Aylen said, “We’re looking for the cart now. But it’s likely the perpetrator would have cleaned it. We already know they have access to a sterilizer to remove contact DNA. And it’s unlikely they used their own ID to request it.”
This sucks more. All you needed to get a cart was an address, and the subject could have used the transport’s lock ID.
Gurathin said, “Then why didn’t this person clean the transport? If they had, we wouldn’t have known this was where what’s his name was killed. We’d know the transport was damaged, that was all.”
It was a good question and I had a good answer. “They meant to. They thought they had more time to come back.”
Indah made a thoughtful noise. Aylen was still eyeing me like she suspected something. Then Indah shook her head and said, “Forensics and Medical are going to need this scene for a while. Investigator, what’s your next step?”
Aylen wasn’t caught unprepared. “We can’t locate this transport’s contractor yet, but we have the ID of the outsystem ship that was supposed to deliver its next cargo. I’m going to the private dock to speak to them.”
“Outsystem” on Preservation meant the same thing as what the Corporation Rim called “non-corporate political entities,” which were basically planetary settlements, stations, moons, floating rocks, whatever that were not under corporate ownership. They might be nice like Preservation or total shitshows, you never knew.
Indah said, “Good. Take SecUnit.”
Yeah, I was surprised too.
Chapter Five
AYLEN MADE IT CLEAR Ratthi and Gurathin were not invited, which was fine, since Gurathin didn’t want to go and Ratthi was glad because he thought this meant that Station Security knew I didn’t have anything to do with Lutran’s death. Aylen did not make it clear that she didn’t like the fact that I was invited. It would have been easier if she had, because then I would have known where I stood, and if I should be an asshole or not.
Followed by two Station Security officers （feed IDs Farid and Tifany）， the Port Authority supervisor （feed ID Gamila）， and the Port Authority bot, we walked over to the end of the public docks, through the gates into the cargo section. I did a quick search on Preservation’s local （public） newsstream archive, and found out that Aylen’s title meant she was called on by Preservation authorities to investigate stuff they couldn’t figure out, both on the station and down on the planet. She also did family and workplace arbitration, which meant a lot of talking to upset humans. So, not as cool a job as the title implied.
PA Supervisor Gamila had been pulling info into her feed, and now said, “This cargo transfer has been on hold for two cycles. We were waiting for an authorization but it hadn’t shown up yet when the order to close the port came through.”
Aylen asked her, “Do you know why?”
“No idea. The ship, the Lalow, isn’t responding to messages.” Gamila sounded annoyed. “It doesn’t use modules, and there’s no record of the cargo being offloaded, so we assume it’s still aboard.”
Aylen didn’t react but my drones saw Farid and Tifany exchange significant looks. They weren’t wrong; we already had one dead human associated with this ship, there was a 42 percent chance the Lalow’s failure to respond meant something more suspicious than ignoring their Port Authority feed messages.
The cargo section of the Merchant Docks wasn’t that different from the Public Docks. There was the big space of the embarkation hall with a line of sealed docking hatches against the far bulkhead. Big cargo bots （the configuration that usually only lived on the outside hulls of stations and hauled transport-sized modules） were sitting around or hanging, dormant, from the curve of the high ceiling. The low-level specialized lifters were parked and only a scatter of humans and augmented humans wandered the stacks of pressurized containers. Large modules were pushed back against the bulkhead, waiting to be loaded and shoved out the module drop so they could be attached to transports. Most of the ships currently in dock didn’t use modules, they had cargo compartments that had to be unloaded through inconvenient specialized hatches. That wasn’t unusual for an outsystem/non-corporate political entity ship.
Preservation has high safety standards so we passed through two air walls before we got to the cargo ship’s hatch. （High safety standards are great when they’re designed to protect humans against dangerous stuff like hatch failures and hull breaches; when they’re designed to protect humans against rogue SecUnits, not so much.）