Exit Strategy

The SecUnit had a Palisade logo on its chest. The armor was a proprietary brand, a different configuration from company armor. No drones, though. (GrayCris should really have paid that extra bribe money to get the drones in.)

(Yes, I thought about hacking it. I had never hacked another SecUnit. I’d hacked a ComfortUnit, but it hadn’t been trying to stop me. I couldn’t afford the experiment. If I tried and failed and it reported me, Mensah and the others would pay for it.)

They reached the junction and I delayed the pod’s arrival to give me a little time. The SecUnit was scanning, checking for weapons on the humans in the transit station and for unauthorized comm and feed activity. I was too deep in the hotel feed for it to find me. (If I hadn’t been able to hide my feed activity from other SecUnits, I would have been spare parts a long time ago.)

I made the connection to Mensah’s implant and pinged her feed to test the security. None of the targets including primary reacted. Then I sent, Hi, Dr. Mensah. It’s me. Her chest moved with a sharp breath and her head made a slight aborted motion. She had just conquered the urge to look around. One target glanced at her but the others didn’t react. I added, Try to answer me without subvocalizing.

She didn’t respond for 3.2 seconds and I had that long to wonder if she didn’t want to talk to me. That would make this rescue 100 percent more awkward.

Then she said, Prove you’re you. Tell me your name.

Okay, not that awkward. That was a relief. It also told me how bad her situation was, if she was worried about someone trying to trick her by posturing in her feed. I said, It’s Murderbot, Dr. Mensah.

That conversation had been permanently deleted, so no one knew about it except the PreservationAux team. Assuming they hadn’t told anyone else about it. Mensah obviously assumed it.

She responded immediately, What are you doing here? You weren’t captured?

They must have told her that, because there was nothing like that in the newsfeeds. Disinformation, which is the same as lying but for some reason has a different name, is the top tactic in corporate negotiation/warfare. (There had been a whole episode about it on Sanctuary Moon.) I told her, I came to help you, to get you to the port where Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin are waiting with a company shuttle. It’s dangerous, but less dangerous than staying where you are. Do I have a go to proceed? I know, but somehow it was easier being formal about it.

She answered immediately, Yes.

I tapped her feed to acknowledge and backburnered it so I could concentrate on my ongoing relationship with hotelSecSys and my new best friend, MobSys. I checked the schematic I had pulled earlier. My operation had to take place in this section, at one of the junctions, because once the pod moved into the hotel’s main network, it would be going too fast. Even if I could pull its direction info, I couldn’t get ahead of it.

Splitting my attention between all the security camera feeds I was monitoring was tricky, but not much trickier than listening to HubSystem, SecSystem, various client feeds, and vocal commands from confused and impatient humans while watching entertainment media. At least that’s what I was telling myself. I’m not sure I could have done it before all the work on Milu had increased my processing space.

If I screwed this up … I couldn’t screw this up.

I selected what the MobSys told me was the most common destination, the hotel’s club section. My pod started to move and two seconds into the trip, I asked MobSys for an emergency halt and hold in a low-traffic junction, but not to trigger any alarms for bot or human supervisors.

The pod stuttered to a halt. Part of the emergency protocol is to redirect any pods headed toward the site of the emergency call. Through MobSys, I felt pods all over the structure swooshing safely away through alternate passages.

I stepped out of my pod into the junction. It was an empty platform with two corridors curving away. I made sure the security camera would hold the image of an empty platform for the next six minutes. Then I got my projectile weapon out of my bag, loaded it, and held it down and to my side, angled back.