habitation block, if there had been one. I walked in the near-darkness until I found an empty cubby prepared for something that had never been installed, and crouched down inside it. I could monitor the cameras now without worrying about any random station personnel spotting me. A maintenance/weapons scanner drone brushed my feed, and I grabbed it and got control. It was on a desultory patrol outside the PA offices and I used it to give me better views and audio than the static security camera.
Wilken and Gerth were talking to two new humans. There was also a human-form bot standing nearby. I hadn’t seen one in a while in person, just on the entertainment feed. They aren’t popular in corporation territory, because there’s not a lot of things they can do that task-specific bots can’t do better, and with the feed available their data storage and processing ability isn’t that exciting. Unlike constructs, they don’t have any cloned human tissue, so they’re just a bare metal bot-body that can pick up heavy things, except not as well as a hauler bot or any other kind of cargo lifter.
In some entertainment media I had seen, they were used to portray the evil rogue SecUnits who menaced the main characters. Not that I was annoyed by that or anything. It was actually good, because then humans who had never worked with SecUnits expected us to look like human-form bots, and not what we actually looked like. I wasn’t annoyed at all. Not one bit.
I had to run back the drone’s camera feed to catch up, I had been so busy conquering that burst of non-annoyance. The first new human said, “I’m Don Abene.” She gestured to the other new human. “This is my colleague Hirune, and our assistant Miki.” She hesitated. “Did the employment agent have time to brief you?”
“They said it was a bodyguard job.” Wilken flicked a glance at the bot, which was apparently called Miki. It stood there with its head cocked, staring at her with big globe-like eyes. It was unusual for a human to introduce a bot, and that’s putting it mildly. Gerth looked like she was struggling to keep her expression professionally blank. Wilken continued, “You’re going down to the terraforming facility to make an initial assessment and your contract with GoodNightLander Independent requires a security team.”
Abene nodded. “I’m hoping we won’t actually need you. But the company that abandoned the facility didn’t maintain the satellite monitoring, and no one has been inside since they left. We assume it’s deserted, but there’s no way to make sure.”
“The agent said that was a potential problem,” Gerth said. “The terraforming shield is preventing any off-site scanning?”
Hirune answered, “Yes. We know it’s stable, because of the tractor array GI put into place, but that’s all. The station’s been monitoring the facility, but as you can see, there are no patrol vessels here.”
She meant there was a possibility that raiders had moved into the facility. Except if they did that, they couldn’t have been very good raiders, because they had ignored this station. Also, raiders tend to hit and run, and not hang around to live on a deteriorating terraforming facility.
Actually, with my experience in security, anybody who wanted to hang around and live on a deteriorating terraforming facility worried me a lot more than raiders.
Gerth and Wilken exchanged a look. Maybe the same thought had occurred to them. Wilken asked, “Is there a possibility there were active organisms in the facility when it was abandoned?”
“The biological matrices would have been sealed, and probably destroyed, before the staff left,” Hirune said. She made a gesture, like flicking something away. “Even if they hadn’t, there’s very little chance that they could create any dangerous airborne contamination.”
Wilken’s expression remained professionally cool, but she persisted, “I meant something other than bacteria. Any organisms large enough to be a physical danger?”
Right, so even I knew more about terraforming than these two.
Hirune’s face now had the blank, lip-biting expression I associated with humans trying not to show their feelings, especially the feeling that someone had said something unintentionally hilarious. (This is why it had been a struggle for me to give up armor; concealing facial expressions was hard, even for humans.)
Don Abene’s eyes crinkled, but she made it seem more like she and Wilken were sharing a joke. “The matrix wouldn’t be working with any organisms larger than bacteria. And there wouldn’t really be any reason to bring any larger organisms up from the