Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6)(23)

Indah was frowning. “Or the refugees killed Lutran? Because he demanded something from them, like payment?”

I said, “What did the review of the Merchant Docks surveillance video show?”

Yeah, it was a trick question. I knew from my drones still out in the main office area that the video had just been transferred from PortAuthSys to StationSecSys, and none of the humans working on the case had had a chance to download the files yet.

Indah looked at me, and I realized that she knew exactly what I was doing. She said, “If that’s your way of asking if you can review the video, then yes.” She nodded to Tural.

On reflection, I could have handled that better.

Tural got into their feed and gave my feed ID permission to download the video. I pulled the files while they were explaining how to access and play the material, and got to work.

Indah signaled for the questioning to continue, but there wasn’t much left to find out. Target Five gave in and supported Target Four’s version of the story, and they both insisted that they didn’t know what was supposed to happen after the refugees disembarked. All they knew was that Lutran would take care of getting them off the station to safety.

We needed to find out where the refugees were now, if they were either a) murderees or b) murderers. Concentrating on the video taken in the area around the Lalow’s dock, within 1.3 minutes I had isolated the moments when the refugees had left the ship. That gave us more to work with than just the descriptions Target Five had provided to Matif, though the camera’s estimates weren’t as good as full body scans.

The refugees were dressed in work clothes, and a few had small shoulder bags. They looked lost, stopping to check the feed markers frequently and moving slowly, as if they had never seen a station like this before. (Trapped in a contract labor camp spread out over an asteroid field, they probably hadn’t.) It didn’t catch any attention in this section of the docks, where ships from a wide range of places disembarked a lot of humans who had no clue what they were doing. And one of the regular-route merchants had just set a large noisy crew loose, plus there were three cargos being unloaded with varying degrees of efficiency and confusion. The Lalow had probably waited until the docks had gotten busy, to let the refugees mix with the crowd. The Port Authority personnel were obviously too worried about humans causing hauler bot accidents to notice the quiet group hesitantly crossing the embarkation floor.

I spotted Lutran entering the Merchant Docks one minute after the refugees left the Lalow. Seventeen minutes later, he left again. He had managed to avoid any cameras while inside the docks, so there was no indication of what he had done while there. It was too bad he was dead; for a human, he had been pretty good at this.

I sent the images of the refugees to Indah and Tural, then checked the video near the Merchant Dock exits to see if we could get some idea of where the refugees had headed next.

Then it got weird.

It got so weird I took extra time running the video back and forth, checking for anomalies and edits.

The Targets had been sent to detention cells to wait, and Aylen, Matif, and Soire had joined Indah and Tural to make exclamations over what they had found out instead of anything more useful. I said, “They never left the Merchant Docks.”

“What?” Indah turned toward me.

I threw the video onto one of the display surfaces. I accelerated the speed, pausing it for two seconds when any human, augmented human, or bot left either of the two exits. “There’s no sign of any member of the refugee party leaving the Merchant Docks. They disappear somewhere between the dockside cameras and the exit cameras’ fields of view.”

The humans stared at the video, Aylen moving so she could see better. “They’ve changed their appearances—” Soire began.

“Body types don’t match.” Since the security cameras used the same calibration standards, it had been easy to include a comparison check in the search. The security system noted feed IDs of known humans and augmented humans (Security officers, Port Authority staff, the merchant crews who did regular runs to Preservation) and I’d used them to annotate my sped-up video. There were only seven unidentified humans who had wandered out of the dock exits during our time frame, none matching the body type estimates the system had taken from the refugees, and all seven unidentified humans had returned via the dock entrance. I matched them on the dockside camera returning to their ships.

Aylen shook her head and reached for a jacket slung over a chair. She had the expression of someone who wanted to curse a lot but wasn’t going to. “We need to get over there and find them.”

Because obviously, if they hadn’t left, they were still there.

Whatever, the chance that it was GrayCris activity that had caused Lutran’s death was dropping rapidly. I could leave Station Security to finish up. Go back and catch up on my media while I kept watch over Mensah. I should do that. The rest of this was Station Security’s job, I could leave. I could pretend to be the enigmatic SecUnit and just get up and walk out. Pin-Lee had written my employment contract that way, so I could just leave.

I wasn’t leaving.

I didn’t think I’d have a better time to push for this. I waited until Indah finished ordering all response teams into the Merchant Docks for a search, then said, “Has there been a diagnostic analysis of StationSec and PortAuth and all associated systems?”

Aylen, Matif, and Soire were already on the way out to get their gear and Tural was in the feed mobilizing the tech crew. Aylen stopped but Indah waved her on to keep moving.