Fugitive Telemetry

Chapter Seven

I’D BEEN BROUGHT TO Preservation on one of their older ships, which had been refitted over and over again. This section of the colony ship had never been refitted. The corridors were dingy, the paint on the dark metal patchy where it had been rubbed off by hands and shoulders.

The colony ship hadn’t just been left to rot; the humans liked it too much for that. It smelled of clean emptiness in a way human places never do. Pieces of clear protective material had been placed over the occasional drawings on the bulkheads, and on the pieces of paper stuck to them and covered with scribbled handwriting and faded print. Feed markers had been installed by Station Historical/Environment Management with translations into Preservation Standard Nomenclature. My drones picked up whispers of lost-and-found notices, messhall schedules, and the rules for games I didn’t recognize.

It should have been creepy. I had been in places like this that were really creepy. But this wasn’t. Maybe because I knew where the humans and augmented humans who had last used this ship had gone, that their descendants were running around all over this system, and that one of them was in my secure feed right now, demanding an update.

I’m almost there, I told Aylen. Just give me a fucking minute.

Indah had gone back to the mobile command center to be visible, but she wanted me to have backup. Aylen was waiting at the entrance to this section of the colony ship, making sure nobody followed me up here. If she had to call in a team for help, she was going to hold off as long as possible, to keep our local actor from knowing what we were doing until hopefully it was too late.

Aylen said, You know, swearing during operations doesn’t meet the professional conduct standards of Station Security.

By this point I knew that was Aylen’s idea of a joke. I replied, Because Senior Indah has never told anybody to fuck off.

You have me there.

I reached the lock corridor and sent, I’m going offline now.

Understood, she sent back. Good luck.

I understand why humans say that, but luck sucks. I found the lock and dropped the EVAC suit container on the deck to expand and unpack it.

Once I had it out, I started to pull the tab to activate it. Then I processed the instructions it was loading into the feed… this emergency device alerts the Port Authority emergency notification network and the transponder will send your location to… Ugh, of course the EVAC suit had a transponder, this was a stripped-down emergency version for stations, not the full ship corporate-brand EVAC suits I’d used before.

The local actor, if not the hostile ship itself, was sure to be monitoring the station’s search and rescue channel. They would know someone was trying to approach surreptitiously.

I was going to have to turn the transponder off. There was no way to do that via the feed so I needed to find the physical switch. I pulled the schematic from the instructions and found the transponder was buried in the sealed drive unit.

Oh, you have to be kidding me. I’d be pissed off at the humans but I had brought this thing up here without checking. Seconds were ticking away while I wasted time. I couldn’t take the drive unit apart without breaking it, I had no idea how. I didn’t have the ability to disguise the signal. I could jam it, but at such close range any static leakage, any hint of activity on the otherwise silent search and rescue channel, might alert the hostile ship. It would sure as hell alert me if I was in their position. There was no time to go back for another EVAC suit or…

Or Murderbot, you dummy, you’re on a giant spaceship that has been meticulously preserved as a historical artifact. If they still had intact lunch menus from however many years ago, the chances were good they still had the safety equipment.

Big green arrows scrawled along the bulkhead pointed me toward the nearest emergency lockers and I opened the first one. The inside was neatly packed with safety supplies, all of it tagged with explanatory labels and scrawled symbols on the containers, all of it simple and easily readable for any panicky untrained human. Except I didn’t have this language loaded.

So I had to go back online for a minute. I secured a connection with Ratthi and Gurathin and said, I need help.

They were eating together in one of the station mall’s food places; Ratthi stood up and knocked his chair over and Gurathin spilled the liquid in the cup he was lifting. Ratthi said, SecUnit, what’s wrong?

I understood the reaction. I didn’t ask for help that often. I sent them my drone video: Which one of these things is most like an EVAC suit?

Uh, are you up in the Pressy? Ratthi asked, baffled. The closest thing I see to an EVAC suit in there is a life-tender. But—

There, third shelf down, with the red tags, Gurathin added. I yanked one out of the rack and he said, Wait, why do you need it? What are you doing?

It’s a Station Security thing, I’ll tell you later, I said, and cut the connection. Now that I had the name, I used the station feed to hit the public library, where I pulled a description and operating instructions from the historical records.

The life-tender wasn’t so much an EVAC suit as it was a small vehicle. It opened into a kind of diamond-shaped bag with rudimentary navigation, propulsion, and life support. According to the library record, it was designed to get several humans off one ship and onto a new one, usually because the first ship was about to have a catastrophic failure. This one also had a transponder but it was set to the colony ship’s comm ID, which had been delisted as an active channel and turned into an audio monument, broadcasting historical facts and stories about the colony ship’s first arrival in the system. It was unlikely the hostiles would be monitoring it and the chatty broadcasts would provide cover for my comm and the life-tender’s location transmissions. The library entry also said life-tenders weren’t used anymore because without their transponders, they were difficult to locate and didn’t meet Preservation’s current safety standards. Difficult to locate sounded good, though, like the hostile ship wouldn’t know it was out there unless it specifically scanned for it, which was what I needed.

The historical story currently playing on the colony ship’s comm sounded interesting, so I set one of my inputs to record it as I carried the life-tender to the airlock. Following the instructions, I pulled the tabs, set the safety to active, tossed it into the lock, and cycled it through. It was old, but its sealed storage was designed to keep equipment functioning for long periods of time, just like everything else on this ship; it was how these old colony ships worked. (You couldn’t be on Preservation for more than five minutes without being forced to listen to a documentary about it.)

I just hoped all the documentaries were right.

The life-tender signaled the ship’s comm that it was ready and I stepped into the airlock and let it cycle shut. I could see the life-tender on the lock’s camera, where it had clamped itself around the outer hatch. Wow, that is just a bag, is what that is.

I didn’t need as much air as humans did, but I needed some, and it was really cold out there, in the colony ship’s shadow. This meant that if the life-tender failed it would take me longer to die so I’d have longer to feel dumb about it than a human would.

So here goes. I told my drones to get in my pockets and go dormant. Then I opened the hatch and leaned out to sort of float/fall into the tender. Okay, new problem. It’s really fucking dark.

The huge hull of the colony ship blocked any light from the primary, the station, the planet, whatever, which was probably why the hostile ship had picked this spot to hide.

It’s cold, it’s dark, whatever was generating the air smelled terrible, I’m in a bag in space. I thought about going back for the EVAC suit, but the chance that the hostiles were scanning for transponders on the station search and rescue channel was still hitting 96 percent. If what I was doing in this stupid bag was dumb, going out here with a beacon I couldn’t turn off or disguise was much more dumb.

Okay, fine, let’s just get it over with.

I sealed the bag’s entrance and let the ship’s hatch close. The tender was controlled via a local connection to its drive and navigation, so it could still be used if, say, your ship blew up and you couldn’t access its comm or feed. I had the location for the hostile ship and I fed it into the simple system, and my little bag headed off through the dark.

I carefully explored the control options, and wow, I now knew why the bag was described as “difficult to locate in a combat situation” because its power supply was so minimal it was almost nonexistent. Even my body heat was already causing condensation. I found the menu for monitoring life support, such as it was. The bag had lights but turning them on would just be stupid plus I didn’t really want to see what was happening.

Then the bag bumped (it wasn’t really a bump, it was more like a blorp) into something solid and stopped. I checked navigation and holy shit, we’re here.

The bag’s sensor system was primitive but it knew it had blorped itself up against the curving hull of a ship. I detected the ship’s feed connection but it was silent. Not locked down, just quiet as whoever was aboard tried to minimize contact.

Modules didn’t have an airlock, they relied on attaching to the transport or station cargo lock; I wouldn’t have been able to open the module’s hatch for the EVAC suit without killing everyone inside, so the plan had been to get into the hostile ship through its lock and then run around getting shot and murdering my way through whoever was aboard until I could get control. (I hadn’t used those exact words during the planning process with Indah and Aylen, but we all knew what we were talking about.) But my maybe-not-so-dumb bag made its own airlock, that was the whole point of it.

If I could get the refugees out of the module and over to the colony ship’s lock without the hostiles even realizing I was there, then the responder would be free to take over the hostile ship.

That plan was easier plus 100 percent less murdery. And I liked it better.

Huh. I liked it better because it wasn’t a CombatUnit plan, or actually a plan that humans would come up with for CombatUnits. Sneaking the endangered humans off the ship to safety and then leaving the hostiles for someone else to deal with, that was a SecUnit plan, that was what we were really designed for, despite how the company and every other corporate used us. The point was to retrieve the clients alive and fuck everything else.

Maybe I’d been waiting too long for GrayCris to show up and try to kill us all. I was thinking like a CombatUnit, or, for fuck’s sake, like a CombatBot.

I got the bag to blorp along the hull over to where the module should be, then along its side to where scan detected the outline of the module’s access hatch. Once the bag was in place, its automatic functions took over and it enlarged itself to completely cover the hatch. The bag assured me it had made a secure seal. Okay, it hadn’t lied to me so far.

Now this part might be tricky. I carefully felt around in the empty feed, looking for the ship’s bot pilot. Oh, there it was. It was a limited bot pilot, just there to steer and dock the ship and guide it through wormholes. It was startled to be accessed, even though I was spoofing a Port Authority ID. It’s usually easy to make friends with low-level bot pilots, but this one had been coded to be adversarial, directed to operate in stealth mode, and was wary of incursion attempts. It tried to alert its onboard SecSystem, but as the old saying (which I just made up) goes, if you can ping the SecUnit, it’s way too late.

I took control, disabled the SecSystem, and put the bot pilot in sleep mode. Having to keep it dormant was annoying, because it limited my ability to use the ship’s functions, but it meant the hostiles wouldn’t be able to fly off toward the wormhole or fire weapons at the responder or whatever else they felt like shooting at.

Next I accessed the module’s hatch control. I didn’t want to risk trying to use the comm or feed to check if anybody was inside, because not alerting the hostiles was the whole point of going in this way.

I checked the bag’s airlock seal again, then told the module to open its access hatch.

Oh, shit, my stupid, stupid feed ID that identified me as a SecUnit. Just as the hatch slid up, I switched it to the last one in my buffer, the Kiran ID I’d used on TranRollinHyfa.

The lighted interior would have blinded me if my eyes worked that way. I meant to say something before I went inside but the bag had no grav function and the module did, so let’s put it this way, my entrance was abrupt and not graceful.

The module was a big oblong container with ribbed supports and racks folded into the bulkheads and no padding anywhere, making it clear it was designed for cargo, not passengers. It was colder than the bag and the air smelled wrong. The bunch of humans inside screamed and threw themselves away from the hatch that from their perspective had apparently just opened into empty space. Then they realized I was standing there and they screamed again.

Fortunately I had a lot of experience being screamed at and stared at by terrified humans. It was never comfortable, and I couldn’t let my drones deploy so I had to look at them with my actual eyes, but I was sort of used to that by now. Also, I’d spent a whole trip through a wormhole pretending to be an augmented human security consultant for humans who badly needed one, so I had coping mechanisms in place. Sort of.

I held up my hands and said, “Please calm down. I’m from Preservation Station Security and I’m here to get you to safety.” They huddled at the other end of the module, still staring, but I thought that was shock and surprise. I added, “You’ve been abducted by whoever is aboard this ship, they were not sent by your contact Lutran.”

“We know that,” one of the humans said. They started to unfold from defensive positions as they realized I wasn’t here to shoot them. I didn’t see any signs of serious injury but from the disarray of their clothes and some visible bruises, they had been knocked around in the module at some point. I wasn’t picking up any augments or interfaces. Which made sense; only the non-augmented contract labor would be able to leave BreharWallHan without being traced, and the escapees would know to leave their interfaces behind. Their captors would have confiscated any comms or interfaces the Lalow crew had given them. Human One continued, “They’re bounty-catchers, sent by the supervisors.” She pointed up.

It could have been a trick but I looked up anyway. Oh shit, the module is attached to a lock. An appallingly jury-rigged lock, way too small.

The module’s other hatch, the large one meant to load and unload bulk cargo, was open, sealed directly against the hull of the ship. For fuck’s sake, I could see part of the ship’s registration number.

The ship’s lock, roughly in the center of the opening, was only about two meters square and had no transparent panel, just a camera, and no controls to open it from this side. It was terrifying, both from a safety standpoint and an “oh shit” standpoint. It’s a good thing I can have a horrified emotional reaction while also simultaneously pulling the latest video out of the ship’s SecSystem, deleting myself and the open hatch, and starting a loop so if any hostiles checked their module camera, everything would look normal. Was there even an air wall behind that lock? Holy shit, who does this?

The hostiles up in the ship might have heard the screaming. I lowered my voice. “We need to get you out of here now.” I hadn’t meant to say that next but it just came out, because this could be such a disaster. All the hostiles had to do was disengage the seal on the module and I’d lose every one of the humans. With the bot pilot down, they couldn’t disengage via the ship’s feed, but the chance that the seal had a manual release was high.

My bag, blorping quietly to itself on the access hatch, was starting to look really friendly in comparison.

I connected to the hostile ship’s hamstrung SecSystem again and started to feel for more cameras. There wasn’t a full set; obviously this crew didn’t like the idea of a video record of all the fun they were having while hunting contract labor refugees. But I needed to get a view of the compartment on the other side of the hatch of jury-rigged terror.

“So your station can send us back to the supervisors and get the bounty?” Human One said. The humans were all shivering and showing various signs of physical and emotional distress. I didn’t know what the air quality rating was in here but I could guess it wasn’t good. This was no time to explain Preservation’s attitude toward forced labor and the fact that the council would be unlikely to allow corporate bounty-collecting as an alternative income for the station. (A bounty probably wouldn’t pay for even a week of JollyBaby’s annual maintenance, anyway.)

I said, “Contract slavery is illegal on Preservation. You have refugee status here and no one can send you back or make you do anything you don’t want to do. If I can get you back to the station.” I pointed at the bag. I know, I felt like an idiot. “This is a life-tender. You’re going to need to get in it.”

The three humans in front, the brave ones, came forward, still afraid but desperately willing to be convinced. Human One stepped close enough to peer through the hatch, where the module’s light was not being kind to my giant bag. “In that?” she said, as if honestly baffled. The others recoiled a little.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I told her. The bag had already set itself to return to the colony ship’s lock and was just waiting for a go code. I wanted to pile all the humans in but the instructions insisted there was a per trip limit. I could override it, but… Yeah, no, better not. On the ship’s feed I found cameras in engineering, the passage into the bridge, and finally, a camera pointed at the other side of the lock where the module was attached. There was no air wall, no full lock, just that round hatch. Oh, huh, I think this is a modified raider ship and that hatch is designed for ship-to-ship boarding. And there was a box attached to it that looked suspiciously like a manual release. Yikes.

(I mean, there had been an 80-plus percent chance it existed, but seeing it drove home the whole oh shit aspect of everything.)

I needed to keep telling the humans to get in the bag. “It’ll hold six of you and you need to get in, now.” I pointed up at the obviously rigged-for-rapid-decompression-hole in the roof of the module. “It’s better than that.” Was I going to have to make them get in the stupid bag? I really hoped not, because if they realized I was a SecUnit, this situation was going to go from awkward to… really fucking awkward. “It’s self-guiding, it’s a short trip, all you have to do is go through the station airlock when it opens for you.”

Then Human One, still looking out at the bag, made her decision. She turned back to the others. “Come on, the youngs go first.”

She picked out the three adolescents and three of the adults. There was some muffled crying and protests as she shoved them into the bag. They were afraid, they didn’t want to leave the others, etc.

The bridge passage camera picked up a human in tactical gear moving past. I said, “How many aboard?”

Human One said, “We only saw two, but there has to be more. They opened the hatch once after we were locked on to look at us.”

Human Two said, “They said they wanted us alive for the bounty.”

Then Human Three added, “They got a SecUnit.”

“They do?” Did they? I hadn’t caught any pings and there’s no way a SecUnit wouldn’t have noticed when I took control of the ship’s SecSystem. I’d had the theory that PortAuth system had been hacked by a SecUnit or CombatUnit, but that didn’t fit with our current working theory that there was a local actor who had legitimate PortAuth access. “Did you see it?”

“Behind the others, in the armor,” Three said. Two and Four nodded.

One made a noise under her breath and I said, “You don’t think it’s a SecUnit.” I should have been more careful there, but I was trying to get into the ship’s memory archives without waking the bot pilot, and with my drones hidden, I was mostly looking at the hatch or the bag. I wanted schematics, controls for the jury-rigged lock. No, they could still use the manual release, I couldn’t jam that from here. Another hostile in tactical gear left the bridge. Yeah, I think they’ve alerted on me, somehow.

Human One said, “They use SecUnits up in the processing centers, not in the backrocks where we were most of the time.”

When the sixth human tumbled into the bag, it signaled that it was at capacity and ready to leave. I let the module’s hatch close. Then I wished I’d left a drone in the bag so I could monitor it directly. Whatever, I was just going to have to trust the damn bag.

At least I had its channel as an input and could tell it had sealed itself and scooted off to take the most direct route back to its “home” airlock. “How long will it take?” Human Three asked.

“Not long, just a few minutes,” I said. If we were lucky, there would be time for a second trip and I wouldn’t have to do this the hard way.

A vibration traveled through the hull and the humans flinched. “What was that?” Human Two demanded.

“They’re trying to dump us!” Human Four’s voice was shrill. He was right, someone in the bridge had tried (and failed, because I had control of SecSystem and it was preventing the command from going through) to release the clamps on the module. Something had spooked the hostiles and they were trying to dump the incriminating module and leave. Well, crap. Time to shift to Plan B. I connected to the station’s feed and used it to send the “proceed” code to the responder. Since there was no point in hiding anymore, I also sent a feed message to Aylen and told her refugees were incoming to the colony ship.

Human One took a sharp breath. “Thanks for trying, Station Security.”

Above us the ship’s camera picked up a hostile in an armored suit, the one that the refugees had mistaken for a SecUnit, stepping into view of the hold camera near the jury-rigged lock above us. Oh, I get it. The hostile wasn’t strong enough to activate the manual release without the armor. But I’d finally found the code they used for the jury-rigged hatch.

In one of my shows, this would have been a great time to say something brave and encouraging. I suck at that, so I said, “Get to the back of the module, on the floor, and cover your heads.”

I checked my input for the life-tender; it had reached the colony ship’s hull and was blorping along toward the airlock. In my peripheral vision, Human One jerked her head at the others and they scrambled toward the far end of the module. I said, “When I yell clear, I need you to follow me up into the ship.”

Skeptically, Human One said, “How are you gonna—”

I pulled my explosive projectile weapon off its strap, then climbed the folded cargo rack nearest the module lock, braced my feet against the bulkhead, and held on with my free arm. As the armored hostile leaned down to reach the release, I triggered the ship’s system to open the jury-rigged hatch.

It rotated open with a hiss of released air, and the module immediately smelled better.

I didn’t move. The camera showed the armored hostile jerking back in surprise. A panicky yell from a hostile on the bridge came over the comm; they must have realized the bot pilot was unresponsive. But the armored hostile couldn’t pull the release now, while the lock was open, without depressurizing the ship. (I’d also frozen open all the interior hatches, which, from the additional yelling over the comm, was something the bridge crew had just discovered.)

The armored hostile hesitated. Come on, look down here, you know you want to. There was going to be an orientation change between the ship’s gravity field and the module’s gravity field, and I’d have to take it into account. The humans huddled at the far end of the module, frozen, waiting.

The armored hostile leaned down and cautiously extended a weapon through the lock.

(I already knew it wasn’t another SecUnit inside that suit, but this was another giveaway. A SecUnit would have moved fast, propelling itself into the module. There’s no point in being cautious when your job is to draw fire, right?)

I woke my drones as I grabbed the armored arm and yanked it down. Twisting the hostile’s weapon free and dropping it, I swung myself over to clamp my body around the armor’s helmet and upper body.

I have a file of access codes I could have used to take control of the armor, but that would take time, and this was an expensive brand and might be newer than my code list. Another reason this wasn’t a SecUnit—our armor was never this nice.

With my chest clamped to its helmet, Armored Hostile couldn’t see and events were moving a little too fast for it to take advantage of the armor’s scan, cameras, or defensive functions. I jammed the nozzle of my projectile weapon into the back neck joint where the important parts were, switched it to full power, and fired. The armor spasmed (an explosive projectile in your motor control functions will do that) and went limp.

My drones shot up through the lock and the hold, and straight into the faces of the two hostiles in tactical gear running toward us down the corridor. They screamed and flailed backward.

I climbed around the dead weight of the armored hostile and up into the ship. Then I dragged the body out of the way and yelled, “Clear!”

I took a guard position at the inner hatch and watched my drones zip through the ship. Behind me the humans scrambled to climb up through the hatch, exhausted and struggling, trying to help each other. When the last one collapsed on the deck, gasping at the fresh air, I let the lock close. That was a relief. Now that there was no more danger of everybody getting sucked into space, I checked my other inputs.

I had confirmation from the bag that it had delivered its humans to the colony ship, where the airlock had accepted its safety code and cycled them through. The responder had sent a confirmation code, and, according to the hostile ship’s SecSystem, had just hailed the hostiles and informed them that they were about to be apprehended.

The armored hostile was still alive, just stunned and trapped in the immobile suit. The other hostiles were confused, panicking about the drones, and there was every chance of getting them to surrender, or at least violently encouraging them to surrender without having to kill them. To the humans, I said, “I’m going after the others, just stay here—”

I felt a hard thump from behind. It was low and to one side, where a fairly important part would be, if I was human.

I turned. Human One had the armored hostile’s weapon, the one I had taken away and dropped down into the module. And she had shot me with it.

I reached her before she could fire again, twisted it out of her grip. Then I walked out of the hold and let the hatch shut behind me.

By the time the responder locked on and its armed intervention team boarded, I had the other hostiles disarmed, restrained with cuffs I’d found in a locker, and sitting on the deck near the main airlock. I’d found their medical unit (it was an off-brand model, and installed in the galley, but whatever) and was letting it seal up the hole in my back. (Just a regular projectile, not an explosive one, so most of my back was still there. I just didn’t feel like walking around leaking in front of humans right now.) I’d gotten Aylen on comm and confirmed she had called in her team for support and was now trying to coax the six refugees out of the colony ship’s airlock corridor. Apparently they weren’t believing the whole “we’re Station Security and we’re here to help” story. Whatever, it wasn’t my problem.

I’d switched my feed ID back to SecUnit.

Senior Indah walked in. I knew from listening to the responder’s comm that she had taken a shuttle out to it, but I hadn’t expected her to come looking for me. She frowned at the galley. The surfaces were smeared with dried food, and it smelled bad, even worse than human food prep areas usually smell. She looked at me and said, “You were hurt?”

I told the MedUnit to stop and pulled my shirt back down. “What gave it away?”

She folded her arms and leaned against the side of the hatch. My drones showed her expression was sour. “The refugees told me they shot you. They realized you were a SecUnit and thought…” She scratched her head, leaving her short hair sticking up unevenly. “I don’t know what they thought, I’m too tired to sort that out. Do you want to make a criminal complaint against them?”

Uh-huh, very funny. “No.” I didn’t want to talk about it, so I stared at the wall. I just wanted to get off this ship, back to the station, back to my regular job making sure no one killed Mensah. “My short-term contract is completed.”

“Is it?” Indah lifted her brows. “Do you know who killed Lutran?”

With everything else, I’d forgotten about the original objective of this whole mess. “No, who?”

Now she rolled her eyes. “I was asking you.”

Oh, right. “But the hostiles will know who they were working with in the Port Authority.”

“We questioned them briefly and they say they don’t. They were given some instructions to send to a scramble-coded feed address, and they have no idea who was on the other end. We checked and the address has been deleted. I don’t know if I believe they really didn’t know who they were talking to, but it’s going to take time to get them to realize that they can help themselves more by telling us everything.” Her mouth set in a grim line. “I don’t want to wait. I want to find that traitor before they do any more damage.”

Did I want that too? Yes, yes I did. And the parameters of the problem had changed, drastically, in a way that made it solvable. Our suspect pool had been a bunch of humans and augmented humans wandering around in the Merchant Docks mostly unobserved and not interacting with station systems, as we tried to identify an actor who could remove themselves from the few surveillance cameras at will. Now we knew it was a local, someone with legitimate access to Port Authority systems. Locals living on the station do stuff that leaves a trail, that generates records in log files. “You need a surveillance audit.”

Her frown turned confused. “A what?”

“You take all the data available during the time frame when the incidents occurred, not just from the Port Authority systems, but from StationSec, StationCommCentral, TransportLocal, the distribution kiosks, the door systems that allow people to enter their private quarters, anything that saves an ID that tells you what someone was doing at the specific moment when we know the perpetrator was active, and you compare it to the list of potential operators to start eliminating them. It’s going to be harder because your surveillance is crap, but it can still drastically reduce the suspect pool.” She didn’t react and I added, “If we know someone is in the station mall accessing a food kiosk at the exact time the transport suffered the catastrophic failure, then they can be eliminated as a suspect.”

Her gaze turned intrigued. “Some of those systems are under privacy lock, we’d need a judge-advocate to release their access records, but the others…” Then she shook her head. “We narrowed down the time of death, but it’s not exact. And the theory was that some of those actions, like using the cart to dump Lutran’s body in the mall, were prearranged. The actor could have been eating in the station mall when it happened.”

I explained, “But not when the transport was hacked. That can’t be done over the feed. When the transport went down, the actor was there, on board.”

Indah’s face did something complicated, which I think was an attempt not to show enthusiasm. “How long would this take you?”

“A few hours. And I’d need outside processing and storage space.” I’d have to pull a bunch of old company code out of archive storage, build the database, and write the queries.

She pushed off the hatch. “Then let’s get out of here and get started.”