felt the hatch roll reluctantly upwards. Success!
The human retriggered the torch, held it like a handgun, and crept forward. Woe be to the machine that got in his way!
The interior looked the way the Hoon said it would look. The compartment was circular. A blue console stood at its center. The exprospector pulled a 360 to ensure he was alone, released the trigger, and heard the torch pop.
The handle was red all right... and easy to spot. Jepp placed the torch on the deck, felt Sam leap off his shoulder, and wiped the palms of his hands. Here it was, what he’d been sent for, ready for the taking. The voice made him jump. It spoke highly stilted standard and came from all around. “Why are you doing this?” It sounded like the Hoon—only different somehow,
“Because you told me to,” Jepp said defensively.
“I told you nothing of the kind,” the voice answered evenly. “The orders you received came from Hoon number one.”
“Hoon number one?” the human asked hesitantly, scanning the bulkheads for some sign of the intelligence he was talking to. “So who are vow? Hoon number two?”
“Precisely,” the AI replied. “Now, leave this compartment, and return to wherever you came from.”
Metal scraped on metal. Jepp turned to find that Alpha had entered the compartment. The robot walked with a limp but its voice was clear. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. James 4:7.”
Who had spoken? Alpha? Or Hoon number one? Jepp decided it didn’t make any difference. God had would have his way. He took the handle, gave it one turn to the right, and pulled it free. There was only one sensor built into Hoon number two’s main processor module, but that was sufficient to monitor the carefully computed launch, the fall toward the sun, and one last moment of existence. What is a devil? the AI wondered. And what would such a being look like? An image etched itself onto the computer’s consciousness and it looked a lot like Jorely Jepp.
Chapter 7
Mowa Sith Horbothna
Turr academic
Standard year 2227
Planet Arballa, the Confederacy of Sentient Beings
Conscious of the fact that his movements were monitored, Senator Samuel Ishimoto Six palmed the panel, waited for the hatch to open, and nodded to the embassy guards. Both had been cloned from a much celebrated soldier named Jonathan Alan Seebo whose badly mangled body, and the DNA stored there, had given birth to entire armies.
Each trooper had experienced different things, leading to different personalities, but remained very similar. They had strong bodies, the intelligence necessary to operate sophisticated weapons systems, and a near fanatical devotion to duty. The guards came to attention, but there was nothing respectful about the look in their eyes, or the expressions on their identical faces. The soldiers had been briefed by either his clone brother, Harlan Ishimoto Seven, or his assistant, Svetlana Gorgin Three, both of whom were aligned with Alpha Clone Magnus Mosby One and his brother Pietro. They, along with a significant number of the advisors who served them, had been seduced by the Ramanthian-led cabal. Something that Six, along with his sponsor, the reclusive Alpha known as Antonio, both opposed. That being the case, the sentries would make a note of his departure and enter it into a log. The politician nodded an acknowledgement and stepped out into the nonstop foot traffic. The corridors, busy during the most lax of times, positively hummed as the senators and their staffs prepared for the half-session hiatus. A rather important opportunity to return home, rub elbows, tentacles, and pseudopods with constituents, and enjoy some R&R.
Six allowed himself to be absorbed into the crowd but was far too experienced to think that it would shield him from surveillance. No, not on board a vessel that crawled with every sort of bug known to more than a dozen races. Information was power—that made it valuable—and everyone sought to obtain as much as they could.
Private meetings were possible, however, provided that the participants took elaborate precautions and left nothing to chance. That being the case, the clone adopted a quick decisive pace, stepped onto a fully packed lift at the precise moment when the doors started to close and rode it down. Then, following the crowd into a labyrinth of corridors, he took a shortcut through one of the passageways reserved for robots, paused in a public restroom, donned a privacy mask, changed into some electronically laundered clothes, and left via the back door.
The mask smelled of plastic, and made the area around his eyes itch, but did offer a modicum of anonymity. The fact that about ten percent of the crowd wore similar disguises hinted at the number of last-minute schemes, deals, and agreements being hammered out as the hiatus began. Finally, after the senator had done everything he could to shake surveillance, he entered a one-person lift tube, dropped to the less-trafficked boat deck, and took a careful look around. Nothing. Nothing he could see anyway.