method for deleting me from the camera’s recording and replacing me with images before and after I walked past. It wasn’t perfect, and I worked on making it better, adding code to work with different types and brands of SecSystems, and a greater number of cameras and angles.
When we came through the wormhole, I was just glad the first leg of the trip was over.
Nobody was waiting for me when we docked at the transit hub so at least that told me that Wilken and Gerth’s IDs were good. I only spent ten hours there, all of it in a tiny room in a transient hostel. I downloaded some new shows, but I spent most of the time pulling files from information bases for anything on TranRollinHyfa. This took longer since most of the bases I needed access to were proprietary corporate ones and I had to hack my way in before I could even tell if they had what I was looking for or not. I also ran my usual searches on newsbursts. (Nothing new on Mensah except lots of speculation that didn’t help my anxiety level.)
When it was almost time to go, I traded out the Jian ID for one with the name Kiran. I had contemplated one more obfuscating hop, but I didn’t know what was happening with Mensah and the thought that I might already be too late wasn’t helpful. So I booked a passage on another fast passenger transport direct to TranRollinHyfa.
I hesitated over my memory clips from Milu, the ones still hidden in my arm and Wilken and Gerth’s clip. I didn’t know how useful the information was anymore.
But Miki had died for that information, whether it knew it or not.
Taking it into GrayCris territory with me would be stupid. In the transient room, I removed the clips from my arm, then left for the embarkation zone. On the way, I stopped at a shipping kiosk and bought a small parcel package. I rolled the clips up in the protective wrapper, included Wilken and Gerth’s clip, and sealed the container. I addressed it to all of Dr. Mensah’s marital partners on their farm on Preservation. (I had all the info for the shipping form, lying around in longterm memory storage, from my old company’s records of PreservationAux. Wow, that seemed like a long time ago.)
I’d boarded my next passenger transport and was hiding in my private cabin when I caught a new newsburst, relayed from a ship that had just come in to dock. It was a brief statement from the Preservation Alliance by Dr. Bharadwaj.
It was unexpectedly odd to see a familiar human, even if she looked really angry. All she said was that Preservation was “taking steps” to resolve the issues with GrayCris.
Huh. I lay down on the bunk and stared at the metal ceiling. There was a background buzz of traffic in the ship’s public feed as the docking clamps were released. I was monitoring the private activity to make sure no one was chatting about the SecUnit hiding in a passenger cabin incompetently pretending to be human. I replayed Bharadwaj’s statement seven times.
I might be wrong. I knew interpreting the emotional subtext in the speech and appearance of real humans was completely different from interpreting it in shows and serials. (For one thing, the shows and serials were trying to communicate accurately with the viewer. As far as I could tell, real humans usually didn’t know what the hell they were doing.) But the interpretation I wanted to make of Bharadwaj’s vid statement was that Mensah was being held by GrayCris, who had threatened her life if Preservation didn’t make a formal statement at least implying that they were in amicable negotiations to settle with GrayCris.
I looked back over the newsburst that had accompanied it and found there was still no statement by DeltFall, whose survey team GrayCris had slaughtered. Or my ex-owner the company, which was probably torn between fury and shitting itself over the amount of equipment and bond payments lost in the debacle and desperate to have someone pay for it. I mean, literally pay for it. GrayCris could buy the company off for a big enough credit payout but so far it hadn’t done that. But maybe GrayCris couldn’t afford that payout.
GrayCris had done all this to acquire strange synthetics, alien remnants. Now that everybody knew that, they couldn’t sell them, or develop them, or whatever they had been planning to do with them. It meant