Orphan's Triumph

FORTY

I SAT WITH A PLASTEEL CRATE IN MY LAP, on my bunk in my double-wide stateroom aboard the Tehran , outbound for Tressel. Tehran ’s accommodations were more generous than older cruisers’, some already mothballed relics like me.

“They don’t make ’em like they used to.” Howard leaned against my stateroom’s bulkhead and pointed at the object in the crate.

Jeeb stretched his ultratanium limbs like a waking, six-legged Siamese. A vintage Tactical Observation Transport looks like a turkey-sized metal cockroach, coated in radar-absorbent fuzz, with dual forward-directed optics that pass for eyes. Compared to cold, sleek modern surveillance ’bots, a TOT passes for cute.

Jeeb rolled onto his back and flailed all six legs like a newborn. According to the engineering texts, the machine was running through its joint-flexibility test program. According to me, and the other diehards who believed that TOTs imprinted their human wranglers’ personalities, he was glad to see me and begging for a belly scratch.

I said to Jeeb, “You’re fine. Knock it off.”

He kept wriggling.

I added, “Please.” He quit.

It’s ridiculous to program precatory language into commands to a mere machine. But Jeeb’s not a mere machine to me.

Howard sighed. “At least we won’t need him to translate.”

Like so much of what had once made Jeeb useful, translation of human language, on or off Earth, was now handled by personal clip-ons no bigger than an Oreo. Old TOTs like Jeeb, in their day, not only observed the battle-field, they intercepted and deciphered communication. A TOT could even teach a code or a language it had monitored, and then decrypted or learned, overnight.

“Howard, my worry isn’t that the Tressens won’t understand us. My worry is that they will.”

“The Pseudocephalopod threatens them as much as it threatens the rest of the human race.”

“Which won’t make them less pricks.”

“Aud Planck always struck me as a decent sort.”

“Aud’s only a third of the Chancellery. And his opinion probably counts for even less than a third because he is decent.”

Jeeb sat up, telescoped out his wings, then tested them by fluttering across my cabin and perching on Howard’s shoulder.

Howard scratched Jeeb behind his optics. “You have flexibility. Your orders are to secure permissions to prospect for and extract Cavorite. The price is open.”

“Howard, I’m the last person I’d give a blank check to.”

“No, the last person would be either of Aud Planck’s colleagues. Just do what you can. Talk it out with them.”

“What if I make a deal? How long until the prospecting starts?”

“I think we could start within a month.”

“Shouldn’t I know where the stuff is?”

“Of course. When negotiations reach the stage where you need to know.”

Frankly, Howard was right. I’ve never had a poker face, and if I betrayed the location of the deposits with a twitch, it could cost us if we ended up having to go in and take it.

Jude rapped on the hatch frame, then stepped through. He had changed back into his neo-Gestapo Tressen black. Nonetheless, Jeeb’s optics whined as they widened, and then he hopped from Howard onto the shoulder of another old friend.

Jude tickled Jeeb alongside the underside of the ’bot’s carapace. After years in a box, Jeeb was getting spoiled rotten. “Downship leaves from Bay Twenty-two in an hour.”

I set Jeeb’s Plasteel cage on the deckplates. “I’ll be dressed in twenty minutes.”

Jude smiled at Jeeb as the ’bot preened his antennae for the first time in three years. “In spite of everything, you must be looking forward to seeing Aud Planck, just like Jeeb. Old friends are old friends.”

We landed in the capital, Tressia, in a fern-grass town-center park tricked out with a yellow windsock that snapped in the breeze to aid our landing. Also snapping were two hundred Republican Socialist flags. The flags all flew at half-staff.