Exit Strategy

Twenty-three of them in power suits, all heavily armed, forming up for a boarding operation. None were in SecUnit armor, and I wasn’t picking up any pings, so they were probably all human or augmented human. Forty-seven security drones of various sizes and armament circled over their heads in a deployment-ready swarm. I caught a station security drone and had it zoom in on the shoulder logo of a suit. I didn’t recognize it immediately, except for the fact that it wasn’t a HaveRatton station logo. I tagged it for a future image search.

HaveRatton Station Security was there, but they were back at the entrance to the Port Authority zone, watching the boarding operation. So whoever it was had contracted with HaveRatton to bring an armed team in. That’s expensive. And worrying. You don’t need twenty-three humans in power suits and a flotilla of security drones for an evidence search.

Station security had to be using their drones to keep an eye on the security company stamping around on their dock area. I checked my captive StationSec drone’s recording buffer and found nearly an hour of intercepted comm traffic. I downloaded it and ran a query for the word SecUnit. It hit almost immediately.

SecUnit. You think this thing is really onboard?

Intel says possibly. I—

With its controller?

No controller, dim-iot, that’s why they call them rogues.

Oh yeah. It was about me.

* * *

On Milu’s terraforming facility/illegal alien remnant mining platform, Wilken and Gerth had recognized me as a SecUnit. It had come in handy at the time, but it wasn’t something I wanted to happen again.

Ever again.

My friend ART had changed my configuration, removing up to a centimeter from my arms and legs so I wouldn’t match a scan for SecUnit standard body shape. ART’s alterations to my code had made parts of me grow sparse, soft, humanlike body hair, and changed the way my skin met the edges of my inorganic parts, so they looked more like augments. It was subtle, something ART thought would lessen human suspicion on a subliminal level. (ART’s pretentious like that.) The change in code had also made my eyebrows and the hair on my head get thicker, and that made my face look far more different than such a slight change should. I didn’t like it, but it was necessary.

But it wasn’t enough of a change to fool humans familiar with SecUnits. (Granted, running up a wall in front of Wilken and Gerth had been a dead giveaway before they even got a real look at me.) I could control my behavior (well, sort of, mostly) but I needed to control my appearance.

So while I was still on Ship, I had used ART’s templates to alter my code temporarily to let the hair on my head grow at an accelerated rate. (Accelerated because if I screwed up and started getting near the bipedal furry media monster end of the spectrum, I’d still have a chance to fix it.) I gave the hair on my head another two centimeters of growth, then stopped it when I hit my target.

To check my results, I’d pulled up an image from my archived video, and found a good view of my face from Dr. Mensah’s camera. I don’t usually use cameras to look at myself because why the hell would I want to do that, but I had been on contract then and still collecting all my clients’ feeds. From the timestamp, the image was from when we’d been standing outside the hoppers, when GrayCris was hunting us, and she had asked me to let the others see my face so they would trust me.

I’d compared that old image with my current image via drone cam. After all the changes, I did look different now, and more human.

I didn’t like it even more.

But now that I was back on HaveRatton with an as yet unidentified security force looking for me, it was coming in handy. The next step was to get rid of my clothing and its obvious projectile holes. At the edge of the station mall, I forced myself to walk into one of the big travelers’ supply places.

I had used station vending machines to buy memory clips, but I had never been in an actual shop before. Even though the vending was all automated, and I sort of knew what to do based on what I had seen on the entertainment feed, it was still weird. (And by weird I mean an agonizing level of anxiety.) Fortunately there are apparently humans as clueless as I was because as soon as I crossed the threshold the shop’s feed immediately sent me an interactive instruction module.

It guided me to one of the empty vending booths, which was completely enclosed. Telling it to shut the privacy door was such a relief my performance reliability percentage went up half a point. The booth scanned my hard currency card and then offered a set of menus.