It was done as smoothly as anything, and nobody even realized that it had been done, but Boss stepped away from the outer hoistway doors which shuddered again as he let go of them.
“Perhaps it would be best if we closed these,” Boss suggested. Zach, without being prompted, took hold of the other side of the door, and between them the two androids physically pulled the two wings together until they almost met in the middle. Boss removed his hand, but Zach kept his own in the crack between the doors just that little bit too long; and it was only then, when he removed his hand from the now closed gap between the two wings of the door, that someone focused on that hand.
“Your fingers! What happened?” Dave exclaimed, staring at Zach’s maimed limb.
“Accident. Please do not concern yourself. We can replace the missing digits,” said Boss. But his eyes went to Marius, briefly.
Marius met them, and then looked down, flushing. He stuck his hand into his pocket, and closed around the thing that he had picked up on the floor of the shattered elevator car when the cable came tumbling down and Zach dived into the car to escape it.
A single android finger.
Marius knew he should volunteer the information that he had it. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that he should surrender it. And yet he did neither of those things. It seemed as though something greater than himself had gripped him, had closed his throat to sound, had closed his mind to the sense of the right thing to do — or perhaps he was listening to something telling him the right thing to do, it was just not the same thing that his usual instincts would point him to.
The android known as Boss appeared to be content not to force the issue, at least not here and not now. He turned away while everyone else was gathered around Vince and Xander and quietly, unobtrusively, pointed the index finger of his right hand at the line where the doors met. A quiet crackle emanated from his hand as he drew that finger, without quite touching the metal of the doors, from the top to the bottom, and then, when he was done, turned his head a little to look at Andy, the handyman, the only one who was paying any attention.
“That is sealed,” Boss said quietly. “I do apologize for future inconvenience because these doors cannot be opened again without a great deal of force. But their safety features have been disabled, and under the circumstances it would appear to be better if they could not be opened accidentally by someone who is merely curious.”
“Oh, agreed, agreed,” Andy said, nodding vigorously. “Indeed. Thank you very much, sir.”
Boss inclined his head in a gesture both acknowledgment and farewell, and stepped away… to come very nearly face — to — face with Andie Mae.
“How are you…” Boss began, but she lifted a hand to silence him, and he obediently stopped speaking.
“It never happened,” she said in a low, intense voice.
“But I have…”
“It never happened.”
“As you wish,” Boss said, giving her a small bow and stepping away.
“Exactly what never happened, then?” Simon said in almost a whisper, very close to Andie Mae’s ear. “I mean, I wouldn’t normally — but Xander said — I was —‘Yee haw’? What is going on….?”
“You were spying on me?” Andie Mae said, her cheeks flushed again.
“Just looking out for you,” Simon said, backing away from the famous Steel Magnolia glare.
Xander, unaware that he was under discussion, had stumbled to his feet and shaken himself off. And with that, apparently, he began to circle back to the pre — elevator — incident situation… and looked at his watch with frantic consternation.
“Did we completely screw up the panel…?”
“We were in there just about forty minutes,” Vince said, consulting his own wrist. “There is a remote possibility that there may still be an audience hanging around with nothing better to do. If someone can first provide me with a cup of decent black coffee, preferably laced with something stronger, I’m game. Now I even have a story to tell — life and death rescue from an elevator hanging by a thread…”
“There’s a replicator just a couple of doors down,” said Dave, beyond caring about who overheard his words or who shouldn’t have been aware of the replicators’ existence. “I’m sure we can manage that coffee. Follow me.”
“Thank you,” Andie Mae said, reaching out to grab Vince’s arm. “There would be plenty who would insist on lying down in a dark room for an hour after all this. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“We’re all in one piece, and a little adrenaline never hurt anybody,” Vince said.
“Helen has informed the audience that there was an emergency and the panel has been slightly delayed,” Boss said calmly.
“There’s an audience?” Xander said, his head swiveling to the android.
“I am informed there is. Not all of them chose to wait, but a number of them are still present.”
“Can we make that coffee to go?” Xander said to Vince, pleading. “I mean, if you’re sure you’re up to it…”
“Lead on,” Vince said. “And damned be the hindmost.”
“Wait. I have an idea. It isn’t fair — not to you — not alone — we can’t find Rory, not even with the delay and if we did I have no idea if he is remotely able to be coherent in public right now — it’s a GoH panel, and technically we kind of acquired you guys as extracurricular GoHs — you’re going on with him, Boss.”
“You tried that — remember how well it worked out the last time?” Dave snapped.
“That was Bob. Bob could not operate without an instruction manual. This time we have the Captain of that Crew. I don’t know if you found the answers you came looking for, Mr. Boss, but I’m perfectly certain that there are plenty of questions out there that you can answer for us.”
“Xander, it’s going to be a disaster…”
“I will do it,” Boss said calmly.
After a beat of silence, Dave heaved a deep sigh of exasperated resignation. “I’ll fetch the coffee. Go.”
Xander was expecting a handful of die — hard fen in the audience, possibly evenly split between those who were genuinely there for the Guests of Honor listed on the program, those who were there because they had nothing better to do on a Sunday morning in interplanetary space, and those who needed an excuse to be somewhere so that they wouldn’t have to be somewhere else or doing something else — plus the occasional attendee who might have snuck in to grab a seat in the back of the room and zone out for a while out of the public eye. But somehow — whether because Andie Mae’s idea of holding this panel this late in the convention had turned out to be a genuinely good one, or because this really was just a captive audience on what was really a stolen resort hurtling through space on what was essentially a small asteroid — there appeared to be at least a hundred people in the room when Xander walked in with his panelists in tow, and more audience members followed him in.
Dave ducked in behind them, and trotted up to Vince, proffering a travel mug which bore the same logo that Xander had designed on the fly for the pizza box on the first occasion that the replicator had been tested. The replicator had since assumed that the same logo had to appear on every item specified as a take — away.
“Coffee, and a shot of ‘something stronger’, as you specified,” Dave said in a low voice. “Break a leg, as it were.”
He was kind of smiling, but his eyes were still worried, and Xander caught himself replaying Dave’s earlier words over and over in the back of his mind — Xander, this is going to be a disaster! All of a sudden they seemed less of a warning and more of a promise. Either way, it was far too late to duck out now.