Марта Уэллс - Exit Strategy

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.”

WE’D GONE AS FARalong 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.