Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6)(30)

Or Murderbot, you dummy, you’re on a giant spaceship that has been meticulously preserved as a historical artifact. If they still had intact lunch menus from however many years ago, the chances were good they still had the safety equipment.

Big green arrows scrawled along the bulkhead pointed me toward the nearest emergency lockers and I opened the first one. The inside was neatly packed with safety supplies, all of it tagged with explanatory labels and scrawled symbols on the containers, all of it simple and easily readable for any panicky untrained human. Except I didn’t have this language loaded.

So I had to go back online for a minute. I secured a connection with Ratthi and Gurathin and said, I need help.

They were eating together in one of the station mall’s food places; Ratthi stood up and knocked his chair over and Gurathin spilled the liquid in the cup he was lifting. Ratthi said, SecUnit, what’s wrong?

I understood the reaction. I didn’t ask for help that often. I sent them my drone video: Which one of these things is most like an EVAC suit?

Uh, are you up in the Pressy? Ratthi asked, baffled. The closest thing I see to an EVAC suit in there is a life-tender. But—

There, third shelf down, with the red tags, Gurathin added. I yanked one out of the rack and he said, Wait, why do you need it? What are you doing?

It’s a Station Security thing, I’ll tell you later, I said, and cut the connection. Now that I had the name, I used the station feed to hit the public library, where I pulled a description and operating instructions from the historical records.

The life-tender wasn’t so much an EVAC suit as it was a small vehicle. It opened into a kind of diamond-shaped bag with rudimentary navigation, propulsion, and life support. According to the library record, it was designed to get several humans off one ship and onto a new one, usually because the first ship was about to have a catastrophic failure. This one also had a transponder but it was set to the colony ship’s comm ID, which had been delisted as an active channel and turned into an audio monument, broadcasting historical facts and stories about the colony ship’s first arrival in the system. It was unlikely the hostiles would be monitoring it and the chatty broadcasts would provide cover for my comm and the life-tender’s location transmissions. The library entry also said life-tenders weren’t used anymore because without their transponders, they were difficult to locate and didn’t meet Preservation’s current safety standards. Difficult to locate sounded good, though, like the hostile ship wouldn’t know it was out there unless it specifically scanned for it, which was what I needed.

The historical story currently playing on the colony ship’s comm sounded interesting, so I set one of my inputs to record it as I carried the life-tender to the airlock. Following the instructions, I pulled the tabs, set the safety to active, tossed it into the lock, and cycled it through. It was old, but its sealed storage was designed to keep equipment functioning for long periods of time, just like everything else on this ship; it was how these old colony ships worked. (You couldn’t be on Preservation for more than five minutes without being forced to listen to a documentary about it.)

I just hoped all the documentaries were right.

The life-tender signaled the ship’s comm that it was ready and I stepped into the airlock and let it cycle shut. I could see the life-tender on the lock’s camera, where it had clamped itself around the outer hatch. Wow, that is just a bag, is what that is.

I didn’t need as much air as humans did, but I needed some, and it was really cold out there, in the colony ship’s shadow. This meant that if the life-tender failed it would take me longer to die so I’d have longer to feel dumb about it than a human would.

So here goes. I told my drones to get in my pockets and go dormant. Then I opened the hatch and leaned out to sort of float/fall into the tender. Okay, new problem. It’s really fucking dark.

The huge hull of the colony ship blocked any light from the primary, the station, the planet, whatever, which was probably why the hostile ship had picked this spot to hide.

It’s cold, it’s dark, whatever was generating the air smelled terrible, I’m in a bag in space. I thought about going back for the EVAC suit, but the chance that the hostiles were scanning for transponders on the station search and rescue channel was still hitting 96 percent. If what I was doing in this stupid bag was dumb, going out here with a beacon I couldn’t turn off or disguise was much more dumb.

Okay, fine, let’s just get it over with.

I sealed the bag’s entrance and let the ship’s hatch close. The tender was controlled via a local connection to its drive and navigation, so it could still be used if, say, your ship blew up and you couldn’t access its comm or feed. I had the location for the hostile ship and I fed it into the simple system, and my little bag headed off through the dark.

I carefully explored the control options, and wow, I now knew why the bag was described as “difficult to locate in a combat situation” because its power supply was so minimal it was almost nonexistent. Even my body heat was already causing condensation. I found the menu for monitoring life support, such as it was. The bag had lights but turning them on would just be stupid plus I didn’t really want to see what was happening.

Then the bag bumped (it wasn’t really a bump, it was more like a blorp) into something solid and stopped. I checked navigation and holy shit, we’re here.

The bag’s sensor system was primitive but it knew it had blorped itself up against the curving hull of a ship. I detected the ship’s feed connection but it was silent. Not locked down, just quiet as whoever was aboard tried to minimize contact.