I stopped our carrier at the cargo access to a large multi-use shop in the station mall, and we stepped out. I released the carrier and it slipped into the dark, heading back up the backbone. We took a maintenance pod to the port level.

In the pod, I used the security camera to evaluate us. No blood, no projectile holes, check. Nervous, check. Mensah looking like a human who had been through a traumatic experience, check. My shoulder bag with my weapon hidden in it, check. “We have to look calm,” I told her, “so station security won’t alert on us.”

She took a deep breath and looked up at me. “We can look calm. We’re good at that.”

Yeah, we were. I did a quick review to make sure I was running all my not-a-SecUnit code, then thought of one more thing I could do. As we stepped out of the pod, I took Mensah’s hand.

We crossed through the busy mall area and the milling humans around the vending and booking kiosks. The crowd was about the same as when I’d arrived, with an approximately 5 percent increase. I’d never done this while walking with a human and it made the process more complicated and somehow, strangely, more natural.

I deflected multiple scans as we entered the embarkation zone. I avoided the lift pods again because if there was an alert, the pods would freeze in place, and if I was hacking one it would become rapidly obvious where we were. I guided us down the ramp that would come out above the private shuttle docks on the first ring level. As we went along, the crowd thinned out, and I estimated a 50 percent reduction by the time we reached the walkway. A check of the stupid advertising garbage-filled port feed said that this was a normal lull in scheduled arrivals. (For once I missed being stuck in a crowd of humans.) There was no lull in the security checks, and I picked up multiple drone swarm traffic over the embarkation floors on all three rings.

I needed more intel. Normally I wouldn’t risk hacking the upper-level security feeds, the ones where the human supervisors communicated, but there was nothing normal about this. Using the drone feeds I’d already infiltrated, I started a careful hack of the top-level security feed, which I was tagging as StationSecAdmin.

I was sure GrayCris would manage to pay off or otherwise convince the StationSecAdmin and Port Authority to issue an alert and let Palisade into the port to search for us. But we had gotten here fast, and GrayCris would want to search the hotel and surrounding area first, since that was a cheaper operation than paying to search the port. If the rest of Team Preservation had made it here, we should be fine. (Yes, I know. I shouldn’t even have thought it.)