Марта Уэллс: Fugitive Telemetry

Ratthi was on a rest break after finishing his work for the last survey and getting ready for the next. I had been lucky to catch him on the way back after a meal appointment with his human friends. Gurathin didn’t have any other human friends from what I could tell but he had been taking a cycle rest period, reading in one of the lounge areas with lots of plant biomes.

“It’s definitely not willfully obtuse,” Ratthi told him. He told me, “I do think we should call Station Security.”

“The transport said I could come in,” I said. “But it’s too damaged to open the door.”

“So we should tell Station Security—”

“It might be just a maintenance issue, which would fall under the Port Authority’s remit,” I said. I almost had it. “We won’t know until we get inside.”

Gurathin sighed. “You sound like Pin-Lee.”

“No, Pin-Lee is much worse than this. And if it was her, she would be swearing at us by now,” Ratthi said. He asked me, “I’ve always wondered, did you learn to swear from her or did you already know how? Because you two use a lot of the same—”

I finally managed to get the transport’s mangled feed to trigger the hatch to open. I stepped back and pulled Gurathin out of the way of the port camera view, so whoever was watching could see the hatch wasn’t damaged, that it had been opened from the inside. I’d managed to keep the transport from automatically triggering any station alerts, too. So even though it was me, we should have a few minutes to take a look around and pull info from the transport’s systems before a human from either Station Security or the Port Authority showed up.

Ratthi craned his neck to see inside the hatch, but let me walk in first. “Are you sure no one’s aboard?” he asked as he followed me through the lock.

I was not. There shouldn’t be, but I hadn’t been able to get a confirmation on that from the transport. I sent my drones ahead and said, “Stay behind me.”

“This is ill-advised,” Gurathin muttered, but he clomped along after Ratthi.

On visual and via drone cam I was looking at small low-ceilinged corridors, dingy and scuffed but mostly clean, worn gray and brown upholstery on the seats along the bulkhead in the small lounge we passed through. Lights were up, life support set for humans, but the transport was clearly designed mostly for cargo shipping with passengers as an afterthought. Ahead off the main corridor, my drones encountered a transport maintenance drone, wobbling in the air with its spidery arms drooping, beeping pathetically.

“Do you smell something bad?” Ratthi frowned.

Gurathin said, “Something’s happened to the waste recycling.”

The air cleaners were working but the filters needed maintenance the transport couldn’t perform. Or maybe it had stopped deliberately, hoping to try to alert someone.

The limping ship’s drone swerved away from my drones and led them through a short upward passage and into the main crew lounge. Right, so this wasn’t a recycler problem.

I followed the drones but stopped in the hatchway to the lounge compartment. Ratthi and Gurathin halted behind me in confusion. I had trained them too well to step past me in a situation like this, walking into a strange place, but Ratthi peered around my side and Gurathin stood on his tiptoes to see over my shoulder.

It was a fairly standard lounge with padded seats along the walls and quiescent display surfaces floating in the air. In the far wall, a set of steps wound up to the cabin area just above. On the floor in the middle were dried stains of various disgusting fluids that tend to come out of human bodies when they die. (I also have fluids that come out of me when I’m injured; they aren’t any less disgusting, just different.) (But I also have fewer places for fluids to come out of, unless you count open wounds.) (Right, this is completely irrelevant.)

And sitting on the curved couch along the bulkhead was a utilitarian blue bag with a shoulder strap.

“That’s blood, and—” Ratthi stopped as the realization hit him. “Oh no.”

“Was someone ill there?” Gurathin asked, still trying to see. (Note to self: tell someone to tell Gurathin his vision augments need adjusting.)

“Someone was dead there,” Ratthi told him. He stepped back, worried and clearly upset. “Now can we call Station Security?”

My drones had just completed a fast scan/search of the transport and I knew it was unoccupied; whoever had killed Lutran—hopefully it was Lutran who had been killed here and not some other human we hadn’t found yet—was long gone. The damage to the transport’s systems meant there was no chance of retrieving video or audio without some extensive memory repair. There was nothing else here we could do.

I said, “Now you can call Station Security.”

Station Security swooped in like they were a big deal and not hours too late to catch anybody, and made us wait outside the transport’s hatch in the embarkation hall. It had taken seven minutes for them to arrive, and I had been able to collect a lot of visual and scan data in that time, including the download of the bio scan filters that Ratthi had suggested. I felt we had done a complete job, even with Gurathin distracting us by standing in the hatchway yelling at us to get out of the ship.

A bot that worked for the Port Authority had shown up before Station Security, pinged me, and then it just stood there. I’d seen it in the embarkation area a lot, and I’d never seen it do anything but just stand there.

(I had considered leaving a few drones hidden strategically around the transport to keep track of the investigation. But I had seen the thorough imaging scans they had done of the area where Lutran was found, and if the drones were discovered it would have been humiliating. I felt like I was at least one if not two points up on Station Security at this moment and I wanted to keep it that way.)

The initial response team was three Station Security officers and a Port Authority supervisor. They had taken a verbal report from Gurathin while eyeing me like they expected him to turn me in for whatever I had probably done. The first officer, feed ID Doran, said, “How do you know there’s no one on the transport?”

Ratthi and Gurathin looked at me, and I said, “I checked the transport for possible fatalities and injured crew or passengers in need of assistance, as well as potential hostiles. It’s clear.”

The expression range was dubious to skeptical.

Gurathin made an exasperated noise and said, “That’s what SecUnits do, that’s their job. Why don’t you do your jobs?”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Officer Doran said, beginning to fluster.

I said, “Station Security Initial Incident Assessment procedures require one of you to view and verify the scene before calling additional assistance from the Major Incident Team, if the surroundings are safe.” Not long after I’d first gotten here, I’d downloaded all the Station Security procedures so I’d know what I was dealing with. I added, “The surroundings are safe.”

Ratthi had to fold his lips almost completely inside his mouth to keep from reacting.

“We know that.” Officer Doran said to the Port Authority supervisor, “We’ll go in. You wait out here.” The Port Authority supervisor rolled her eyes and went to go stand with the Port Authority bot.

They had gone in, and after three minutes, came out again and stood around talking on their feeds. The PA supervisor started to set up a feed marker perimeter to warn off the hauler bots. The PA bot followed her around, which while not exactly helping, at least was better than just standing there.

Then Indah showed up with the same group of techs and officers who had been at the Lutran site. A second response team from the Port Authority, this one with more bots and different techs, showed up to mill around. Ratthi said they were here to assess the damage to the transport and try to repair it. (Apparently on Preservation this would be free? Gurathin said it fell under what they called a traveler’s aid rule. In the Corporation Rim, the transport would have had to sit there damaged and racking up fines until its owner or an owner’s rep arrived.) Station Security told the PA team to hold off, since the damage to the transport was evidence and would have to be documented before it could be repaired.