Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6)(37)

The three at the sphere’s apex picked up the sound of snapping metal and gave me a .5-second warning to move. The two further out on the sphere’s curve gave me an estimate of the dimensions of the falling object so I knew what direction to go in.

I threw myself out of the way and hit the metal floor in the gap between the crane’s second and third arms. Nothing hit me but the sound of a heavy thing striking the floor all around and the vibration rattled the shit out of me. I’m hard to kill, but an entire hover crane landing on me would sure do it.

My drones reported no additional falling objects and I scrambled away from the crane. I used my StationSec access to kill all surveillance on the embarkation floor so whoever it was couldn’t take a second shot.

I sent an alert code to the responder team and directed my drones to form a perimeter again. With nothing else heavy about to fall on me, I did what I should have done before I left the secure bay, and used the comm to call Aylen.

Farid answered, “Special Investigator Aylen can’t take your call, can I help—”

“Farid, this is SecUnit, did Aylen send a feed message to Indah telling me to meet her in the Security Station Office?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded startled. “Maybe? She’s not here yet and she’s off feed for a quick break. It took forever to talk the refugees out of the colony ship’s nav control and I think she just needed some personal time—”

“Find her. Make sure she’s all right.” Hopefully Aylen was in a restroom and not dead somewhere in a corridor. Then I signed off because my query had returned results. The cargo bot scheduled to attach Lutran’s module to his transport had been cancelled by the Port Authority and directed to the opposite end of the Public Docks. Which wasn’t helpful because we knew our actor was in the Port Authority so …

Oh. For fuck’s sake, you have to be kidding me.

Pin-Lee tells me I have to make everything complicated, and wow, is she right this time.

I established a secure feed connection with Indah and said, A crane almost fell on me in the Public Docks. Aylen didn’t send you a message, someone spoofed her ID. Did you tell Supervisor Gamila about the trap?

No! She was startled. Of course not, I—Damn it, I told her we needed a Port Authority data dump. I had to, she had to authorize the transfer to the temp storage—It can’t be her. We grew up together—

It’s not her, I said. But I know who it is.



* * *



I had never been in a Port Authority office before, for the same reasons I had never been in a Station Security office. But there had been a lot of firsts for me on this contract.

It was a multilevel structure, mostly private work spaces, with the public entrance on the second level opening inward to stationside, for humans who couldn’t/didn’t want to do their business over the feed. There were secure entrances I could have used, but I took the public one, sending my drones zipping ahead as the transparent doors slid open. I didn’t bother to remove myself from the surveillance camera at the doorway.

I did remove the responder team and the special investigation team, who were coming in through the secure dock entrance on the lower level and evacuating Port Authority workers in case a big structural-integrity-imperiling fight started.

I passed through a large open room with only two humans working with display surfaces. They looked up, startled, but I didn’t stop. I walked into Supervisor Gamila’s office, which had a wide curving window looking down into the Public Docks. The transparent material was interior port grade but not hatch grade. (I’d looked it up on the walk over here, along with the structure’s schematic.)

Gamila sat at her desk, a half dozen documents and database results open in her feed and floating on the display surfaces around her. She was surprised to see me. Then her expression turned frightened when she saw the large projectile weapon I was holding. I said, “Run.”

Balin stood beside the window, pretending to be dormant.

Gamila shoved to her feet, bumped into the desk, and bolted out the door behind me. My drone video saw her run into Aylen, who caught her and hurried her out of the office after the other workers.

I said to Balin, “The humans think you’re hacked, but we both know that’s not true.”

Balin stood up and expanded its limbs, the top of its carapace almost brushing the curve of the high ceiling. It sent into the feed, query: would it make a difference if I was hacked? Then it launched a code attack to slam through my wall and hit my feed and comm connections and disrupt my processing. At the same instant it extended a limb at high speed right toward my chest.

Nice try. I deflected the code attack and stepped to the side. The limb shot through the empty air where I had been standing and punched a hole in the office partition.

My turn. I lifted my weapon and put three explosive projectiles into the center of Balin’s carapace. I was hoping that would do the trick but I had a bad feeling it wouldn’t. But it would still confirm my working theory.

I had run a quick check of Balin’s records on the way here. It had been on Preservation Station for 43.7 local planetary years, and its original “guardian” had been the Port Authority supervisor at that time, who had taken it on when Balin jumped ship from a corporate cargo transport and asked for refuge. It had been the first and only bot to do that, which, you know, should have told the humans something.