Марта Уэллс - Fugitive Telemetry

I’m not the public library feed, Senior Officer, go do your own research. I said, “If I told you, then you might find all the bodies I’ve already disposed of.”

“It’s joking.” Ratthi managed to sound like he completely believed that. “That’s how it looks when it’s joking.” He sent me on the feed, Stop joking .

Gurathin sighed and rubbed his face and looked off into the distance, like he regretted all his life choices that had led to him standing here right now. On our private feed connection, he sent, Or you could just show them where you were when this person was being killed .

(Yeah, on reflection I think I misdirected in the wrong direction. It was the kind of thing a human or augmented human could get away with saying, not a rogue SecUnit. Even if they knew I was just being an asshole, I’d made them wonder, I’d put the idea in their heads.)

(And now if I did have to kill some GrayCris agents, I’d have to be really careful about what I did with the bodies.)

(It was probably better to make it look like an accident.)

I hated to admit it but Gurathin had a point. I pulled the right section of video from my drone archive. (I don’t keep all my drone video because it would take up storage space that could be used for media, but I run an analysis of it for relevant stuff before I delete it. I was behind and still had the last 72 hours stored.) I clipped it around the relevant section and sent it to Indah and Aylen.

The clip was from one of Mensah’s sentry drones parked up on the ceiling of her council office. I was sitting on a corner of her desk and she was pacing. I’d muted the audio; her complaining that Councilor Sonje was an ass was proprietary data. I let the clip run, showing I’d had an alert from another sentry drone, warned Mensah, and got off her desk in time to be standing by the wall when Councilor Ephraim walked in. Then I stopped the clip.

So that was one planetary leader plus one councilor who had seen me at the council offices across the station when Lutran was being killed.

Indah sighed (yes, she did that a lot around me) and said, “Continue, Officer Aylen.”

Aylen said, “The reason I had to ask was this,” and via the feed she sent me a video clip.

It was the video from the transit ring surveillance camera. The clip had been processed already but the timestamp was intact. It showed the transport’s lock, and Lutran walking up to it, asking for entrance, and being admitted. The hatch closed after him. I fast-forwarded through the video, but there was nothing else. No one else approached the transport’s hatch, no one had entered the transport after Lutran. I said, “There was someone already in there?”

My drones showed me Aylen’s grim expression. “No. No one other than Lutran ever entered or exited that transport.”

It had to be a hack. It wasn’t like the way I removed myself from video surveillance—I did that from inside the system, removing the images of me and substituting images taken before or after I walked into view. It was nearly seamless, but it was easier to spot than this. The person who had done this had known the video might be checked by humans, not just a monitoring system.

If it was a person. Could GrayCris have sent another SecUnit? Or a CombatUnit?

My organic skin actually had a prickling reaction like from sudden exposure to cold air. Could they afford that kind of firepower just for revenge? I checked Mensah’s drones, and tightened the drone sentry perimeter around the admin office block anyway. I didn’t want to scare her with something that might just be me being nervous.

(Ratthi was asking Indah, “Can I see too?”

“No,” she told him.)

I pulled the clip apart to look at its underlying code, but it didn’t tell me anything. Aylen said, “From the report on how you rescued Dr. Mensah from the corporate station, you can do something similar?”

I said, “I can, but only under certain circumstances.” Circumstances which I am not going to explain to you, Special Investigator. “Is your security system compromised?” It was kind of an urgent question.

Indah was watching me closely. “Our analysts say the PA’s system hasn’t been hacked. They think it could be a jamming device.”

Which was good, because that meant it wasn’t a construct. A construct would use a hack, not a tool. “I don’t know of anything that could do that.” I started a search against my own archives, which included the tech catalogs I’d used to pick out the new drones Dr. Mensah had bought for me. “And the Corporation Rim runs on surveillance, there’s no way a tool like this wouldn’t be banned there. At least, banned for commercial sale.” My search wasn’t finding any results. The only jamming devices I’d seen like this were in the media, secret weapons or magical artifacts. “It might come from outside the Rim.”

“So it would be an espionage tool.” Aylen glanced at Indah, who looked grim.

I started to say that they never used SecUnits for espionage, and then realized I didn’t actually know that for sure. Take away our armor and alter our appearance and give us the right module…

There was a lot I didn’t know for sure.

I am going to have to stop scaring the shit out of myself.

I asked, “Did they use this when they removed the body from the transport?”

“No.” Aylen sent me another clip. “A simpler method.”

On this video there was no attempt to hide what was happening. A floating delivery cart arrived, and the transport’s hatch opened to let it in. Seven minutes later, the hatch opened again and the cart floated out. Well, that sucked because it was so obvious. It looked like a standard large cart, a three-meter square box used for deliveries around the port. I said, “The subject is in the cart with the body. Who called for the cart?”

Aylen said, “We’re looking for the cart now. But it’s likely the perpetrator would have cleaned it. We already know they have access to a sterilizer to remove contact DNA. And it’s unlikely they used their own ID to request it.”

This sucks more. All you needed to get a cart was an address, and the subject could have used the transport’s lock ID.

Gurathin said, “Then why didn’t this person clean the transport? If they had, we wouldn’t have known this was where what’s his name was killed. We’d know the transport was damaged, that was all.”

It was a good question and I had a good answer. “They meant to. They thought they had more time to come back.”

Indah made a thoughtful noise. Aylen was still eyeing me like she suspected something. Then Indah shook her head and said, “Forensics and Medical are going to need this scene for a while. Investigator, what’s your next step?”

Aylen wasn’t caught unprepared. “We can’t locate this transport’s contractor yet, but we have the ID of the outsystem ship that was supposed to deliver its next cargo. I’m going to the private dock to speak to them.”

“Outsystem” on Preservation meant the same thing as what the Corporation Rim called “non-corporate political entities,” which were basically planetary settlements, stations, moons, floating rocks, whatever that were not under corporate ownership. They might be nice like Preservation or total shitshows, you never knew.

Indah said, “Good. Take SecUnit.”

Yeah, I was surprised too.

AYLEN MADE IT CLEARRatthi and Gurathin were not invited, which was fine, since Gurathin didn’t want to go and Ratthi was glad because he thought this meant that Station Security knew I didn’t have anything to do with Lutran’s death. Aylen did not make it clear that she didn’t like the fact that I was invited. It would have been easier if she had, because then I would have known where I stood, and if I should be an asshole or not.