The lifter’s auto-defenses fire a snap-shot response with infinite repeaters. Hyper-v missiles scream straight into the cliff face behind Chenga Falls. Explosions shake the bedrock with sufficient force to register on my sensors.
“Direct hit,” the pilot reports. “Sorry about your waterfall. We took a big bite out of it. Got the damned Hellbore, though. Anybody care to explain how a bunch of terrorists got hold of Hellbores, for God’s sake?”
Nobody answers. No further attempts are made against the sled, either, which enters the airspace over Madison and follows a direct route toward me at virtual rooftop level. At that altitude, the massive engines must be shattering windows along a half-kilometer-wide swath. At the very least, the lifter’s sheer bulk — great enough to accommodate my entire warhull — will serve as a psychological shock to the entire population of Madison, including the urban insurrectionists.
An escort of aircars rises to meet the heavy lifter, including one that broadcasts Sar Gremian’s personal ID signal. The sled finally sets down twenty meters from my overturned warhull. The escorting governmental aircars land beside the nearest corner of the lifter, which dwarfs them into insignificance. The passengers and pilot aboard the sled disembark first. There are thirteen, counting the pilot.
I cannot see them as anything but patterns of radiant heat against the cooler, darker colors comprising the ambient background. Sar Gremian — or someone wearing his wrist-comm — emerges from his aircar while others climb out of the remaining cars and spread out along my flank, creating a defensive line. These defenders carry objects that show as long, dark shadows against the heat of their bodies, shadows shaped like combat rifles. I conclude that they are the guards assigned to the repair team — or possibly to stand guard over me, while watching the repair team for potential sabotage.
This precaution would be in keeping with Sar Gremian’s distrust of everything.
One member of the repair team greets Sar Gremian with a droll observation. “Your rebels made a for-sure-enough mess of that machine, didn’t they? I’m Bhish Magada, chief weapons engineer, Shiva Labs,” he adds, approaching the thermal signature that corresponds with the ID transponder in Sar Gremian’s wrist-comm. “You’ll be Sar Gremian? Can’t say it’s a pleasure, but as long as you pay us, you’ll get your money’s worth.”
“I’d damned well better,” he says with heavy, sullen threat in his voice. “It’s a long walk home for you and your people.”
Having duly disposed of the obligatory threat and counterthreat, the team’s spokesman performs perfunctory introductions that include nothing but bare names and titles. Four are engineers. The other seven are technicians with various specialties, running the gamut from psychotronic calibrationists to master gunsmiths with Shiva’s armories.
The sled’s pilot is not an official member of the repair crew, but he is on Shiva Weapons Lab’s payroll, according to Bhish Magada, who refers to him as a retired navy pilot looking for a second income. This explains his quick reaction time and level-headed response under fire, traits lamentably lacking in civilian pilots. I find myself wondering how many of Shiva’s employees are former combat veterans and what bearing — if any — this may have on my personal security.
Sar Gremian, with a voice as distinctive as his fingerprints, addresses me with his usual abrupt growl. “Bolo, lock onto these thirteen ID signals. They’re your official repair team. They’re authorized to do whatever’s necessary to get you back into action.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Get busy, then,” he tells the engineers and technicians. The team begins the heavy job of off-loading crates and setting up a field-grade depot, beginning with prefab tool sheds and a prefab workshop from which they will conduct much of their exacting work. Sar Gremian stays just long enough to satisfy himself that they know what they are doing, then climbs into his aircar and leaves, heading back for the president’s palace and the urgent business of coping with an on-going rebellion.
It takes the repair team three days just to run diagnostics. The process is slowed time and again by the P-Squad guards. Each and every step of the complex diagnostics is delayed by the security protocols, which are so unwieldy the technicians cannot flip a switch or push a button on their equipment without enduring a twenty-minute security interrogation on the use of said button or switch and a polygraph analysis of the answers, looking for stress variables that would indicate an untruthful answer. The resulting delays bring the repair process to a screeching halt.
When Sar Gremian discovers that diagnostics are still underway, with no repairs even begun, he explodes.
Bhish Magada cuts him off mid-tirade. “You want that machine fixed? Tell your goons to get off our backs and let us work. Those gorillas interrupt us every three seconds—”
“They’re following orders! Oroton will stop at nothing to sabotage that Bolo. Security has to be tight. I suggest you cope.”
Magada slams a reticulated servo clamp onto the desktop. “That’s it!” he snarls. “Get yourself another whipping boy, Gremian!”
He emits a shrill whistle and shouts, “Hey! Ganetti! Pull the team out right now. Get ’em back to the hotel. I’ve had enough of these anal-retentive assholes.”
Before Sar Gremian can respond, the Irate Bhish Magata kills the connection. He has literally hung up on Jefferson’s head of security. Twenty-three seconds later, Sar Gremian calls back.
“All right, Mr. Magata, you’ve made your position clear. What do you need?”
“Breathing room,” Magata says after a long, silent moment. “Those brainless baboons demand explanations for every single action we take, every piece of equipment we unpack, every tool we pick up. They want to know every single detail and then they demand to know why. When they don’t understand the answer — which they never do — they hold us at goddamned gunpoint until they’re satisfied. Since they don’t have enough brain cells between them to understand anything more complicated than ‘it’s broken and we’re trying to find out why,’ we end up spending most of the day trying to explain high-tech military science to a pack of trigger-happy morons who make bacteria look smart. Call them off or find yourself another repair team.”
“You have no idea what my problems are—”
“And I don’t give a crap about ’em, either. But you’d jolly well better start worrying about ours. Your security guards are keeping that Bolo out of action, not us. We could’ve finished the diagnostics and moved forward with repairs two days ago, if they’d just let us get on with it. So here we sit while your final invoice just keeps getting higher. You’ve already paid for those replacement parts and you’ve already paid advance rental fees for most of the equipment. But you’re paying us — engineers and technicians — by the hour, at mandatory union rates. It’s your money to waste. You can spend it having us fix your Bolo or you can pony up the cash to pay for day after day talking to idiots who can’t add one plus one and come up with two. So make your decision. But don’t you dare snarl at me or my people for taking too long, when it’s your own stupid fault.”