Target Four seemed shocked. “SecUnits aren’t supposed to talk back,” Target Five said weakly.
Tell me about it. “Cargo ship crews aren’t supposed to take Port Authority supervisors as hostages, but here we all are.”
From the front of the group, Aylen snapped, “Get them inside!”
The officers hurriedly milled into a more efficient configuration for taking the Targets in through the foyer. As I was rolling my sleeve down, Aylen stepped over to me. I don’t know what I was expecting; nothing good, basically. But keeping her voice low, she said, “I’ve just had a preliminary report from the Port Authority inspectors. They did an initial scan of the Lalow’s storage, and the cargo containers are empty. And there’s no record of anything leaving that ship.”
Empty? What the fuck? I actually locked up for a second, still rolling down my sleeve. Threat assessment had just spiked and even risk assessment （which really needed to be purged and reloaded） tried to deliver a report.
I was thinking a lot of different things but the one that came out was, “So what was the transport waiting for?” I knew from my drone search that the transport Lutran had been killed in didn’t have a cargo module attached. At the time, this hadn’t seemed a big deal, since if the transport was sitting in dock it was probably waiting for modules to be loaded.
“A good question,” Aylen said. Her expression was still in the neutral range but I could tell she was intrigued by the report, just like my threat assessment module.
I wasn’t sure why she had told me this. Unless it was because she had just gotten the news and after the weapons scan fuck-up I was the only one involved with the investigation who she wasn’t currently pissed off at. It would be nice if she had recognized me as the only other one here who actually knew how to investigate a suspicious incident that wasn’t a cargo safety violation, but I doubted that. I said, “They know a lot about SecUnits for a ship with a non-corporate registry. We’re usually only deployed as rentals on mining or other isolated contract labor installations, or by licensed security companies. They could have seen SecUnits in the media, but…” I couldn’t finish that sentence. The fear and hatred had felt different from the fear and hatred generated by shows like Valorous Defenders, which sometimes featured rogue SecUnits as scary villains. The crew’s reaction had felt like there was personal experience behind it, but I had no data to back that up.
“Hmm.” Aylen lifted her brows. “According to their ship’s circuit report, they’ve never even visited a corporate dock.”
“There could be an explanation,” I said, because there could be, and I’m used to having to be as accurate as possible or get my neural tissue fried and old habits, etc.
“Let’s ask them,” she said, and went on into the station.
* * *
There was a delay, because there was documentation on the arrests that needed to be completed and the Targets all needed medical checks because that was a regulation and blah blah blah. Also more relevantly, a tech team was searching the ship for anything that looked like 1） a contact DNA cleaner and 2） something that could cause the visual jamming effect with the transit ring’s surveillance camera or 3） a suspiciously fluid-stained floater cart. It also gave the Port Authority more time to pull corroborating documentation about the ship and the missing/nonexistent cargo.
I had feed messages; one from Ratthi asking if everything was okay and had I caught the murderer yet, one from Gurathin which was the same except he didn’t ask if I was okay, and one from Pin-Lee saying she wanted me to contact her now, no she meant right now, it was important.
I had followed the others into the main office space on level two, which had a large holo map of the whole station in the center, with a running status display on all station locks, air walls, and other safety systems, plus a scroll of data on cargo regulation checks throughout the port. It was surrounded by work areas and floating display surfaces. Also way too many containers with food residue, ugh. Several humans were sitting around working in their feeds and none of them looked up when I came in.
I found an unoccupied corner to stand in and sent acknowledgments/reply-laters to Ratthi and Gurathin, and tapped Pin-Lee’s feed.
The first thing she sent was I saw the update Indah sent to Mensah about an incident in the cargo dock. Is it GrayCris?
I told her, I don’t know. I just didn’t have enough data yet for my percentages to be meaningful as anything other than theoretical shit-talking, even with the info Aylen had given me. I added, It might be.