Марта Уэллс: Fugitive Telemetry

The other conversation was Tural and Aylen, with Tural saying, Why didn’t the refugees just stop here? Why take the transport somewhere else?

Aylen replied, Maybe another group, or groups did. But they couldn’t bring all the groups here without the risk that someone would find out about the scheme and expose it.

No shuttles had left for the planet or any other insystem destination in the incident time frame, and I guess we were all just assuming the refugees hadn’t been spaced, though the exterior station scan results hadn’t come back yet.

The refugees couldn’t have gotten off this dock, and Lutran’s killer couldn’t have entered his transport without the cameras’ data on the PA systems being hacked. And I had of course proved that it hadn’t.

Which… was a massive fuck-up on my part.

Because this was the kind of hacking a SecUnit could do, specifically a CombatUnit. If this was a BreharWallHan operation to stop the escapes, they might have brought in a security company with a CombatUnit doing exactly the kind of thing I had pretended to do on Milu: operating almost independently with a human supervisor planted somewhere on station. I just hadn’t been good enough to find that Unit’s trail in the PA’s system.

I didn’t know what I was going to do. I could call Mensah and ask for advice, which would actually be a cover for asking her to fix my fuck-up. Except I had no evidence of the hack; I couldn’t even prove it to myself, so I didn’t know how Mensah could fix it.

On the comm, one of the techs said, “Officer Aylen.” It was the one who had made the comment about a historical documentary on the crap stored in the private docks. “I’ve got a problem with the empty modules.”

Sounding frustrated, Aylen answered, “What problem?”

The tech explained, “According to the inventory, we’re missing one. I’m guessing it’s outside for transfer, so we need it brought in so we can verify—”

I cut into the channel and said, “A module is missing?” at the same time as Indah, Aylen, and Soire. Matif was already on the feed telling the Port Authority that we needed the spare-module use records and could they confirm an empty module outside the station?

“Ask them who authorized that transfer,” Soire told Matif at the same time Aylen said, “Those modules can be pressurized, correct?”

I said, “Correct.” I was already walking out of the ancient storage compartment back toward the embarkation area. They could finish the historical documentary without my help. If I was going to be useless, I could at least be useless where stuff was going on.

Indah said, “Find that fucking module.”

I reached what the humans were calling the “mobile command center,” which was actually just one of the portable Port Authority terminal and display surfaces for accessing all the transit ring’s traffic data. Indah stood next to it with PA Supervisor Gamila. Aylen, Tural, and other officers and techs sprinted in from different directions. Gamila controlled the terminal via her feed, the display surface floating above her head and flicking through sensor views of the outside hull of the station. I picked up a live feed from the station responder on picket duty, supplying alternate sensor views. Gamila was talking to someone on the responder, saying, “No, those modules are for the Walks Silent Shores, that’s a scheduled transfer, they’re all accounted for. We’re looking for a single unregistered module—”

No authorized transfer, Matif reported via the Station Security feed. It’s just missing .

Soire added, Somebody must have deleted its records .

(If it seems like they twigged to this faster than they had anything else, it was because cargo safety/smuggling and hazardous material prevention was actually most of their job. I’m sure they were great at talking down aggressively intoxicated humans, too.)

Still breathing hard from running down the dock, Aylen said to Tural, “Could someone install longterm life support in one of those things?”

“Theoretically, I guess.” Tural’s face scrunched with worry. “Not in a hurry. These are just transfer modules. They’re pressurized and they hold air, but… They’re not meant for…”

They’re not meant for anything that needs to breathe, not for longer than a cycle or so, Tural meant. If the refugees were in there, they didn’t have much time left.

As a means to quickly move humans from the private Merchant Docks to a transport, it would have been fine, especially on a small transit ring like this one where the trip would have taken no more than half an hour at most. It was the ideal means of getting them from one end of the station to the other with no one noticing, especially if you were desperate to cover your tracks and throw off any corporate pursuit.

“Was this a trick all along?” Tifany said, low-voiced. She and Farid were standing next to me, for some reason. “Bring those people here, then put them on the module to kill them?”

“No, that’s way too elaborate, if they just want to murder whoever tries to escape,” Farid told her.

Well, yeah. The Lalow had thought it was delivering the group of refugees to the next step in their route to safety. The crew had sent the refugees out to meet their contact, who they knew was called Lutran, though they didn’t know what he looked like. There had been no reported disruptions on the embarkation floor, no fight, no struggle picked up by the cameras, so the refugees had had no idea they were in danger.

So, working theory: Lutran meets the refugees and gets them to board the module that is due to be transferred from the Merchant Docks to his transport waiting in the Public Docks. (The transfers were all done by bot; haulers moved the recently loaded modules to the lock and pushed them out. If it was an inert module, the cargo bots would take it and attach it to its transport. If it was a powered module, the cargo bots would place it on one of the set paths around the station where it would get a go-signal and then head toward its destination. When it arrived, another cargo bot, or the transport itself if it had the right configuration, would attach the module.) With the refugees safe aboard the module, Lutran then goes back to his transport to make sure the module attaches correctly when it arrives and that the refugees get aboard. But it’s not there, the module has been diverted to an unknown destination. Someone else is aboard the transport, and that person kills Lutran. Then that person, who somehow has hacked the PA’s systems, deletes the record of Lutran’s module transfer.

This scenario was the most likely one, the probability was 86 percent, easily. But it was impossible unless the perpetrator could 1) hack Lutran’s transport, 2) hack the PortAuth surveillance cameras, and 3) hack the PortAuth transfer records.

So where was the module? It couldn’t just be floating around out there. The responder would have found it by now. Wherever it had gone, it must have looked like it was headed toward a legitimate destination, so the systems that did nothing but scan and monitor all station traffic wouldn’t alert on it.

It had to be attached to a ship.

And that ship, and the BreharWallHan agents, was still out there. It had been unable to leave before Lutran was discovered and the port closed. Most stations wouldn’t close their transit rings because someone found a dead body, but most stations weren’t as short on random dead bodies as this one.

The BreharWallHan ship hadn’t run, or tried to fight the responder, because Indah was right, they wanted to keep it quiet. They wanted the Lalow to continue its part of the operation until the BreharWallHan agents could trace all the routes, all the stations where refugees had been transferred, maybe until they could figure out where the pick-up point was inside the mining field.