Toby glared at her. “Who says I want it?”
She came to stand in front of him, though she was wary of the twentier. “Toby, the one thing you have to get through your head is that certain people will never believe that you don’t want it. As long as you’re alive, you’ll be a threat to them. That’s why we’ve been sheltering you, not letting you say too much to people on the street … Just the knowledge that you exist is going to cause ripples through the whole lockstep.”
Toby sat down heavily on the lowest step of the stairway. “You’ve got a deal for me, huh.”
She glanced back at the men. “We’ve got some possibilities we can explore together, once you understand your situation a bit better. But clearly we’ve done too much today. Why don’t we head back to the hotel and sort out how we all feel?”
Toby put his hand on the mining bot. “I’m taking this.”
M’boto threw up his hands with an angry laugh. “You can’t take that to a hotel! What, are you going to hide it in your luggage?”
Toby glared at him. “I’m not leaving it.”
Ammond and M’boto held a quick whispering discussion, then M’boto turned back, nodding. “Well, why don’t you stay here, then? For tonight, anyway. Maybe we do need to work on this ‘trust’ thing, like Persea said.”
Toby thought about it. With the twentier as his guard, he had little to fear from these men. And he was determined not to let it out of his sight. “Okay,” he said reluctantly.
Persea clapped her hands together, beaming. “It’s a start,” she said. “That’s all we can ask.”
HE’D PULLED AN ARMCHAIR in front of the glass wall of the underwater bedroom they’d given him. Toby had hoped that watching the fish would soothe him into sleep; he hadn’t even tried the bed. Sleep wouldn’t come, though, and much as he was trying to keep his sense of wonder about the silvery visions that slid by just a meter away, their darting movements were becoming more annoying than lulling.
Ammond and M’boto had done a lot more talking after Toby agreed to stay the night. There was stuff about the politics of the empire—a tyrant was mentioned, and more stuff about worlds cut off and other worlds forced to live on different frequencies, whatever that meant. Toby hadn’t been able to keep it straight, though he knew it was important.
Now his mind refused to settle. He thought about Sedna; about Earth; about his family. What was he now, king of Sedna? That was weird, and ultimately meaningless. He just wanted to go home.
He reached around and patted the scuffed yellow dome of the twentier. “You’re all I’ve got, boy.”
It angled its lenses up at him. For a second Toby thought he was going to burst into tears.
He hopped up and paced, windmilling his arms. Every time he got near the room’s one door, he glanced at it and frowned. Finally he reached out and pulled it open.
Two of M’boto’s household bots stood just outside. “Is there anything you require, sir?” one asked.
“No, no, that’s fine.” So he really was a prisoner. Toby made to close the door but then noticed something.
The house was a long rectangle, and this room was at its offshore end. From here he had a good view down a hallway to the stairs and the lounge beyond it.
Ammond, Persea, M’boto, and six or seven other people were sitting there, discussing something. Hands were waving, heads were shaking and nodding. It looked important.
Now seriously uneasy, Toby listened carefully but couldn’t make out what anybody was saying. Carefully, he closed the door and went to sit on the bed.
“I think we’re in trouble,” he said to the twentier.
Again, it just looked at him. He looked back, wondering now what it was really capable of. It wasn’t a fighting machine. In fact, it probably had multiple layers of programming to keep it from harming anybody. Not three laws, but twenty or thirty. And no real weaponry, just its digging arms.
He knelt to examine it more closely. According to M’boto, it had been locked in a block of frozen nitrogen for fourteen thousand years. Time pretty much stopped at such temperatures. He ran his fingers along its carapace, and they stopped at a narrow, almost invisible seam at its back end.
If you didn’t know this was here, you’d probably never notice it. “Hey, twentier,” he said softly, “could you open your CPU maintenance hatch for me?”
There was a clank, and the container’s lid popped up. “Huh.” He reached inside and felt something squarish and hard. What he brought out was a flat data block, about two hand spans long. Gingerly, he pulled it out of the sample container and turned it over, looking for a label. It looked like standard backup drive, not at all surprising to find one of these things. But it could contain a record of all that the twentier had seen and done since the block was installed.
Something bumped against the glass wall.
Toby nearly dropped the block. Somehow he’d jumped from the floor to the bed without thinking. He blinked at the dark mirror of the wall. It was night now and the few fish he’d seen in the past minutes had only been dimly lit by the lamps in the room.
“Twentier, can you shine a light out there?”
He’d forgotten that the twentier’s “light” was an incredibly powerful spotlight, which instantly dazzled Toby and created a hazy cone through the water outside. A couple of minnows swam through it, but there was nothing else.
That bump must have been his imagination. “Turn it off,” he said. Then he thought of something.
“Hey, have you got acoustic sensors?”
The twentier laboriously turned its crab body back to face him. “Janus Industries Squatbot Model Twenties are equipped with the latest in acoustic depth-finding and materials-sensing technologies,” it said. “This technology allows us to do sonar exploration of solid rock and ice faces to a depth of—”
“Fine, fine. Can you amplify the sounds coming from the far end of the house?” He jabbed a thumb at the door.
“Yes, sir.” The twentier waddled up to the door and placed two of its metal arms against it. Suddenly voices filled the room.
“Why should we trust you?” He didn’t recognize the voice. It was a woman’s, dry and sarcastic. She reminded Toby of a teacher he’d once had. “You work for the Chairman.”
“We did,” Ammond replied. “So of course we told him the instant we found out who we’d recovered. In hindsight I should have known what that would mean to him. The Chairman himself ordered us to kill the boy.”
Toby sucked in a shocked breath. Kill? Somebody had ordered Ammond to kill him?
“It would be … such a waste.” That was Persea’s voice. “But we didn’t have the resources for the obvious alternative. That’s why we’re here.”
More was said, but Toby couldn’t take it in. Ammond and Persea had been working for somebody else—somebody who wanted Toby dead. They’d refused and, what? Run away? So they weren’t traveling when they’d come here; they were fleeing?
One of the voices penetrated his fog of shock. “… So it comes down to a choice: Ammond’s idea of a fait accompli, where we head straight to Destrier to wake the mother, or Catai’s proposal to build a force from the edges.”
“It’ll never work! The Chairman’ll slap us down faster than we can swap the worlds out.”
“Yes, but under my proposed system—”
“—introduces one more layer of complexity—”
“What about the boy?”