Miki helped Hirune stow the protective suits, then defaulted to randomly following its human friends around as they stowed their personal gear. I suggested Miki walk out of the lab space and go to the storage area where Wilken and Gerth were unpacking their equipment. Miki didn’t have a weapons scan nearly as sensitive as mine but its vision had magnification capabilities that mine didn’t. (This is one of the differences between a security unit and a bot designed to help with scientific research.)

I asked it to take a good look at the cases the two security consultants were unpacking and it gave me a close-up view, breaking up the image into different angles as Gerth lifted her case into the storage locker. I’d wanted to do this aboard Ship, but they had stowed their gear too quickly, and asking a drone to inspect it would probably have drawn some unwanted attention. Gerth glanced at Miki, stowed the case, and said, “What are you looking at?”

I told Miki, Say, “Don Abene wants me to ask you if you need any help stowing your gear.”

Miki cocked its head and repeated it verbatim, with the kind of perfect innocence only a perfectly innocent bot could manage.

Gerth smiled a little. “No, thanks, little bot,” she said. Wilken chuckled.

“Little bot,” seriously? (Somewhere there had to be a happy medium between being treated as a terrifying murder machine and being infantilized.) I prompted Miki to go back to its friends. As it retreated down the passage, it asked, Rin, why did they not want us to see their cases?

Not everybody wants a pet robot sticking its scanner into their business, but I was distracted and just said, I’m not sure. From the shapes, the cases held weapons, ammo, and a couple of high-end sets of self-adjusting armor, the kind I’d only seen in the media. The company had never given us armor that nice, though in its defense, our armor did get blasted off us at regular intervals. No drones, but then humans aren’t good with security drones; it takes multi-track processing to direct them and most humans just can’t do it without extensive augmentation. Even without drones, they looked like they were prepared for anything. Maybe no reason.

I was trying to decide if I should take the opportunity to steal anything if said opportunity should occur. The self-adjusting armor was incredibly tempting, and would be even better once I made some modifications to the code. But it was enough work to just get myself past the weapons scanners; bringing anything that bulky along was just going to make it more likely that I’d be caught.