despite the lighter gravity, I wasn’t keen on it, either. I was scanning for an empty carrier and found an idle one up toward the area of activity. I teased it out of the herd and told it to come to us.

It slid up to the passage two minutes later, a boxy structure used to transport station engineers, their bots, and equipment. We stepped inside and I made the doors shut before I let it bring up the interior lights. I checked its map system and sent it toward the port.

Mensah swayed as it started to move and grabbed my arm above the gun port, squeezing hard enough that the organic part of my arm felt it. The racing heartbeat seemed normal under the circumstances, but she still hadn’t let go of me. I asked, “Are you all right?” What if they’d tortured her? Everything in my emergency med/psych assistance module involved accessing a MedSystem so it could tell me what to do. (My company-supplied education modules were crap, I may have mentioned.)

She shook her head. “I’m fine. I’m just … very glad to see you.”

She still sounded unsteady. She looked the same, dark brown skin, short light brown hair. There were definitely more creases at the corner of her eyes, something I confirmed with a comparison of my earlier recordings of her. And I was looking at her now.

In the shows, I saw humans comfort each other all the time at moments like this. I had never wanted that and I still didn’t. (Touching while rendering assistance, shielding humans from explosions, etc., is different.) But I was the only one here, so I braced myself and made the ultimate sacrifice. “Uh, you can hug me if you need to.”

She started to laugh, then her face did something complicated and she hugged me. I upped the temperature in my chest and told myself it was like first aid.

Except it wasn’t entirely awful. It was like when Tapan had slept next to me in the room at the hostel, or when Abene had leaned on me after I saved her; strange, but not as horrific as I would have thought.

She stepped back and rubbed her face, as if impatient with her own reaction. She looked up at me. “That was you at the GrayCris terraforming facility.”

They must have questioned her about it. “It was an accident,” I said.

She nodded. “What part was an accident?”

“Most of the parts.”

Her brow was furrowed. “Did you tell them I sent you?”

“No, I impersonated my client. My imaginary client. That I impersonated.” I was caught in a loop for a second there. “Since I left Port FreeCommerce, I’ve successfully impersonated an augmented human security consultant with two different groups of humans. At Milu I meant to do the same, but I was identified as a SecUnit so I told them I was under the control of an off-site security consultant client.” Impersonated is a weird word, especially in this context. (I just noticed that. Im-person-ated. Weird.)

“I see. Why did you go to Milu?”

“I saw a story about Milu in a newsburst. I wanted to get corroborating evidence of GrayCris’ illegal activity and send it to you.” That sounded good. Not that it wasn’t true, but I had a lot of conflicting motivations and that was the only one that made sense, even to me.

She let her breath out and pressed her hands over her face for 5.3 seconds. “I’ll remember this the next time I give an off-the-cuff interview.” She looked up again. “Did you get the evidence?”

“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.”