Martha Wells

She’s a really good commander. I’m going to hack her file and put that in.

I wanted to seal my helmet so badly my organic parts started to sweat, but I replayed the conversation with Mensah and managed not to.

My jaw was so tight it triggered a performance reliability alert in my feed. I said, “You don’t need to look at me. I’m not a sexbot.”

I was also planning to use the time to watch some Sanctuary Moon and recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind.

Hard work really did make you improve; who knew?

I asked the cargo bot if I could go inside the transport before it inserted the new empty module. It said sure.

(Humans never think to tell their bots things like, say, don’t respond to random individuals wandering the outside of the station. Bots are instructed to report and repel theft attempts, but no one ever tells them not to answer polite requests from other bots.)

(Possibly I was overthinking this. I do that; it’s the anxiety that comes with being a part-organic murderbot. The upside was paranoid attention to detail. The downside was also paranoid attention to detail.)

I did a quick walk-through to scan for anomalies, then dropped my bag and lay down on the bed. (It was huge. Why have a bed that
could easily accommodate four medium to large humans when you only had one hook for towels in the bath facility? Were the humans supposed to share the towel?)

I found Pin-Lee standing at a kiosk for a local security company, her expression grim, but she hadn’t put her hand in the access field yet. I saw tension in her body language, particularly in the way she held her head. Whatever it was she had come here to do, she didn’t want to do it.

It hit me then, how all those cycles of watching Pin-Lee on our contract had made me trust her judgment. If she didn’t want to do it, she probably had a good reason. I had to talk to her, give her another option.

If it had been one of the others, I would have figured out a different approach. For Pin-Lee, I just said, “Hi.”

She barely glanced at me, her expression set with disinterest. Then she took another look, frowned, started to
speak, then stopped herself. She still wasn’t sure. I said, “We met on Port FreeCommerce.” I couldn’t resist adding, “I was the one in the transport box.”

Her eyes widened, then narrowed. She forced her tense shoulders to relax, and she didn’t make the mistake of looking around. She planted a smile on her face and said through gritted teeth, “What—How—”

“I came to find our friend,” I said. “Do you want to get in a transit bubble?” Local mass transport is usually easy to secure against potential surveillance and security screens. (Yes, it’s supposed to be the opposite. Yes, you should worry.)

She hesitated, then forced her smile wider. It looked fake and angry, but it was the thought that counted. “Sure.”

She said, “So where the fuck did you go? And what are you doing here?” She hesitated warily. “Are you working for someone, on contract?”

That was the whole point of leaving. “Either I’m Mensah’s property, and I work for her, or I’m a free agent and I work for myself.”

Glare intensifying. “Okay, so what did you hire yourself to do?”

That was an interesting way to put it. I kind of liked it. And it felt so weird to be talking to a human like this, a human who knew what I was. I didn’t have to force myself to stare at Pin-Lee’s face, worry that my expressions were normal. Abene had known I was a SecUnit, but she hadn’t known I was me.