Exit Strategy

by Martha Wells

  As I lowered her to the floor, Mensah shoved to her feet and staggered. I think she got clipped by a flailing boot. I said, “Let’s go.”

  Mensah took a sharp breath and stepped over the twitching bodies, then edged past the slumped SecUnit. I picked up my projectile weapon and followed her. (I didn’t want to risk taking the SecUnit’s projectile weapon. It might have a tracer. Mine fit better in my bag, anyway.) I rolled the SecUnit back into the pod and asked MobSys to hold it with the door shut while it ran a full diagnostic cycle.

  I ushered Mensah into my pod and hit a new destination. As I reloaded my projectile weapon and tucked it back into my bag, I asked the pod to hold while I checked the transit lobby security cam again. Yes, the two GrayCris targets were still there, though they both looked worried and were speaking into their feeds. There were nine other non-target humans waiting in two loosely clustered groups.

  What was that idea again? Oh, here it is, right where I filed it.

  I said, “I have to take out the two targets on the transit pipe platform. When we arrive, step out of the pod, move away from the entrance, and wait for me.” I hadn’t been able to look at her face yet, not even with the pod’s camera.

  She said, “Understood.”

  I let our pod arrive at the platform, and as the doors opened, I had MobSys, which also controlled the hotel’s active decor, drop the holographic thunderstorm to the platform level.

  I stepped out of the pod into dark purple clouds, lightning, simulated rain, and the startled yelps and laughter of the waiting passengers. Visibility was down to fifteen percent, but my scan found the two armed targets. I reached Target One, blocked her feed, and delivered an incapacitating pulse with the energy weapon in my right arm.

  I caught her as she fell and turned to sling her into the pod. Target Two knew something had happened (probably when he lost feed contact with One), and I had to duck sideways and trip him. He hit the platform and I leaned down to give him just enough of a tap on the head to make resistance unlikely.

  I dragged Target Two to the pod, where Target One was still twitching. When the doors of their pod closed, I directed it to the club level and told it to freeze in place and notify hotelMaint. Then I let MobSys, which was getting impatient, lift the thunderstorm back to its assigned position.

  The other humans and augmented humans on the platform looked confused or relieved, with a few expressing disappointment. No one acted like they had seen a SecUnit take out two corporate security agents. I nodded to Mensah, and we stepped into the waiting area. I was already removing us from the platform’s cam, but this wouldn’t delay pursuit for very long.

  I led Mensah down the platform toward where the last pipe capsule would load. The platform camera showed I was doing pretty well on looking casual. (It surprised me, too.) Mensah had her expression under control, her shoulders relaxed. Her clothes, a long caftan over pants, looked more rumpled and creased than they should, but not enough to draw attention. In our feed connection, she said, You said the others are here with a company shuttle? Is the company helping you?

  I said, No, GrayCris paid off the station to keep the company out. Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin came anyway.

  The pipe slid into the station and we boarded the empty capsule at the rear. (This part was mostly luck, but while I was waiting in the lobby, I had done a quick review of the pipe activity from this platform, which wasn’t very active through day cycle. It wasn’t part of the main pipe circuit, but a side route paid for by the hotel.)

  As the pipe door slid shut, the platform security cam showed a set of pod doors opening and three humans in hotelSec gear rushing out. Well, shit. There went my timeline.

  I had control of the cam in the pipe capsule and now I slid into the pipe’s control feed. I told Mensah, “Change of plan, they know where we are.”

  She nodded, her expression tight.

  This was a direct transit to the port and I needed a stop, before GrayCris persuaded station security to stop us. The map said that the pipe was approaching a platform in an office building. A quick check on the local security camera showed the platform was empty, which made sense, as there were no pipes scheduled to stop there for another thirty-three minutes. I had to be quick because this pipe was due to merge into the main access track not far past the office building and its window was tightly scheduled. (Causing a major accident by delaying this pipe too long would not only encourage station security to act against us with all its resources but also be kind of a shitty thing to do.) I sent Mensah an alert in her feed—this was happening so fast I didn’t have time to verbalize it to myself, let alone tell her what I was doing—and wrapped an arm around her waist. She knotted her hands in my jacket and buried her head against my shoulder. I folded my free arm over her head. Then I sent the slow command.

  The capsule dropped speed as it entered the station and I was already moving as I gave the doors an emergency signal to open. The pipe door made it open in time but the inner station door didn’t. Fortunately I only clipped it and it just altered my trajectory as I spun across the platform floor.

  The capsule had already slid its door shut and accelerated to the speed needed to make its merge window. I deleted us out of the recordings, deleted various buffers and logs, and removed the capsule’s memory of the incident.

  I’d managed to roll to a stop with Mensah on top, but that couldn’t have been comfortable. The last time we’d done this, I’d been in armor and also jumping off a steep slope, and this was a smooth synthetic stone floor and nothing was exploding at close range. So this was better, is my point, I think. I lifted her off me, shoved upright, and then pulled her to her feet.

  She waved me off. “I’m all right.”

  I let go of her cautiously, but she stayed up. I pulled maps from the building’s feed to look for transportation options. Aha, there was a good one.

  I led us off the platform and down the ramp to the building’s pods, using my code to delete us from the security cams. At the junction we stepped into the first pod to arrive, and I told it to override its rules and take us all the way to the maintenance level, which was listed on the map as a closed floor and wasn’t an option on the pod’s normal menu.

  We stepped out into a low-ceilinged space, and once the pod shut behind us it was completely dark. I could see via infrared and used my scan to create a physical map. Mensah couldn’t see at all. She grabbed my jacket and shifted behind me, letting me pull her forward.

  The air circulation and quality wasn’t great but at least there was air. I navigated a path through currently offline maintenance and hauler bots over to an open ramp that led down. We hit two changes in gravity, one gradual, and one not so gradual, when the wall to the right abruptly became the floor.

  We were headed toward a branch of an access backbone, which was a space for moving cargo to and from the port and between station levels, and was also an access and transport system for station engineering bots and teams. There were strips of emergency lighting here and lots of marker paint, giving off bursts of light and feed signals, mostly temporary instructions and guides for bots and human workers. Mensah’s grip on my jacket relaxed and I could tell from her breathing the light was a relief.

  We walked into a strong breeze coming from the access backbone. I picked up human voices on audio not far away. From the feed activity, there was a lot of traffic about two hundred meters to the right, toward the plaza and the hotels. None of it sounded like emergency or security operations, just normal support system work. In six more steps the ramp reached the backbone, a shadowy cavern lit by low-level navigation beacons. Things whooshed by in the dimness, mostly lift platforms and automated carriers coming from or heading back to the port cargo depots.

  It wasn’t like there was no security, since if you were going to steal cargo or do something terrible to a competitor’s station structure, this was the place to do it from. I was deflecting the scans for weapons and power sources, and we had five minutes and counting
before the next drone squad came through.

  Mensah had gripped my jacket again, maybe nervous at the height and depth of the backbone. Despite the lighter gravity, I wasn’t keen on it, either. I was scanning for an empty carrier and found an idle one up toward the area of activity. I teased it out of the herd and told it to come to us.

  It slid up to the passage two minutes later, a boxy structure used to transport station engineers, their bots, and equipment. We stepped inside and I made the doors shut before I let it bring up the interior lights. I checked its map system and sent it toward the port.

  Mensah swayed as it started to move and grabbed my arm above the gun port, squeezing hard enough that the organic part of my arm felt it. The racing heartbeat seemed normal under the circumstances, but she still hadn’t let go of me. I asked, “Are you all right?” What if they’d tortured her? Everything in my emergency med/psych assistance module involved accessing a MedSystem so it could tell me what to do. (My company-supplied education modules were crap, I may have mentioned.)

  She shook her head. “I’m fine. I’m just … very glad to see you.”

  She still sounded unsteady. She looked the same, dark brown skin, short light brown hair. There were definitely more creases at the corner of her eyes, something I con firmed with a comparison of my earlier recordings of her. And I was looking at her now.

  In the shows, I saw humans comfort each other all the time at moments like this. I had never wanted that and I still didn’t. (Touching while rendering assistance, shielding humans from explosions, etc., is different.) But I was the only one here, so I braced myself and made the ultimate sacrifice. “Uh, you can hug me if you need to.”

  She started to laugh, then her face did something complicated and she hugged me. I upped the temperature in my chest and told myself it was like first aid.

  Except it wasn’t entirely awful. It was like when Tapan had slept next to me in the room at the hostel, or when Abene had leaned on me after I saved her; strange, but not as horrific as I would have thought.

  She stepped back and rubbed her face, as if impatient with her own reaction. She looked up at me. “That was you at the GrayCris terraforming facility.”

  They must have questioned her about it. “It was an accident,” I said.

  She nodded. “What part was an accident?”

  “Most of the parts.”

  Her brow was furrowed. “Did you tell them I sent you?”

  “No, I impersonated my client. My imaginary client. That I impersonated.” I was caught in a loop for a second there. “Since I left Port FreeCommerce, I’ve successfully impersonated an augmented human security consultant with two different groups of humans. At Milu I meant to do the same, but I was identified as a SecUnit so I told them I was under the control of an off-site security consultant client.” Impersonated is a weird word, especially in this context. (I just noticed that. Im-person-ated. Weird.)

  “I see. Why did you go to Milu?”

  “I saw a story about Milu in a newsburst. I wanted to get corroborating evidence of GrayCris’ illegal activity and send it to you.” That sounded good. Not that it wasn’t true, but I had a lot of conflicting motivations and that was the only one that made sense, even to me.

  She let her breath out and pressed her hands over her face for 5.3 seconds. “I’ll remember this the next time I give an off-the-cuff interview.” She looked up again. “Did you get the evidence?”

  “Yes. But by the time I returned to HaveRatton Station, a Palisade security squad was waiting for me. Then I saw on the Port FreeCommerce newsfeed that you were missing.” I added, “I shipped the data to your home on Preservation.”

  She nodded again. “I see, right.” She hesitated. “The GrayCris executives who questioned me about this said you destroyed some combat bots?”

  “Three.”

  She took a sharp breath. “Good.”

  I didn’t know what I was going to say next until it came out suddenly. “I left.”

  She was looking at my face, and suddenly I couldn’t look at hers anymore. She said, “Yes. I handled the situation very badly. I apologize.”

  “Okay.” I was definitely going to need to just stand here and stare at a wall. ART and Tapan had both apologized to me, so it wasn’t like it had never happened before, but I still had no idea how to respond. “Pin-Lee said you were worried.”

  She admitted, “I was. I was so afraid you’d be caught by someone before you could leave the Corporation Rim.” There was a little smile in her voice. “I should have had more confidence in you.”

  “I’m not sure I’d go that far,” I said. My backburnered map-monitor alerted me and it was a relief. I’d had all the emotions I could handle right now. I said, “We’re coming up on the port.”

  Chapter Six

  WE’D GONE AS FAR along the backbone as we could go without hitting the port security barriers. I didn’t know how tight those barriers would be, but from the signal leakage I was picking up, it wasn’t worth the risk.

  It was the walk through the embarkation zone I was more worried about.

  I stopped our carrier at the cargo access to a large multi-use shop in the station mall, and we stepped out. I released the carrier and it slipped into the dark, heading back up the backbone. We took a maintenance pod to the port level.

  In the pod, I used the security camera to evaluate us. No blood, no projectile holes, check. Nervous, check. Mensah looking like a human who had been through a traumatic experience, check. My shoulder bag with my weapon hidden in it, check. “We have to look calm,” I told her, “so station security won’t alert on us.”

  She took a deep breath and looked up at me. “We can look calm. We’re good at that.”

  Yeah, we were. I did a quick review to make sure I was running all my not-a-SecUnit code, then thought of one more thing I could do. As we stepped out of the pod, I took Mensah’s hand.

  We crossed through the busy mall area and the milling humans around the vending and booking kiosks. The crowd was about the same as when I’d arrived, with an approximately 5 percent increase. I’d never done this while walking with a human and it made the process more complicated and somehow, strangely, more natural.

  I deflected multiple scans as we entered the embarkation zone. I avoided the lift pods again because if there was an alert, the pods would freeze in place, and if I was hacking one it would become rapidly obvious where we were. I guided us down the ramp that would come out above the private shuttle docks on the first ring level. As we went along, the crowd thinned out, and I estimated a 50 percent reduction by the time we reached the walkway. A check of the stupid advertising garbage-filled port feed said that this was a normal lull in scheduled arrivals. (For once I missed being stuck in a crowd of humans.) There was no lull in the security checks, and I picked up multiple drone swarm traffic over the embarkation floors on all three rings.

  I needed more intel. Normally I wouldn’t risk hacking the upper-level security feeds, the ones where the human supervisors communicated, but there was nothing normal about this. Using the drone feeds I’d already infiltrated, I started a careful hack of the top-level security feed, which I was tagging as StationSecAdmin.

  I was sure GrayCris would manage to pay off or otherwise convince the StationSecAdmin and Port Authority to issue an alert and let Palisade into the port to search for us. But we had gotten here fast, and GrayCris would want to search the hotel and surrounding area first, since that was a cheaper operation than paying to search the port. If the rest of Team Preservation had made it here, we should be fine. (Yes, I know. I shouldn’t even have thought it.)

  Once I was into the StationSecAdmin feed, I didn’t try to pry any further, just set some internal alerts and backburnered it.

  “Will it be better if we talk?” Mensah said. I knew her well enough to hear the forced calm in her voice, and to know that the forced part wouldn’t show on her face.

  We were near the public docks and I turned onto the next ramp
down to the embarkation floor level. The crowd had dropped another 20 percent, to where it couldn’t actually be called a crowd anymore. I said, “That depends on what we talk about.”

  As we reached the floor level, she said, “Why is Sanctuary Moon your favorite?”

  Yes, that we can talk about. I actually felt the organic tissue in my back and shoulders relax. I asked, “Have you ever seen it?” I still didn’t want to directly communicate with the shuttle, but we passed a departure schedule feed access point and after the burst of ads, I saw the company shuttle was on the wait list for a launch time. It was hopefully Pin-Lee’s way of signaling that they had made it aboard, and not a trick by GrayCris.

  (If it was a trick by GrayCris we were screwed. The shuttle was the only reliable way to get Mensah and the others off the station. I would have enough trouble getting myself off on a bot-piloted transport once they were safe, with all the security alerts that were going out to the transports in dock.)

  (No, I had absolutely no intention of getting on a company shuttle heading toward a company gunship.)

  Mensah glanced around, not looking too much like a human who had suddenly remembered she should be looking around like everything was normal. She tightened her grip on my hand. “I’ve watched some episodes, and I liked it, but I wasn’t sure why you would.” She shook her head at herself. “Maybe because it’s about the problems of a bunch of humans, and I had the impression you were tired of dealing with us.”

  I actually turned my head and looked down at her, I was so surprised. I was expecting her to say no, she hadn’t seen it. Then I could tell her the plot and she could pretend to be interested, which would have gotten us all the way to the shuttle. “You watched it?”

  “I wanted to see the part about the colony solicitor you and Ratthi mentioned, then I got involved.” I deflected more weapon scans as we crossed through the first gate into the private docks, and the crowd level went back up by 16 percent. We didn’t stand out nearly as much and my scan showed Mensah’s breathing and heartbeat even out. She added, “It’s a good story, I see why it’s popular. I just don’t understand why you like it best, when there are such a variety of serials out there.”