“You need the ransom to pay off the bond company, right?” Pin-Lee said. I hadn’t looked away from Serrat, though most of my attention was on the admittedly rough job I was doing on the hotel relays and still listening for Mensah’s implant. She added, “Surely GrayCris has assets it can sign over. Or is it revenge?”

Serrat’s face slipped into a skeptical sneer. He didn’t take them seriously, which, sure, I can see why. 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. And he was certain they were controlling me somehow. He said, “Revenge? You buy a SecUnit and send it to Milu to expose an essential GrayCris asset operation. You and your little planetary polity have the audacity to think you can compete with a corporation—what did you expect to happen?”

Pin-Lee must have been taken aback, but she said, “GrayCris attacked us first. GrayCris started this. All we want is the return of Dr. Mensah.”

In the feed, a baffled Ratthi said, Milu?

With his augment, Gurathin had some information storage. He said, That was in a newsburst, they asked Mensah about it. It’s an abandoned terraforming platform.

I got the hotel’s relays back up and the activity on the hotel’s management feed began to drop immediately. The two GrayCris targets in the lobby still hadn’t noticed anything wrong. Still nothing from the implant.

They weren’t bringing her. This had all been for nothing. All of it, Milu, Miki’s death, the trip here, everything. I said, “Milu was my idea. I’m a rogue unit.”

He ignored me, but he said to Pin-Lee, “A rogue unit would have left a trail of dead bodies across this station.”

I said, “Maybe I wanted the trail to start here.”

He made eye contact with me, and his pupils widened slightly.

I added, “You people are so naive.”

It was a really good thing that right then Mensah’s implant pinged. I hadn’t completely decided to crush Serrat’s windpipe, I was just entertaining the idea. Instead I pulled him away from the wall and choked him out.

From the humans it was all “Wait!” “No!” “Um—”

“I’m not going to kill him,” I said, and dumped him on the couch. “I know what I’m fucking doing.”

Pin-Lee had tuned her feed to the implant and now clawed the key out of her jacket to check it. “She’s moving, she’s—Can you tell—”