I checked the cameras again and saw Wilken and Gerth had found signs of life in the Port Authority area. They stood outside an office center with three levels of bubble windows looking out over what should be the station mall. It was an open plaza area with a couple of tube transports arcing overhead, and a big globular display that was currently on standby hovering in the air. It was surrounded by multi-levels of dark shadowy occupation blocks and empty fronts for places that should be cafés, hotels, cargo brokers, transit offices, tech shops, and so on. Much of it looked unfinished, like no one had ever moved in, and the rest had closed, nothing left behind but a few stray floating display surfaces.

I turned into a corridor that would have led away from the Port Authority district into the main habitation block, if there had been one. I walked in the near-darkness until I found an empty cubby prepared for something that had never been installed, and crouched down inside it. I could monitor the cameras now without worrying about any random station personnel spotting me. A maintenance/weapons scanner drone brushed my feed, and I grabbed it and got control. It was on a desultory patrol outside the PA offices and I used it to give me better views and audio than the static security camera.

Wilken and Gerth were talking to two new humans. There was also a human-form bot standing nearby. I hadn’t seen one in a while in person, just on the entertainment feed. They aren’t popular in corporation territory, because there’s not a lot of things they can do that task-specific bots can’t do better, and with the feed available their data storage and processing ability isn’t that exciting. Unlike constructs, they don’t have any cloned human tissue, so they’re just a bare metal bot-body that can pick up heavy things, except not as well as a hauler bot or any other kind of cargo lifter.

In some entertainment media I had seen, they were used to portray the evil rogue SecUnits who menaced the main characters. Not that I was annoyed by that or anything. It was actually good, because then humans who had never worked with SecUnits expected us to look like human-form bots, and not what we actually looked like. I wasn’t annoyed at all. Not one bit.

I had to run back the drone’s camera feed to catch up, I had been so busy conquering that burst of non-annoyance. The first new human said, “I’m Don Abene.” She gestured to the other new human. “This is my colleague Hirune, and our assistant Miki.” She hesitated. “Did the employment agent have time to brief you?”