And this whole exercise could be totally useless, if his transport was one of the three that had left before the body was found and the council had closed the port.
If I didn’t find anything, this was going to be a huge waste of my time.
Possibly I should just stop complaining like a human and get on with it.
I had checked 57 percent of the transports in dock, when I hit an anomaly. I pulled a transport connection and pinged it with a salutation. It pinged me back with a salutation. （This is not how it’s supposed to work, there’s usually an answer protocol, even if it’s in a different language.） But maybe the transport had missed part of the ping or had a different kind of protocol. （Unlikely. Ships from outside the Corporation Rim, particularly on the routes intersecting Preservation, had a variety of different protocols, some of them horrifyingly jury-rigged by humans. But by the registry signifiers in its feed connection, this transport was from a Corporation Rim origin.） I pinged it again. It pinged me back, still a salutation. Okay, I’m just going to start talking to it.
By poking around in its open feed, I found out the transport was a lower level automated crewless cargo hauler with booked passengers on the side. Preservation was self-sufficient and didn’t import or export raw materials from the Corporation Rim, but did act as a cargo transfer point for other non-corporate polities that did. Talking to it was reminiscent of dealing with Ship, the cargo hauler I had taken to Milu and back, which had not abandoned me to die in space even though I wasn’t entirely sure it had understood it was saving me, but whatever; it made me more inclined to be patient.
On my initial query, Transport tentatively identified Lutran as a passenger but I honestly couldn’t tell if it was just doing that because it thought that was what I wanted to hear and it was trying to be polite. I backtracked and tried to get some more baseline data. What was its route? How many passengers, where had they boarded, and what were their destinations?
It sent me a garbled cargo manifest.
Uh. That was … not normal, not a lower level transport failing to communicate.
I asked it to perform a diagnostic and after five seconds got a stream of error codes.
I opened my eyes and pushed out of my chair, startling the group of humans at the opposite end of the waiting area who hadn’t known I was there. My drones dropped down from their perimeter positions and followed me through the entry gates to the transit ring.
The weapons scanner （which I was not allowed to hack, and which I wasn’t hacking） alerted on me, but it had my body scan ID on the weapons-allowed list so it didn’t set off an alarm. （I have energy weapons in my arms and it’s not like I can leave them behind in the hotel room.） （I mean, my arms are detachable so theoretically I could leave them behind if I had a little help but as a longterm solution it was really inconvenient.） I was sure the weapons scanner would alert Station Security that I was in the area.
I took the wide ramp down to the embarkation floor, which was much less busy than usual. There were still humans and augmented humans wandering around, plus some hauler bots and maintenance bots, catching up on cargo transfers that had been ordered before the port closure. Some humans glanced at me but obviously didn’t know what I was; the Station Security officer posted in the help area at the base of the ramp did, and watched me walk down the floor toward the transport docks.
（I hate being identified like that. I had gone to a lot of effort to not be immediately identified as a SecUnit, and now it all felt like a waste.） （I grew longer hair and everything.）
I had gotten enough info from the confused transport to figure out what dock it was attached to, and I confirmed it in the public access port directory. Nine minutes later I was standing in front of its closed lock where it was attached to the transit ring. I touched the hatch and pinged again. The direct connection gave me a sense of the transport’s urgency that I hadn’t been able to detect through the Station feed.
Instead of a ping I got a different garbled manifest file back; it knew the first file had somehow communicated to me that it needed help and it was sending the second to reinforce the message. Something aboard was terribly wrong, something that had left it with no way of notifying the Port Authority that it needed help. I don’t think it had any idea what I was, but I thought it was relieved that I was here.
I needed to get onboard.
I also needed not to give Station Security any opportunity to fuck me over. There was surveillance on the embarkation floor, and I can tell when I’m on camera, even when I’m not supposed to access the system.