Exit Strategy

by Martha Wells

  Gotcha.

  I kept reviewing the surveillance. Ratthi should have put in some time reviewing it, too, or at least looking around a little, because two potential hostiles followed him to the junction. They didn’t try to get on the same pod, but they clearly had access to the security system, because they were there when I picked Ratthi up in the lobby again. They followed him to the stores and vending areas in the hotel’s lower level, then back to his room. Now that I knew to focus on that section of the hotel, I was able to eliminate a lot of video from other camera feeds, and within three minutes I picked up both Gurathin and Pin-Lee. All three were being followed, whenever they went out.

  This wasn’t unexpected, given that GrayCris had to know they were here. But I’d been doing some risk assessments in background and there was a scenario where this was a trap for me, where the Preservation team was bait.

  Mensah might be the face of the group of political entities and companies determined to get GrayCris for killing their citizens/employees. But I was the one who had made the recordings of the most important evidence, I was the active component of the company SecSystem who had collected and stored all that data. If I was shown to be unreliable, compromised, whatever, then the SecSystem’s data could be called into question and that might help GrayCris’ case.

  Another possibility was that the Preservation team had been contacted by GrayCris and asked to lure me here in exchange for Mensah’s release. Yeah, that possibility was no fun at all.

  I watched Ratthi on the recordings, but the automated system had had no reason to zoom in and the resolution wasn’t good enough for a real evaluation. But I ran a few of my archived records from the survey mission: Ratthi walking when he was tired after a long day, absorbed in a conversation as he walked with Arada and Overse, laughing and pretending to defend himself as Pin-Lee threw a cushion at him, running as we frantically loaded a hopper to escape.

  I wanted to say he walked through this hotel like it was a prison, but I wasn’t sure. Real humans don’t act like the ones in the media.

  I’d just have to wait and see. (And yes, that was painfully stressful.)

  The surveillance was an interesting problem, but not unsolvable. Everywhere but in the lobby, the hotel had its own secured feed, which it charged extra to access. To encourage use, the hotel was choking the public feed. This meant the security system already had code in place to redirect feed accesses. That was convenient for me. I set some alerts on the various feeds in play and started picking which shows I wanted to watch on my gigantic display surface. I only picked old favorites I had watched before, though, because I really needed to buckle down and work on some new code. With luck, I wouldn’t need it, but … Let’s face it, I would probably need it.

  Five hours and seventeen minutes later Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin left their room and headed toward the pod junction. Twenty-three seconds after they left their room, the system registered a door opening and closing in the same section. Two hostiles exited the room to follow the Preservation team, and I was able to set a redirect on the feed stream they were using to get orders and deliver reports.

  I waited to see if the Preservation team were just going to one of the food service or entertainment areas. It would be safer (for everybody, but especially me) to approach them outside the hotel.

  I checked the feed stream the two hostiles used to get their orders and saw my redirect had worked. They stopped at the pod junction, confused, waiting for the go-ahead from their controller. My redirect had sent that go-ahead to the housekeeping bots in another section. The redirect was set to expire and delete itself in two minutes and would look like a glitch due to the hotel’s feed-choking.

  The Preservation team took the pod to the lobby and headed out through the front entrance. I reluctantly shut down my giant display surface and rolled off the bed.

  Time to go to work.

  * * *

  I took my bag with me because it was likely I wouldn’t come back here. (Yes, I was going to miss that display surface.) It also had my projectile weapon, and you never could tell when you might need armor-piercing fire power. (And I could hook my right hand on the strap, which gave me something to do with that arm. How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis, I still have no idea.)

  I caught up with Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin in the plaza, with no sign of any hostiles trailing them. I wasn’t sure the Preservation team knew GrayCris was surveilling them, though Ratthi’s shoulders seemed a little stiff, not the way he usually walked. Then they started up the stairs to the second-level seating area and Gurathin glanced back in what he probably thought was a totally casual and not at all suspicious way. Yeah, they knew.

  No, he didn’t spot me. I was using the drone cams to keep track of them so I could take another route through the plaza, the one that led under the platforms through the gardens and vending areas.

  Gurathin said something to Pin-Lee as they crossed the plaza and they sped up a little, heading for the shopping block on the far side. It was a good place to avoid visual surveillance from a tail and also gave me time to make minor adjustments to the security cams so it was more difficult to track them. GrayCris security would realize by now that they had lost them and I wanted to make sure they couldn’t pick them up again. I didn’t know if GrayCris had paid off the station to get access to their public space security video, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  Pin-Lee led the other two on a convoluted route through the shopping block, through various stores and plazas, and ended up in an open garden seating area at the foot of another cone-shaped hotel. It was a good effort, designed to take them through six different private security jurisdictions and private feed areas, a good way to lose a tail trying to follow you using drones or security cams. It didn’t lose me, of course, but it was a great way to lose normal (human) surveillance. And the seating area was surrounded by curtains of falling water, obscuring the view from the surrounding plazas and walkways.

  I stopped outside the entrance, joining a small crowd of humans beside a store projecting more artsy product videos into the feed. On the hotel’s security cam I watched Pin-Lee and Gurathin have a short argument, which Ratthi tried to mediate, that ended with Gurathin and Ratthi taking a seat at a table and Pin-Lee walking away into the mercantile area next to the hotel’s lobby.

  I know, I could have contacted them by now, either by establishing a secure connection on their feeds, or just walking up and saying hi. I just … wasn’t sure.

  Okay, I was scared. Or nervous. Nervous-scared.

  Were they my sort-of human friends? My clients? My ex-owners, though legally that was only Dr. Mensah. Were they going to see me and yell for help, alert security?

  And if it was this hard with Ratthi and Pin-Lee (Gurathin had never liked me and it was mutual), what was it going to be like with Mensah, if I managed to get that far?

  I didn’t know if I could trust them. I wanted to. But I want a lot of things—freedom, unlimited downloads, new episodes of Drama Sun Islands—most of which I wasn’t going to get.

  I walked through the garden seating area, which was only 37 percent occupied, but Ratthi and Gurathin didn’t notice me. I scanned them as I went by, and picked up Gurathin’s augments but no energy signatures indicating weapons. Ratthi rubbed his eyes and sighed. Gurathin’s hard mouth was actually betraying some dismay.

  I went through the open doorway into the mercantile area, which was light on the usual vending machines but had a lot of kiosks for various businesses, including passenger transport lines, station real estate, planetary real estate in this system and others, a lot of banks, and security companies. (Not Palisade, which catered only to corporate clients.) The area security was robust, but I couldn’t pick up any facial recognition scans. The feed was choked and privatized, any humans or augmented humans not registered with the hotel required to pay a fee to use it, and the security was all focused on theft-prevention. At the far end of the space was
an access to a transit platform; it didn’t lead to the pipe, but to something called “transit bubbles.”

  I found Pin-Lee standing at a kiosk for a local security company, her expression grim, but she hadn’t put her hand in the access field yet. I saw tension in her body language, particularly in the way she held her head. Whatever it was she had come here to do, she didn’t want to do it.

  It hit me then, how all those cycles of watching Pin-Lee on our contract had made me trust her judgment. If she didn’t want to do it, she probably had a good reason. I had to talk to her, give her another option.

  If it had been one of the others, I would have figured out a different approach. For Pin-Lee, I just said, “Hi.”

  She barely glanced at me, her expression set with disinterest. Then she took another look, frowned, started to speak, then stopped herself. She still wasn’t sure. I said, “We met on Port FreeCommerce.” I couldn’t resist adding, “I was the one in the transport box.”

  Her eyes widened, then narrowed. She forced her tense shoulders to relax, and she didn’t make the mistake of looking around. She planted a smile on her face and said through gritted teeth, “What—How—”

  “I came to find our friend,” I said. “Do you want to get in a transit bubble?” Local mass transport is usually easy to secure against potential surveillance and security screens. (Yes, it’s supposed to be the opposite. Yes, you should worry.)

  She hesitated, then forced her smile wider. It looked fake and angry, but it was the thought that counted. “Sure.”

  We crossed the room and walked up the access ramp to the station. A burst of feed advertising explained that the bubbles were a cup-shaped lift platform lined with padded benches, with a transparent bubble shield over the top so the humans couldn’t manage to fall out no matter how hard they tried. (The ad didn’t describe it that way.) The bubbles floated along a set path over the commercial segments and were much slower than the transit pipes, so they were mostly used for sightseeing. They also looked convenient for awkward conversations.

  Only a few humans were in the station, stepping out of a just-arrived bubble. We walked up to the first rack and I paid with another hard currency card and—Wow, that was three times the price of my last transient hostel. It’s a good thing I don’t have to eat.

  Pin-Lee climbed in first, eyeing me with what I wanted to interpret as discreet wariness but maybe wasn’t. I sat down on the opposite bench and selected the option for an overhead tour of this segment’s shopping park. The door sealed and the bubble floated up to join the line of others passing over the hotel.

  The bubble had a camera feed, but it was the kind meant to alert on certain words, sounds, and motions, probably only there to cut down on random murders. I blocked its audio feed and said, “Clear.”

  She glared at me. “You left.”

  Somehow I hadn’t expected that. I said, “Mensah said I could learn to do anything I wanted. I learned to leave.”

  “You could have told her what you wanted. We—she—we were worried, okay.” My gaze was on the view behind her, using the bubble’s camera to study her face. She pressed her lips together, cutting off whatever she was going to say next. Then she regrouped and continued, “I saw the goodbye message you sent her. It’s not like she didn’t realize that we’d fucked up the whole situation.”

  I was having an emotion, and I hate that. I’d rather have nice safe emotions about shows on the entertainment media; having them about things real-life humans said and did just led to stupid decisions like coming to TranRollinHyfa. And they hadn’t fucked up the whole situation. Parts of it, sure. But it’s not like I knew what to do with me, either. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She sighed, a tired but angry sigh, and pressed her fingers to her forehead. I had to quell an impulse to tap my nonexistent MedSystem and ask for a diagnosis. She said, “So where the fuck did you go? And what are you doing here?” She hesitated warily. “Are you working for someone, on contract?”

  That was the whole point of leaving. “Either I’m Mensah’s property, and I work for her, or I’m a free agent and I work for myself.”

  Glare intensifying. “Okay, so what did you hire yourself to do?”

  That was an interesting way to put it. I kind of liked it. And it felt so weird to be talking to a human like this, a human who knew what I was. I didn’t have to force myself to stare at Pin-Lee’s face, worry that my expressions were normal. Abene had known I was a SecUnit, but she hadn’t known I was me. “I’ve been traveling, and I saw a newsburst that said Mensah was missing. Did they trick her into coming here, or was she abducted?”

  Her eyes narrowed again, but this time more in speculation. “You’ve really just been wandering around watching that serial. We were afraid GrayCris might catch you, but they kept demanding you be submitted as part of the evidence process. It seemed like they would have let us know if they had you, gloated about it.”

  “I’ve been wandering around watching a lot of serials.” I waited. Pin-Lee had always been the tough one, and it took her time to let down her guard. Like all the others, I had hundreds of hours of stored audio and video of her. I didn’t need to review it to know her nerves were stretched thin from fear for Mensah, from the responsibility for the others’ lives.

  She said finally, “So you came to help us. Why should I trust you? You obviously don’t trust us.”

  If I could answer that, I’d probably be a lot better off. I didn’t trust them, not with some things. I had no idea why they should trust me. “I pulled a status report from the company gunship. They aren’t going to help you unless the station lifts the docking prohibition. You’re on your own. Or you’re on your own with Ratthi and Gurathin, which may be worse.”

  She grimaced. “I forgot what an asshole you are.”

  Well, yeah. I said, “I need intel to make a plan.”

  She looked at the view, and winced a little at the flashing ad display circling the spire we were passing. “They took her off Port FreeCommerce, after a meeting with DeltFall representatives. Some of the families of the victims had traveled in to personally collect the remains, there were a lot of people there, it was emotional. She stepped away for a minute afterward, and she was gone. The security cams showed the moment when they grabbed her, but by that time they had already taken her off the station. With some help from our diplomatic corps on Preservation, I convinced the company that this was their problem, that they had fucked up so badly with our survey bond that they owed us. Then GrayCris sent a demand that Preservation drop our suit against them and make a public announcement to that effect. We’ve done that, and now we’re here to negotiate a ransom.” Her expression tightened. “We’ve got people on Preservation working to free up assets, but right now we don’t have nearly as much as they want.”

  So I was right, and GrayCris did need money. “But no company contract support?”

  “Not after TRH refused to let them dock. They did give us a key for the fail-safe interface implant Mensah bought in case of emergency, but Gurathin said it’s blocked because she’s being held somewhere in the torus above us, behind the main station security barrier, and it’s dampening the signal.”

  “Do you have it with you?” I asked. It might be blocked for Gurathin, but not for me.

  She unsealed an inside pocket on her jacket and handed me the key, which was designed to look like a feed-accessible memory clip. I downloaded the address information and spent one minute and forty-three seconds trying to access Mensah’s implant. So it was actually blocked for me, too. “Gurathin may be right about the main station security barrier.” I hated to say it.

  Pin-Lee slumped in disappointment. “We don’t have much longer to raise the ransom. I was going to try to hire a local security company to help us, and just hope the one I picked hadn’t been paid off by GrayCris.” She looked away from the window, eyeing me again. “Speaking of pay-offs, the company is playing a double game, right?”

  I was glad Pin-Lee had
thought of that already and wasn’t going to deny reality. “There’s a ninety-five percent chance,” I told her. The company is like an evil vending machine, you put money in and it does what you want, unless somebody else puts more money in and tells it to stop. GrayCris’ best option at this point was to pour as much money in as possible.

  Pin-Lee groaned and rubbed her face. “I’m almost glad you’re here.”

  Chapter Four

  WHEN OUR BUBBLE RETURNED to the station, I went to a hotel kiosk to book a room and Pin-Lee went to get the others. She thought we needed to talk as a group in private. I sort of did, too. (We could have done it via the feed in the garden seating area, but I didn’t trust the humans not to wave their arms and draw attention.)

  I took a pod up to the room and of course there was no security feed inside because of the stupid hotel wanting to lure humans in with promises of room privacy so it could record them in the public spaces. This hotel was less expensive than the previous one but the pretty quotient was about the same. And the feed was choked, unless of course you happened to know how to get around that.

  The room was a lot more practical, with a normal-sized bed folded up into the wall to leave extra space for chairs, and a display surface that only took up a fourth of a wall instead of all of it, and a bathing facility with more room for towels. SecUnits are never allowed to sit down or use human furniture whether on or off duty, so I sat in one of the chairs and put my feet up on the table. Then I took my feet off the table because it wasn’t comfortable. I entertained myself by infiltrating the hotel’s security system while I waited.