Марта Уэллс: Exit Strategy

When I put the new clothes on, I had a strange feeling I usually associated with finding a new show on the entertainment feed that looked good. I “liked” these clothes. Maybe I actually liked them enough to remove the quotation marks around “liked.” I don’t like things in general that can’t be downloaded via the entertainment feed.

Maybe because I’d picked them myself.

Maybe.

I got a replacement knapsack, too, a better one with more sealable pockets. I dressed, got a discount because I was willing to dump my old clothes into the shop’s recycler, and left the booth.

Back out in the station mall, blending with the crowd, I started downloading new entertainment media and transport schedules, and started a feed search for news reports. My image search had turned up a name for the security company logo: Palisade. I started a search on it, too.

I needed to get off HaveRatton as soon as possible, and figure out a good way to get my memory clips to Dr. Mensah.

The clips I had stashed in my arm had a lot of data drawn directly from the Milu diggers about the strange synthetics that GrayCris had illegally extracted under the guise of a terraforming operation. And the memory clip I had found in Wilken and Gerth’s gear was even more revealing. It was records of their work history for GrayCris, carefully organized and arranged, ready to submit to journalists or a corporate rival. I think it was a blackmail threat, or an attempt to ensure that GrayCris didn’t try to kill them. Whatever it was, I had it now.

Taking it and the other clips to Mensah in person would be the most secure method, and that’s what I meant to do. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to see her again. (Or more accurately, for her to see me again.)

Thinking about her brought up a whole knot of confused emotion I didn’t want to deal with right now. Or ever, actually. But it wasn’t a decision I had to make immediately. (Yeah, “Or ever, actually” applied there, too.) I could always break in to wherever she was staying and leave the clips in her belongings with a note. (I’d thought a lot about the note. I had other options but would probably go with “Hope this evidence against GrayCris helps, signed Murderbot.”) I needed to concentrate on how to find out if she was still on Port FreeCommerce or had gone back to the Preservation Alliance without—

My newsfeed search turned up a string of hits and the tagline on the top-ranked most-popular made me stop in my tracks. Luckily I was in a wide place in the mall, where the big transport lines had their offices, and the sparse crowd spread out and flowed around me. I made myself move over to the nearest office entrance, and stood in the spot where their proprietary feed was displaying advertising and informational vids. It wasn’t ideal, but I had to be somewhere where I could stand still and just concentrate on the news story.

Dr. Mensah had been accused by GrayCris of corporate espionage.

How the hell had we gotten to that point from the last newsburst I’d picked up here? There had been multiple lawsuits in play, but GrayCris had clearly been the aggressor in the violence against the survey teams. Besides all the other evidence, we had my feed recording and Mensah’s suit camera video of GrayCris representatives admitting guilt. Not even the cheap stupid half-assed bond company that had owned me could fuck that up.

Except apparently it could. And Dr. Mensah was a planetary leader from a non-corporate political entity; how could she be charged with corporate espionage? I mean, I don’t know anything about it because we never got education modules on human law stuff, but it sounded wrong.

I got past my initial outrage and managed to read the rest of the newsburst. GrayCris had made the charge, but nobody knew if they had brought an actual litigation (counterlitigation? Was that a word?) or not. It was all speculation because the journalists couldn’t find Mensah.

Wait, what?

So where was she? Where were the others? Had they gone back to Preservation and left her alone? From what I’d been able to research, Preservation’s attitude to its planetary leaders was extremely casual. At home, Dr. Mensah didn’t even need security. But it was stupid to leave her alone on Port FreeCommerce where anything could happen to her. Had happened to her.

I wanted to put my fist through the nearest corporate logo. Idiotic humans don’t understand how to be safe, idiotic humans thought every place was like stupid boring Preservation!

I needed more info; obviously I’d missed some important developments. I worked my way back up the news timeline, searching the related tags, doing it thoroughly, trying not to panic. According to records that Port FreeCommerce had made available to get the journalists off its back, Arada, Overse, Bharadwaj, and Volescu had all left for Preservation about thirty cycles ago. Mensah was supposed to follow with the others, but hadn’t. So far so good.

The next data point was buried in another story so deeply even I almost missed it. There had been a news re lease by GrayCris that Mensah had gone to TranRollinHyfa to answer their litigation, but Port FreeCommerce couldn’t confirm.

Where the fuck was TranRollinHyfa?

A frantic search on the public feed information bases told me TranRollinHyfa was a station, a major hub, where close to two hundred companies, including GrayCris, had their corporate headquarters. So, not exclusively enemy territory. Funny how that didn’t make me feel any better.

The next relevant newsburst speculated that Mensah had gone to TranRollinHyfa to pursue testimony on behalf of Preservation and DeltFall in the suit against GrayCris. The newsburst after that speculated that she was going to testify in GrayCris’ possibly apocryphal suit against her. Terrifyingly, the two entities that might actually know anything, the Preservation Alliance and my stupid half-assed ex-owner bond company on Port FreeCommerce, had made no official statement except to say she was definitely on TranRollinHyfa.

Mensah wasn’t stupid, she would never have gone near hostile corporate territory without protection. If she had gone to TranRollinHyfa voluntarily, the bond for a trip to visit GrayCris, who had already tried to kill her once, would be expensive to buy and more expensive to execute, and the company would have to agree to anything to get her out, including sending gunships. Safer and therefore cheaper to stay on Port FreeCommerce, the bond company’s major deployment center, and make all the parties with testimony come there. That’s what the company would have insisted on.

Conclusion: Mensah hadn’t gone to TranRollinHyfa voluntarily.

Somebody had tricked, trapped, or forced her to go. But why? If GrayCris was going to do that, why wait so long, why give all the witnesses involved time to bring their suits and testify and give their evidence to journalists? What had happened that had panicked GrayCris so much that …

Oh. Oh, shit.

I NEEDED TO GO, and go fast. And not on a bot-piloted transport. Not finding me on Ship would throw off Palisade’s pursuit, but not for long, and if they had any brains at all they would be checking automated transports. I pulled schedules for extra-fast crewed passenger transports (No, not a direct trip. I’m apparently an idiot, but not that big an idiot.) and found one leaving in four hours heading for a major hub. From there, I could get where I needed to go.

I hadn’t traveled like this before, mainly because I hadn’t wanted to. At first, I’d doubted my ability to hack weapons scanners while I was hacking the ID and payment systems. But now I had no excuse not to, thanks to Wilken and Gerth.

I had ended up with their emergency go-bag, filled with hard currency cards and a variety of ID markers. The markers are meant for subcutaneous insertion and contain identifying information. Normally they wouldn’t be readable by anything but the scanners designed for the purpose, but with a little fine-tuning my scan had been able to view the encoded data, and I had examined them all on the trip back to HaveRatton.