Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6)(12)

“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.

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.”



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