Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4)

by Martha Wells

They did give us a key for the fail-safe interface implant Mensah bought in case of emergency, but Gurathin said it’s blocked because she’s being held somewhere in the torus above us,

SecUnits are never allowed to sit down or use human furniture whether on or off duty, so I sat in one of the chairs and put my feet up on the table.

Ratthi was grinning. He said, “You look great! What have you been doing?”

We need to focus on how to free Mensah.”

They won’t release Mensah without the ransom, and we don’t have it.”

They’re probably raising the money to buy off the company. The gunship is also here to exert pressure on GrayCris while the company is negotiating with their reps back on Port FreeCommerce.

“Is there any way we—you—can get her out without the ransom?”

“We need to find a way to make them bring her outside the main station security barrier so that I can track her location via her company implant.”

“We could offer them the ransom and arrange an exchange in one of these hotels.”

It looked nice, inviting humans to sit around and discuss proprietary information in the hotel’s choked feed so the hotel could record it and sell it to the highest bidder.

It had to be an emergency abort for the hostage release, and possibly a signal for his backup to come in shooting.

I’d just discarded Plan Actually Not All That Terrible and shifted to Plan Approaching Terrible.

Serrat made a strangled noise and tried to shoot me.

He said, “So this is the supposedly missing SecUnit.”

“Is Mensah really being brought here? Was that a lie?”

I’ve signaled our security officer to cancel the exchange.

If you were GrayCris and regularly murdered humans as part of your job, the wrath of three research surveyors from a non-corporate backwater planet probably didn’t fill you with fear.

You buy a SecUnit and send it to Milu to expose an essential GrayCris asset operation.

In the feed, a baffled Ratthi said, Milu?

It’s an abandoned terraforming platform.

The two GrayCris targets in the lobby still hadn’t noticed anything wrong.

right then Mensah’s implant pinged.

“They’re on a transit pipe.” I had to go, now. I told them, “You need to get back to your shuttle.

The GrayCris group with Mensah is less than two minutes out and counting, you need to be out of the hotel before they get here. She’ll meet you at your shuttle. Do not try to contact me on the feed. If they buy off StationSec, they could trace us.

StationSec as well as hotelSec had been paid for access.

they had an armored SecUnit with them.

four targets plus the SecUnit, the primary target.

SecUnits who haven’t hacked their governor module like me can’t hack feeds and systems like I can.

Splitting my attention between all the security camera feeds I was monitoring was tricky,

I’m not sure I could have done it before all the work on Milu had increased my processing space.

I made sure the security camera would hold the image of an empty platform for the next six minutes.

Primary Target (the other SecUnit) was already in motion

It couldn’t fire because of my human shield and that bought me the extra second to fire three armor-piercing projectiles point-blank into the neck joint of its armor, then down into its knee joints.

(The neck joint was the kill shot, the knee joints were to make it drop, otherwise the armor might h...

Mensah took a sharp breath and stepped over the twitching bodies, then edged past the slumped SecUnit.

I rolled the SecUnit back into the pod and asked MobSys to hold it with the door shut while it ran a full diagnostic cycle.

Ha!

I dragged Target Two to the pod, where Target One was still twitching.

I love this bad-assery!

GrayCris paid off the station to keep the company out. Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin came anyway.

In the shows, I saw humans comfort each other all the time at moments like this.

I braced myself and made the ultimate sacrifice. “Uh, you can hug me if you need to.”

“Did you get the evidence?”

“I shipped the data to your home on Preservation.”

It was the walk through the embarkation zone I was more worried about.

As we stepped out of the pod, I took Mensah’s hand.

I was sure GrayCris would manage to pay off or otherwise convince the StationSecAdmin and Port Authority to issue an alert and let Palisade into the port to search for us. But we had gotten here fast, and GrayCris would want to search the hotel and surrounding area first, since that was a cheaper operation than paying to search the port.

I saw the company shuttle was on the wait list for a launch time. It was hopefully Pin-Lee’s way of signaling that they had made it aboard, and not a trick by GrayCris.

I hadn’t been afraid that she wasn’t my friend, I had been afraid that she was, and what it did to me.

“The shuttle will take you and the others to the company gunship. I’m not going with you.”

An authorization for a non-station security operation had just come through to the human supervisors. This is one of those “oh shit” moments.

the public feed cut off in mid-advertising and the PA official feed said, Emergency lockdown, take shelter/shelter in place, armed security will be moving through port—