feed.
Her voice rough and deep with fury, Abene shouted, “Who sent you? GrayCris?”
On my shoulder, Hirune made a confused “huh?” sound.
The other comm audio I could hear was too faint even for me to tell what it was. I had to waste four seconds converting it to a spectrogram before I recognized it. It was two noises, the low pitch of Miki’s joints and the higher pitch of powered armor, bracing against each other.
Well, shit.
I do make mistakes (I keep a running tally in a special file) and it looked like I had made a big one. I had interpreted all of Wilken’s behavior as being about me, about the discomfort and paranoia associated with a SecUnit suddenly appearing out of nowhere, supposedly sent by another security consultant whose existence implied that the clients didn’t trust her and Gerth. (I know, the “it’s all about me” bit is usually a human thing.) But now it seemed she had been uneasy for a whole other reason.
The good thing about getting your security through a bond company like the one that had owned me is that for small contracts you take delivery at a company office, and for big ones it arrives in a company transport. This greatly reduces opportunities for somebody to show up pretending to be your security team when they’ve really been contracted to kill you.
Wilken and Gerth were good. I had listened in on and analyzed their conversations aboard Ship and not picked up any hint of it. But then, if they worked for GrayCris, they would be alert for the kind of bond company security surveillance in use throughout the Corporation Rim.
By this point my drone had reached the hatch junction where Wilken was supposed to be waiting. She wasn’t there, obviously, being busy betraying her clients. (When I said I didn’t like humans working security you thought I was just being an asshole, right?)
I used my connection to Miki’s feed and accessed its camera view. Oh yeah, not good. The image was shaky but I could see Miki had Wilken backed up against a pillar. Miki had one arm pinning Wilken’s right wrist against the pillar, as Wilken tried to bring her projectile weapon down to bear on Abene. Something was wrong with Miki’s hand but I didn’t have a clear view, and I didn’t want to distract Miki at the moment by pulling a damage report. Wilken had her other forearm braced against Miki’s face, like she was trying to shove it away, but that wasn’t what she was doing. She had energy weapons built into the forearms of her armor and she was trying to slide one into position to blow Miki’s head off.
(Miki could operate without its head, but its sensory inputs and cameras were there, and it would be really awkward.)
Wilken had cut me out of her feed connection, but I used Abene’s to bypass the block: This is SecUnit. We can talk about this. Consultant Rin can offer you immunity from prosecution if you testify. I hoped that made sense (it was a line from Sanctuary Moon) and I’m sure it sounded like I was stalling. I wasn’t stalling and I didn’t need her to answer me, I just needed her distracted enough to not think about what I was doing in her feed. Your bosses are going down. Whatever they paid you, it won’t make up for a stint in prison. (Yeah, that was from Sanctuary Moon, too.) In the meantime, I was frantically looking for the right code. The companies that make powered armor are different from the ones that make SecSystems, intel drones, cameras, and so on, and their system architectures were different and it made everything harder.
Abene had a grip on Wilken’s projectile weapon, trying to help Miki wrench it away, but couldn’t do much against the powered armor. I could tell she had no idea about the forearm energy weapon, which was in a much more dangerous position. In the feed, I could hear Abene telling Miki to let go and run, and Miki refusing on the basis that Wilken would then shoot Abene. Who should be running, frankly, but wasn’t going without Miki, obviously.
I reached the turn into the production pod’s foyer where Abene and Miki struggled with Wilken. Her energy weapon slid slowly but inexorably into position next to Miki’s head, despite its attempts to hold her and Abene hanging off her other arm and kicking her. In about thirty seconds I was going