“You’re here to take our ship!” Target Two snarled, the feed translating. “You pussing corporates! You sent a SecUnit after us!”
I turned to look down at her. “You didn’t know they had a SecUnit until we broke in. Try again.”
Target Two’s brow knit as she looked up at me and her mouth hung open.
Target Five moaned, “Shut up, Fenn. They’re going to take our ship.”
Aylen shook her head wearily and Gamila said, “You should have thought of that before you attacked us!”
My drone sentries saw the Station Security Response Team thunder up to the outer hatch. Balin unwedged itself from its guard position, strode down the corridor, and folded itself down to get into the compartment. It extended a limb across to Gamila, she took it, and it led her out of the ship.
Nobody moved until they were out of the way. Then the response team crowded in and Aylen said, “Arrest everyone associated with this ship. They obviously don’t want to talk to us here, so we’ll do it at the station.”
* * *
Putting it mildly, it was weird to voluntarily walk into a Station Security office.
I had never been to one before on any station. （If I had, I’d be parts and recycler trash and you wouldn’t be reading this.） SecUnits weren’t normally used in stations in the Corporation Rim, and we sure weren’t used in normal station regulation enforcement. We were only deployed on a station as an extreme measure, like repelling a raider attack. （And stations with deployment centers weren’t likely to be attacked anyway, unless there were an absolute shit-ton of raiders or they were really stupid or both.） Palisade Security, working for GrayCris, had used a SecUnit as part of their hostage security team on TranRollinHyfa because they were worried about me showing up. And they had used two SecUnits and a CombatUnit as fugitive pursuit when I escaped with Mensah. And look how that had turned out for them.
But anyway, for most of my career as an escaped rogue SecUnit, staying away from Station Security had been kind of important.
Preservation’s Station Security office was next to the Port Authority, part of the barrier that separated the port’s embarkation area from the rest of the station. Both offices had entrances into the admin section of the mall and the transit ring.
Not long after I had first gotten here I had accessed a map of the security office interior from the station archives. The first level was a public area, where humans came in to complain about each other and to pay fines for cargo and docking violations. （Preservation had two economies, one a complicated barter system for planetary residents and one currency-based for visitors and for dealing with other polities. Most of the humans here didn’t really understand how important hard currency was in the Corporation Rim but the council did, and Mensah said the port took in enough in various fees to keep the station from being a drain on the planet’s resources.） The second level was much bigger and had work spaces, conference rooms, and accident/safety equipment storage. There was also a separate attached space for holding cells, and a larger separate section for storing and analyzing samples from potentially hazardous cargo, and a small medical treatment area that seemed to be mostly used for intoxicated detainees.
The response team brought in the detainees through the transit ring entrance. Targets Two and Three had already come in on gurneys headed for the medical area but the others were mostly ambulatory.
The weapons scanners on the station’s entrance went off on me, of course.
It caused some confusion, because the response team thought someone had screwed up and not searched the detainees properly. I stood there for two minutes and twelve seconds wondering if anyone would figure it out while they searched the detainees again, looking for the weapon the scanner was alerting on. In their defense, they had actually done the weapons search right the first time （I had verified it with scan and visual）， and they had confiscated the detainees’ interfaces. （None of them were augmented humans—apparently it wasn’t common to be feed augmented in the polities outside the Corporation Rim that used Preservation as a waystation.） But not so much in their defense, they had forgotten a SecUnit was standing behind them.
Finally I pulled up my sleeve （using my onboard energy weapons made holes in fabric, so I’d have to get my shirt fixed） and held my arm up. “Hey, it’s me.”
They all stared. Still woozy, Target Four said, “It’s a slitting SecUnit, you pussers, how stupid are you?”
Yeah, these Targets are going to be fun to chat with, I can tell already. I told him, “You’re the one who got yourself bodyslammed into station detention, so let’s talk about how dumb you are.”