Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2)(18)

I moved between him and the table. I put a hand up at his chest height and said, “Stop.”

On most contracts this was as far as I was allowed to go with a human until they made physical contact. But you’d be surprised how often this works, if you do it right. Though that was when I was wearing my armor with the helmet opaqued. Standing here in normal human clothes with my human face showing made it a whole different thing. But it wasn’t like he could hurt me by hitting me and he hadn’t drawn his weapon yet.

I could have torn through him like tissue paper.

He didn’t know that, but he must have been able to tell from my face that I wasn’t afraid of him. I checked the security camera to see what I looked like, and decided I looked bored. That wasn’t unusual, because I almost always looked bored while I was doing my job, it was just impossible to tell when I was in my armor.

He visibly regrouped and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

My clients had shoved their chairs back and were on their feet. Rami said, “This is our security consultant.”

He stepped back, and glanced uncertainly at the other two, the second male human bodyguard and Tlacey, who was an augmented human female.

I dropped my arm but didn’t move. I had clear shots at all three of them, but that was a worst-case scenario. For me, at least. Humans can miss a lot of little clues, but me being able to fire energy weapons from my arms would be something of a red flag. I diverted just enough attention to scan the security camera feeds for whatever it was that had pinged me.

I caught an image on a camera across the public area, near one of the entrance tunnels. The figure standing near the edge of the seating area didn’t match what I was expecting to see and I had to review it again before I understood. It wasn’t wearing armor and its physical configuration didn’t match SecUnit standard. It had a lot of hair, silver with blue and purple on the ends, pulled back and braided like Tapan’s but in a much more complicated pattern. Its facial features were different from mine, but all Units’ features are different, assigned randomly based on the human cloned material that’s used to make our organic parts. Its arms were bare, and there was no metal showing and no gun ports. This was not a SecUnit.

I was looking at a sexbot.

That is not the official designation, ART said.

The official designation is ComfortUnit but everybody knows what that means.

Sexbots aren’t allowed to walk around in human areas without orders, any more than murderbots. Someone must have sent it here.

ART poked me hard enough to make me twitch. I snapped out of it and ran my recording back a little to catch up on what was happening.

Tlacey had stepped forward. “And just why do you need a security consultant?”

Rami took a breath. I hit ter feed, secured a private connection between ter, Tapan, and Maro, and told ter, Don’t answer that. Don’t mention the attempt on the shuttle. Just stick to business. It was an impulse. Tlacey had come here expecting an angry confrontation; that was why she had brought armed bodyguards. We had an advantage now; we weren’t dead, and they were off balance and we wanted to keep them that way.

Rami let the breath out, tapped my feed in acknowledgment, then said, “We’re here to talk about our files.”

Maro, who had realized what I was trying to do, told Rami, Keep going, don’t even let them sit down.

Sounding more confident, Rami continued, “Deleting our personal work was not part of our employment contract. But we’ll agree to your proposal that we return our signing bonus in exchange for our files.”

On the security cameras, I watched the sexbot turn and leave the public area via the tunnel directly behind it.

Tlacey said, “The entire bonus?” She clearly hadn’t expected them to agree.

Maro leaned forward. “We opened an account with Umro to hold the funds. We can transfer it to you as soon as you give us the files.”

Tlacey’s jaw moved as she spoke in her private feed. The two bodyguards eased back. Tlacey stepped over and took a chair at my clients’ table. After a moment, Rami sat down, and Tapan and Maro followed suit.

I kept part of my attention on the negotiation, and went back to the public feed. I started pulling historical data, looking for any irregular activity around the time of my contract here.

While my clients were talking, and while I sorted through the data with ART peering over my shoulder again, I was watching the security cameras. I noted two more potential threats enter the area. Both were augmented humans. I had noted three potential threats already sitting at adjacent tables. (All three exhibited a curious lack of attention toward the confrontation occurring near the center of the seating area. The other humans and augmented humans in the immediate area had watched it with open or surreptitious curiosity.)

ART poked me. I see it, I told it. The search had turned up a series of notices posted around the right timeframe. They were warnings that changes in shipments of raw materials and supplies to outlying installations would cause diversions in the passenger tube routes. (The tube was a small-scale transit system that took passengers around the port and service centers and had private lines going out to the closer mining installations.) Later notices mentioned a new route that had been constructed to compensate for the diversion.

That was it. Reading between the lines, you could see that the service contractors had had to build a new tube route to bypass the tunnels that had led to a mining installation that had abruptly closed. That had to be the site of Ganaka Pit.