Mei shakes her head and glances out the viewport at a brief dazzle of electric fire wisping past off the hull. 'That's not possible. Phoboi Twelve is not outfitted for personnel. It must be an androne.'
'No. It's a distress signal from a human being-an archaic human being.'
With a puzzled frown, Mei stares up into the androne's crimson visor. 'How can that be?'
'As I said, it is singular. Instead of gearing the ore processor with an expensive psyonic master control, Ap Com used wetware instead.'
'That's illegal.'
'They found a loophole, Jumper Nili. It is illegal to use living wetware. What they found was already legally dead.'
'I don't understand.'
'Apparently, a trove of cryonic heads from archaic times was found on Earth-' 'Cryonic?'
'Yes. Human heads frozen in liquid nitrogen, sealed near the end of the archaic period in plasteel capsules impermeable to sublimation. They've been preserved intact for hundreds of Earth years, waiting to be reanimated.'
'Is that possible? Wouldn't the cell structures have burst in the intense cold?'
'The cost of repair and reanimation of the cell matrix is high yet cheaper than the expense of manufacturing a psyonic master control for an ore processor.'
Mei Nili's pale eyes widen as a sick, raw feeling pervades her. Too well she imagines the horror of encasement, the claustrophobic terror of the nightmare that killed her family. She cannot help but wonder again if they briefly survived their behemoth interment, for minutes or hours left bleeding, suffocating in the crushing dark? Too well she imagines the helplessness and
despair of a brain imprisoned in the spidery circuits of a rock factory. 'That's monstrous.'
'Yes-a human mind enslaved to a machine, burrowing deeper in senseless toil far from all humanity. Monstrous but within the bounds of Commonality law. In archaic times, people were cryonically suspended only after they had legally died.'
'Who is this person?'
'His name is Charles Outis, but a translator glitch has him registered with the Commonality as Mr. Charlie. Now that this appellation has been wired into his translator modem, of course that's the only way to refer to him. His real name spoken to him comes out as gibberish.'
Mei scowls with disdain. 'That's just like the Commonality-depersonalize and control. How did Mr. Charlie get a signal out?'
'Obviously, he knew how to use the electromagnetic components of the ore processor to generate radio waves. As primitive an idea as that is, not very many people in archaic times actually knew how to make even the simplest radio. Most of Mr. Charlie's contemporaries used electromagnetic waves daily without understanding them or how they were generated.'
Amazement swells through Mei Nili, and her eyes soft-focus for an instant as she accepts that out there, in the Belt, in the precisely mapped jumble of planetary scraps where mountains of rock lob end over end on their paths of gravitational destiny, an archaic human voice called. Her gaze sharpens with the realization of what the stakes are now. 'If the others get him first, he'll be rewired to serve another company.'
'Or, worse, dissected into useful components without the annoying characteristics of will, memory, and reflection that enabled him to use an ore processor as a signal station.'
'Who else received his signal?'
'Everyone. He manipulated the ore processor's equipment to broadcast across the full waveband from audio frequencies all the way out to infrared. No one could miss it. But only three other vessels were close enough to respond, and two veered off after Ares Bund declared salvage rights.'
'The Bund-they're a demolition company.' Her heart sinks. 'We won't be able to negotiate with them. They'll go for profit maximization and sell Mr. Charlie in pieces.'
Munk turns back to the command console, gratified that, with the little data he had and the split-second decisiveness that was required, he had selected the right jumper to accompany him. 'Get some rest,' he advises. 'You must be exhausted from your shift work.'
'Wait, Munk.' Mei Nili's ears hum with the rush of blood carrying her bewildered excitement. 'Why did you hurry us out here? What are we going to do?'
'You're a jumper,' Munk replies. 'Your job is jumping among these rocks, troubleshooting the bandit equipment salvaged from other companies. You're well acquainted with the limits within which we must work. And, perhaps more importantly, you're human. I'm sure Mr. Charlie will be glad to see a human. With your help, I think we can take him.'
'Take him where? Even if we get him away from the Bund, we can't take him back to Ap Com. They'll just slice him into parts. If we get him at all, we're going to have to go rogue.'
'Indeed.' Munk pulls himself into the wavery blue light of the console and begins correcting their trajectory. 'That is why I couldn't speak about my intentions in the thrust station where we might have been overheard by Central. And that is also why I selected you. You are the one jumper who is truly unhappy at Apollo Combine. Where the others were conditioned for this work, you came to the company by default. You lost your family. You seemed the best choice to go rogue.'
Mei accedes with a dull nod. This has all happened so fast, she feels the mereness of her humanity, her inability to process information with the nanosecond speed of the androne.
Munk reads her correctly. 'This is shocking, I know. And it was 'presumptuous of me to call you into this so abruptly. But, as you can see, I had no choice. I responded as soon as I detected Mr. Charlie's broadcast.'
'Why?' She cocks her head suspiciously, almost arrogantly. 'Why have you responded at all? What do you care about an archaic human brain?'
