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Ayda Mensah missed doors she could open, and doors she could close.
The cell she was in—or she could call it a room, it wasn’t that much different from a hotel on Preservation Station—had a bed with a fluffy pillow that collapsed down to nothing, too-slick sheets and a colorful blanket. There was a flat, wall-mounted light panel. A toilet and sink, and a floor drain that almost allowed the sink to serve as a shower.
But there was no door between the toilet and bed. There was no one else here, so she did have privacy—well, not exactly privacy, because people came in unexpectedly and unannounced. It might be someone delivering food or picking up her laundry—or it might be an interrogator. Or, she feared, her executioner.
The room she was in—or call it what it was, a cell—had no chair or table, so she sat cross-legged on the bed for meals, just an arm’s length from the lidless toilet. Sometimes she would instead wall-sit, her feet planted on the too-soft bed, her back flat against the blank windowless wall. A tiring kind of chair.
There was no floor space either, just a narrow path around the narrow bed. She did squats and pushups and headstands on the mattress, shaking the whole wobbly frame when exertion made her muscles quiver. It passed the time and made her feel capable. Or at least like she could be capable, if any need arose except the need to wait.
She was inverted on the tripod of her head and forearms when the door she couldn’t open swung open suddenly. She startled and tipped, tried to regain her balance but fell to her knees. It wasn’t meal delivery, or housekeeping, and it wasn’t her usual interrogator. It was someone she’d never seen before, and they had a projectile weapon holstered at their side.
“Dr. Ayda Mensah, follow me.”
“Where are you taking me?” Ayda asked, her head spinning. She felt like she needed to hang onto something, and it wasn’t just from coming upright after the long headstand.
They didn’t even answer, just gestured sharply with a jerk of the head, their hand coming to rest on the grip of the gun.
Her vision tunneled. She kept talking, to buy a few seconds for her head to clear. “I’m coming. Should I bring my spare clothes? Am I being released?”
“Leave everything.”
Was this it, then? After all these cycles, was GrayCris going to kill her like they’d threatened to do countless times?
Ayda exited her “room” with as much dignity as she could.
They walked down a short hallway of closed doors, then passed an open door through which she could see humming recyclers, folded work uniforms, and a worker stacking meal trays on a cart. A right turn brought them to a lift pod that opened when her escort scanned their embedded ID interface. Another jerk of the head indicated Mensah should enter first. She imagined a weapon’s sight on her back, but no shot came. Her—guard? executioner?—followed her into the pod.
The pod hummed along for a few minutes, its faint buzzing loud in the silence, until it glided to stop and the doors swooshed open. Ayda had been expecting the opening doors to reveal an airlock waiting to deliver her to space, or the open maw of a human-sized recycler. What she saw was a short, blank-walled passageway. The GrayCris rep gestured for her to exit the pod, then followed a step behind.
She tried to keep her head high, her steps strong, but she faltered, moving more and more slowly toward the unknown. She thought of all the loved ones she couldn’t let herself picture or she would surely stop and crumple to the floor.
The corridor ended at a windowless, secure door. The GrayCris rep scanned this door to slide open, and through the widening gap, Ayda saw to her surprise a crowded station mall.
And then, in the crowd, she spotted Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin.
She leaned toward them and lifted a foot, but stopped the urge to run. Ratthi did surge forward but was caught by a restraining hand on each shoulder by Gurathin and Pin-Lee. They waited as Mensah approached with her escort, who departed with the words, “Nice doing business with you, Dr. Mensah. We’ll be in touch with the contract of terminated sale.”
As soon as they could, they embraced. Arms around torsos, hands squeezing shoulders, even Gurathin stepped into the group hug briefly.
“I never thought I’d see any of you again!” Ayda cried into Pin-Lee’s hair. She thought she’d never see anyone she cared about again, and here she was embraced by dear friends, tears she hadn’t let herself shed wetting her cheeks.
Ayda did think now of her family, those who weren’t here in her arms. GrayCris hadn’t allowed her to contact anyone. She leaned back to look at Pin-Lee and asked, “Is everyone okay? What’s happening? I haven’t gotten any news.” As Pin-Lee reassured her, something the GrayCris rep had said clicked and she added, “What was that about a terminated sale?”
“It’s SecUnit,” Pin-Lee answered. Ayda's stomach dropped. She understood why SecUnit had left, but she’d been dreading hearing news of its capture. About its sale or refurbishment or destruction.
Pin-Lee explained more. “It came here to try to rescue you. But they captured it before it could reach you. GrayCris is claiming that we breached the non-compete and non-disclosure clauses of our purchase agreement for SecUnit. Something about SecUnit being used for espionage at a place called Milu? They say this voids the sales contract, which leaves SecUnit vulnerable to a claim for salvage ownership of abandoned property.”
Ayda understood that Pin-Lee needed to use these words, this awful language of ownership, that Pin-Lee’s ability to use these words was a power Preservation could use against the Rim. But it was still sickening.
Pin-Lee continued, “We’re working on a lawsuit to counter the abandoned property claim, since our original contract gave us right of first refusal on any subsequent sales. But…it will take time. I’m worried. That we don’t have time.” Pin-Lee’s usual strong river of words had become a trickle, then stopped.
Gurathin filled in what Pin-Lee had left unspoken. “We don’t think they actually want to buy SecUnit. We’re afraid they just want time to get at its memories. If they could destroy the data it has about their activities on Hanlon-5 and, apparently, Milu, it would derail DeltFall’s litigation. Destroying that data would be illegal because of the injunction, but GrayCris is probably right to think that illicitly destroying a SecUnit’s memories won’t be as bad for them as the public release of hard evidence of their actions.”
“We’re doing everything we can,” Pin-Lee said with unusual quietness.
Ayda wasn’t so sure about that. “Everything legal,” she said. They each looked at her with varying degrees of concern and interest.
They’d tried to do this the legal way. They’d bought a person while trying to follow the legal rules of the Rim. Ayda Mensah understood the importance of political maneuvering. She’d been a planetary administrator for a few years. But before that, farm life and the frontier of a newly terraformed planet had taught her the appeal of expedient problem-solving.
“Do you know where it's being kept?” Ayda asked.
“We don’t,” Pin-Lee answered, her voice stronger. “But this station doesn’t have a big SecUnit deployment or service center like Port FreeCommerce, so GrayCris might be holding SecUnit at their corporate headquarters, the same place where they were keeping you.
That’s what she was hoping to hear. It was a long shot, but maybe they could come up with a plan, something faster than the grinding wheels of what passed for justice in the Corporation Rim.
They scheduled a series of meetings with GrayCris to discuss the terms of their terminated sales contract, which got the four of them two cycles of guest access through the security barrier that separated the station's lower torus from the upper torus. This got them partway there, with many steps to go.
While Pin-Lee and Mensah met with a GrayCris rep in a station meeting space, Gurathin and Ratthi scoped out the various access points to GrayCris headquarters. Their focus was on the underlings: the custodial and meal delivery staff who had come and gone from Ayda's room with a higher frequency and less security than she imagined would occur in a real prison. If one of them could get into GrayCris headquarters with the uniform and ID of a low-level worker, that person would have at least some access to search for SecUnit. There were a lot of challenges and unknowns in their plan. The only easy part was picking who would go. Ayda insisted, and her reasons were good.
Ratthi was too striking in appearance to go unnoticed. Pin-Lee had regular meetings to attend and her expertise was crucial to SecUnit’s legal means of escape, which they didn’t want to abandon in case their rescue plan failed. Ayda had an advantage: the reality here on the Rim was that an older woman, especially one who looked her age with natural wrinkles and an unaugmented shape, was an invisible sort of person, not worthy of attention. She was unlikely to raise anyone’s suspicions that there was a prisoner heist in progress.
Gurathin argued that someone would recognize Mensah from the newsfeeds. He offered to go himself. Ayda didn’t like that idea, for reasons both spoken and unspoken. What she said was that, once she was out of the newsfeeds and into worker’s coveralls, no one would look closely enough at her to recognize her. Biometric scanners would identify her, but if she could get past those and into the headquarters, the corporates’ eyes would slide right off of her. What she didn’t say was that she doubted SecUnit would trust Gurathin enough to follow him out of the facility.
During one of their reconnaissance walks, Gurathin and Ratthi spotted someone who looked a lot like Mensah at the service workers’ entrance for the GrayCris corporate headquarters. Her hair was shorter, a dark texture instead of Ayda’s springy cap of dense curls, but that could be fixed: Ratthi had a trimmer. What they offered was a way out. A place of freedom and dignity. They brought Helana and her family to the relative safety of the bond shuttle and surreptitiously used some feed-disconnected medical supplies they’d brought (knowing they’d be monitored and charged for even a minor visit to the company’s med system) to transplant her GrayCris worker ID tag into Ayda’s wrist. Newly shorn, she donned Helana’s uniform and looked at herself in a mirror. Her captivity had given her ashen skin and tired eyes. The whorls of trimmed hair over her scalp looked thinner than she’d expected. She looked tired, stressed and underfed, just like an overworked indentured laborer.
The embedded ID interface and a passing similarity in appearance to Helana would only do part of the work, though, getting Mensah through the internal doors within the secure facility. First she had to get through a biometrically-IDed secure entrance. Or rather, she had to get around it.
It would be a climb. And a tight fit. But they had found a possible way in: a wall-mounted cluster of exposed ducts coming up from the sublevel, pipes and conduits that disappeared into a vertical chase that eventually connected to the drop ceiling of the unadorned passage that led to the GrayCris facility’s underbelly. Or that’s where they thought the ductwork probably went, after studying the images Gurathin had captured with his vision augments.
Ayda knew SecUnit wouldn’t like their plan at all. She smiled a shaky smile that almost tipped into tears when she imagined SecUnit scolding her for her foolish plan. It wouldn’t say it was stupid human plan, but it would clearly be thinking that.
She was going to make her move during the shift change, when dozens of workers waited in lines to pass through the entrance (which had a weapons scanner plus biometric and ID checks) and exit (which had an ID check and a scan for stolen goods). The mood in the lines was somber, but there were enough people chatting to create an ambient din that would hopefully mask any bumps or thuds coming from the ceiling.
The pipes were only exposed to view briefly before they disappeared into the enclosed chase. The lowest pipes were well above her reach…unless she was on Gurathin’s shoulders. Ratthi was the distraction, drawing eyes and security cameras with a dramatic, clattery fall while carrying two laden trays of food across the nearby food court. In the quick glance Ayda gave him before she started climbing, she saw him clutching his elbow, calling for help. She hoped he was just being a very convincing actor, but maybe not. Ratthi would do anything for SecUnit.
The handholds were vertically oriented pipes, too smooth for an easy grip, but Ayda put every bit of strength she could muster into each tight grasp. At least her palms weren’t sweating yet. Gurathin helped as long as he could, boosting her by the soles of her shoes until she was out of his reach.
Once she slid herself into the walled-off pipe chase, she found she could fit her feet into the gaps between conduits, catching the soles of her boots on clamps and pressing her back to the solid surface behind her. This made the climb less physically taxing. She still moved slowly, though, not for fear of falling but because she was worried she might get stuck. There was barely room for her torso. She lifted each leg to the side, feeling for footholds with her toes, pushing herself upward, happy that her shape had been streamlined by age.
The ventilation ducts were the most difficult to maneuver around. They provided no places to grip and weren’t strong enough to press a foot against without bending. She didn’t want to discover what twang or pop would result if a deformed sheet of ductwork snapped back into shape. She slid slowly against these ducts, squeezing up the chase, fearing every moment she’d wedge herself in too tightly, or make too much noise. She tried to keep her breathing regulated: no coughing, no panting. These ventilation shafts could transmit sound far too easily.
There was more room to maneuver when the pipes took a right turn into the space above a drop ceiling. But stealth was even more critical here. She could hear voices below, and if she lost her grip, the ceiling panels under her would not support her weight. She’d crash through, delivering herself right into security’s hands.
No longer wedged in, she now had to rely on the strength of her grip. Her arms were strong, maintained by cycles of boredom alleviated only by pushups and balances, but her hands had lost some of their usual strength. There had been nothing to hang from in her cell, no pipes or ceiling fixtures to do pullups from. This was, she imagined, to keep captives from stealing themselves away from GrayCris via the only means left to them. There had been the wall-mounted light panel, its top edge barely wide enough for her fingertips. She’d suspended herself like a rock climber on the wall, the light she couldn’t turn off illuminating her face in its unremitting glow.
Soon her hands were burning with exhaustion, and even her arms were shaking. The sustained adrenaline was making her whole body feel like it was buzzing. Her palms were definitely sweating now. Each time she changed to a new grip, she had to wipe her hand dry on her uniform.
With each passing minute, the fear of failure was catching up. She was in the unknown part of their plan; they’d had no way to scope out a safe location to exit the ceiling. Maybe there would be none. If she couldn’t find an exit within 30 minutes, she was supposed to climb back out.
19 minutes in, she was past the security checkpoint, periodically pressing her ear against the ceiling panels to listen below. There were many silent rooms. A few where bureaucrats cavalierly discussed policy which would no doubt affect thousands. She heard one weeping person and wondered if this was a good sign, if it meant she was over the rooms that were cells.
27 minutes in, shaking but still hanging on, her breath gone ragged, Mensah worried this had all been for nothing. But when she paused again, she finally heard what she’d been listening for: the hum of a bank of recyclers, the quiet voices of workers exchanging enough information to do their jobs, and the rattle of wheeled carts.
Now she just needed a way to get out of the ceiling unseen. She kept up her dangling crawl. She wouldn’t turn back, not quite yet, not without SecUnit.
36 minutes in, she heard the dry suction of a toilet bowl emptying, followed by the spray of hand cleaning solution and a door opening and closing. A bathroom, now empty. That would work.
Ayda clung to a pipe with one hand to suspend herself while she worked the fingers of her free hand under the edge of a ceiling panel, lifting it up and sliding it aside within the ceiling. Now, how to do this? The ceiling was higher than she expected. Once she dropped through, she wouldn’t be able to reach back up to put the shifted ceiling panel back in place.
Finding two secure gripping points for her hands, she uncurled from a tuck to lower herself feet first through the gap below her. She then shifted to a one-handed dangle, freeing the other hand to slide the ceiling panel back as far into place as she could get it, leaving a gap for her arm. She released her grip as she gave the panel a final nudge. It fell back into place almost perfectly, a little lifted along one edge. It would have to do, because just then the bathroom door opened.
The person, a mid-level bureaucrat by the looks of them, was initially startled to see someone unexpectedly. They almost apologized before registering Ayda's appearance. They caught their apology and instead scolded. “Remember to lock the door!”
“Very sorry,” Ayda murmured with a dip of her head, backing out of the restroom.
The hallway she found herself in looked familiar. Or maybe it was one of many identical corridors. But she walked down it as if she knew where she was going, in the direction of the service room she’d heard from the ceiling. When she came to the expected open door, she went in. There was one person working inside, their back to the door, sliding dirty meal trays from lunch into a reclaimer-cleaner. Ayda grabbed a rolling laundry hamper (no grav-assist for these workers), tossed some uniforms and a few towels from the shelf into the empty hamper, and rolled it out the door. The other worker didn’t pause, just turned briefly to nod at Ayda with a look that had a shadow of confusion.
Now to find SecUnit. Another part of their plan with too many unknowns. The hope was that once she was in the GrayCris facility, she’d be able to use the emergency locator implant she’d purchased from the bond company to send a retrieval beacon that SecUnit could pick up and respond to. The implant hadn’t helped anyone find her during her captivity, apparently due to the feed dampening effect on outgoing signals that isolated the upper torus, but at least it hadn’t been detected and excised. Based on what Gurathin had explained, SecUnit had learned about her fail-safe interface before it was captured and they’d given it the implant’s key code. Ayda was sure (she hoped) that SecUnit would’ve programmed its systems to automatically receive emergency alerts from her implant.
Pausing with her hands on the cart, she activated the implant to send an encrypted request for retrieval. She waited, not realizing she was holding her breath until she had to gasp an inhale. After a pause longer than she expected, she received an automated acknowledgment with a location indicator. The automated reply had been customized to read help is on the way. But the signal wasn’t moving. Ayda had to go to it.
She followed the maze of halls toward the location, rolling the cart as fast as seemed reasonable for an over-worked employee. She only passed two people, neither of which even looked at her, one of which she recognized from her time in captivity. She felt invisible, and this time it was a good feeling.
The location ping was near, but when she rounded the last corner, she saw a guard standing outside a closed door. She almost stopped, the unwieldy cart listing to the side while her heart skipped a beat. The guard turned to look at her. What should she do?
She thought of SecUnit complaining about human security, who missed so much and cared so little about details.
The guard was just a man. He looked bored.
She pushed the rattling cart back to the middle of the hall and kept walking, slowly, giving herself time to think and steady her breathing. But she arrived too soon, with nothing but a half-formed idea. The location ping was behind the guard, right on the other side of the closed door.
“Excuse me,” Ayda said timidly. “I was told to clean in here.”
“Clean? A room refresh for a SecUnit?” The guard laughed.
“Something about fluids? Making the floor slippery?” She kept her face pointed downward, diffidently. She gripped the cart’s edge so her shaking hands wouldn’t show.
“Oh, I guess they were in there before my shift, working on it again.” The guard stood aside. “You’ve got to scan in, though, I’m not supposed to let anyone in who doesn’t have access.”
Holding her breath again, Ayda scanned her stolen credentials. The door beeped and slid open.
As she started to roll her cart forward, the guard said, “Don’t worry about that thing, they’ve got it shut off or something, it doesn't move at all. So creepy. I poked it.” He sounded proud of himself.
“Yes sir, thank you.”
She stepped through into the dim light. The door slid closed behind her. It was a room identical to the one she’d been in, except the bed had been removed. Standing in one corner, facing away from her, was SecUnit.
It didn’t react to her entrance.
This scared her more than she could express. Was this still SecUnit, her SecUnit? What had they done to it? It had a fat spiral cord and a bulky piece of tech attached to the data port in the back of its neck, and there were wounds to the skin surrounding that connection, raw unhealed gaps as if the port had been recently modified. There were, in fact, fluids oozing from the wounds, in trails that had dried and reformed in multiple rivulets down SecUnit’s back.
It wasn’t even wearing a suit skin.
Ayda left the cart and came closer, to where she could see SecUnit’s face. Its eyes were open but unmoving, its face completely rigid. Was it even alive? But they wouldn’t have it under guard (would they?) if they’d stripped to a husk, leaving nothing?
(A small voice in her head, which she tried to ignore, said it would take more than one human guard and one door to contain SecUnit—if it were still itself.)
“SecUnit?” she tried tentatively.
No response.
She noticed now that it had some kind of marks around its wrists and forearms, the skin there an abraded dark red. And its ankles—which were metal, she saw for the first time—were also scored. Like shackles had been recently removed. She felt queasy.
Was the cord dangling from its neck immobilizing it? Ayda remembered the data carrier that had almost taken SecUnit from them on Hanlon-5. Was there any way she could get through to it in this state? She tried her emergency implant to send another distress call. She again received nothing but the automated response: help is on the way.
To calm herself, she spoke to SecUnit. “Yes, I’m here, I’m here to help you.”
(Somehow.)
It was time for desperate action, for choices with unknown consequences. She grabbed the cord and pulled. It popped out of SecUnit’s data port and she dropped it to the ground.
SecUnit’s torso sagged, its face going from rigid to slack. One knee buckled and it crashed to the floor.
“SecUnit!” she cried, kneeling next to it. “Can you hear me? It’s Dr. Mensah.”
“Client registry rebuild in progress, please standby.”
This was the canned voice of its buffer phrases. She remembered its programmed response, asking to be discarded. She leaned over to see its face, which was almost pressed to the wall where it had fallen. The pupils of SecUnit’s eyes had been far too dilated, filling most of its eyes with a black reflective void. Now its irises constricted as it focused on Mensah.
“SecUnit, do you know me?” What if it didn’t? If they’d wiped its memory already it might even be a danger to her.
“Who are you?” it said. This was its normal voice, at least, but Ayda could detect no sign of recognition.
“It’s me. It’s Dr. Mensah.”
It seemed to scan her, running its eyes quickly over her once from head to foot. Surely it would recognize her, even with her shorn hair, her drab clothing, her body pared down by many cycles of captivity. But it didn’t respond. She tried the implant a third time, sending the emergency beacon.
This time there was no automatic response. SecUnit must’ve stopped the reply signal. It was looking at her differently, its face doing something complicated—eyebrows knitting downward then raising, mouth wavering between a glower and opening as if to speak.
“I’m here to rescue you,” Ayda said. It sounded so ridiculous that she had to stopper an inappropriate laugh behind pinched lips. It might be ridiculous, but it was true.
It studied her for a moment longer, its expression still unsettled. “Prove you’re you,” SecUnit said. “Tell me my name.”
She let a breathy little laugh escape, one of relief: it knew her, it knew itself, or it wouldn’t ask that.
“It’s Murderbot,” she said quietly. It felt wrong to say it out loud, but she repeated it anyway, more strongly the second time. “You’re Murderbot.”
“Dr. Mensah,” it said, the surprise plain on its face. It finally seemed to revive, climbing to its feet before speaking again. “Dr. Mensah, what are you doing here? They told me you’d been captured. They told me you’d been killed.” No wonder it had been so slow to believe she was here.
“I was held captive, but they let me go after they captured you. They want whatever data you have against them. Maybe they already have it, but that doesn’t matter.”
“But why are you here?” It looked into the cell-like room, and down at the spiral-corded tech on the floor.
“I’m here for you.” It was painful to her that this wasn’t obvious.
There was a loud knock on the door. Ayda jumped and gasped. It was the guard asking, “You about done in there?”
“Yes sir, almost,” she called out. They were out of time.
SecUnit’s energy weapons popped out of their ports, “I can get us out of here.”
“No, we’re going to get us out of here,” she said with more confidence than she felt. She pointed at the hamper. “Climb in.”
“We need more of a plan than that, Dr. Mensah.”
Ayda did have a plan, summarized in a feed document by Gurathin. She sent it to SecUnit, embarrassed that it was so obviously incomplete, so optimistic and so human. They couldn’t exit via the pipe chase, SecUnit was too large, so they were going to exit via the...exit.
She hoped SecUnit could still hack and alter security scanners. She asked, “You can get us through security?”
“I can get us through the scanners, but I don’t know about the human security.”
Ayda reached into the hamper and held up one of the maintenance uniforms she’d grabbed. “This will help.”
“It actually might.”
It quickly stepped into the coverall uniform, not even wincing when the collar edge dragged against its sliced neck skin. It must have its pain sensors turned down. She reached to help with the collar, but paused to wait for unspoken permission in the form of a nod before she carefully tugged the collar up to cover the bloody skin and inhuman tech visible there.
“Let’s go,” SecUnit said, then climbed into the hamper. She covered it with the other uniforms then scanned her ID to open the door and pushed the hamper out. It was heavy now, requiring effort to move and steer.
“Good day, sir,” she said as she rolled the hamper past the guard, doing her best to make it seem like no more effort than before.
The guard’s life depended on him not caring enough to look in the hamper or in the room. He lived.
Again, she passed a few people, most of whom did not even raise their eyes to glance in her direction. Only one person, a fellow worker, looked at her and noticed the effort she was putting into rolling the hamper, and gave a commiserating smile.
They went as far as the laundry room, which thankfully was empty, before SecUnit climbed out of the hamper. Ayda then led the way, following the mental map she’d made from the ceiling, reversing the turns to get them back to the exit hall.
When they were near, Ayda warned, “The security barrier is around the next corner. We have to look calm.” They had to look human, she didn’t say. Could SecUnit do this, so soon after reviving from whatever GrayCris had done to it?
“You’re good at looking calm.” SecUnit replied.
“You are, too,” she said. She hoped. “Would it be better if we talk?”
“Talk about what?” SecUnit answered warily.
“Tell me why Sanctuary Moon is your favorite.”
“Have you seen it?”
She had. She’d watched some episodes out of curiosity about SecUnit. “Yes. I wanted to see the part about the colony solicitor you and Ratthi mentioned, but then I got involved.”
SecUnit stopped in the hall and turned to her. It was looking at her so directly she had to remind herself not to return its gaze eye to eye. “You watched it?” it asked.
“Yes. It’s a good story, I liked it. But I wasn’t sure why you would, since it’s about a bunch of humans and their annoying problems.”
“It’s the first one I saw, after I hacked my governor module. Watching it gave me context for…everything I was feeling. It made me feel like a person.”
SecUnit seemed surprised to have said so much. It snapped its mouth shut and continued walking, done with talking. But they were approaching the security checkpoint: they needed to keep chatting, they needed to look like they were regular people, not worth a second glance, definitely not escaping prisoners. Ayda looked up at SecUnit; she couldn’t keep the fear from her face. SecUnit barely glanced at her, so she was surprised that it noticed her fear, that it took her hand and held it.
Ayda squeezed lightly in return, her tired hand and frazzled heart soothed by the contact. As they queued in the line for the scanner, she asked what she hoped was a less fraught question, “So, who did you think killed the terraforming supervisor?”
“It was the secret third donor for the solicitor’s implanted baby,” SecUnit answered promptly.
“Oh! I have a guess who that is…”
They chatted about Sanctuary Moon the whole way through the service workers’ exit. The security monitor gave them only a cursory glance. Ayda didn’t bother worrying what the guard thought of them, an older woman with a young-looking person, hand-in-hand. The scanner gave no alarms when they passed through and SecUnit didn’t even pause its list of clues about the secret donor’s identity.
They kept talking all the way through the station mall. SecUnit really was so funny. She was laughing as they passed through a weapons scanner positioned at the entrance to the transit center.
They only fell silent after they’d boarded a pod bound for the lower torus and found seats, side by side, still holding hands.