crew area where I now stood from the squidlettes outside, I still tasted the tang of adrenaline and noticed the hairs on my arms standing up.
“Can you feel them, Lobo?” I kept our chatter to our private frequency, which Lobos armor blocked from any sensors Osterlad’s people were training on us. Thanks to the repairs my sister, Jennie, made to my brain way back when we were kids on Pinkelponker, and to the modifications the doctors on Aggro made when they laced me with nanomachines, I can communicate with most machines by focusing my thoughts in the right way. If more people realized how lonely and chatty machines generally are and how much information they’ll give to anyone who gets them talking, we might go back to living with dumb devices.
“Not the way you feel, Jon, not as best I understand humans. But I have enough hull sensors to detect the motion, and once they find the few hatch seams we had to leave open, the acid will start affecting more internal circuits.”
“Give em a jolt,” I said. “A hard one.”
“You understand that it probably won’t destroy them,” Lobo said.
“Yes, but if we don’t try to fight back, Osterlad will know somethings up, and besides, we have to use some power now so they’ll believe we’re out of it later.”
Lobo didn’t bother to answer. The displays and speakers showed his response: the air popped with electricity, streaks of blue arced all over his hull, and almost all the squidlettes slid off onto the clearing around us.
I checked the stealthie’s progress. Its top was about six inches below ground level, and it was spraying dirt around its flank. It was almost as low as it would go without me.
The squidlettes immediately began to climb up Lobo. A few weren’t moving, which made me happy; those things were expensive armament, even for a dealer like Osterlad. Most, though, were on the move again, which meant he was true to his reputation and carried good stuff. These meat/mech combos were engineered to handle strong current and probably a great many other forms of attack. Any off-market squidlettes would have been reduced to metal and fried meat, or at least lost some function, from the shock Lobo gave them.
The outlines of two squidlettes flashed yellow in the displays, Lobo’s sign that their paths would take them to seams.
“My new friend, the weather sat, tells me that heat signatures not far from Osterlad’s home suggest he’ll be launching interceptor ships momentarily,” Lobo said. “Once they get into medium orbit, I won’t be able to outrun them.”
The stealthie had stopped digging and opened its lid, beckoning me.
I looked at the large, pale-brown-metal lozenge and shook my head. “You owe me for this, Lobo,” I said.
“What can I owe you? You already own me.”
I sighed. When I want a little emotive programming, I get facts. “It’s only an expression. I hate this plan.”
“It’s your plan.”
“That doesn’t make it any better,” I said. “The fact that it’s the best plan I can come up with doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“We could have simply landed on the building’s pad,” Lobo said, “and you could have removed them all—as I suggested.”
“I told you before: they would have attacked, I would have been forced to fight back, and I probably would have ended up having to kill a lot of them. I want to avoid killing whenever I can.”
“So you’re buying me new weapon controls so I can kill for you?”
The problem with emotive programming is that you sometimes can’t tell sarcasm from genuine confusion. “No. I’m fixing your weapons systems because you’re broken, incomplete, without them.” I thought about Pinkelponker, about tracking Jennie down and finally freeing her, and realized there was no point in lying to Lobo, or to myself. “And so you have them when we need to fight.”
Lobo superimposed hatch lines on the displays showing the two flashing yellow squidlettes; they were drawing close.
“I get the point,” I said.
I climbed into the stealthie and stretched out. A little bigger than a coffin on the inside, when closed it afforded me only enough room to stretch out my legs or draw my knees to my chest, roll over, and prop myself up on my elbows. I’d already loaded it with food and a few special supplies; everything else I’d need was standard equipment.
“As soon as I close up, Lobo, shove the dirt back over me and take off. Hit this area hard with thrusters to fuse the ground, and head out to the wait point as fast as you can; you need to burn off all the squidlettes.”
“Thanks for the reminders, Jon. It’s not like I’m capable of forgetting the plan.”
Spending hours alone in the stealthie was looking better.
“I’ll contact you when I need pickup,” I said. Before he could tell me he knew that, too, I added,
“Signing off,” and pushed one button to close the stealthie’s hatch and another to bathe the tiny chamber in a soft, blue-white light.
Now came the hard part: waiting and hoping that both machines, Lobo and the stealthie, succeeded at their jobs.
The plan should work. As I lay inside it, the stealthie was burrowing deeper into the earth, sucking dirt from beneath it and forcing that same dirt back over it, digging as quickly as it could now that I was aboard, stopping only when it was six feet down, coolant in its hull and tentacles keeping it from generating any kind of noticeable heat signature. Layers of metal and deadening circuitry combined to give it equally inert radio and radar signatures. Orbital-based x-ray probes could penetrate four or at most five feet into the soil, so they wouldn’t spot me, either. Only a serious local x-ray probe would find me, and I had bet that the combination of Lobo’s launch, the scorched ground it left, and the distress signal he’d eventually be sending would be enough to convince Osterlads team that I was still inside Lobo, stuck with him in deep orbit, stranded beyond the range of Osterlads local ships. All I had to do was lie in this container, believe in the plan, and wait.
Yeah, that’s all. I forced myself to breathe deeply and slowly. I felt the vibrations of Lobo’s takeoff and relaxed a little more; so far, so good. One of the stealthie’s displays estimated we were four feet down and descending. Lobo’s thrusters should have left the ground hot enough to more than cover any of my underground activity. Lobo should be able to beat Osterlads ships to deep space easily, and then he could join me in waiting.
I punched on an overhead timer to count down the ten hours I figured I’d need to spend in the stealthie. The depth meter showed a bit over five feet; we were nearly done descending. The stealthie was working well. The air smelled fresh. I sucked a bit of water from the tube on the right wall near my head; it was cool and pure, just as it should be. I rolled to face the display on the opposite wall, which gave me access to a small library of books I’d chosen for the trip, but I couldn’t relax enough to read. I called up the map and recon photos of the forest between the landing zone and Osterlads setup, studied it a bit, and went over the plan again in my head. I was doing well, I thought, handling the wait, no difficulties. Ten hours would he no problem.
I glanced at the countdown timer. Three minutes had passed. Ten hours might be a little harder than I had thought.
I normally try to avoid drugs. For one thing, they don’t work well on me, because the nanomachines that live in almost all my body’s cells treat the drugs as attackers and consume them before they can take effect. I can focus and will the nanomachines to back off, to let the drugs work, but then I run into my other issue: I don’t like drugs. Even though I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only successful, living human/nanomachine hybrid—and thus arguably the most artificially enhanced human in a universe crawling with genetically engineered, surgically enhanced, medically rebuilt, and nano-shaped human bodies—deep down I cling to the hick attitude of the once- retarded boy who lugged hay on a fifth-rate Pinkelponker island over one hundred and fifty years ago: I ought to be able to do it all myself. Whatever “it” is.
Whatever myself is. I’ve changed so many times, been broken and rebuilt in so many ways by so many different forces that though I still seem to me to be me, I can’t honestly say what bits are original working equipment, what bits new, what bits broken and repaired or replaced.
I shook my head and turned onto my back. At this rate, if I wanted to be operational when the stealthie
