We’re going, we’re going, Ratthi sent back, and hotelSecSys told me the room door had just opened and closed. Be careful—
I’m breaking contact, Ratthi, I told him, and stepped into the pod.
I shut my risk assessment module down.
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—”