Abene was looking at me again. I could see her doing it from the view through Miki’s camera. She said, “Gerth must be waiting for a sign from Wilken before she acts against the others on the shuttle, surely. I should try to contact Kader. I can get a tight feed connection with him.”

“Are you sure he won’t say aloud, ‘Hey everybody, Don Abene’s just signaled me on the feed’ before you can tell him not to?” That’s a problem with humans.

Abene started to speak, hesitated, and then shook her head once. “He might, he might. But we must find out what is happening aboard the shuttle.”

Miki said, “Vibol doesn’t speak very fast. Maybe we should call her.”

I sent Abene and Miki a warning in the feed right before the drone passed us in silent mode; I was sending it ahead to scout. Abene still flinched, then stared after it. But she was right about the shuttle. If we could get a report from onboard, it would help us plan. Also, Abene and Miki would stop asking me about it, which would be a very big bonus right now. (I’d forgotten how stressful being a SecUnit was.) I said, “You don’t have any security monitoring aboard your shuttle? No cameras? No other bots, even a currently inactive one?”

“No.” Abene pushed her hair back, frustrated but thinking. “There’s no need. There are cameras in the evac suit helmets, but they’re inactive in the emergency lockers.”

Miki said, “Don Abene, there are two evac suits on the flight deck. I have the hard addresses for their comms.”

Abene turned to me. “Can you activate their comms from here?”

I probably could. But whether Gerth had killed the others yet, or was still waiting for a signal from Wilken, it didn’t matter. We still needed to get Gerth off the shuttle.

We needed to get everyone off the shuttle.

I was getting an idea. It was probably a bad idea. (When most of your training in tactical thinking comes from adventure shows, that does tend to happen.) I said, “We need to get back to the geo pod.”

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

NOW THAT I KNEW where we were going, it was a lot easier to get there. We went to the next lift junction, and I spent a careful minute cutting my code-protected lift out of the system and making its actions invisible to the rest of the lifts. (That sounds like an obvious thing to do, but the problem is, if the other lifts can’t see your lift, they can attempt to occupy the space your lift is already in. This is just as catastrophic for the occupants as it sounds.)