Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6)(26)

JollyBaby broadcast to the feed: ID=JollyBaby. The other cargo bots and everything in the bay with a processing capability larger than a drone all immediately pinged it back, and added amusement sigils, like it was a stupid private joke.

I said, “You have to be shitting me.” I already wanted to walk out an airlock and this didn’t help. (The only thing worse than humans infantilizing bots was bots infantilizing themselves.)

JollyBaby secured a private connection with me and sent: Re: previous message=joke. And it added its actual ID, which was its hard feed address. So it was a stupid private joke. I don’t think that made it any better.

The human was still looking at me helplessly and I said, “Where the fuck is the Port Authority bot? Isn’t this its job?” All those arms had to be good for something besides holding hatches open.

The human shrugged vaguely. “I think it’s with the Port Authority supervisor. It doesn’t work in these docks.” JollyBaby sent me another private message: Balin not equal cargo hauler Balin equal cargo management.

Balin didn’t lift heavy things? Well, fuck Balin then. I said, “All right, where’s the fucking cabinet?”

On the team channel, Matif was saying to Indah, But would these refugees have a device that let them jam the port cameras? He didn’t think the refugees were responsible for killing Lutran, either. He added, And know they could call a cart to the transport to dump the body? That seems like it has to be someone who was already here on station.

The other conversation was Tural and Aylen, with Tural saying, Why didn’t the refugees just stop here? Why take the transport somewhere else?

Aylen replied, Maybe another group, or groups did. But they couldn’t bring all the groups here without the risk that someone would find out about the scheme and expose it.

No shuttles had left for the planet or any other insystem destination in the incident time frame, and I guess we were all just assuming the refugees hadn’t been spaced, though the exterior station scan results hadn’t come back yet.

The refugees couldn’t have gotten off this dock, and Lutran’s killer couldn’t have entered his transport without the cameras’ data on the PA systems being hacked. And I had of course proved that it hadn’t.

Which … was a massive fuck-up on my part.

Because this was the kind of hacking a SecUnit could do, specifically a CombatUnit. If this was a BreharWallHan operation to stop the escapes, they might have brought in a security company with a CombatUnit doing exactly the kind of thing I had pretended to do on Milu: operating almost independently with a human supervisor planted somewhere on station. I just hadn’t been good enough to find that Unit’s trail in the PA’s system.

I didn’t know what I was going to do. I could call Mensah and ask for advice, which would actually be a cover for asking her to fix my fuck-up. Except I had no evidence of the hack; I couldn’t even prove it to myself, so I didn’t know how Mensah could fix it.

On the comm, one of the techs said, “Officer Aylen.” It was the one who had made the comment about a historical documentary on the crap stored in the private docks. “I’ve got a problem with the empty modules.”

Sounding frustrated, Aylen answered, “What problem?”

The tech explained, “According to the inventory, we’re missing one. I’m guessing it’s outside for transfer, so we need it brought in so we can verify—”

I cut into the channel and said, “A module is missing?” at the same time as Indah, Aylen, and Soire. Matif was already on the feed telling the Port Authority that we needed the spare-module use records and could they confirm an empty module outside the station?

“Ask them who authorized that transfer,” Soire told Matif at the same time Aylen said, “Those modules can be pressurized, correct?”

I said, “Correct.” I was already walking out of the ancient storage compartment back toward the embarkation area. They could finish the historical documentary without my help. If I was going to be useless, I could at least be useless where stuff was going on.

Indah said, “Find that fucking module.”

I reached what the humans were calling the “mobile command center,” which was actually just one of the portable Port Authority terminal and display surfaces for accessing all the transit ring’s traffic data. Indah stood next to it with PA Supervisor Gamila. Aylen, Tural, and other officers and techs sprinted in from different directions. Gamila controlled the terminal via her feed, the display surface floating above her head and flicking through sensor views of the outside hull of the station. I picked up a live feed from the station responder on picket duty, supplying alternate sensor views. Gamila was talking to someone on the responder, saying, “No, those modules are for the Walks Silent Shores, that’s a scheduled transfer, they’re all accounted for. We’re looking for a single unregistered module—”

No authorized transfer, Matif reported via the Station Security feed. It’s just missing.

Soire added, Somebody must have deleted its records.

(If it seems like they twigged to this faster than they had anything else, it was because cargo safety/smuggling and hazardous material prevention was actually most of their job. I’m sure they were great at talking down aggressively intoxicated humans, too.)

Still breathing hard from running down the dock, Aylen said to Tural, “Could someone install longterm life support in one of those things?”