I said, “I’ve blocked it and his feed.” One of my inputs was the management channel on the hotel feed, which was already filling up with complaints about the comm failure. I had also taken out the connection between the hotel’s choked feed and the station feed. (Which implies I did it intentionally, but I had been in a hurry and just slammed down everything with a signal.) (Yeah, so much for making this a stealth operation.)

Serrat breathed hard, and this close my scan picked up elevated pulse and sweat gland activity. He said, “So this is the supposedly missing SecUnit.”

I checked hotelSecSys’ view of the lobby and spotted the two GrayCris backups. They hadn’t reacted yet, still pretending to be casual around the vending machines, but oh shit did I need to get the hotel feed’s connections back up before they noticed.

Pin-Lee leaned down to grab the gun off the floor. “Is Mensah really being brought here? Was that a lie?”

No response from the implant yet, I told her on the feed. I could still access the station feed, and that’s what would carry the implant’s signal. If GrayCris was really bringing her here, they hadn’t crossed the main station security barrier yet.

So the plan wasn’t a clusterfuck, it was just circling the clusterfuck target zone, getting ready to come in for a landing.

Serrat said to Pin-Lee, “You’re the liars, thinking you could fool us with that ridiculous fake document. Order this thing to let me go. You’re violating station law, threatening me with a deadly weapon.”

“What deadly weapon?” Ratthi demanded. He gestured to the gun in Pin-Lee’s hand. “You threatened us with a deadly weapon, we could call station security on you!”

In the feed, Gurathin said, We can’t call station security.

I know that! Ratthi sent back. I’m bluffing.

Pin-Lee said, “He means SecUnit. SecUnit is the deadly weapon.” She hesitated, then sent to me in the feed, I’m going to touch you, don’t freak out.

Uh, okay. I tapped back an acknowledgment because I was frantically working to bring the hotel’s main and secondary relays back up and I had to get in ahead of the repair techs.

Pin-Lee put her hand on my shoulder and I did not freak out. She leaned in toward Serrat and said, “This is not a deadly weapon. This is a person. An angry person, who wants you to answer the question. Are you bringing Mensah here?”

He smiled at her. “I was. I’ve signaled our security officer to cancel the exchange. They know where I am, and they’ll be here soon. Since you’ve violated station law by bringing in a privately owned SecUnit, no one will help you.”