I’d followed Indah to the responder’s bridge, where she and the responder’s captain lied to the Port Authority about what the responder was doing. （They told them that a trader ship had had an onboard emergency that caused a comm and drive failure, and that the responder had alerted because it looked like the ship was trying to break port lockdown and leave. The misunderstanding had been cleared up now and the responder was arranging to bring the ship in for repair.） （I thought it was too complicated for a good lie, but whatever.） As we docked I followed Indah down to the airlock foyer to disembark. She stopped abruptly at the top of the corridor and I didn’t run into her because unlike the humans who are usually following me I pay attention. Audio picked up movement ahead; I sent a drone around the corner for a look. Oh, right, they were leading the refugees off the ship and she didn’t want them to see me. Which, fine.
But standing there, I thought of something. Whoever the actor was in the Port Authority, it was a human or augmented human who thought they were pretty clever and able to manipulate systems to their advantage.
Maybe we could get them to try again. I secured a connection with Indah’s feed: I have an idea.
She replied, Well, your last idea didn’t work out so badly. Let’s hear it.
* * *
The hard part had been deciding who/what was going to be the bait. It couldn’t be me; the important part （the thesis? I guess?） of our theory was that the actor was a local, with access to Port Authority if not Station Security systems. This person would know what I was and that attempting to attack me was not a good idea. （I wasn’t in a great mood right now, so it was an even worse idea than it usually was.） And there had to be some explanation of how/why the bait human knew who the actor was, so it couldn’t be a Station Security officer or a random station resident. I suggested Target Four from the Lalow, who had all the characteristics of a human who could be talked into doing anything.
Indah disagreed, on the grounds that Target Four had been talking to anybody who got within range while he was on detention in the station, and there was too high a chance that the actor would realize he didn’t know anything he hadn’t already told us. She thought it had to be one of the refugees, who had all had an opportunity to overhear/get information from the bounty-catchers. Which meant that even though it was my plan I couldn’t be in the middle of it. Which, whatever, I didn’t want to be in the middle of it where the excitement was, I wanted to be in an office working on a giant database in case the stupid plan didn’t work.
For the refugee/bait, Indah chose Human Three, the one who had been convinced the armored hostile was a SecUnit. She went to talk to him with the new special investigation team she had conscripted from the responder’s crew. （They had all been in the responder, which had been undocked on picket, so they couldn’t have been in the transport to kill Lutran.） （The other special investigation team was still potentially compromised, except for Aylen and Indah.） （And me, I guess.）
Human Three was in the responder’s medical compartment because he or someone else （I was betting it was him） had forcibly removed an interface from the skin of his forehead before leaving BreharWallHan and it had become infected. （Either the Lalow crew hadn’t offered the use of their MedUnit or with his curly head hair flopping over the wound, they hadn’t noticed.）
He was sitting on the med platform listening to Indah explain what we wanted him to do, with the other members of the new team gathered around. （I wasn’t there because I’m an evil SecUnit. I was out in the responder’s secure bay waiting for Indah’s request for system processing space for our database to be approved, checking my inputs, pulling and sorting code out of my archive, and watching the conversation via drone.）
Human Three, hair pulled back with a big patch of new skin on his forehead, said, “I’ll help you, but you got a SecUnit here. It’s probably passing tales to BreharWallHan.”
This would bother me more if it wasn’t so fucking typical.
So it surprised me when one of Indah’s conscripted responder team members said, “It was the SecUnit got you out of that module. You wanted to stay in it? It’s coming with the tug, you can hop back in.”
“No, no, we’re not corporates, we have laws. One of which is it’s illegal to put people in transfer modules so he couldn’t get in it again even if he wanted to,” Indah said, leaning against the bulkhead with her arms folded, as if none of this was urgent. “What we should do is charge his friend for shooting a Station Security consultant.”