Exit Strategy (Novella) by Martha Wells

Author:Martha Wells [Wells, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781250191854
Publisher: Tor; Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2018-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

WHEN THE TRANSIT PIPE with GrayCrisSec and Dr. Mensah arrived, I was in a pod, paused and ready.

The hotelSecSys cams showed me the GrayCris group exiting the pipe onto the platform as waiting passengers scattered out of the way. The hostiles were in plain clothes but with visible weapons; this obviously wasn’t a covert operation for them, so that meant StationSec as well as hotelSec had been paid for access.

And they had an armored SecUnit with them.

This was still doable. (My wonky Risk Assessment Module would probably have informed me that everything was great.) There was a pause while the group encountered the hotel’s choked feed and got someone to authorize a payment. (I guess you could pay off the management to let you bring in a SecUnit and weapons and do a hostage exchange, but they drew the line at giving you free feed access.)

The hotel’s transit station was three levels tall, with one open level above the platform where the pipe stopped and one below. The one above was currently running a holographic thunderstorm display, and the one below was cycling through overhead views of various art installations, or at least that’s what the feed tag said it was doing.

I just had an idea, which I filed under save-for-later.

The hostiles took Mensah along the platform walkway toward the pod junction. She wasn’t wearing any kind of restraints, but there were six of them plus the SecUnit. Two peeled off to take up positions in the transit station. That left four targets plus the SecUnit, the primary target.

SecUnits who haven’t hacked their governor module like me can’t hack feeds and systems like I can. Well, they could try, but their governor module would punish them and their Sec or HubSystem would report them and they would end up with a memory purge. (So if you decide to hack your governor module, you need to do a good job and get it right the first time.) The unit GrayCris had with them was your basic killing machine.

The SecUnit had a Palisade logo on its chest. The armor was a proprietary brand, a different configuration from company armor. No drones, though. (GrayCris should really have paid that extra bribe money to get the drones in.)

(Yes, I thought about hacking it. I had never hacked another SecUnit. I’d hacked a ComfortUnit, but it hadn’t been trying to stop me. I couldn’t afford the experiment. If I tried and failed and it reported me, Mensah and the others would pay for it.)

They reached the junction and I delayed the pod’s arrival to give me a little time. The SecUnit was scanning, checking for weapons on the humans in the transit station and for unauthorized comm and feed activity. I was too deep in the hotel feed for it to find me. (If I hadn’t been able to hide my feed activity from other SecUnits, I would have been spare parts a long time ago.)

I made the connection to Mensah’s implant and pinged her feed to test the security.

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