Exit Strategy

by Martha Wells

  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.

  Two small humans rounded the curve of the corridor, very occupied with adjusting shoulder bags and head coverings. They passed me but it slowed my progress to target and I had to walk past the room door until they were out of sight, then wait for them to reach the junction and step into a pod. Then I moved.

  I muted my feed audio, which was Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin loudly objecting to the gun and protesting their innocence and that the funds transfer bank must have made a mistake and Ratthi was a biologist and he didn’t understand all this esoteric financial stuff and etc. I pressed my ear to the door and upped my hearing, and managed to pick up Serrat saying, “I don’t have time to teach you the facts of corporate relations.”

  That gave me his relative position. Then I hit the door release.

  As the door slid open, Serrat started to turn toward me. I crossed the room, grabbed his wrist and forced it down, and sent a targeted pulse through my arm to fry the power cell of his tiny, cute little gun. Then I used my other forearm to pin his throat to the wall. This all happened really fast.

  Serrat made a strangled noise and tried to shoot me. Even if the gun had still worked, it would have hit me in the shin, which would have just made me that much more pissed off. I squeezed his wrist and he dropped the gun. He was still holding the comm device.

  Ratthi had fallen over a chair trying to get out of the way, and Pin-Lee lost a few seconds getting around him. Gurathin staggered but lunged forward and grabbed Serrat’s other hand. He pried Serrat’s fingers open and Pin-Lee plucked the comm device out.

  “It’s activated?” Ratthi asked, struggling to his feet.

  I said, “I’ve blocked it and his feed.” One of my inputs was the management channel on the hotel feed, which was already filling up with complaints about the comm failure. I had also taken out the connection between the hotel’s choked feed and the station feed. (Which implies I did it intentionally, but I had been in a hurry and just slammed down everything with a signal.) (Yeah, so much for making this a stealth operation.)

  Serrat breathed hard, and this close my scan picked up elevated pulse and sweat gland activity. He said, “So this is the supposedly missing SecUnit.”

  I checked hotelSecSys’ view of the lobby and spotted the two GrayCris backups. They hadn’t reacted yet, still pretending to be casual around the vending machines, but oh shit did I need to get the hotel feed’s connections back up before they noticed.

  Pin-Lee leaned down to grab the gun off the floor. “Is Mensah really being brought here? Was that a lie?”

  No response from the implant yet, I told her on the feed. I could still access the station feed, and that’s what would carry the implant’s signal. If GrayCris was really bringing her here, they hadn’t crossed the main station security barrier yet.

  So the plan wasn’t a clusterfuck, it was just circling the clusterfuck target zone, getting ready to come in for a landing.

  Serrat said to Pin-Lee, “You’re the liars, thinking you could fool us with that ridiculous fake document. Order this thing to let me go. You’re violating station law, threatening me with a deadly weapon.”

  “What deadly weapon?” Ratthi demanded. He gestured to the gun in Pin-Lee’s hand. “You threatened us with a deadly weapon, we could call station security on you!”

  In the feed, Gurathin said, We can’t call station security.

  I know that! Ratthi sent back. I’m bluffing .

  Pin-Lee said, “He means SecUnit. SecUnit is the deadly weapon.” She hesitated, then sent to me in the feed, I’m going to touch you, don’t freak out.

  Uh, okay. I tapped back an acknowledgment because I was frantically working to bring the hotel’s main and secondary relays back up and I had to get in ahead of the repair techs.

  Pin-Lee put her hand on my shoulder and I did not freak out. She leaned in toward Serrat and said, “This is not a deadly weapon. This is a person. An angry person, who wants you to answer the question. Are you bringing Mensah here?”

  He smiled at her. “I was. I’ve signaled our security officer to cancel the exchange. They know where I am, and they’ll be here soon. Since you’ve violated station law by bringing in a privately owned SecUnit, no one will help you.”

  “You need the ransom to pay off the bond company, right?” Pin-Lee said. I hadn’t looked away from Serrat, though most of my attention was on the admittedly rough job I was doing on the hotel relays and still listening for Mensah’s implant. She added, “Surely GrayCris has assets it can sign over. Or is it revenge?”

  Serrat’s face slipped into a skeptical sneer. He didn’t take them seriously, which, sure, I can see why. If you were GrayCris and regularly murdered humans as part of your job, the wrath of three research surveyors from a non-corporate backwater planet probably didn’t fill you with fear. And he was certain they were controlling me somehow. He said, “Revenge? You buy a SecUnit and send it to Milu to expose an essential GrayCris asset operation. You and your little planetary polity have the audacity to think you can compete with a corporation—what did you expect to happen?”

  Pin-Lee must have been taken aback, but she said, “GrayCris attacked us first. GrayCris started this. All we want is the return of Dr. Mensah.”

  In the feed, a baffled Ratthi said, Milu?

  With his augment, Gurathin had some information storage. He said, That was in a newsburst, they asked Mensah about it. It’s an abandoned terraforming platform.

  I got the hotel’s relays back up and the activity on the hotel’s management feed began to drop immediately. The two GrayCris targets in the lobby still hadn’t noticed anything wrong. Still nothing from the implant.

  They weren’t bringing her. This had all been for nothing. All of it, Milu, Miki’s death, the trip here, everything. I said, “Milu was my idea. I’m a rogue unit.”

  He ignored me, but he said to Pin-Lee, “A rog
ue unit would have left a trail of dead bodies across this station.”

  I said, “Maybe I wanted the trail to start here.”

  He made eye contact with me, and his pupils widened slightly.

  I added, “You people are so naive.”

  It was a really good thing that right then Mensah’s implant pinged. I hadn’t completely decided to crush Serrat’s windpipe, I was just entertaining the idea. Instead I pulled him away from the wall and choked him out.

  From the humans it was all “Wait!” “No!” “Um—”

  “I’m not going to kill him,” I said, and dumped him on the couch. “I know what I’m fucking doing.”

  Pin-Lee had tuned her feed to the implant and now clawed the key out of her jacket to check it. “She’s moving, she’s—Can you tell—”

  I was already matching the ping to my station maps. “They’re on a transit pipe.” I had to go, now. I told them, “You need to get back to your shuttle. Leave him; by the time he’s conscious GrayCris will already know what we’re doing. Don’t take his comm or his gun with you, StationSec can scan for them. Go down to the hotel’s first-level garden court and take the bubble transit to the next shopping complex, then take pipe transit from there.”

  I was out the door before they could do more than take in enough air to object. The corridor was clear so I sprinted to the pod junction. In the feed, I sent, The GrayCris group with Mensah is less than two minutes out and counting, you need to be out of the hotel before they get here. She’ll meet you at your shuttle. Do not try to contact me on the feed. If they buy off StationSec, they could trace us.

  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 wit
h 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—”

  I tapped Mensah’s feed and she dropped. I already had the tough-with-apparently-unarmed-citizen target by the arm. I fired the energy weapon in my arm into his shoulder, pulled him toward me as he slumped, then lifted him up to shield my body.

  Primary Target (the other SecUnit) was already in motion and shoved two human targets aside and brought its projectile weapon up. It couldn’t fire because of my human shield and that bought me the extra second to fire three armor-piercing projectiles point-blank into the neck joint of its armor, then down into its knee joints.

  (The neck joint was the kill shot, the knee joints were to make it drop, otherwise the armor might have made it freeze in place.)

  I dropped my projectile weapon because I needed both hands, and tossed my human shield into the two targets on the far side of the pod hard enough to slam them into the wall. The fourth target shot me, but her weapon delivered an energy pulse that would be incapacitating but non-lethal to a human. (A healthy human, at least.) Me, it just pissed off. I grabbed her hand and pulled her in, twisted her so her weapon pointed at the other two targets still struggling to stand, and triggered it five times. They dropped, I snapped her arm (she was fast enough to be a potential future threat), and then pressed her artery to make her pass out.