I might not be able to get to Milu without my own ship, and that wasn’t going to happen. I have a training module for hoppers and other planetary aircraft, but not shuttles or transports or anything. I’d have to steal a ship and a bot pilot, and that would just be getting too complicated, even for me.
But HaveRatton was a main hub for transports heading outside the Corporation Rim and I could choose hundreds of destinations from there. So even if the Milu plan turned out to be a bust, it wouldn’t be a wasted trip.
The next transport leaving directly for HaveRatton was listed as cargo and passenger, and that’s how I ended up with Ayres and his bunch of contract-labor-bound idiots.
After breaking up the latest fight in the mess, and trying to end my short-lived career as a relationship counselor for desperate humans, I went to hide in my bunkspace. When we came through the wormhole and started to approach HaveRatton, I picked up the station feed.
I needed to get the schedules as soon as possible, and I was also looking forward to a chance to download new media. The latest new show I was watching had started out good but turned annoying. It was about a pre-terraform survey (on a planet with completely the wrong profile for terraforming anyway, but I didn’t care about that part) that turned into a battle for survival against hostile fauna and mutant raiders. But the humans were too helpless to make it interesting and they were all getting killed. I could tell it was headed toward a depressing ending, and I just wasn’t in the mood. It was especially annoying because I could see how the addition of a heroic SecUnit and maybe some interesting alien remnants could have turned it into a great adventure story.
And there was no way their bond company would have guaranteed the survey without some kind of professional security. That was unrealistic. Heroic SecUnits were unrealistic, too, but like I had told ART, there’s the right kind of unrealistic and the wrong kind of unrealistic.
I had stopped watching it when the mutants dragged off the group’s biologist to eat him. Seriously, this was exactly the kind of situation I was designed to prevent.
Thinking about the probable fate of Transport’s passengers put me out of the mood, too. I didn’t want to see helpless humans. I’d rather see smart ones rescuing each other.
I sorted through indices of available info, then started new downloads and queried the schedules and transport guide for ways to get to Milu.
Nothing this cycle, nothing the next. Even when I widened the search to thirty cycles from now. Well, that was possibly a problem.
I had been thinking about my plan a lot in between bouts of passenger-wrangling, and now I hated to give it up; I really wanted to hurt GrayCris, and if I couldn’t do it with explosive projectiles, this was the next best way. Maybe the schedules hadn’t been updated; humans are so fucking unreliable when it comes to maintaining data. As we slowed for final approach and docking, I searched the station’s public destination catalog, and yeah, Milu was listed. As usual, an independent company operated the transit station, so it was listed as still active even after the facility had been abandoned. The population of the station was floating and under one hundred at most.
Floating was good as it meant there were few permanent residents; people came and went constantly. But under a hundred was bad. Even if I could get there, with no legitimate reason to be there, I’d have to make sure no one saw me.
ART had altered my configuration so scans wouldn’t read me as a SecUnit, and I had written myself some code to make sure I behaved more like a human or augmented human. (Mostly randomizing my movements and breathing.) But I had to avoid other SecUnits, and it was best to avoid humans (like deployment center personnel) who had seen SecUnits without armor. GrayCris contracted for SecUnits in the Corporation Rim, and they might have used them on the Milu station, too. GrayCris was supposed to have removed any offices from the transit station when they abandoned the facility, but the humans who were still there might have seen their SecUnits. It was a calculated risk, which meant I was doing it even though I knew it could be like shooting myself in the knee joint.
I could have given up on the whole idea. There were transports leaving for destinations far away from Corporate territory, destinations I didn’t know anything about. But I was tired of pretending to be human. I needed a break.
I tried the schedule for privately owned ships and didn’t see any marked for Milu. But there were several ships scheduled to leave in the next cycle or so with no listed destination. One was a small bot-piloted cargo ship that was just large enough to carry supplies for about one hundred to one hundred-fifty humans for one hundred-plus cycles. I checked its history in the knowledge base and saw that it left and returned on a regular schedule. It could be a private contractor supplying Milu station, and not listed on the schedule because they didn’t want any random humans trying to go there until the terraforming facility debacle had been sorted out.
The cargo ship had actually been scheduled to leave eighteen cycles ago, but had requested a hold. Six transports of varying sizes and points of origin were arriving on HaveRatton at the same time as my transport. The supply ship might have been waiting for one of those, if it was fulfilling specific cargo orders. It might have been waiting for a repair.
To find out more, I’d have to ask in person.
Chapter Two
ONCE TRANSPORT COMPLETED DOCKING protocols, I climbed out of my bunk, collected my knapsack (I had a few things in it but mostly it was just so I could look more like a human traveler), and took a shortcut down the maintenance shaft to the passenger lock. The others would be going out through the cargo lock, into a transport module that a cargo lifter would tow to the ship taking them to their new home. This was billed as for their convenience, but their contractor wouldn’t want them to walk through the station where they might change their minds and escape.
I didn’t want to say goodbye. I couldn’t save this many humans from where they were going, where they thought they wanted to go, but I didn’t have to watch it, either.
I did say goodbye to Transport, which let me out of the lock and then deleted the record from its log. I could tell it was sad to see me go, but this wasn’t a trip I’d be anxious to repeat.
I had practice at hacking different hub and ring security now, so it was much less nerve-racking to get past the weapon scans. SecUnits are designed to be mobile components of SecSystems, every kind of SecSystem, so the company can rent us to as many different clients as possible, even those with proprietary equipment. The trick to hacking a SecSystem is making it think you’re supposed to be there, and the company had helpfully provided us with all the code necessary for that. Practice and terrifying necessity had made me good at altering it on the fly.
I did stop in the ring mall, at an automated kiosk that sold feed interfaces for non-augmented humans, portable display surfaces, and memory clips. The clips were for extra data storage, and were each about the size of a fingertip. They were used by humans who had to set up new systems or travel to places that didn’t have the feed, or who wanted to store data somewhere that wasn’t feed accessible. (Though company SecSystems had ways of reading them; clients sometimes tried to hide proprietary data on them.) I bought a set of clips with my hard currency card. (I saw it still had plenty of money left on it; Tapan and the others must have paid me a lot.)