Марта Уэллс: Exit Strategy

Taking it into GrayCris territory with me would be stupid. In the transient room, I removed the clips from my arm, then left for the embarkation zone. On the way, I stopped at a shipping kiosk and bought a small parcel package. I rolled the clips up in the protective wrapper, included Wilken and Gerth’s clip, and sealed the container. I addressed it to all of Dr. Mensah’s marital partners on their farm on Preservation. (I had all the info for the shipping form, lying around in longterm memory storage, from my old company’s records of PreservationAux. Wow, that seemed like a long time ago.)

I’d boarded my next passenger transport and was hiding in my private cabin when I caught a new newsburst, relayed from a ship that had just come in to dock. It was a brief statement from the Preservation Alliance by Dr. Bharadwaj.

It was unexpectedly odd to see a familiar human, even if she looked really angry. All she said was that Preservation was “taking steps” to resolve the issues with GrayCris.

Huh. I lay down on the bunk and stared at the metal ceiling. There was a background buzz of traffic in the ship’s public feed as the docking clamps were released. I was monitoring the private activity to make sure no one was chatting about the SecUnit hiding in a passenger cabin incompetently pretending to be human. I replayed Bharadwaj’s statement seven times.

I might be wrong. I knew interpreting the emotional subtext in the speech and appearance of real humans was completely different from interpreting it in shows and serials. (For one thing, the shows and serials were trying to communicate accurately with the viewer. As far as I could tell, real humans usually didn’t know what the hell they were doing.) But the interpretation I wanted to make of Bharadwaj’s vid statement was that Mensah was being held by GrayCris, who had threatened her life if Preservation didn’t make a formal statement at least implying that they were in amicable negotiations to settle with GrayCris.

I looked back over the newsburst that had accompanied it and found there was still no statement by DeltFall, whose survey team GrayCris had slaughtered. Or my ex-owner the company, which was probably torn between fury and shitting itself over the amount of equipment and bond payments lost in the debacle and desperate to have someone pay for it. I mean, literally pay for it. GrayCris could buy the company off for a big enough credit payout but so far it hadn’t done that. But maybe GrayCris couldn’t afford that payout.

GrayCris had done all this to acquire strange synthetics, alien remnants. Now that everybody knew that, they couldn’t sell them, or develop them, or whatever they had been planning to do with them. It meant they were desperate, too.

That wasn’t good.

After four cycles by ship’s local time, the passenger transport came through the wormhole and I picked up the edge of the TranRollinHyfa Station feed.

It looked bigger up close. The station itself was larger than Port FreeCommerce, with three interconnected transit rings below the main hull. Usually the transit ring circles the station, with the main part where humans and augmented humans live or do whatever in the center. Or, I guess, I’ve never been in those parts except for the deployment center on Port FreeCommerce, which was near the transit ring.

I picked up the feed but it was crammed with advertising, with the transit schedules and service listings swamped by corporation ads that were dissolving into static because other corporations had paid fees to drown them out. Well, that was all useless. I dropped it and picked up the ship’s comm, which was monitoring the Port Authority’s feed. There were still ads, but at least the PA was able to get a word in edgewise every now and then. One of those words was a navigation alert and—

Huh.

I pulled it up on the transport’s feed, where the scan and nav was running for the crew. There was a company gunship hanging off the station.

Not on approach, not waiting for a docking slot. Just maintaining position.

There was no mistake about who owned it, the navigation alert included the stupid logo the gunship was broadcasting in its otherwise blocked feed, the same logo etched into my non-organic parts. I checked the alert’s timestamp. Converted to my local time it equaled twenty cycles, give or take.

It could have been here for another contract, but that seemed like a big coincidence. Gunships don’t have any other purpose except to go fast and blow stuff up, and contracts for them are tricky, because of the treaties between corporate and non-corporate political entities.

I had thought that if Mensah had actually gone to TranRollinHyfa voluntarily to negotiate with GrayCris, then the bond might have been high enough to require a gunship. But then why wasn’t it docked? Did Mensah need rescuing or what? I needed intel, and there was one way to get it.

The station approach traffic was heavy, and we were showing a twenty-seven-minute docking delay. Twenty-seven minutes was more than enough time for me to do something stupid.

I sank into the ship’s comm. The approach protocol the PA had managed to slip out between ads stipulated that comms be set to monitor all signal traffic, voice and feed. This was so ships could bypass the choked station feed and pick up any alerts or alarms the other ships might broadcast.

It was harder to sort and separate them without the comm system assisting but I knew what I was looking for. After six minutes I found it: the company gunship’s encrypted feed, twined around its comm signal like the melody in a music sample. I pulled the feed in and applied the key, and—this could be a mistake, did I need intel this badly? Yeah, yeah, I did. I needed to know if Mensah was here on a mission or under duress—I sent the gunship’s bot pilot a ping and added the code that would tell it I was in stealth mode.

It acknowledged. It recognized me as also company property, since I had the decryption key and I was using the right salutation. I didn’t think it would notify its crew that it had been contacted by what it had every reason to identify as another company bot, not unless someone had told it to. Another SecUnit would have reported me immediately, but then a SecUnit would have known what I was and that I shouldn’t be out here.

I waited, listening in to make sure no one had noticed the offsite connection. No alarms were raised. I could tell feed traffic aboard the ship was light, and mostly in standby mode. They were waiting for something.

I mentally braced myself and sent the bot pilot Status: update (stealth) . After a long three seconds, it returned a databurst. I sent an acknowledgment and broke free of the connection.

I focused on the ceiling of the cabin again. If I was lucky, nobody would check the bot pilot’s contact log. The company had been paid for me and taken me off inventory, but I had no legal status in corporate territory without Mensah. If they realized I was here, they could report me to station authorities, or decide to catch me and forcibly separate me into my component parts, or anything in between.

I checked the databurst for tracers and malware and then unpacked it.

Well, this was … potentially a disaster. Shortly after the gunship had arrived at TranRollinHyfa, the contract status had gone from Retrieve: Active to Retrieve: Suspended Due to Neutral Party Access Denial, Escalation Out of Contracted Parameters . That meant that the gunship had been sent to retrieve an endangered client, but the operation had been halted because the retrieval had been blocked, and by something other than just being beyond the range of the client’s ability to pay. The client ID code was Mensah’s, the same one from my contract, which meant this was an extension of her original safety bond for the planetary survey. Which, okay, I didn’t know it worked like that, but it was confirmation Mensah was here, or at least that the company’s current intel thought she was here.