I wasn’t the only one who thought Mensah should go get the trauma treatment. I was probably the only one who knew she hadn’t. (She hadn’t exactly lied; it was more a way of letting the other humans assume she had.) But the treatment wasn’t like a one-time thing with a MedSystem; it took multiple long visits, and I knew she had never made time for it in her schedule. I said, “Is that why you’re afraid to go off-station without me?”

So there were two positions on whether the Preservation Planetary leader needed security. The first was the one 99 percent of the population shared, that she did not unless she went on a formal visit to somewhere like the Corporation Rim. And to a large extent, they were right.

The crime stats on Preservation Station and the planet were pitifully low, and usually involved intoxication-related property damage or disturbances and/or minor infractions of station cargo handling or planetary environmental regulations. Mensah had never needed on-station or on-planet security before this, except for the young Preservation Council–trainee humans who followed her around and kept track of her appointments and handed her things occasionally. (And they did not count as security.)

The other 1 percent was composed of me, Mensah’s survey team, all the humans working in Station Security, and the members of the Preservation Council who had seen the GrayCris assassins try to kill her. But that incident had been kept out of the newsfeeds, so hardly anyone thought Mensah needed a security consultant let alone a SecUnit.

But GrayCris was not doing so hot now due to their hired security service Palisade making an extremely bad decision to punch my ex-owner bond company in the operating funds by attacking one of its gunships. (The company is paranoid and greedy and cheap but also ruthless, methodical, and intensely violent when it thinks it’s being threatened.) Relations between the two corporates had deteriorated since what we call The Gunship Incident, with GrayCris assets getting mysteriously destroyed a lot in supposedly random accidents and its executives and employees getting blown up or found stuffed in containers way too small for intact adult humans and so on.

And once GrayCris had started to cease to exist, even my threat assessment had dropped drastically, but Mensah had still wanted me to continue to provide security. I thought she was humoring me, and taking the opportunity to pay me in hard currency cards which I would need if/when I left Preservation, and giving me practice in being around humans in a setting where I was not categorized as a tool and/or deadly weapon. (Yeah, I assumed it was about me, but humans assume everything is about them, too. It’s not an uncommon problem, okay?)

But for a while now I had been thinking it was about something else.

Her mouth twisted a little and she looked away, over the dark hills and fields toward the lighted windows of the other camp houses and tents. She said, “I suppose it was obvious.”