Марта Уэллс: Fugitive Telemetry

I found a transport connection and pinged it. It pinged back readily, with enough identifying information to class it as a passenger transport whose home destination was a small hub station outside the Corporation Rim. It visited Preservation on a regular route, carrying cargo and passengers, continuing on to five other non–Corporation Rim polities and then looping back home. Transports don’t communicate in words (most transports don’t; ART did, but ART was ART) so I wasn’t really asking it questions so much as sending images and code back and forth. It had no record of Lutran as one of its passengers, and I moved on to the next.

This got boring very quickly. And it was the tedious kind of boring where I couldn’t run media in the background. I couldn’t code this process, each transport needed an individual approach based on its capabilities, and finding their connections to the station feed out of the confusing mass of inputs and outputs took more finesse than I was used to needing. I couldn’t use a data range to exclude transports, since Lutran could have come in on any of them; some transports didn’t require passengers to disembark immediately and Lutran could have stayed in his quarters on board for some time before applying for transient housing. I also couldn’t pull the transport’s date of arrival until after I made contact with it.

And this whole exercise could be totally useless, if his transport was one of the three that had left before the body was found and the council had closed the port.

If I didn’t find anything, this was going to be a huge waste of my time.

Possibly I should just stop complaining like a human and get on with it.

I had checked 57 percent of the transports in dock, when I hit an anomaly. I pulled a transport connection and pinged it with a salutation. It pinged me back with a salutation. (This is not how it’s supposed to work, there’s usually an answer protocol, even if it’s in a different language.) But maybe the transport had missed part of the ping or had a different kind of protocol. (Unlikely. Ships from outside the Corporation Rim, particularly on the routes intersecting Preservation, had a variety of different protocols, some of them horrifyingly jury-rigged by humans. But by the registry signifiers in its feed connection, this transport was from a Corporation Rim origin.) I pinged it again. It pinged me back, still a salutation. Okay, I’m just going to start talking to it.

By poking around in its open feed, I found out the transport was a lower level automated crewless cargo hauler with booked passengers on the side. Preservation was self-sufficient and didn’t import or export raw materials from the Corporation Rim, but did act as a cargo transfer point for other non-corporate polities that did. Talking to it was reminiscent of dealing with Ship, the cargo hauler I had taken to Milu and back, which had not abandoned me to die in space even though I wasn’t entirely sure it had understood it was saving me, but whatever; it made me more inclined to be patient.

On my initial query, Transport tentatively identified Lutran as a passenger but I honestly couldn’t tell if it was just doing that because it thought that was what I wanted to hear and it was trying to be polite. I backtracked and tried to get some more baseline data. What was its route? How many passengers, where had they boarded, and what were their destinations?

It sent me a garbled cargo manifest.

Uh. That was… not normal, not a lower level transport failing to communicate.

I asked it to perform a diagnostic and after five seconds got a stream of error codes.

I opened my eyes and pushed out of my chair, startling the group of humans at the opposite end of the waiting area who hadn’t known I was there. My drones dropped down from their perimeter positions and followed me through the entry gates to the transit ring.

The weapons scanner (which I was not allowed to hack, and which I wasn’t hacking) alerted on me, but it had my body scan ID on the weapons-allowed list so it didn’t set off an alarm. (I have energy weapons in my arms and it’s not like I can leave them behind in the hotel room.) (I mean, my arms are detachable so theoretically I could leave them behind if I had a little help but as a longterm solution it was really inconvenient.) I was sure the weapons scanner would alert Station Security that I was in the area.

I took the wide ramp down to the embarkation floor, which was much less busy than usual. There were still humans and augmented humans wandering around, plus some hauler bots and maintenance bots, catching up on cargo transfers that had been ordered before the port closure. Some humans glanced at me but obviously didn’t know what I was; the Station Security officer posted in the help area at the base of the ramp did, and watched me walk down the floor toward the transport docks.

(I hate being identified like that. I had gone to a lot of effort to not be immediately identified as a SecUnit, and now it all felt like a waste.) (I grew longer hair and everything.)

I had gotten enough info from the confused transport to figure out what dock it was attached to, and I confirmed it in the public access port directory. Nine minutes later I was standing in front of its closed lock where it was attached to the transit ring. I touched the hatch and pinged again. The direct connection gave me a sense of the transport’s urgency that I hadn’t been able to detect through the Station feed.

Instead of a ping I got a different garbled manifest file back; it knew the first file had somehow communicated to me that it needed help and it was sending the second to reinforce the message. Something aboard was terribly wrong, something that had left it with no way of notifying the Port Authority that it needed help. I don’t think it had any idea what I was, but I thought it was relieved that I was here.

I needed to get onboard.

I also needed not to give Station Security any opportunity to fuck me over. There was surveillance on the embarkation floor, and I can tell when I’m on camera, even when I’m not supposed to access the system.

From my drone sentries I knew Mensah was in a council meeting now. I tapped Pin-Lee’s feed to check on her but she was in a different meeting. I knew the others were on planet: Dr. Bharadwaj on a family visit and Arada and Overse at the FirstLanding university working on preparation for the survey they wanted to do, and Volescu was retired.

That left me with the human most likely to want to drop everything and come watch me break into a damaged transport and the human also most likely to come watch me break into a damaged transport but only so he could argue with me about it.

So I called both of them.

WATCHING ME TRY TOget the transport’s lock open, Ratthi said, “You don’t think we should call Station Security?”

I had my hand on the entry panel. The transport wanted to let me in but couldn’t get the lock open. I was trying to force an emergency open through the transport’s feed but the connections were inactive and it was like groping around in a giant bin of tiny broken drones for the one that was still intact. I said, “No. They told me they didn’t need my help.”

“Did they tell you that?” Ratthi said. His expression was doubtful. “What exactly did they say?”

I pulled it from memory. “They said, ‘We’ll call you if we need you.’”

Gurathin said, “I can’t tell if that’s you being passive aggressive or you being willfully obtuse.”

I would be more pissed off about him saying that except a) he was right about the passive aggressive thing and b) he was standing where I had told him to stand, blocking the nearest port camera view of what I was doing.