Текст книги "Forge of Heaven "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

With that, he shut the voices down himself, definitively, and possessed a thunderous and rainy silence he had chosen. Let them worry what he knew, and what he might do about it.

He gripped the slit of the tarp against the wind, with his wife warm and close against him, and they looked out on the lightning-lit rain, on rock spires and new streams of water pouring past them—well calculated, where those storm-made streams would run.

The heavens quarreled. At least they knew the relay the boys had set up on the ridge was functioning very well, even in the weather, since the Refuge had come in clear and strong.

This, the thunder and the rain and the constant shivering of the earth, this was reliable and real. The grinding war of shattered sections of the earth were producing something he and Hati had never seen, and despite their danger, even this far away, they shared it. Let the Ila and Ian battle it out with Brazis and the rest. Watchers came and went, sorry as they might be for the loss of three innocents. They could never touch the heavens. They had the earth to watch.

But, then—a small thought slithered back into Marak’s mind—if there was in fact someone new in the network, then perhaps something in the long maneuvering in the world above hadtruly changed. Like the cracking of the earth’s plates under the hammerfall, like the rupture of the Southern Wall, an event that, over time sufficient to lift mountains, and bring this weather down on them—change could happen up there. They had feared the water rising from below, and instead were half-drowned by water falling down on them from the sky and the cliffs. Surprise could still happen, on the world’s scale.

And if something up in the heavens had finally cracked, then they were no longer in an endless loop, one set of known forces against another. If something up there had cracked, then, up there, as below, plates might have begun to shift, bringing chaos and real change in the heavens.

“What are you thinking, husband?” Hati, close against him, could surely feel his heart, and the tension in his arms. It was never a good plan to lie to her.

“A stranger. A stranger seems to have arrived in the heavens. Or something has shifted.”

A deep breath. Hati was considering that notion.

“They do not affect us,” she said.

“Indeed,” he said. “And the uplink is still in our hands.”

Brazis might have silenced the downlink, as he could, but not what ascended to the heavens. He knew the Ila’s tricks. He knew what she had done to get into Brazis’s system: trip switch after switch, locking the relays open, and move like quicksilver, difficult to stop. That was the way.

And use not the ordinary contact codes, but the emergency ones, the ones just very few people alive remembered, the ones intended to allow them to reestablish contact in an inert system if something did go wrong in the heavens.

The master codes. He had never forgotten them, from the earliest days in the Refuge, when the earth and sky were broken. He lived his long life assuming something, at some time in all eternity, would surely go wrong, and he tested his memory of them from time to time.

He did it now. “I think I can get through,” he said to Hati.

“Forbear,” Hati urged him. “Watchers have died of mistakes. Cannot we?”

He sat with his eyes closed, deaf and blind to the storm, quietly testing his limits, probing the relay, running small tests.

The beshti set up a sudden raucous clamor that shattered his effort, a clamor that, under the roar of the rain, found an answer in the dark. Beshti talked to beshti in the storm.

Now– now,cold and hungry, soaked and deafened by thunder, their fugitives had become agitated enough to break from the young bull’s rule. His own beshta sent out a loud warning into the dark, overruling the young bull’s orders to the females.

Hati had not disturbed him with that news. He heard it for himself. He got up, and Hati—after so many years they had no need to discuss the necessities—Hati was right beside him, leaping up into the driving rain, both of them quick to lay hands on the old bull’s halter before he ripped the deep-irons right out of the rock, double-tether and all, and ran off to kill the young thief.

“Hyiii-yi-yi!” Hati yelled her own summons out into the dark, and beside them the herd matriarch bawled out her fury at the robbery. The young bull had thought the string were all his females until two arriving senior riders brought in this senior bull and a canny old female that changed the rules on him. There, before the earth ever shook, was the root of their problem. The young bull, opportunist, had done what instinct told him.

So now, fleeing an uncertainty in the weather and the earth, the females who had run off with the young bull had turned, evading calamity they might feel in the earth itself, disaster reeking in that icy wind.

Not at a convenient moment for their return, no. They had rather have found their fugitives by daylight, on easy ground. In the stormy dark, beshti saw ghosts and devils at every turn, and every fleeting notion was an enemy.

The females came, nonetheless.

So the young bull was going to come up that rain-soaked slope. He had no choice.

In the uncertainty of the night, they had left the beshti saddled, the leather under weather cover, and Marak ripped the plastic cover free, losing it to the wind as he tried to gain footing to mount, as shadowy huge figures came bawling and braying up among the shadowy pillars, out of the rain, driving the bull into a circling struggle to get free.

“Let go, woman!” he yelled at his wife, worried for Hati’s safety, but there was no chance Hati would let go her hold, though the old bull threw his head up, lifting Hati completely off her feet as Marak grabbed at the rein.

Beshti milled around in the lightning and the rain, squalling and bawling to drown the thunder. One silly cow fouled their tether-line, trying to cross it, tangled and threw Hati half to her knees.

“Unclip!” Marak yelled, half-turning toward Hati as he got a hand on the rain-slick saddle, and Hati risked one free hand, lifted a knife, shining in the lightnings, and began to saw the taut tether-line, no wrestling with the halter clip against the beshta’s irate strength.

Marak swung up and landed astride as the bull snapped free with a rolling shake of his long neck.

“Hya!” he yelled, and popped the old bull hard on the rump with his quirt, disabusing him of any thought he was riderless. His vision was all a blur of lightning-lit rain as the old bull spun about, threatened from the dark, with an unexpected problem on his back. He was all puffed up to fight, and had a rider with a loaded quirt and a taut rein complicating his headlong rush for trouble.

The young bull lunged out of the rainy dark toward them, teeth bared.

“Hai!” Marak yelled, pulled his beshta’s head aside by main force, jerking himself out of the way, and hit the young bull hard across the face when the youngster tried to sneak a bite.

The young bull, veering off, shouldered them hard in the movement and came in again. Where the cliff edge was, Marak had a guess, but only a guess. Marak laid on a second blow, and a third, the rascal thinking to snake his head under to nip the old bull’s throat. The old bull fought to turn under the rein and come full about for a neck-blow that could kill. For a moment it was all a squalling mill of turning bodies and diving heads, and Marak plied the loaded quirt on their young attacker with all the force in his arm, until the young bull finally felt the blows and shied back, flash of the white of one eye in the flickering lightning.

The old bull lunged to give chase. Marak hauled his head around and back, which forced the old bull around and around in a circle. Pops of the quirt stinging his rump kept his rear dodging sideways to escape those blows. This proved too many diversions at once for the old fellow’s brain, and he grudgingly resigned the fight, puffing and blowing, on the very edge of the cliff.

There was a great deal of grunting and blowing all around, and complaints out of the dark, complaints from the young bull, complaints from the herd, rumbles of thunder from the rock walls above them. The earth itself jolted, one sharp thump, and the panicky herd milled and squalled in confusion.

Another rider showed in the lightnings. Hati had gotten herself up to the matriarch’s saddle, and applied her quirt liberally wherever a beshta showed a disposition to break out of the herd and start a panic or a fight with the matriarch.

They were soaked to the skin. Their tarp with their supplies inside was flat, trampled in the confusion. He had the gun. He had never thought to use it.

But they had the herd back in their control.

13

THE HOSPITAL DIDN ’THAVE a feeling of shattering crisis as Reaux arrived. Two volunteers stood just past the foyer, chatting idly by the lift, then stopped their conversation and stared, openmouthed, recognizing their governor, and security.

Security called a lift car. Reaux rode up to the isolation level, fretting at the ordinary speed, and exited with his minimal escort, the two building security guards Ernst had commandeered for him. No training, no special skills—but no commitment to Dortland, either.

God, what was he into?

The look of crisis manifested the moment he exited onto the Gide’s floor and turned the corner toward the isolation units. Hospital security was in plain sight, armed not with guns but with detector wands and hose-down kits. He’d seen the precautions in drill. He’d never seen the reality in his life. He didn’t know where the safe limit might be, and pulled up short with his unprotected staff.

“What are we up against?” he asked.

“Governor, sir.” The hazmat leader in charge spoke jargon to a collar-com, and a moment later, having heard some sort of answer:

“Containment’s maintained, sir. It’s safe right here.”

“Can I see him?”

He didn’t particularly want to see Gide, but it was what he’d come to the hospital to do. The first report had said Gide could die. Reaux was a civilized man—but he had fervently hoped for that event. What he had heard on the way here, however, indicated something far less satisfactory.

He knew the drill with the suit, now. He went into the adjacent room and suited, making the seals tight, checking them twice. When he came out, the men opened the door for him, and he went into the restricted area, leaving his escort in the safe zone.

Faceless, behind another mask, the physician in charge met him as he came through into containment. Waiting for him, clearly.

“Governor.”

“Doctor. What’s the story here?”

“We’ve got a problem, but not as life-critical a medical problem as we initially feared. There’s a nanism at work, organizing fast. A sitednanism, not general.”

“Where is it?”

The doctor touched the side of his masked head.

“Are you saying it’s a tap, then?” A tap was good news. A tap was a limited involvement, a known mod, with a known progress, a known limit.

“Not commercial. No chance it’s commercial. It’s a large area of involvement. It’s got the ear, the jaw, and the nerves and vessels there, and it’s developed faster than anything I’ve seen.”

“Any chance it’s contagious? How in hell did he get it?”

“Any breach in the skin. Which he certainly has. Even ingested. It wouldn’t matter. The usual administration of the common tap is in a capsule. But we can’t readily identify it and we’re taking no chances until it’s finished doing whatever it’s going to do. He, on the other hand, wants out of here immediately. He’s furious. And I take it this infection isn’t within your knowledge, Governor.”

“No,” he said, aghast that the doctor had even suggested it, as if his government could have done it.

But Dortland? He could hardly believe it. But he supposed it was possible.

And meanwhile his brain spun its wheels on that word tap,getting nowhere he wanted to go. “No, I assure you this is nothing my administration knows about.”

“It happened somehow.”

“Is he still conscious?”

“Too conscious. Sedation isn’t taking. That’s one thing that very much worries us. He’s got a hellacious headache, understandable with a new mod, and whatever it is, the nanism’s sopping up any drug we give him—not uncommon. It’s been doing that. But, on the not entirely positive side, his wounds are healing extremely fast. It acts—” A little hesitation. “And this is what makes me nervous—it acts like a general nanism. It acts, in fact, complex.”

Complex. Complexwas not at all a good word. Complexput it far beyond the sort of monopurpose illicit the occasional teenaged idiot met and had to have purged out of his system.

If it was a complex nanism, if it was worse than that, sending it to specialists who understood things that didn’t have to do with a little body-sculpting…that might be a good idea, and, far from offending the doctor, he was sure the doctor would support that move.

Except it bounced Gide, with all the classified things in his head, down to Brazis’s territory. All the experts in this sort of thing were Outsiders.

But the facts were, somebody had infected a body too pure to walk Concord streets with a mod he began to fear no hack parlor down on Blunt would dare handle—something that came precapsuled, maybe, that an ordinary hand could handle. Or something injected. Probably not contagious. But it had effects in the bloodstream, by what the doctor said, and that meant it might potentially travel.

“I’ll see him,” he said.

“Go right ahead,” the doctor invited him, more than anxious, he suspected, to get some official order to send Gide anywhere as long as it was out of his containment ward.

Complex,kept echoing in Reaux’s brain. Nanocele. The sort of thing only Project labs understood.

Gide had come here to trace smuggling in the PO. Well, he’d found it, hadn’t he?

He heard, through the containment suit, Gide shouting at a nurse down the hall. Cursing. He heard some object bang and fall, as if thrown at a wall. A suited nurse exited Gide’s sealed door, shaking his head.

He put out a hand to forestall the nurse’s resealing that door. Went in.

Gide was sitting up in bed, feet tucked up, hair standing up at angles, hands clenched on the sheets. Whatever had just fallen, a medical bot had nabbed the contaminated article and retreated into the baseboards.

“Mr. Ambassador,” Reaux said calmly, “I’m here.”

“The hell you say!” Gide tore at his own hair, clamped his hands over his ears, grimacing. “There’s something in my head, damn you! There’s something in my head!”

“I’m truly afraid there is,” Reaux said, with honest compassion. “I wish I could tell you otherwise.”

“It buzzes!”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“You stand there in that suit, all holy and sanctimonious! This is worse than dead!”

“I wish I could offer you some honest comfort in your situation, Mr. Gide, but the doctors up here are at a loss. I personally recommend you transfer down to Outsider level. Their hospitals have a greater expertise in handling illicits, and the faster they get on it, the better a chance they can do something.”

“Damn you! Is that the care I get from my own people? My own doctor doesn’t come to tell me this! And now he wants to ship me off to the Outsiders? My God, my God!”

“I sincerely wish I had something better to offer. But I’m sure official Outsider levels didn’t do this. There’s an outside chance they might even recognize this item and be able to remediate, if you don’t delay…”

“Considering it was clearly one of their minions that did this, they should know what it is, shouldn’t they? Oh, God, the pain!”

“Doctors in this hospital aren’t expert at this sort of thing. But by all I understand, by what the doctor believes, the thing is likely a tap, a communication device.”

“Communication!”

“Hence the noise I suspect you’re complaining of, Mr. Gide, as it infiltrates the ear and the jaw, as a resonance device. It communicates with exterior relays that support whatever system it’s tuned to. Whoever did this to you can hear what you say and to some degree hear sounds around you…ultimately, can communicate with you, once you habituate to the thing. That’s the way they work—which you may know, but I didn’t, when I first met Outsider systems.”

Gide had a thoroughly distracted look, utter panic, or a spate of activity had just happened in the device.

“It’s not lethal,” Reaux said further. “Quite the contrary, the doctor says your wounds are healing very quickly, probably through its action.”

“It’s complex,is what you’re saying?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what the doctor fears. It’s one thing for it to draw nutrients from your bloodstream, to build on. They do that. It’s quite another to reach out and correct damage elsewhere, in cooperation with the body’s own cells.”

Gide was stark pale, except a fever-blush around his right ear and along his jaw. His eyes stared, white-edged with fury. “This is sabotage. This is intentional sabotage from the Outsider Authority, and your sole solution is to turn me over to them?”

“On security grounds, I by no means want to send you down there. But you came here to investigate activity that—listen to me, please—activity that the Outsider Chairman absolutely does not support. He’s not in sympathy with whoever did this. I believe he would take a hands-off attitude towards information you might contain, under these circumstances. I think you might find him honorable in that regard—potentially an ally in your investigation.”

“Ally!”

Reaux kept firm hold of both his nerves and his patience. “A working relationship with the Outsider authority, sir, is an asset—in this place of all places. This is not the introduction to the Chairman you’d have chosen, I’m sure, but, yes, I believe you’d find him a valuable ally.”

“Don’t lecture me.”

“I’m trying to assure you—”

“They’re the people who did this!”

“Listen to me, please. What willhappen once that tap clarifies, is contact with its system, and it doesn’t make thorough sense that Chairman Brazis would infect an Earth official with a tap that gives full access to their own highly restricted system. A common tap would be no use to anyone who wanted to eavesdrop. Do you follow my reasoning, sir?” He was far from sure Gide was reasoning with any clarity, at the moment; but he was suddenly reasoning clearly, himself. A moment before, he had held a niggling suspicion of Brazis—but once he followed the logic of the thing, he had far more suspicion of agencies that Brazis might be as interested as Gide in stamping out, agencies they hadn’tknown accessed this kind of technology, agencies that Gide himself had declared existed on Concord. “After all, sir, what did you come here looking for? Illegalnanoceles. I think you’re right. And I think Brazis will be as upset as we are.”

Gide stared at him, disheveled, distraught, but the slack mouth clamped shut. The eyes registered a rational, if agitated, thought process.

“Brazis could do this, I suspect he could, but I assure you he wouldn’t,” Reaux pursued his logic. “Someone that we know would, we didn’t think had the technology, but you did think so, and that’s where our mistake was, and where you were right. Unhappily…whoever did it is now in touch with you. And will be in touch with you, increasingly so, unless the Outsiders can clean this thing out of your system.”

“I can leavethis forsaken station.”

God, didn’t he wish. “That might be safest for you, all told, if you can find a place where you know the agencies responsible for this aren’t.But the hell of it is, you can’t necessarily knowthey’re not operating wherever you go, and you can’t go all the way back to Earth, which would be the only safe place. As soon as this nanism organizes itself, until you assume some sort of control over it, which, again, sir, Brazis’s people could teach you, I’d suggest at least confining your more sensitive communications to writing. I’d suggest it, in fact, from now on, and you should insist those who talk to you do the same.”

“Damn you!” Gide cried. But it was a less furious protest, more a moan against a very unenviable fate. “Get me released from this place. Never mind hospitals. Just get me released. They’re not doing anything helpful.”

“You’re not likely contagious, that’s true. Taps never have been. But there’s another reason for keeping you in isolation. Until we know who aimed a missile at you—the station can’t know what they’ll do next. And if we send you out to a residency, it’s very difficult to keep you safe from something worse.”

“What could be worse than this?”

“Kidnapping. Kidnapping,sir, considering you’re from governmental levels. The ones responsible for this attack would ask you a lot of questions, if they got their hands on you, and I don’t mean legitimate authorities. No, sir.” As Gide moved to protest the idea, Reaux held up a cautioning hand. “No! Panic is not useful here. Look at the positives. You aren’t dead. You’re not likely to die of this. The tap contact will develop over time. A tap is also two-way. You can use it as well as they can. And if you stay safe, you’re a threat to them.”

“The hell with that!”

“Hell it may be.” Reaux drew a deep breath. This man had threatened him. Now—now, it seemed, it was perfectly possible for him to dictate where this man lived, what he did, with whom he ever had contact. A major threat to his life and livelihood had just become wholly dependent on his decisions. He watched Gide wince and clutch his ears as the fever progressed, and he managed, despite the satisfactions present, a touch of real compassion for the man. “I’m putting you under general security. Another warning. I’ve reason to suspect my personal head of security is taking orders from your ship, and I wouldn’t entirely trust your safety to anyone he picked—if your ship should realize what a security risk it is to them, to have you here alive, and compromised.”

“Dortland?” Gide said.

“He is Treaty Board, too, is he?”

“He’s not Treaty Board. He’s Homeworld Security.”

“And you relied on him. So did I. A mistake.”

“Dammit.” Gide sat with knees tucked up under the sheets, hands clamped over his ears, the picture of a man on the verge of panic.

“Before this thing takes hold, before they can decipher what you say—let me suggest Dortland’s probably told your ship everything. And if you are Treaty Board—”

“I am!”

“I doubt under these circumstances you’re going to get any official support from your ship in setting up an office here. So I offer you mine. Expert counsel, in how to live with this tap. Medical care, should you need it. Meaningful protection that won’t draw any resources from Dortland’s office. And, of course, a home here, considering a return to Earth is nota possibility for you. If you can get your relatives out here—they’ll find a very comfortable life, as comfortable as mine. Your official function on Concord has become beside the point. I’ve every reason to suspect that Dortland himself engineered the attack on you, if you want the honest truth. The missile was black market, from Orb, and who better to smuggle something so outrageous onto this station? I suspect he did it precisely at the behest of your office—I take it without your knowledge. Your own ship carried the orders andmaybe the missile itself, all to set you up here and get you past my authority without an argument—I take it by the look on your face that none of this was with your personal knowledge. But I’m increasingly sure he was responsible, and remains responsible, and possibly intended to infiltrate your office when you set it up. But somehow—someone else got to you. One of the police, perhaps. An on-scene medic. Someone at the hospital itself. Someonewho dealt with you, injected you with something that makes you a threat to Dortland, and to that ship, since certainly this kind of technology is very far from anything they’d handle. At this point, your office here is not in question. Your life is. Worse, your sanity. That’s a very nasty mod.”

Gide, disheveled, distraught, looked up at him—not a weak-minded man, Reaux decided. A tough, dangerous man who’d thought a system governor couldn’t stand up to his office, who’d been convinced when he arrived here that the system governor might have been part of the problem.

Wrong, Reaux said to himself, with a coldness of soul that surprised him. Quite, quite wrong. He’d headed into this negotiation with Gide with his hands empty. Now he found they weren’t. And Mr. Gide had just learned that fact.

“I do care, Mr. Gide, humanly speaking. And I will help you, personally, with all my resources and good offices. Think about my suggestion you remove to an Outsider facility. It’s made with your best interest in mind.”

“I expect reports from you.”

“I’ll be glad to oblige, when I learn anything new. Is there anything you’d like me to relay to your ship?”

“Nothing.” Glumly. Dejectedly. “I’ll think about this other hospital.”

“Rest assured we’re taking every precaution for your protection.”

Gide said nothing.

Reaux walked out, cleared main quarantine, and stripped the suit. “Get Gide’s doctor,” he said to his bodyguard when he emerged from the robing room, quite steady and serene. His hair wasn’t even ruffled from the hood.

His hands, however, had begun to shake. A thought of Kathy had intruded, the danger she was in, the action that was proceeding on hisstation. Illicits. Rogue nanoceles. Someone who didn’t hesitate to attack a high official. Who might not stick at all at fifteen-year-old girls with high-placed parents.

“Governor?” The doctor in charge showed up.

“Dr. Lenn.” He read the name, this time, off the uniform tag, and phrased matters as diplomatically as he could. “I agree with you that this poses a serious security problem. I’ve discussed the matter with Mr. Gide. And I am intending to clear the ambassador to go downstairs, to the PO’s own hospital, if I can get them to agree and if I can get him to agree. For security reasons. How much time do you think we have for them to do anything?”

“I have no idea, with a thing like this. Hours, maybe. But I have no objections, medically or otherwise. They’re equipped for this. We’re not.”

“A technical question. C anthey completely wash this out of him?”

“To our knowledge, not entirely, not a nanocele, if that’s what it is. Dr. Kantorin, down there, is an honest man. I’d trust him—professionally speaking, at least. They might be able to limit its effects. There’s been some suggestion that’s possible.”

Trust him, the doctor said. Trust the Outsider government…not to take an unethical notion.

“God, what a mess.” Even when he looked at his bodyguard, he saw low-level people he’d had to use to avoid the traitor who was supposed to oversee his safety.

The ones he’d stationed outside his house, the ones watching Judy, were Dortland’s men.

And did he dare call Dortland on the carpet at this point, tell him outright what he knew and see if Dortland had any bright suggestions at this point what to do? Dortland wasn’t a monster. He had an agenda, which right now was going dangerously wrong.

Calling Dortland in might be the best thing to do. It might be the best thing for his own career, before he delivered Gide down to an Outsider hospital, under that ship’s witness. He could challenge Dortland face-to-face and see if there were any remaining truths that no one had told him. He didn’t think Brazis expected complete collaboration of him. Only a reasonable accommodation, which he might yet achieve, reclaiming certain resources.

He walked. He used his phone, that he hadn’t dared use.

“Ernst,” he said, and got an answer. “Ernst, call Mr. Dortland, and tell him I want him in my office in ten minutes. Tell him I don’t care what I interrupt. This is priority.”

MAGDALLENcalled—on the phone: that was what they were down to. Brazis grabbed the instrument off his desk and parked on the edge, one foot on the floor. “What news?”

“News, Mr. Chairman? News is your boy is walking down the middle of Blunt at the moment with that ondatmark on his forehead, in company with his sister and a collection of the Trend’s elite.”

Two motions of the heart. Relief and desperation in quick succession. “Good loving God. His sister?”

“Your boy, a fair representation of the practicing Stylists, two little cleaner-bots and one repair bot, all moving right down the center of Blunt. People not involved are not interfering with them. I’ll admit I’m not inclined to touch them, either.”

The phone was compromised all the way from the governor’s office to the ship at dock, but what was happening down on Blunt wasn’t exactly secret from the station at large.

Dead middle of the street, and an ondatmark on his forehead. If it was gang revenge that had been perpetrated on Procyon Stafford, it was extravagant and stupid, someone anxious either to turn a young man into a pariah or to provoke absolute catastrophe in politics, not giving a damn if the ondatblew up.

But he had this terrible, uneasy feeling, given the intrusion into the taps, and all else that had gone on, that there was some connection between Gide, Reaux’s communication with the ondat,Dortland’s treason, and that keepaway mark, that claim,on Marak’s junior tap.

“Which way is he going?”

“Straight up to Blunt at 9th, away from Grozny.”

“Are you watching him now?”

“From across the street.” A picture flashed to his phone, zoomed in on a coatless young man in a black shirt, a young man who didn’t seem to feel the ordinary chill of the street. The view zoomed closer, to a shocked, weary face that, yes, Brazis recognized, and a lime green mark that shimmered faintly gold underneath the fringe of disheveled hair as they passed between neon lights.

The zoom backed off again, giving him the entire disturbing picture.

Procyon, no question. With his sister. With a man called Spider. Isis. And three ankle-high bots trundling along beside.

Bots, for God’s sake. Bots.A malfunction? Three little bots anticipating a cleaning job when this expedition got where it was going?

It wasn’t right. It wasn’t at all right. Bots didn’t just take to the middle of the street.