No, I left, I said, I’ve decided to live here and just move from hotel to hotel, watching the entertainment feed.
Okay, so that did sound like a much better idea than I meant it to.
There was a pause, then he said, I’m not your enemy. I’m just cautious.
I don’t care about your opinion, I said, and then immediately wished I’d put myself on a one-second delay so I could delete it. It made it sound like I did care. Which I didn’t.
One minute crawled by. Then two. Gurathin said, What did you do, while you were gone? Where did you go?
I didn’t want to answer, because I didn’t want to talk about it, but it seemed weirdly petty to just ignore him. I pulled a selection of video from the trip with Ayres and the others on the way to HaveRatton, mostly exchanges I’d tagged so I could critique my performance later. (A few times I’d broken up fights, been forced to give relationship advice, and the infamous Cracker Wrapper in the Sink Incident.) I cut it together, labeled it “Murderbot Impersonates an Augmented Human Security Consultant,” and sent it to Gurathin.
He was still watching it when the GrayCris representative walked into the lobby from the main entrance.
There was nothing physical to set him apart from the other humans and augmented humans wandering in and out. He was a tall pale human, with long light-colored hair, and he was wearing one of the many local variations of business attire: a dark long-sleeved jacket that went to the knees, over wide pants.
I tapped Gurathin and he stopped the video play.
The GrayCris rep paused and a flash of annoyance crossed his face. He’d encountered the choked hotel feed. The hotel system registered the charge to a station credit account and then gave him access. I caught the results of the routine scan from the hotel’s security drone: no weapons, just interface activity. A brief analysis of the drone’s read gave me a 65 percent probability that he had something on him to falsify the scan. So he was probably armed and probably carrying a secured comm device.
I had access to his feed but I didn’t figure it would do much good. If he had a device on him to fake readings for a security scan, then he had to know a choked hotel feed was hardly the best place for operational communication.
It was the hypothetical secured comm device I had to worry about. Whatever it was, it would need to use the hotel’s relay to reach the station’s comm network.
The GrayCris rep did a visual scan of the lobby and obviously recognized Gurathin, probably from intel obtained by GrayCris on Port FreeCommerce. He went toward Gurathin, who stood to meet him. He said, “Gurathin? I’m Serrat, here at the request of Pin-Lee.” He was calm, confident, with a hint of a friendly smile.
Gurathin’s asshole effect must come in handy at times like this. With a deeply unimpressed expression, he said, “This way,” and started toward the pod junction.
I tapped Pin-Lee and Ratthi to warn them, and continued a visual sweep for hostiles. Like those two humans, strolling casually through the main entrance, casually pausing to casually look around, then casually proceeding to the stairs that led to the lounge/food service area. (Right, so they really weren’t that bad, but I’d been sitting here long enough to analyze the traffic patterns. Humans who walk in looking for something, or are genuinely confused about where to go next, tended to move in erratic ways, their attention caught by the biozones, the feed indicators for the ramp that takes you to the registration area, etc. Compared to that, the hostiles were easy to spot.)
Maybe too easy? The hotel drone scan came back negative, but with that same suspicious pattern as the GrayCris rep. (It was suspicious to me; I’ve fooled a lot of drone scans.)
I marked two more potential hostiles exiting a pipe capsule in the transit lobby, and a check-in with my friends the plaza drone cams showed more outside the hotel’s plaza entrance.
Yeah, I had a bad feeling about that, too. But I was still monitoring the security system, and there were no alerts, no anomalous signals.
I meant to stay here until the exchange was arranged, but now I got up and headed for the pod junction. I had one input riding Gurathin’s feed. He and Serrat had just stepped out of the pod. Gurathin had made the whole trip awkwardly silent. I was reluctantly impressed.
I was in the pod and at the right section by the time Gurathin and Serrat reached the room. There was no cover in the corridor, so I told the pod to hold and notify hotelEnvironmentAccessAndMobilitySystem (MobSys for short) not to take action on any maintenance requests. (It sounds like a lot of trouble just to stop a pod, but if I didn’t do it that way it would have crashed the system. Literally, if I interfered with MobSys’ pod traffic control. And by literally, I mean pods full of humans and augmented humans crashing into each other.)
They were in the room now and Pin-Lee was saying, “We have the currency your corporation asked for. Some of it had to come from liquidated assets, and I’ve received notice that they’re ready to transfer. I won’t produce the list or send the authorization until we see Dr. Mensah.”
Serrat answered, “I assure you, she’s already on her way here, escorted by a security detail. I do need to see the transfer authorization.”
I had one input monitoring Mensah’s implant, but it wasn’t pinging yet. I also had a couple of analyses going, estimating distances and potential routes between here and the upper torus, and I was working on a contingency for the port in case they had real security (i.e., SecUnits from Palisade or one of the other local bond companies) with them. It could potentially get disastrously complicated, but I still thought it was doable.
Then it got disastrously complicated.
In the feed, Ratthi said, Uh, SecUnit? Please help.
Like an idiot my first reaction was to try to switch to the helmet cam Ratthi wasn’t wearing. I had no camera in the room, just audio, and all I could hear was breathing. (This was the flaw in Plan 1A. There had been no way to get a camera in the room in the time we had, or at least not one undetectable to the security screen the GrayCris rep would come prepared to make.) Then Pin-Lee said, “That won’t get you the money. And money is what you need, right? What GrayCris needs right now to call off the bond company.”
Serrat said flatly, “That is not a transfer authorization. That is just a list of assets. What are you playing at?”
Scrambling for my inputs, scrambling to make sure I had control of hotelSecSys, I caught the signal Serrat had just used his comm device to send. It had to be an emergency abort for the hostage release, and possibly a signal for his backup to come in shooting. With zero time for finesse, I killed the main hotel relay, then had to take down two secondary relays that tried to activate to pick up the traffic. Then I found Serrat’s connection to the hotel feed and blocked it. I was busy, so my buffer said, Dr. Ratthi, please describe the problem.
Ratthi’s feed voice was nervous. He has a gun. It’s small, um, palm-sized. Energy weapon, I think too small for projectiles.
On audio, Gurathin said, “That’s the transfer document we were given—”
“And that’s a ridiculous lie,” Serrat said.
Keep him talking, I sent to Pin-Lee. I didn’t want him wondering why his backup hadn’t sent an acknowledgment. I’d just discarded Plan Actually Not All That Terrible and shifted to Plan Approaching Terrible. I stepped out of the pod, and released it back to MobSys as I strode down the corridor. My scan picked up a moving target around the curve and I slowed down to a casual stroll that looked just as fake and awkward as the version performed by the GrayCris reps in the lobby. But my connection to hotelSecSys showed another room door had opened in this section twenty seconds ago and the chance that the approaching humans were hostiles was less than ten percent.