（Yes, again, I know. Why bring them all the way here alive and in relative comfort, let them disembark, then kill them? Theoretically the Lalow crew could have been paid to do that, but if there had been a hard currency transfer it wouldn’t have occurred on station so there was no way we could find that out.）
Station Security was only allowed to keep the Lalow for one Preservation day-cycle before they either had to charge the crew with something or let them go. Indah could charge them with the threatening and imprisoning or whatever else they had done to Aylen and Supervisor Gamila anytime she wanted to give us more time to investigate, but she was holding off. Before we had left for the Merchant Docks again, Indah told the special investigation team, “If this circus act is telling the truth and they’re the only lifeline those people trapped at BreharWallHan have, then we’ll release them without charge. Until then I don’t want to risk any information about any of this getting into outsystem newsfeeds. Normally this isn’t a problem but—” She pointed her eyebrows at me. “We seem to be getting a lot of attention from the Corporation Rim lately.”
Like that’s my fault.
She continued, “I think we all realize by now that between the murder and the missing individuals, this is unlikely to be a single local actor. Our most likely perpetrators will be agents of the corporate entity BreharWallHan, who came here specifically to stop this refugee operation. With the port closed, they’re trapped here.”
I was with her right up until the “they’re trapped here” part. I wasn’t willing to count on that because it involved depending on humans and bots and systems I didn’t have access to.
Aylen had formed up two more teams to search the ships in dock, though Station Security was starting to run short of personnel. There were ships not attached to the docks, in holding positions around the station, who had either been stopped in the middle of approach or departure by the closure of the port. If we didn’t find anything in the port, the ships stopped in departure were going to have to be searched next. Even with the responder patrolling out there to keep everybody from leaving, that was going to be a mess.
From what I could hear over the team feed channel, the ships in dock were cooperating with the search so far. The teams were going with the story that they were looking for “adults and adolescents who might be in the company of individuals who had committed violent acts on station,” which was probably true.
No, I was not helping with the ship-to-ship search because the humans thought there would be “panic and resistance” if any of the search teams tried to board with a SecUnit. （Yeah, let’s revisit that the next time you get held hostage.）
So I was searching the dock utility areas with the hazardous materials safety techs and the cargo bots. The modules had drives but they weren’t the kind you could turn on inside the station, so the cargo bots lifted and moved them for us so the techs could check the interiors.
Since this was the oldest part of the transit ring, we were moving along the stationside of the dock area, climbing in and out of outdated cargo storage chambers, safety equipment deployment corrals, office spaces that were long abandoned to storage. One of the techs muttered, “We can take our video and make a historical documentary.”
Another tech walked up to me. “Um, SecUnit, we need someone to help move this cabinet—”
“Then you should find someone to do that for you.” I was not in the mood.
“Well, it’s in a small space and JollyBaby can’t fit.” They gestured to the cargo bot looming over us.
“Its name is not JollyBaby.” Tell me its name is not JollyBaby. It was five meters tall sitting in a crouch and looked like the mobile version of something you used to dig mining shafts.
JollyBaby broadcast to the feed: ID=JollyBaby. The other cargo bots and everything in the bay with a processing capability larger than a drone all immediately pinged it back, and added amusement sigils, like it was a stupid private joke.
I said, “You have to be shitting me.” I already wanted to walk out an airlock and this didn’t help. （The only thing worse than humans infantilizing bots was bots infantilizing themselves.）
JollyBaby secured a private connection with me and sent: Re: previous message=joke. And it added its actual ID, which was its hard feed address. So it was a stupid private joke. I don’t think that made it any better.
The human was still looking at me helplessly and I said, “Where the fuck is the Port Authority bot? Isn’t this its job?” All those arms had to be good for something besides holding hatches open.