Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6)(19)

Not long after I had first gotten here I had accessed a map of the security office interior from the station archives. The first level was a public area, where humans came in to complain about each other and to pay fines for cargo and docking violations. (Preservation had two economies, one a complicated barter system for planetary residents and one currency-based for visitors and for dealing with other polities. Most of the humans here didn’t really understand how important hard currency was in the Corporation Rim but the council did, and Mensah said the port took in enough in various fees to keep the station from being a drain on the planet’s resources.) The second level was much bigger and had work spaces, conference rooms, and accident/safety equipment storage. There was also a separate attached space for holding cells, and a larger separate section for storing and analyzing samples from potentially hazardous cargo, and a small medical treatment area that seemed to be mostly used for intoxicated detainees.

The response team brought in the detainees through the transit ring entrance. Targets Two and Three had already come in on gurneys headed for the medical area but the others were mostly ambulatory.

The weapons scanners on the station’s entrance went off on me, of course.

It caused some confusion, because the response team thought someone had screwed up and not searched the detainees properly. I stood there for two minutes and twelve seconds wondering if anyone would figure it out while they searched the detainees again, looking for the weapon the scanner was alerting on. In their defense, they had actually done the weapons search right the first time (I had verified it with scan and visual), and they had confiscated the detainees’ interfaces. (None of them were augmented humans—apparently it wasn’t common to be feed augmented in the polities outside the Corporation Rim that used Preservation as a waystation.) But not so much in their defense, they had forgotten a SecUnit was standing behind them.

Finally I pulled up my sleeve (using my onboard energy weapons made holes in fabric, so I’d have to get my shirt fixed) and held my arm up. “Hey, it’s me.”

They all stared. Still woozy, Target Four said, “It’s a slitting SecUnit, you pussers, how stupid are you?”

Yeah, these Targets are going to be fun to chat with, I can tell already. I told him, “You’re the one who got yourself bodyslammed into station detention, so let’s talk about how dumb you are.”

Target Four seemed shocked. “SecUnits aren’t supposed to talk back,” Target Five said weakly.

Tell me about it. “Cargo ship crews aren’t supposed to take Port Authority supervisors as hostages, but here we all are.”

From the front of the group, Aylen snapped, “Get them inside!”

The officers hurriedly milled into a more efficient configuration for taking the Targets in through the foyer. As I was rolling my sleeve down, Aylen stepped over to me. I don’t know what I was expecting; nothing good, basically. But keeping her voice low, she said, “I’ve just had a preliminary report from the Port Authority inspectors. They did an initial scan of the Lalow’s storage, and the cargo containers are empty. And there’s no record of anything leaving that ship.”

Empty? What the fuck? I actually locked up for a second, still rolling down my sleeve. Threat assessment had just spiked and even risk assessment (which really needed to be purged and reloaded) tried to deliver a report.

I was thinking a lot of different things but the one that came out was, “So what was the transport waiting for?” I knew from my drone search that the transport Lutran had been killed in didn’t have a cargo module attached. At the time, this hadn’t seemed a big deal, since if the transport was sitting in dock it was probably waiting for modules to be loaded.

“A good question,” Aylen said. Her expression was still in the neutral range but I could tell she was intrigued by the report, just like my threat assessment module.

I wasn’t sure why she had told me this. Unless it was because she had just gotten the news and after the weapons scan fuck-up I was the only one involved with the investigation who she wasn’t currently pissed off at. It would be nice if she had recognized me as the only other one here who actually knew how to investigate a suspicious incident that wasn’t a cargo safety violation, but I doubted that. I said, “They know a lot about SecUnits for a ship with a non-corporate registry. We’re usually only deployed as rentals on mining or other isolated contract labor installations, or by licensed security companies. They could have seen SecUnits in the media, but…” I couldn’t finish that sentence. The fear and hatred had felt different from the fear and hatred generated by shows like Valorous Defenders, which sometimes featured rogue SecUnits as scary villains. The crew’s reaction had felt like there was personal experience behind it, but I had no data to back that up.

“Hmm.” Aylen lifted her brows. “According to their ship’s circuit report, they’ve never even visited a corporate dock.”

“There could be an explanation,” I said, because there could be, and I’m used to having to be as accurate as possible or get my neural tissue fried and old habits, etc.

“Let’s ask them,” she said, and went on into the station.



* * *



There was a delay, because there was documentation on the arrests that needed to be completed and the Targets all needed medical checks because that was a regulation and blah blah blah. Also more relevantly, a tech team was searching the ship for anything that looked like 1) a contact DNA cleaner and 2) something that could cause the visual jamming effect with the transit ring’s surveillance camera or 3) a suspiciously fluid-stained floater cart. It also gave the Port Authority more time to pull corroborating documentation about the ship and the missing/nonexistent cargo.