I had access to his feed but I didn’t figure it would do much good. If he had a device on him to fake readings for a security scan, then he had to know a choked hotel feed was hardly the best place for operational communication.

It was the hypothetical secured comm device I had to worry about. Whatever it was, it would need to use the hotel’s relay to reach the station’s comm network.

The GrayCris rep did a visual scan of the lobby and obviously recognized Gurathin, probably from intel obtained by GrayCris on Port FreeCommerce. He went toward Gurathin, who stood to meet him. He said, “Gurathin? I’m Serrat, here at the request of Pin-Lee.” He was calm, confident, with a hint of a friendly smile.

Gurathin’s asshole effect must come in handy at times like this. With a deeply unimpressed expression, he said, “This way,” and started toward the pod junction.

I tapped Pin-Lee and Ratthi to warn them, and continued a visual sweep for hostiles. Like those two humans, strolling casually through the main entrance, casually pausing to casually look around, then casually proceeding to the stairs that led to the lounge/food service area. (Right, so they really weren’t that bad, but I’d been sitting here long enough to analyze the traffic patterns. Humans who walk in looking for something, or are genuinely confused about where to go next, tended to move in erratic ways, their attention caught by the biozones, the feed indicators for the ramp that takes you to the registration area, etc. Compared to that, the hostiles were easy to spot.)

Maybe too easy? The hotel drone scan came back negative, but with that same suspicious pattern as the GrayCris rep. (It was suspicious to me; I’ve fooled a lot of drone scans.)

I marked two more potential hostiles exiting a pipe capsule in the transit lobby, and a check-in with my friends the plaza drone cams showed more outside the hotel’s plaza entrance.

Yeah, I had a bad feeling about that, too. But I was still monitoring the security system, and there were no alerts, no anomalous signals.

I meant to stay here until the exchange was arranged, but now I got up and headed for the pod junction. I had one input riding Gurathin’s feed. He and Serrat had just stepped out of the pod. Gurathin had made the whole trip awkwardly silent. I was reluctantly impressed.