Марта Уэллс - Exit Strategy

I made some room in my temp storage, downloaded the first archive, and started my scans. I was reviewing it all myself instead of using a quicker and more efficient facial recognition scan on the collected data. That type of scan is only 62 percent reliable under most conditions and while that’s fine for half-assed company security work, I didn’t want to miss my targets. It turned out I could have started there instead of wasting the eight minutes, because in the first pass I caught an image of Ratthi in a corridor, walking toward a pod junction, timestamp sixteen hours and twenty-seven minutes minus present time.

Gotcha.

I kept reviewing the surveillance. Ratthi should have put in some time reviewing it, too, or at least looking around a little, because two potential hostiles followed him to the junction. They didn’t try to get on the same pod, but they clearly had access to the security system, because they were there when I picked Ratthi up in the lobby again. They followed him to the stores and vending areas in the hotel’s lower level, then back to his room. Now that I knew to focus on that section of the hotel, I was able to eliminate a lot of video from other camera feeds, and within three minutes I picked up both Gurathin and Pin-Lee. All three were being followed, whenever they went out.

This wasn’t unexpected, given that GrayCris had to know they were here. But I’d been doing some risk assessments in background and there was a scenario where this was a trap for me, where the Preservation team was bait.

Mensah might be the face of the group of political entities and companies determined to get GrayCris for killing their citizens/employees. But I was the one who had made the recordings of the most important evidence, I was the active component of the company SecSystem who had collected and stored all that data. If I was shown to be unreliable, compromised, whatever, then the SecSystem’s data could be called into question and that might help GrayCris’ case.

Another possibility was that the Preservation team had been contacted by GrayCris and asked to lure me here in exchange for Mensah’s release. Yeah, that possibility was no fun at all.

I watched Ratthi on the recordings, but the automated system had had no reason to zoom in and the resolution wasn’t good enough for a real evaluation. But I ran a few of my archived records from the survey mission: Ratthi walking when he was tired after a long day, absorbed in a conversation as he walked with Arada and Overse, laughing and pretending to defend himself as Pin-Lee threw a cushion at him, running as we frantically loaded a hopper to escape.

I wanted to say he walked through this hotel like it was a prison, but I wasn’t sure. Real humans don’t act like the ones in the media.

I’d just have to wait and see. (And yes, that was painfully stressful.)

The surveillance was an interesting problem, but not unsolvable. Everywhere but in the lobby, the hotel had its own secured feed, which it charged extra to access. To encourage use, the hotel was choking the public feed. This meant the security system already had code in place to redirect feed accesses. That was convenient for me. I set some alerts on the various feeds in play and started picking which shows I wanted to watch on my gigantic display surface. I only picked old favorites I had watched before, though, because I really needed to buckle down and work on some new code. With luck, I wouldn’t need it, but … Let’s face it, I would probably need it.

Five hours and seventeen minutes later Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin left their room and headed toward the pod junction. Twenty-three seconds after they left their room, the system registered a door opening and closing in the same section. Two hostiles exited the room to follow the Preservation team, and I was able to set a redirect on the feed stream they were using to get orders and deliver reports.

I waited to see if the Preservation team were just going to one of the food service or entertainment areas. It would be safer (for everybody, but especially me) to approach them outside the hotel.

I checked the feed stream the two hostiles used to get their orders and saw my redirect had worked. They stopped at the pod junction, confused, waiting for the go-ahead from their controller. My redirect had sent that go-ahead to the housekeeping bots in another section. The redirect was set to expire and delete itself in two minutes and would look like a glitch due to the hotel’s feed-choking.

The Preservation team took the pod to the lobby and headed out through the front entrance. I reluctantly shut down my giant display surface and rolled off the bed.

Time to go to work.

I took my bag with me because it was likely I wouldn’t come back here. (Yes, I was going to miss that display surface.) It also had my projectile weapon, and you never could tell when you might need armor-piercing fire power. (And I could hook my right hand on the strap, which gave me something to do with that arm. How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis, I still have no idea.)

I caught up with Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin in the plaza, with no sign of any hostiles trailing them. I wasn’t sure the Preservation team knew GrayCris was surveilling them, though Ratthi’s shoulders seemed a little stiff, not the way he usually walked. Then they started up the stairs to the second-level seating area and Gurathin glanced back in what he probably thought was a totally casual and not at all suspicious way. Yeah, they knew.

No, he didn’t spot me. I was using the drone cams to keep track of them so I could take another route through the plaza, the one that led under the platforms through the gardens and vending areas.

Gurathin said something to Pin-Lee as they crossed the plaza and they sped up a little, heading for the shopping block on the far side. It was a good place to avoid visual surveillance from a tail and also gave me time to make minor adjustments to the security cams so it was more difficult to track them. GrayCris security would realize by now that they had lost them and I wanted to make sure they couldn’t pick them up again. I didn’t know if GrayCris had paid off the station to get access to their public space security video, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

Pin-Lee led the other two on a convoluted route through the shopping block, through various stores and plazas, and ended up in an open garden seating area at the foot of another cone-shaped hotel. It was a good effort, designed to take them through six different private security jurisdictions and private feed areas, a good way to lose a tail trying to follow you using drones or security cams. It didn’t lose me, of course, but it was a great way to lose normal (human) surveillance. And the seating area was surrounded by curtains of falling water, obscuring the view from the surrounding plazas and walkways.

I stopped outside the entrance, joining a small crowd of humans beside a store projecting more artsy product videos into the feed. On the hotel’s security cam I watched Pin-Lee and Gurathin have a short argument, which Ratthi tried to mediate, that ended with Gurathin and Ratthi taking a seat at a table and Pin-Lee walking away into the mercantile area next to the hotel’s lobby.

I know, I could have contacted them by now, either by establishing a secure connection on their feeds, or just walking up and saying hi. I just … wasn’t sure.

Okay, I was scared. Or nervous. Nervous-scared.

Were they my sort-of human friends? My clients? My ex-owners, though legally that was only Dr. Mensah. Were they going to see me and yell for help, alert security?

And if it was this hard with Ratthi and Pin-Lee (Gurathin had never liked me and it was mutual), what was it going to be like with Mensah, if I managed to get that far?