Once I was into the StationSecAdmin feed, I didn’t try to pry any further, just set some internal alerts and backburnered it.

“Will it be better if we talk?” Mensah said. I knew her well enough to hear the forced calm in her voice, and to know that the forced part wouldn’t show on her face.

We were near the public docks and I turned onto the next ramp down to the embarkation floor level. The crowd had dropped another 20 percent, to where it couldn’t actually be called a crowd anymore. I said, “That depends on what we talk about.”

As we reached the floor level, she said, “Why is Sanctuary Moon your favorite?”

Yes, that we can talk about. I actually felt the organic tissue in my back and shoulders relax. I asked, “Have you ever seen it?” I still didn’t want to directly communicate with the shuttle, but we passed a departure schedule feed access point and after the burst of ads, I saw the company shuttle was on the wait list for a launch time. It was hopefully Pin-Lee’s way of signaling that they had made it aboard, and not a trick by GrayCris.

(If it was a trick by GrayCris we were screwed. The shuttle was the only reliable way to get Mensah and the others off the station. I would have enough trouble getting myself off on a bot-piloted transport once they were safe, with all the security alerts that were going out to the transports in dock.)

(No, I had absolutely no intention of getting on a company shuttle heading toward a company gunship.)

Mensah glanced around, not looking too much like a human who had suddenly remembered she should be looking around like everything was normal. She tightened her grip on my hand. “I’ve watched some episodes, and I liked it, but I wasn’t sure why you would.” She shook her head at herself. “Maybe because it’s about the problems of a bunch of humans, and I had the impression you were tired of dealing with us.”

I actually turned my head and looked down at her, I was so surprised. I was expecting her to say no, she hadn’t seen it. Then I could tell her the plot and she could pretend to be interested, which would have gotten us all the way to the shuttle. “You watched it?”