No telling if they were GrayCris or Palisade, though if they were the hotel would know they were here. I couldn’t tell if they were looking for me; there were no standing alerts in the security comm feed. Though from their affect they were paying close attention to augmented humans wearing any kind of hood, hat, or scarf, or face-obscuring tattoos, cosmetics, or ornaments. Me, a generic type augmented human person with my hood folded down on my back, didn’t get a second glance.

This is why humans shouldn’t do their own security.

I went up the ramp to the check-in platform, followed the directional feed with its welcoming musical theme and instructions to a kiosk, and booked a room with one of Gerth’s hard currency cards.

Yes, I did enjoy doing that.

I took the rear exit off the platform to the pod junction and followed five humans into the first pod to arrive. It was a limited system, no outside connections, and would only take you to the room section now tied to your ID marker by the hotel’s feed, or the lobbies and public entertainment sections. The pod took us to our sections in order of arrival, so it gave me a chance to watch the system in operation and copy its code. It took me to my section and I followed the feed map to my room.

It opened at the authorization the hotel had attached to my ID marker and at that brilliant moment I discovered there were no interior camera views or audio surveillance. Stupid hotel. I had probably even paid extra for it.

Still, the room was bigger and much nicer than the cabins I’d had on the passenger transports. I did a quick walk-through to scan for anomalies, then dropped my bag and lay down on the bed. (It was huge. Why have a bed that could easily accommodate four medium to large humans when you only had one hook for towels in the bath facility? Were the humans supposed to share the towel?) The wall across from the unnecessarily large bed was all display surface. To keep me company, I sent an episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon to it to play—holy shit, the humans were almost actual size in the long shots—and then I got to work.

So there were no camera feeds from the rooms, but the cameras in the corridors were picking up humans and augmented humans as they moved through the connecting passages and used the transport pods to go to and from the lobbies and the three sections of food and club areas. (Whatever “clubs” were. The things going on there didn’t seem to match my lexicon definition.) There was also a transport link to the pipe train level.

I worked my way carefully into the system, alert for traps. Without room cameras I was going to have to do this the hard way.