Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6)(10)

It followed me back through the corridors to the lobby, where a few new humans had arrived and were standing in front of a kiosk like they had never seen anything like it before. It went to help them, but sent me query: next action?

I still didn’t have enough for a real threat assessment. I should go back to monitoring Mensah’s security arrangements while lurking in the hotel near the admin offices and watching media. I didn’t think I’d hear from Station Security again. (Or at least not about this; I figured they would come up with other ways to try to get rid of me.) I’d have to get intel on their investigation through Mensah’s council channels. To get the bot to leave me alone, I answered, task complete.

I was already out the door when the bot said, query: arrivals data, meaning I should look for the dead human in the transit ring and its traveler records.

I didn’t respond because I don’t need a critique from a “free” bot and I couldn’t access the arrivals data without Station Security’s permission anyway, and fuck that.

Huh, I just thought of another way to do it.

It was annoying that the “free” bot was right, but I needed to go to the transit ring.



* * *



Preservation’s transit ring wasn’t that big compared to the major Corporation Rim hubs. Or even to the non-major Corporation Rim hubs. It had only one entry/exit point for passengers, near the booking kiosks where you could search for berths on the docked transports offering passage. There was another entry/exit point for crews of private ships and cargo-only transports in the Merchant Docks, and Dead Lutran might have come in through that section, but it made more sense statistically to start at the public entrance.

This being Preservation, there was a nice waiting area to one side of the transit ring’s entry hall for humans to sit and figure out what they were doing, with couches and chairs and a mosaic floor with tiled images of the planet’s flora and fauna, all tagged in the feed with detailed descriptions. Wooden conical structures that were duplicates of the first shelters used on the planet sat around, most of them holding information kiosks or displays for visitors.

I found a chair behind yet another plant biome (a big one, with reedy plants in a simulated stream) and sat down.

I had an ID that Dead Lutran must have used on entry in order to get a room assignment for transient housing. Finding the ship he had come in on could be an important data point. Based on the tech used to create his clothes, I was betting he had come here from the Corporation Rim and not another non-corporate political entity, station or whatever, but it would be nice to be sure.

I could hack the port’s transient arrivals system but I had said I wouldn’t, so I wouldn’t. Also, it seemed pointless to do it just to run a search that Tural and the other Station Security techs could run as soon as they bothered to read my report. But just asking for information had worked really well the first time so I decided to try it again.

I leaned back in the chair, told my drones to form a sensor perimeter, and verified that my inputs for the constant cycle of checks for Dr. Mensah’s sentry task group were all still open. Then I closed my eyes and slipped into the feed.

Transports don’t hang out on the feed constantly downloading (not that there’s anything wrong with constantly downloading) but they do access it to keep in contact with the transit ring’s scheduling and alerts channels, and also to allow local feed access to any humans on board.

I had to sort through the hundreds of different connections currently attached to the station feed in the transit ring, humans, augmented humans, bots, bot pilots, small and large scale port systems, all interlinked and busy doing their jobs. Or in most of the humans’ cases, wandering around. I was looking for the distinctive profiles of transports, which were different from any of the other connections. I could have done this a lot more easily by walking around from hatch to hatch and using the comm to contact each transport directly, but it would have been ridiculously obvious that I was doing something, even if the humans couldn’t tell what it was.

(The humans not being able to tell what I was doing just guaranteed that whatever they assumed I was doing would be way, way worse than me having a brief comm interaction with each transport in dock, trying to get info for stupid Station Security.)

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.