From my drone sentries I knew Mensah was in a council meeting now. I tapped Pin-Lee’s feed to check on her but she was in a different meeting. I knew the others were on planet: Dr. Bharadwaj on a family visit and Arada and Overse at the FirstLanding university working on preparation for the survey they wanted to do, and Volescu was retired.
That left me with the human most likely to want to drop everything and come watch me break into a damaged transport and the human also most likely to come watch me break into a damaged transport but only so he could argue with me about it.
So I called both of them.
Chapter Four
WATCHING ME TRY TO get the transport’s lock open, Ratthi said, “You don’t think we should call Station Security?”
I had my hand on the entry panel. The transport wanted to let me in but couldn’t get the lock open. I was trying to force an emergency open through the transport’s feed but the connections were inactive and it was like groping around in a giant bin of tiny broken drones for the one that was still intact. I said, “No. They told me they didn’t need my help.”
“Did they tell you that?” Ratthi said. His expression was doubtful. “What exactly did they say?”
I pulled it from memory. “They said, ‘We’ll call you if we need you.’”
Gurathin said, “I can’t tell if that’s you being passive aggressive or you being willfully obtuse.”
I would be more pissed off about him saying that except a） he was right about the passive aggressive thing and b） he was standing where I had told him to stand, blocking the nearest port camera view of what I was doing.
Ratthi was on a rest break after finishing his work for the last survey and getting ready for the next. I had been lucky to catch him on the way back after a meal appointment with his human friends. Gurathin didn’t have any other human friends from what I could tell but he had been taking a cycle rest period, reading in one of the lounge areas with lots of plant biomes.
“It’s definitely not willfully obtuse,” Ratthi told him. He told me, “I do think we should call Station Security.”
“The transport said I could come in,” I said. “But it’s too damaged to open the door.”
“So we should tell Station Security—”
“It might be just a maintenance issue, which would fall under the Port Authority’s remit,” I said. I almost had it. “We won’t know until we get inside.”
Gurathin sighed. “You sound like Pin-Lee.”
“No, Pin-Lee is much worse than this. And if it was her, she would be swearing at us by now,” Ratthi said. He asked me, “I’ve always wondered, did you learn to swear from her or did you already know how? Because you two use a lot of the same—”
I finally managed to get the transport’s mangled feed to trigger the hatch to open. I stepped back and pulled Gurathin out of the way of the port camera view, so whoever was watching could see the hatch wasn’t damaged, that it had been opened from the inside. I’d managed to keep the transport from automatically triggering any station alerts, too. So even though it was me, we should have a few minutes to take a look around and pull info from the transport’s systems before a human from either Station Security or the Port Authority showed up.
Ratthi craned his neck to see inside the hatch, but let me walk in first. “Are you sure no one’s aboard?” he asked as he followed me through the lock.
I was not. There shouldn’t be, but I hadn’t been able to get a confirmation on that from the transport. I sent my drones ahead and said, “Stay behind me.”
“This is ill-advised,” Gurathin muttered, but he clomped along after Ratthi.
On visual and via drone cam I was looking at small low-ceilinged corridors, dingy and scuffed but mostly clean, worn gray and brown upholstery on the seats along the bulkhead in the small lounge we passed through. Lights were up, life support set for humans, but the transport was clearly designed mostly for cargo shipping with passengers as an afterthought. Ahead off the main corridor, my drones encountered a transport maintenance drone, wobbling in the air with its spidery arms drooping, beeping pathetically.
“Do you smell something bad?” Ratthi frowned.
Gurathin said, “Something’s happened to the waste recycling.”
The air cleaners were working but the filters needed maintenance the transport couldn’t perform. Or maybe it had stopped deliberately, hoping to try to alert someone.
The limping ship’s drone swerved away from my drones and led them through a short upward passage and into the main crew lounge. Right, so this wasn’t a recycler problem.