It also had my projectile weapon, and you never could tell when you might need armor-piercing fire power. (And I could hook my right hand on the strap, which gave me something to do with that arm. How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis, I still have no idea.)
I caught up with Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin in the plaza, with no sign of any hostiles trailing them. I wasn’t sure the Preservation team knew GrayCris was surveilling them, though Ratthi’s shoulders seemed a little stiff, not the way he usually walked. Then they started up the stairs to the second-level seating area and Gurathin glanced back in what he probably thought was a totally casual and not at all suspicious way. Yeah, they knew.
No, he didn’t spot me. I was using the drone cams to keep track of them so I could take another route through the plaza, the one that led under the platforms through the gardens and vending areas.
Gurathin said something to Pin-Lee as they crossed the plaza and they sped up a little, heading for the shopping block on the far side. It was a good place to avoid visual surveillance from a tail and also gave me time to make minor adjustments to the security cams so it was more difficult to track them. GrayCris security would realize by now that they had lost them and I wanted to make sure they couldn’t pick them up again. I didn’t know if GrayCris had paid off the station to get access to their public space security video, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
Pin-Lee led the other two on a convoluted route through the shopping block, through various stores and plazas, and ended up in an open garden seating area at the foot of another cone-shaped hotel. It was a good effort, designed to take them through six different private security jurisdictions and private feed areas, a good way to lose a tail trying to follow you using drones or security cams. It didn’t lose me, of course, but it was a great way to lose normal (human) surveillance. And the seating area was surrounded by curtains of falling water, obscuring the view from the surrounding plazas and walkways.
I stopped outside the entrance, joining a small crowd of humans beside a store projecting more artsy product videos into the feed. On the hotel’s security cam I watched Pin-Lee and Gurathin have a short argument, which Ratthi tried to mediate, that ended with Gurathin and Ratthi taking a seat at a table and Pin-Lee walking away into the mercantile area next to the hotel’s lobby.
I know, I could have contacted them by now, either by establishing a secure connection on their feeds, or just walking up and saying hi. I just … wasn’t sure.
Okay, I was scared. Or nervous. Nervous-scared.
Were they my sort-of human friends? My clients? My ex-owners, though legally that was only Dr. Mensah. Were they going to see me and yell for help, alert security?
And if it was this hard with Ratthi and Pin-Lee (Gurathin had never liked me and it was mutual), what was it going to be like with Mensah, if I managed to get that far?
I didn’t know if I could trust them. I wanted to. But I want a lot of things—freedom, unlimited downloads, new episodes of Drama Sun Islands—most of which I wasn’t going to get.
I walked through the garden seating area, which was only 37 percent occupied, but Ratthi and Gurathin didn’t notice me. I scanned them as I went by, and picked up Gurathin’s augments but no energy signatures indicating weapons. Ratthi rubbed his eyes and sighed. Gurathin’s hard mouth was actually betraying some dismay.
I went through the open doorway into the mercantile area, which was light on the usual vending machines but had a lot of kiosks for various businesses, including passenger transport lines, station real estate, planetary real estate in this system and others, a lot of banks, and security companies. (Not Palisade, which catered only to corporate clients.) The area security was robust, but I couldn’t pick up any facial recognition scans. The feed was choked and privatized, any humans or augmented humans not registered with the hotel required to pay a fee to use it, and the security was all focused on theft-prevention. At the far end of the space was an access to a transit platform; it didn’t lead to the pipe, but to something