Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries #3) - Martha Wells Page 0,29

right, Don Abene. It’s what I do.” It was still extremely difficult not to sound ironic.

On our private connection, I said to her and Miki, It’s all right, I have another plan. It’s safer for Hirune.

Are you sure? Abene said, then, You don’t want to tell Wilken your plan.

No, I didn’t, mostly because I didn’t want her giving me orders I had to ignore. Also because I had only a vague idea of what I wanted to do; most of it was going to be created on the fly. You’re my client. You can monitor me on this connection. I told Wilken, “We should go now. Give me your weapon.”

“What?” Wilken didn’t fall back into a firing position, but the way the armor shifted over her joints made me think that was her first impulse.

I said, “If I’m going in first, I’ll need a projectile weapon.” I just wanted to see what she’d do.

“No, I’m going to follow you in,” Wilken said, not so patiently. “I’ll be at the hatch junction between the production pod corridor and the tube, to give you cover.” She started up the corridor, telling Abene, “Wait here. If I send you a feed message to run, get back to the shuttle.” I followed her, like a good little SecUnit/killing machine.

Behind me, Miki moved to watch us head away up the corridor, sending its camera-view to Abene.

Once we were out of earshot, Wilken muted her comm and feed and said, “Any word from Consultant Rin?”

“No, the station feed isn’t accessible from here.” Which Wilken knew. “I may be able to reach her on comm if you need to speak to her.” I could fake that, but I’d need a little time to work on it.

Fortunately Wilken decided she didn’t want to invite another Security Consultant to give opinions on her strategy, especially since she was planning on getting that Security Consultant’s contracted SecUnit killed. I don’t know what bond companies charge clients when we get killed, but it’s probably a lot.

I figured Wilken’s plan was to send me in, seal the hatch, and when the combat bots killed me, she would tell Abene and Miki that she had tried and now they needed to go back to the shuttle and leave. Without a SecUnit on her side, Abene was unarmed and not wearing powered armor, and Wilken could drag her back if Abene resisted. Of course, if Wilken touched Abene, Miki would intervene, but I’m not sure Wilken realized that.

We reached the hatch junction and Wilken stopped. She said, “Good luck.”

Yeah, fuck you, I thought, and kept walking.

All right, so I wasn’t happy about this. It wasn’t like I had a repair cubicle waiting somewhere. I could repair with a MedSystem but I needed access to one, and the closest one I had any chance of getting to myself was onboard my cargo ship still docked at the station. But I knew I could do this.

(I hoped I could do this. I had been wondering a lot about my judgment lately.)

As I got further up the access tube, out of Wilken’s sight, I backburnered her channel and tapped my connection to Miki and Abene to give them a visual through my feed. (It’s not as good as a helmet camera would be; it uses my eyes to record so it jumps around a lot.) Miki was talking, more to Abene than to me, but I stopped listening. I was fishing for a drone.

I was broadcasting little spurts of static on an open channel. The drone should read it as signals from a vocal comm, like if some poor human was wandering through here, trying to call for help on their comm rather than on the secured interfaces Abene, Miki, and Wilken were using for our feed.

This could blow up in my face in that all the drones might decide to slam through here at once to get me, but I didn’t think that would happen. The bots hadn’t sent them after us yet because they didn’t want us to know they had them, probably because that’s how they intended to attack the shuttle. I was hoping the drones were set to protect the perimeter and a sentry would come to investigate.

I came to a spot where a connector in the tube had empty slots where equipment was supposed to be fitted. It formed shadowy cubbies and I stepped into one. My scan stretched as far as it would go, still sending my tempting intermittent signal. And