Expendable - James Alan Gardner [93]
Not that I expected them to stop us from getting away—they’d let the other Explorers go—but I didn’t want them to know how we went. The AI had kept the hangar secret because its planes were only intended for flesh-and-blood human use. But Tobit was as much flesh-and-blood as I was; if he detached his prosthetic arm, he could command the AI like a despot. Melaquin had enough troubles without a souse in charge of a fighter squadron.
My pack was close to the door of the room; also close to a Morlock woman with a slosh of booze in her stomach. Tendrils of brown extended threadlike through her abdomen, the alcohol slowly becoming part of her, diffusing into the background transparency. The zoologist in me felt fascinated, curious to stay and watch the complete process of digestion—but the prospect made me queasy. How could these people watch such a thing happen to themselves?
But they didn’t watch it. They were out cold.
Or so I thought.
“Leaving so soon?” asked Tobit as I lifted my backpack.
He lay spreadeagled on the floor. He had not moved a muscle except to open his eyes.
“I have the chance to go,” I told him. “I thought I might as well.”
“Another shark came in?” he asked. “Or is it two sharks: one for you and one for your…friend.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“You can keep the sharks from leaving if you want to spend more time resting from the road. There’s a toggle-switch on the airlock door; flip it and the machines won’t go till you’re ready.”
“Still…” I said.
“You want to leave,” he finished my sentence. “Of course you do. There’s nothing that interests you here.”
He lowered his gaze to the floor. A good actor could have made the moment poignant, but Tobit was too drunk for that. The line between tragic and maudlin is too thin.
“You can leave too,” I told him. “Hop a shark. Go south. The other Explorers will be happy to see you.”
“You think that, do you?”
“Phylar,” I said, with a trace of anger, “don’t blame the world for your own sulkiness. If you’re feeling lonely or hard done by, it’s because you deliberately choose to isolate yourself. There’s nothing genuinely wrong with you. You’re perfectly all right. Stop bitching about your lot in life if you never make an effort to fix things.”
He stared at me for a moment. Then he broke into deep gut-busting laughter, not mean or forced, but sincerely spontaneous. “What?” I demanded; but that just sent him into fresh gusts, long and loud—as if this was the first time in his life he’d been totally delighted.
I couldn’t understand it. With burning cheeks, I heaved up my pack and stormed out the door.
Essential Maintenance
By the time I returned to the hangar, the place buzzed with service drones of all types: everything from an automated fuel truck filling up long-dry tanks to a bevy of chipcheckers no bigger than my thumbnail, crawling like beetles over the lark’s hull in search of structural flaws. A gray haze around the craft showed there were nanites at work too, microscopically reconstituting any systems that had rotted or corroded since the last time such repairs had been made.
I wondered how often this flurry of maintenance had taken place over the past four thousand years. Once a decade? Once a month? High-tech equipment has a half-life comparable to fast-decaying radioactive elements—even in a sealed, climate-controlled storage chamber, components willfully break down as soon as you turn your back. Still, the AI in charge must have done its best to keep the craft functional over the centuries: replacing a circuit here and a rivet there, until each plane had been rebuilt completely several dozen times. The service checks taking place before my eyes were a matter of form, not necessity…I hoped.
(In the back of my mind, I couldn’t forget how the AI’s holographic projection had flickered that once. There were glitches in the system. I crossed my fingers that the nanites clouding around my plane were repairing faults, not causing them.)
Something beeped impatiently behind me. I stepped quickly out of the way