Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6)(21)

She shook her head slightly. “Maybe not.”

Target Five vibrated with dismay. “I didn’t—We didn’t do that—It was a misunderstanding—”

Weirdly, I got the sense that was true. It had been a misunderstanding.

Aylen said, “Before you argue with me about it, please recall that I was the Station Security officer you abducted.”

“But—It was—” Target Five subsided and looked glum.

“Attempted abduction is the charge my senior is at this moment bringing to the Preservation Station judge-advocate.” Since Aylen’s senior was at this moment sitting with her arms folded intently watching the display, I guess this was a tactic. It seemed really transparent to me, but then I wasn’t the one who’d landed myself in detention for what I was beginning to think was not monumental stupidity, but just a monumentally stupid mistake.

Aylen listened to Target Five sputter and protest. She said finally, “Unless you have an explanation?”

“We’re just shipping cargo,” Target Five said, too desperately. “It was a mistake. We overreacted. Fenn and Miro would never hurt anybody.”

“It didn’t look that way from the other side of the guns they had aimed at my face.” Aylen was still calm and pointed.

I said, “They were expecting someone else. Someone they didn’t know. They thought Aylen was lying about being Station Security.”

All the humans in the room turned to look at me. I always hate that, but Tifany was nodding, and Indah said, “I’m leaning that way myself.”

Targets Two and Four had been giving very convincing descriptions of their cargo route. Clearly they had taken some effort to get their stories straight. But Target Four had gotten the too-detailed story confused after the third stop and was now winging it very badly. It could have just been that Target Four had a bad memory. (I was always having to remember that humans didn’t have full access to the archives stored in their neural tissue, which explained a lot about their behavior.)

Indah was subvocalizing on her feed. Aylen paused to listen, then said, “Who did you think we were?”

Target Five flustered, then leaned forward, confiding now. “The rings we go to aren’t nice like this one, you can get your ship raided by the people who work there. That’s what we thought it was.”

Aylen nodded, like there was some tiny chance in the realm of possibility that she was buying that. “These rings are in the Corporation Rim?”

“No, no, no.” Target Five did an agitated shaking movement that was apparently emphatic denial. “We’ve never been there. Too many permits, we can’t afford it. And it’s dangerous.”

Aylen eyed her. Then she said, “Do you recognize this person?” and used her feed to throw an image of Lutran up on the room’s display surface.

The image wasn’t one of the good close-ups of Dead Lutran but the one of him alive, from the hostel. Scanners had been activated in the conference room and the real-time reports were running alongside the video display. As part of the rights thing, Aylen had told Target Five the scanner would be on, which I thought was playing way too fair, but maybe not, because Target Five didn’t show an elevated heart rate or any other neural cues indicating recognition.

Target Five frowned, a clearly “why the fuck is she asking me this” expression. She said, “Uh … No.”

Matif and Soire were getting similar reactions: Target Two clearly thought it was a trick and Target Four demanded to know who “that picker” was.

The humans all looked at the scan results and I said, “Chances that they’re lying are below 20 percent.” I had tapped the scanner’s raw feed so I could process the data faster. (Tapping a feed that’s being displayed in front of me is not hacking.)

Everybody looked at me again, then at Indah, who nodded, her gaze not leaving the display of Target Five’s face. It looked like she knew what she was doing. It would be interesting to compare her data to mine. Then I remembered the main reason I was doing this was to make sure there was no connection to GrayCris and I wasn’t going to refine my methods, such as they were. (What they were being mostly: crap I made up on the spot as I needed it that sort of worked, and leftover company code analysis.)

Aylen tilted her head, an unconscious gesture while she was receiving feed reports from Matif and Soire. She said, “Here’s a better view of his face.”

This time Lutran was dead in the image, lying where he had been dumped in the corridor junction. Target Five shook her head slowly, eyes narrowing. “No. I don’t know this person. Why are you asking me about them?”

Similar reactions from Targets Two and Four. (Well, Four wanted to know if it was the same person in the two images. Matif looked like someone who was desperately repressing the urge to sigh.)

From Aylen’s briefly preoccupied expression, I thought Indah had delivered another instruction via the feed. Then Aylen said, “His name was Lutran. He was found—”

She stopped abruptly because the scanner spiked. Target Five had had a reaction, a controlled flinch, and her skin was flushing as her internal fluids moved around. Target Two blinked rapidly, also flushing. Four said, “Fuck no.”

Indah said softly, “Oh, now, here we go.”

Aylen asked Target Five, “So you do know him?”