Марта Уэллс: Exit Strategy

Three newssearch results popped up while I was deleting any trace of my intrusion from the PA’s system, but they were old newsbursts from Port FreeCommerce. Just more useless speculation on where Mensah was and what she was doing, why she had disappeared.

None of my queries had turned up any mention of her.

I didn’t have a lot of choice. The team from Preservation must be here to negotiate for Mensah’s release, the only way they could proceed until Preservation scraped up enough currency to pay the company to violate TranRollinHyfa’s docking ban. I needed intel before I could do anything, and they were my only potential source.

I left the shop, first making sure to do one loop of the aimless wander around the displays that the humans were doing.

I had to go meet some old friends.

THE HOTEL WAS ATthe far end of the station mall, in a quieter area with 60 percent less foot and drone traffic, next to a multi-level plaza. All the structures around it were office blocks or hotels, all were shaped like giant cones or cylinders, except for one either iconoclast or outdated sphere, which seemed to be holding on to its real estate despite the fact that the station had tried to block it from view with a large holo forest display.

I crossed one of the multi-level plazas, where humans and augmented humans were sitting singly and in groups at scattered tables and chairs, talking, viewing entertainment media on the displays, or working in their feeds. Surveillance was tight so I started one of the new codes I had written on the way here.

I had been thinking about other ways to look less like a SecUnit. (An obvious option was to pretend to eat or drink something, but that was tricky. I can do that if I have to, but only for a limited time. I don’t have anything like a digestive system so I have to segregate a section of my lung to store it until I can expel it. Yes, it’s just as awful as it sounds.) I’d decided on something more subtle and less disgusting. Humans, even augmented humans, subvocalize when they speak on the feed. I had written a quick set of code that I could run in background to mimic those jaw movements. (I pulled a selection of conversations from Sanctuary Moon, Legends of the Fire, and Toward Tomorrow to use as a template for the movements.) As I crossed the plaza toward the hotel I made sure my shoulders were relaxed and my expression was distracted. I picked up a camera feed from one of the drones watching the plaza for a look. Operating in concert with my code to mimic human breathing patterns and small random movements, it was perfect. Well, perfect for me. Let’s say 98 percent perfect.

The Preservation group’s hotel had a big terraced entrance with transparent walls and a wide doorway. A track for the station’s pipe transport ran through a transparent upper floor of the structure, so you could see passengers disembarking and boarding inside when the chain of pipe capsules arrived. (I could see them via the higher-flying drones; the other humans in the plaza couldn’t.)

I identified two potential hostiles sitting at tables in the plaza.

At the hotel entrance, I blended with a crowd of humans and augmented humans who were watching a floating advertising display that was showing funny short videos. (Some were pretty good so I saved them to permanent storage.) It also gave me a place to stand while I worked my way into the hotel’s security system. I had the improved version of my RaviHyral code routine to remove myself from camera views ready to deploy if needed.

When the video display started to repeat, I followed another group of humans through the entrance. I probably sound confident, but the scan at the arched doorway made my human skin prickle. I knew the kind of chance I was taking in coming here.

The lobby was a series of wide platforms with seating. It also had giant hanging biospheres full of simulated planetary skies, all displaying different weather. Ostensibly they were there to obscure the view of the seating platforms and provide some privacy, but they actually had the security system’s cameras and scanners along the rims. As I watched myself through the cameras I spotted four more potential hostiles, all augmented humans. One was clearly in the feed, reviewing the scan results, and the others were moving around, doing visual sweeps.

No telling if they were GrayCris or Palisade, though if they were the hotel would know they were here. I couldn’t tell if they were looking for me; there were no standing alerts in the security comm feed. Though from their affect they were paying close attention to augmented humans wearing any kind of hood, hat, or scarf, or face-obscuring tattoos, cosmetics, or ornaments. Me, a generic type augmented human person with my hood folded down on my back, didn’t get a second glance.

This is why humans shouldn’t do their own security.

I went up the ramp to the check-in platform, followed the directional feed with its welcoming musical theme and instructions to a kiosk, and booked a room with one of Gerth’s hard currency cards.

Yes, I did enjoy doing that.

I took the rear exit off the platform to the pod junction and followed five humans into the first pod to arrive. It was a limited system, no outside connections, and would only take you to the room section now tied to your ID marker by the hotel’s feed, or the lobbies and public entertainment sections. The pod took us to our sections in order of arrival, so it gave me a chance to watch the system in operation and copy its code. It took me to my section and I followed the feed map to my room.

It opened at the authorization the hotel had attached to my ID marker and at that brilliant moment I discovered there were no interior camera views or audio surveillance. Stupid hotel. I had probably even paid extra for it.

Still, the room was bigger and much nicer than the cabins I’d had on the passenger transports. I did a quick walk-through to scan for anomalies, then dropped my bag and lay down on the bed. (It was huge. Why have a bed that could easily accommodate four medium to large humans when you only had one hook for towels in the bath facility? Were the humans supposed to share the towel?) The wall across from the unnecessarily large bed was all display surface. To keep me company, I sent an episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon to it to play—holy shit, the humans were almost actual size in the long shots—and then I got to work.

So there were no camera feeds from the rooms, but the cameras in the corridors were picking up humans and augmented humans as they moved through the connecting passages and used the transport pods to go to and from the lobbies and the three sections of food and club areas. (Whatever “clubs” were. The things going on there didn’t seem to match my lexicon definition.) There was also a transport link to the pipe train level.

I worked my way carefully into the system, alert for traps. Without room cameras I was going to have to do this the hard way.

Like most surveillance systems on non-secure installations, this one didn’t save their recordings permanently and supposedly deleted their archives after a waiting period. Note I said “supposedly.” Of course, the hotel was datamining.

The mining was only on the conversations in the public areas and corridors, but then that was what I needed. I found the stored archives from the past twenty cycles, took over one of the routines that was processing it (it was separating out the boring bits from the juicy business conversations that would need to be sent to a human or bot monitor for review), and redirected it to search for my keyword set.

Eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, my captured routine turned up a sizable set of hits. I got the timestamps, then released the routine back to its job of searching for proprietary financial information. The timestamps let me know which archives to check for the camera surveillance.