Indah added, “You are the most paranoid person I’ve ever met, and I’ve worked in criminal reform for twenty-six years.”
I don’t even know how to react to that. She’s not wrong but hey, I need my paranoia. Speaking of which, I asked Aylen, “Where were you when Lutran was killed?”
She didn’t blink. “I was on a shuttle, coming back from an assignment in FirstLanding.”
“She was docking when the body was found.” Indah huffed impatiently. “Give me a little credit.”
The responder had kept its channel open and we could hear the crew talking in the background. “SatAmratEye5 is in the best position… That one’s clear… If they aren’t local they probably don’t know our satellite placement… There we go. Senior Indah, we’ve got it. There’s a ship with a module attached hiding in station section zero, in the shadow of the Pressy’s upper hull.” They were sending data and I transferred it to the big display above our heads.
It was a sensor schematic of a long shot view of the station, the curve of the ring tucked below the main structure and the shape of the giant colony ship it had been built out from. The view turned into a scan schematic and focused in on a shape huddled not far from the colony ship’s starboard hull.
It wasn’t a modular transport, it was a ship more like the Lalow. A bulky tube with round parts sticking out, and the module clamped onto its hull stood out in the sensor view like a… like a weird thing that shouldn’t be there. Aylen swore in relief and Indah told the responder to hold position and wait for orders.
Indah said, “The priority right now is to get to those people and if they’re alive, to get them out of there.”
Aylen looked grim. “That’s not going to be easy. It’s close enough to the colony ship that we could reach it with a team in EVAC suits, but we can’t arrange that from here. If the BreharWallHan agents have someone in the Port Authority who can listen in on our comms and feed, they’re going to know what we’re doing.”
Yeah, not we, me. I said, “This is the part that’s my job.”
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.