But I did not need to speculate about this—I just needed to ask.
"Who's watching me now?"
"Oh, it's all getting very interesting up there. Combine have just informed Fleet of the ejection of a pod from the part of the ship where you were quartered. Fleet are claiming this was a misfiring, that no one was aboard, and that you died in the section of the ship struck by the missile; though, to cover themselves, they admit they may be mistaken and are supposedly searching for this errant pod right now. Of course they know where it is, and have been watching it for some time. Combine also knows where it is and are waiting to see what Fleet does next. With high satcam resolution on both sides, both sides know you are still alive."
A nasty thought occurred to me. "Of course if Fleet come to my rescue and find me dead, Combine will have enough evidence to roast Fleet and gain great leverage in the Sudorian Parliament. They could probably then ensure the establishment of a Polity Consulate despite Fleet."
"Just a thought here," said the drone, "that won't make you any less dead."
"A definite disadvantage." I pondered my options. It had been my intention to come, at some point, to this world anyway. Any rescue by Fleet would probably prove unhealthy for me, so perhaps it would be best if I died for a little while. "Can you cover this pod with your chameleonware?"
"Nope, an object that size is outside the range of my 'ware. But I could cover a human being, even such a large one. Like a ride?"
"Why not?" I gazed back into the pod, at its grisly cargo. "Sink the pod. If I'm being watched I'll have to go down with it."
Black lines immediately cut across the flotation bags and with a whoosh they released their contents. The pod began to tip over and taking a breath I stepped off into the sea and went down like an iron statue. The brine was cold as death and soon, deep down in it, I could see nothing but black and green all around me. I tried swimming, just out of curiosity, but even with my strength it was a case of one stroke upward for every ten feet I sank. The drone suddenly appeared as a tiger-shaped blur underneath me. My boots came down on its back and I parted them to slide down astride it. Its back was slick metal only partially warmer than the sea, and there seemed nothing for me to take hold of unless I wrapped my arms around its neck or grabbed its ears. I was about to try one of these when tongues of metal clamped over my thighs, holding me in place. I touched that metal experimentally, surmising the drone's outer form to be a cell-form metal skin it could reconfigure at will. Then we were rising.
The drone broke from the water and began running across its surface, its paws occasionally clipping the wavetops—all for effect, of course, since it was grav-planing. I could see the machine entire now, probably because it was only 'ware-shielding itself from the satellites. It occurred to me that if any Fleet personnel saw or even recorded this, they would have a tough time convincing others of the reality. This was exactly the kind of technology Fleet commanders feared, yet were able to prevent from swamping the system only because Polity AIs allowed them to do so. An apt analogy would be that of a nation still only at the technological level of being able to launch biplanes, laying down the law to a neighbour geared up to fly stealthed Mach 10 jets and control orbital laser arrays. Yes, as I had told Duras, we genuinely did not want Sudoria turned into just another homogeneous addition to the Polity. Any more than we wanted to utterly destroy the pride of these people, or terrify them.
"How far to the shore?" I asked.
" 'Bout a hundred miles—we should be there in under an hour." As if to confirm this, the drone accelerated and the wind of its passage chilled my skin and forced me back from my seat. I leant forward and obligingly a curved bar oozed up from the metal of its neck for me to grip. I took hold, feeling slick cell-metal roughening to my touch. We ran through a squall and I observed how stained my soaking clothing had become, and that in places the cloth itself was parting. But all hoopers are aware that no clothing will ever be as durable as their own bodies.
"How far then to the nearest habitation?"
"Another fifty. Do you want me to drop you right there?"
"Get me within ten miles. I want to take a look at this place before I go underground. I take it you'll be hanging around?"
"Well," the amber tiger eyes peered back at me, "my instructions from Geronamid have been to keep a watch here in this system, but to make my prime focus Corisanthe Main, as it has been for the last twenty years. I do have some cams positioned there…"
"So you are following those instructions," I replied, thinking some about the patience of machines—twenty years! — and how even that wasn't limitless.
"Geronamid—"
"You know I've got carte blanche here, as the agent on the ground. I say I want your help, Geronamid can go suck on a black hole."
"I think I like you," said Tigger, facing forward again.
A while after that, land became visible as a lumpy purple-blue line separated from the sea by a line of mist. As we drew closer to shore I began to notice more life in the water below, and was reminded of home. The water remained a murky green but I began to see globular masses of something that might have been weed, and things swimming between them like foot-thick catfish: wormfish being the nearest translation.
"Herbivores," commented Tigger. "Nothing like on Spatterjay."
Further in, I observed low rolling hills cloaked in bluey green. The beach consisted of boulder slabs, and through crevices in these white fumaroles of spume stabbed up into the air. An acidic chemical factory smell choked me and made my eyes water. By now, that mythical normal human would probably have been drowning in the fluid inside his own lungs. Tigger thumped down on these stone slabs, took a couple of almighty leaps, and came down again in a sandy cove.
"Take a break?"
"Yeah, why not." Maybe my time schedule was tighter than I liked to admit, what with my viral problem, but I knew that ten years either way did not matter that much to Geronamid.
The two tongues of metal over my thighs withdrew and I stepped off Tigger's back down onto soft grey sand. Washed up in a tideline were numerous bones and mats of weed, though tides were rare here compared to Spatterjay or Earth, for this place possessed no moon. The tides only appeared during a few solstan months occurring three times every Brumallian year, when Sudoria passed close. As I recollected, such times were when many of the sea creatures bred. The wormfish then squirmed up onto beaches like these to bury their eggs in the sand. They hatched out between tides and the young headed inland, where they entered various pools and slow-moving rivers. By then they were carnivores, feeding on abundant pond and river life until attaining sufficient size to compete for mates in the ocean to which they eventually returned, transforming into weed-feeders on the way. No, not really like Spatterjay, for the only herbivores there were the land-based heirodonts, who were prey to just about every other life form they came into contact with. There seemed to be no predators feeding on these worms. As far as I knew they died of old age or from becoming loaded down with parasites. But the planetary almanac for this place was far from complete, so some as yet unknown predator might turn up.
"So, you're an Old Captain," said Tigger.
Always that. Throughout the Polity there existed what I can only describe as an unhealthy interest in Old Captains. This stemmed from the part Spatterjay had played in the Prador-human war and other significant events much later that brought my world to the attention of Polity citizens. For it was the only world in the Polity where it was possible to attain immortality without technological intervention, and some of the sea captains sailing its oceans were the oldest humans in existence. This whole obsessive interest in us struck me as rather silly.