by Corey Ostman
Raj laughed. “Maybe I should be the one assisting you.”
“Let’s just consider it a team operation,” she said.
“Deal.”
Together, they removed the charred bits. It was mostly wiring overloaded from the phasewave blast. Raj wanted to replace most of it, but Anna showed him how to splice.
“See?” she said. Her right hand wielded a laser like a conductor’s baton. “No sense wasting new wire.”
“Where’d you learn to do that?” Raj asked.
“When I was growing up, we had to make do with what little we had,” Anna said. “Most of our resources went into cultivating cyano for oxygen production. Dad taught me to re-use anything I could get my hands on. I could put together a twofer from scrap.”
“Could have used your help when I constructed Tim Trouncer,” Raj said, and instantly wished he hadn’t.
“The PodPooch? I thought he was off-the-shelf.”
“The chassis is standard, but he has a mimic surface and a completely different brain.”
Raj paused. He wanted to tell Anna more, but may have told her too much, too soon. He didn’t know what he’d say if she asked about the brain. Fortunately for him, she returned to the subject at hand.
“I’ve checked the rest of his wiring harness,” she said. “I think we can power him up.”
“Really?”
“And it took only two hours. I should have made a bet,” she smirked.
“I’d have paid it gladly,” said Raj, and meant it. He put a finger near the detent in Mazz’s neck, then pulled his hand away.
“No, you get the honor,” he said.
Anna bowed. “Why thank you, sir,” she said, and pressed the button.
In a matter of moments, Mazz sat up and swiveled to face Anna.
“Thank you,” it rotated its head to Raj, “both.”
“Diagnostic, Mazz,” Anna said.
Mazz paused. “Satisfactory,” it said. Mazz blinked and turned to Raj. “How is The Tim?”
“The Tim?” The question caught Raj by surprise.
“How is Tim Trouncer?”
“Why do you ask, Mazz?” Anna asked.
“Tim Trouncer seemed distressed.”
Chapter 23
Grace felt Tim twitch at her feet. He whimpered. Dreaming, again. She turned back to her impromptu breakfast in bed. Four eggs, five slices of bacon, two biscuits, and steaming hot coffee. Not a puck to be seen. Grace grinned. How did they get fresh eggs? Are they real? she wondered.
“But how did you know he’d have a copy?” Richard asked.
“I saw the toolkit on his ptenda. He had a sniffer set to all and a whistler in a custom deep storage chip.” She decided her answer was close enough to the truth. Had she begun with Tim examined the toolkit, she would have had a lot of explaining to do.
“Where did you learn that much tech?” Richard asked. “Not in cloister, surely.”
Grace swallowed the bacon. Bliss. “Raj has kept me on a steady diet of technobabble,” she answered. “I know the basics.”
Richard laughed. “Well you saved the mission, Grace.”
Grace smiled. She had to admit, she enjoyed playing the role of the most indispensable cog in the universe. Especially if the reward was food like this.
“Is Protector Donner well, sir?”
Mazz walked briskly into the room, apparently restored. Grace wished her own body were fixed so easily.
“Mazz! I knew the doc would fix you up.” Richard walked over to Mazz and began examining it from top to bottom. There was genuine affection on his face: the man clearly loved his robot.
While Richard was inspecting Mazz, Raj and Anna entered the room. They were smiling. Standing too close to one another. Hands nearly touching. What is this? Grace raised an eyebrow.
Richard stood back, satisfied. “You look like new, Mazz. Even got your cage polished.” He turned, clasping Raj’s hand. “I owe you, doc.”
“Actually, Anna did most of the work,” Raj said, inclining his head toward his companion.
Grace grinned. How gallant.
“You’re being modest, Raj,” Anna said, then turned to Richard. “He’s got the healing touch, this one. Your engineer is back afoot, too.”
Raj looked down and squeaked his shoe on the smooth deck. Grace chuckled. Raj had been easy to embarrass, ever since he was a child—a shy streak with compliments she never understood. With someone attractive to him, like Anna, attention was bound to make him want to run to his workbench and hide.
Grace wasn’t surprised when Raj abruptly changed topics.
“I found Marty at your side once we got you breathing,” he told Grace. “Two slugs gone.”
Grace nodded. “I would have needed more if Mazz hadn’t gotten there first. The robot bought me enough time to intercept.” She paused, surprised to feel something akin to respect when she mentioned Mazz.
“And thank you for taking care of Quint,” Anna said, moving closer to Grace. Her black eyes were shadowed.
“I didn’t plan to kill him,” Grace said softly.
“I’m glad you did,” said Anna. “You weren’t there, at our farm. Quint’s father would comm and make demands. Then Quint would show up. He was ruthless.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you when you came aboard,” Grace said.
“I know it was hard to believe me at first.”
“What happened to Anna,” Richard said, “and us—we’re lucky to be alive. I certainly didn’t see it coming. That kid was so calculating beyond his years, so calm when he should have—”
Raj shifted. “I think I can explain that.”
“Explain what?” Richard asked.
“I didn’t get a chance to talk about this before all hell broke loose. I had suspicions, but once I saw him up close and stressed, I knew,” Raj said. “Quint Brown was a gene addict. He was suffering from early gene therapy. Unsupervised, I imagine.”
“An addict,” Richard said, shaking his head. “How did I not see that?”
“They don’t usually revert to that young. Too many problems.”
“So you mean,” Anna said, “the father and the kid—”
“One and the same.”
“No chimerism?” Grace asked.
“No. That only occurs in two thirds of gene addicts. But I could tell. Shakes and paranoia. He was running out of stabilizer.”
“How could he afford gene therapy?” asked Richard, pacing. “The cost would be enough to buy this ship. If he had that sort of backing, why did he need my cruiser in the first place?”
Richard stopped and turned to Anna.
“What was he after from you and your father, Anna?”
“Bacteria,” said Anna. “Despite all we know about the limits of terraforming, he was convinced it would turn Mars into a garden.”
“Whatever else, he got sanctuary, at first, by being with us,” said Grace. “As a protector, I could shield him from the law. As long as I bought his story, anyway. And he got food, shelter. A way out of the dome. And our course to a probable location of the twofers, not to mention a valuable second ship.” Grace mulled it over. “Do squirts have stored navigation?”
“Normally, yes,” said Richard. “But Quint had already sealed off his squirt from the ship’s computer before he encoded his destination. He would have had to in order to release the worm. Otherwise, his own system would have been wiped.”
“Wragg told me that Quint didn’t last long,” Grace said. “But maybe if we calculated his exit trajectory…”
“Actually, we have a good recording of his escape attempt,” Richard said. He wrangled a display over to the bed. “Compliments of Admiral Jameson. Well, compliments of Wragg, who convinced him we needed a copy.”
Wragg. Grace looked around. When had he left?
“Here we are, then.”
Grace sat up and leaned toward the monitor. She was still getting used to reading the ship’s displays. After staring at the screen for a moment,
it started to make sense. It was a top-down view, with the Central Command craft and the Scout in the center of the display, their call signs clearly visible. The chronometer ticked down as the interceptor moved over the Scout.
“Watch there,” Richard said a few seconds later, pointing to the starboard side of the Scout.
A small blip appeared in a whirl of dust and shot quickly toward the bottom of the display. It expanded into a bright disc surrounded by a cacophony of sand. Then it vanished.
The segment looped.
“South,” Grace murmured.
“They did a long-range sweep and found nothing,” Richard continued. “The squirt was totally destroyed.”
“How can you tell?” Grace said. “Maybe it burrowed into a dune.”
Raj shook his head. “No. Your slugs fragged its engine. Completely destroyed it. At first, Jameson and Jackson thought you were reckless—crazy. They changed their minds afterwards. Thought you were crazy and dangerously effective.”
Grace smiled. She liked that.
Hobbs’s disembodied voice suddenly leapt into the room. “I’m sorry to break up the party, but if we mean to get underway by morning, I’m going to need what’s left of the engineering staff back.”
“We’ll send Mazz down, Hobbs,” Richard said, activating his comm. “But no excuses. I want to be out of here by morning.”
Grace heard an affirmative sound mixed with a grumble.
“Raj and I will go, too,” Anna said, dragging him out of the door. Raj followed, looking helpless.
Grace snickered.
• • •
Hobbs stood next to the starboard engine in the back of the engine room and frowned. Forcing his ship into the sand caused a thermal overload and the engines had scrammed in self-defense, but not before the fluctuating power disrupted some of the comm fabric. He’d set Anna and the doctor to work on the communications network. Now it was up to him and Mazz to bring the engines back to life.
“Time for a manual restart, Mazz,” he said, looping his hair back and rolling up his sleeves.
“I understand, sir,” it said. “What would you like me to do?”
“First, help me clear a path between the two engines,” Hobbs said. He hadn’t had to cold start for years, and the area was full of boxes.
He sat down and began pointing at containers. Mazz worked three times as fast as he could, so Hobbs just directed the robot and kept out of its way. Mazz worked steadily from the top down, heeding each of Hobbs’s placement orders. It was unerring. Hobbs relaxed, rubbing his knees. He hated working with real people. A good, sturdy twofer was worth ten techs of Nutter’s caliber.
“Where would you like these, sir?”
Mazz had paused beside two large magnetic coils. Hobbs motioned to a starboard storage alcove.
“So Nutter stuck a tasker on you,” Hobbs said, scanning the engine restart sequence on his ptenda.
“Yes, sir.”
He looked up. “But you managed to attack Brown and help rescue the ship.”
“Yes, sir.” Mazz hefted two containers of spare parts.
“Well I don’t get this, Mazz,” said Hobbs, waving the robot to a storage unit. “How did you override the programming of the tasker? How’d you get around it? There are more than a few citizens on this planet who would find that skill disturbing.”
“Overriding a tasker is impossible, sir. But my programmed priority to protect this ship and its occupants worked between the constraints.” Mazz paused, followed by a whir of processing. “Quint Brown still incapacitated me. My solution was flawed.”
Its solution? Hobbs wondered if it was trying to convey creativity. Twofer inventiveness. He shook his head.
“Well, Mazz, I have seen my share of twofers require maintenance after a few hours of having a tasker hung on ‘em. Conflicting routines tend to over-tax.”
“Perhaps the Archdale’s additional programming to my systems aided to the cohesion of my priorities. Perhaps the tasker was programmed incorrectly or was malfunctioning. Would you like me to run a query, Mr. Hobbs? It should take approximately thirty-six minutes for me to formulate a statistically significant analysis.”
Hobbs considered. Most of the boxes had been moved by now, and he was feeling an itch of curiosity.
“All right, then. Once the containers are stowed.”
“Acknowledged, sir.” Mazz continued its work.
Hobbs stood. His knees complained, but not much. Good medicine, that. He stretched and moved a few containers himself to walk off the stiffness.
They worked in silence for a while.
“Mazz, I want speculation,” Hobbs said after some thought.
This was a higher-order function. Mazz paused in the middle of its task.
“Why didn’t you bug out when all the other twofers left? I mean, I know you’re an older model, but the Archdales kept you upgraded.”
Mazz whirred and clicked for a moment.
“I never felt compelled to perform as the others, sir,” Mazz said at length. “But my programming recognized that I would be traveling south aboard the Scout.”
“Before the twofers left?”
“That was the Archdale’s plan. So perhaps…” Mazz paused.
“Yes?”
“I am where I am supposed to be.”
Hobbs stared at Mazz. For a moment, he nearly thought the tangled mess inside the head-cage was smiling.
“What is the next step, sir?”
“Oh, the engines. Right.”
Hobbs sat down and keyed his ptenda, but he forgot what he was doing halfway through. He looked up at Mazz, finishing the last of the boxes. For the first time in their journey—in any journey—Hobbs worried about what lay ahead.
• • •
Captain Wragg stood in front of the main viewscreen, his arms crossed, staring ahead. The first glimmer of sunlight made the horizon glow, but the sky was filled with stars. It felt strange to look out and see the landscape unmoving.
He wished he could have stayed with Grace, but duty called. The ship’s navigation had been restored from Grace’s ptenda, but the hull damage would probably mean he’d have to adjust it slightly. He couldn’t trust it to Mazz, even if Hobbs were willing to give him up. If Grace were at her usual post, he would have trusted her to do it.
Grace Donner. Wragg smiled. What a surprise she was. Fast learner, agile fighter, full of energy and initiative. Not too deft, politically, but she always spoke from a position of power. It carried her through. Pity she was a protector—she was a fair pilot.
“I didn’t hear you leave, Harmon,” Richard said, walking onto the bridge.
Wragg turned. “I wanted to check the navigation. How is she?”
“Grace is doing fine, and Mazz is in tip-top shape.”
“Ah. Mazz. That was a rapid repair.”
“Indeed. I think the doctor and Anna more than made up for the loss of techs.”
Wragg nodded. “When can we get underway?”
Richard plopped down on a seat. “Hobbs will be starting the engines any minute now.”
They were silent for a moment. Wragg watched a dust devil whirl in the distance.
“Are we still in agreement?”
Richard shifted in his seat. “You mean about the crew?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see why not,” Richard said. “Anna’s proven herself already. I think we can make it on what we have. And I…I don’t think I could trust another hire. Not after Quint and Nutter.”
“I concur.”
Richard nodded, then chuckled. “A protector, a surgeon-tech, and an engineer, all by accident.” He humpfed. “If we make it back with our skins, we’ll never be able to put together a group to match.”
“That’s certain.”
Richard looked at him. “What is it, Wragg?”
“Eh?”
“You sighed, just now.”
“It was nothing.”
The men stared at each other. Wragg b
roke eye contact first, turning to the display. He fiddled with it to have something to do, focusing on the dust devil.
Richard walked up behind him.
“What’s that?”
“A dust devil.”
“No, to the left.”
Wragg moved the display, zooming over the spot Richard indicated. They saw a robot, standing idle about three hundred meters away from the whirlwind.
“Hmph. Look at it,” said Wragg. “Just standing there, like a fence post.”
“Like a sentinel,” Richard said. “What is it looking for?”
Chapter 24
The Scout and its crew spent an uneventful week traveling south. Grace tracked and adjusted all the moving parts: the crew, the ship, the charts. They all worked well.
On the tech side, the ship had never run so smoothly. Raj was blissfully happy, spending most of his time with Anna, immersed in deep discussions of Mars, robots, medical science, and interplanetary travel. Grace once walked in on a discussion of the relative merits of endoskeletons versus exoskeletons for robots, and walked right back out. Hobbs, too, was in his technology heaven, keeping the engines going and playing twenty questions with Mazz. The chief engineer also relished discussing artificial life with Raj and Anna, a taboo subject on Earth.
Richard seemed subdued, still deeply affected by the abduction of the Scout. When he wasn’t on the bridge fussing over navigation, he and Yvette could be found in their cabin. He was dedicated to his daughter’s schooling, but Yvette still found time to torment Raj with thousands of questions.
Tim hid himself in plain sight, maintaining a brown mimic spaniel and acting the part of a dutiful PodPooch. He would occasionally pipe a dermal message to Grace. Nothing important. She knew he continued to explore his dreams. Something about dreaming bothered him.
The bridge was the center of action for Grace, and Wragg was its main fixture. Mazz would appear promptly with meals, but if it lingered too long, Hobbs would bark the robot back below. The week had begun with Raj and Anna joining them to eat, but lately they’d been eating elsewhere. Yvette, too, spent little time on the bridge and more time with Raj or Mazz.
Once they left Gusev, Wragg began overlapping his shifts with Grace, using the time to teach her more about the ship. Mostly, he had her alternate between the engineering and navigation stations. While monitoring engineering, she was surprised to learn how temperamental the ion engines were. Several times a day she would see via the display status that Hobbs was tweaking the magnetic fields.