Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6)(27)

“Theoretically, I guess.” Tural’s face scrunched with worry. “Not in a hurry. These are just transfer modules. They’re pressurized and they hold air, but … They’re not meant for…”

They’re not meant for anything that needs to breathe, not for longer than a cycle or so, Tural meant. If the refugees were in there, they didn’t have much time left.

As a means to quickly move humans from the private Merchant Docks to a transport, it would have been fine, especially on a small transit ring like this one where the trip would have taken no more than half an hour at most. It was the ideal means of getting them from one end of the station to the other with no one noticing, especially if you were desperate to cover your tracks and throw off any corporate pursuit.

“Was this a trick all along?” Tifany said, low-voiced. She and Farid were standing next to me, for some reason. “Bring those people here, then put them on the module to kill them?”

“No, that’s way too elaborate, if they just want to murder whoever tries to escape,” Farid told her.

Well, yeah. The Lalow had thought it was delivering the group of refugees to the next step in their route to safety. The crew had sent the refugees out to meet their contact, who they knew was called Lutran, though they didn’t know what he looked like. There had been no reported disruptions on the embarkation floor, no fight, no struggle picked up by the cameras, so the refugees had had no idea they were in danger.

So, working theory: Lutran meets the refugees and gets them to board the module that is due to be transferred from the Merchant Docks to his transport waiting in the Public Docks. (The transfers were all done by bot; haulers moved the recently loaded modules to the lock and pushed them out. If it was an inert module, the cargo bots would take it and attach it to its transport. If it was a powered module, the cargo bots would place it on one of the set paths around the station where it would get a go-signal and then head toward its destination. When it arrived, another cargo bot, or the transport itself if it had the right configuration, would attach the module.) With the refugees safe aboard the module, Lutran then goes back to his transport to make sure the module attaches correctly when it arrives and that the refugees get aboard. But it’s not there, the module has been diverted to an unknown destination. Someone else is aboard the transport, and that person kills Lutran. Then that person, who somehow has hacked the PA’s systems, deletes the record of Lutran’s module transfer.

This scenario was the most likely one, the probability was 86 percent, easily. But it was impossible unless the perpetrator could 1) hack Lutran’s transport, 2) hack the PortAuth surveillance cameras, and 3) hack the PortAuth transfer records.

So where was the module? It couldn’t just be floating around out there. The responder would have found it by now. Wherever it had gone, it must have looked like it was headed toward a legitimate destination, so the systems that did nothing but scan and monitor all station traffic wouldn’t alert on it.

It had to be attached to a ship.

And that ship, and the BreharWallHan agents, was still out there. It had been unable to leave before Lutran was discovered and the port closed. Most stations wouldn’t close their transit rings because someone found a dead body, but most stations weren’t as short on random dead bodies as this one.

The BreharWallHan ship hadn’t run, or tried to fight the responder, because Indah was right, they wanted to keep it quiet. They wanted the Lalow to continue its part of the operation until the BreharWallHan agents could trace all the routes, all the stations where refugees had been transferred, maybe until they could figure out where the pick-up point was inside the mining field.

All of this was leading to the conclusion … Oh, shit.

Which meant … I had to stop the search.

I could call Mensah and get her to make Indah listen to me. I could do that, but I still thought it would sound a lot like the time Mensah’s youngest child had got hold of the comm and demanded that Mensah tell an older sibling to stop taking all the squash dumplings. Mensah could make Indah listen to me, but it would waste time, and Indah being made to listen to me against her will was step one of a failure scenario. (I don’t know much about human interactions, but even I knew that.) I had to get Indah to trust me.

I could start by talking to her, I guess, I had actually not tried that yet, really.

I secured a protected feed connection with her and sent, Senior Officer Indah, you have to stop the search. The module must be attached to a ship still holding position off the station. If the BreharWallHan agents know we’ve found the module, they’ll kill the refugees and run. Everything on the Port Authority systems has to be treated as compromised. Whoever is on that ship could be using the dock cameras and Supervisor Gamila’s comm to listen to you and your officers right now. If you find the module while they’re listening—

She objected, You said that system wasn’t hacked.

I said, I’m wrong. Whoever did this is good enough not to leave any indication they were in the system. They are as good at this or better than I am. (Oh yeah, it hurt to say that.)

Aylen was trying to say something to her and Indah held up a hand to show she was on her feed. Her eyes were narrow and her mouth was thin. I had no idea what that meant. She said, How do you know this hacker isn’t listening to you right now?

Because that’s how fuckers get permanently deleted, is what I wanted to say. What I actually said was, I can secure my own internal system. I can’t secure the Port Authority’s systems or yours.