Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6)(25)

Fortunately Indah and Tural had followed the others out to the main office to get their gear for the search, and I could have an emotion on my face in relative private.

I’d decided to stay, but I really wanted to leave.

I’d been so sure I was right.

I went out into the main office and told Indah, “There’s no hack. The surveillance system was clear.”

I was braced for something, I had no idea what. But the fleeting look of disappointment that crossed Indah’s face wasn’t it. She grimaced, and used the feed to revoke my system access.

Aylen came in from the other room, pulling on a deflection vest. “The off shift volunteered to come in early,” she said. “And Supervisor Gamila is helping with coordination.”

“Good, take all of them.” Indah glanced at me. “And SecUnit.”

Well, fine.



* * *



An evidence team was still searching the Lalow and Indah sent them an order via the feed that they might be looking for “signs of body disposal.” One theory was that the refugees had been killed in the docks by the Lalow’s crew and the remains somehow smuggled back into their ship.

(I know, if they could do that to ten refugees why didn’t they do that to Lutran? But sometimes you have to look into every possibility, even the dumb ones.)

The Lalow search team had already found evidence that the refugees really had been aboard long enough to get here from a point near the BreharWallHan mining field: the ship’s recycler stats showed waste and water conversion from at least fifteen humans for the duration of the trip, and the ship’s stores had a suspiciously large amount of bedding and food, plus games for pre-adolescents.

(Yes, again, I know. Why bring them all the way here alive and in relative comfort, let them disembark, then kill them? Theoretically the Lalow crew could have been paid to do that, but if there had been a hard currency transfer it wouldn’t have occurred on station so there was no way we could find that out.)

Station Security was only allowed to keep the Lalow for one Preservation day-cycle before they either had to charge the crew with something or let them go. Indah could charge them with the threatening and imprisoning or whatever else they had done to Aylen and Supervisor Gamila anytime she wanted to give us more time to investigate, but she was holding off. Before we had left for the Merchant Docks again, Indah told the special investigation team, “If this circus act is telling the truth and they’re the only lifeline those people trapped at BreharWallHan have, then we’ll release them without charge. Until then I don’t want to risk any information about any of this getting into outsystem newsfeeds. Normally this isn’t a problem but—” She pointed her eyebrows at me. “We seem to be getting a lot of attention from the Corporation Rim lately.”

Like that’s my fault.

She continued, “I think we all realize by now that between the murder and the missing individuals, this is unlikely to be a single local actor. Our most likely perpetrators will be agents of the corporate entity BreharWallHan, who came here specifically to stop this refugee operation. With the port closed, they’re trapped here.”

I was with her right up until the “they’re trapped here” part. I wasn’t willing to count on that because it involved depending on humans and bots and systems I didn’t have access to.

Aylen had formed up two more teams to search the ships in dock, though Station Security was starting to run short of personnel. There were ships not attached to the docks, in holding positions around the station, who had either been stopped in the middle of approach or departure by the closure of the port. If we didn’t find anything in the port, the ships stopped in departure were going to have to be searched next. Even with the responder patrolling out there to keep everybody from leaving, that was going to be a mess.

From what I could hear over the team feed channel, the ships in dock were cooperating with the search so far. The teams were going with the story that they were looking for “adults and adolescents who might be in the company of individuals who had committed violent acts on station,” which was probably true.

No, I was not helping with the ship-to-ship search because the humans thought there would be “panic and resistance” if any of the search teams tried to board with a SecUnit. (Yeah, let’s revisit that the next time you get held hostage.)

So I was searching the dock utility areas with the hazardous materials safety techs and the cargo bots. The modules had drives but they weren’t the kind you could turn on inside the station, so the cargo bots lifted and moved them for us so the techs could check the interiors.

Since this was the oldest part of the transit ring, we were moving along the stationside of the dock area, climbing in and out of outdated cargo storage chambers, safety equipment deployment corrals, office spaces that were long abandoned to storage. One of the techs muttered, “We can take our video and make a historical documentary.”

Another tech walked up to me. “Um, SecUnit, we need someone to help move this cabinet—”

“Then you should find someone to do that for you.” I was not in the mood.

“Well, it’s in a small space and JollyBaby can’t fit.” They gestured to the cargo bot looming over us.

“Its name is not JollyBaby.” Tell me its name is not JollyBaby. It was five meters tall sitting in a crouch and looked like the mobile version of something you used to dig mining shafts.