“This reminds me of waiting for my first assignment,” Paladin vocalized.
Eliasz looked up from a map of the northern Zone he’d been studying. His muscles were tense; Paladin had startled him. He said nothing. The bot tried again. “I didn’t learn much about human intelligence gathering. But some of the bots got paired with humans who gave them intensive training.”
Eliasz was nodding. “Yeah, they don’t always give you the training you need. When I was in Warsaw I had to learn a lot on the job—just like you are now, buddy.”
Paladin was getting somewhere. To retrieve personal information, he had to share personal information first. This was his chance to get the answers he wanted, by stretching his truths into strategic lies.
“Some of the robots said they were learning about human sexuality. Do you think military robots need to do that?”
Blood rushed to Eliasz’ face and electricity arced over his skin. “I don’t know anything about that. I’m not a faggot.”
It was not the first time that Eliasz had said something orthogonal as if it were relevant. This was clearly a conversation whose progress Paladin would only understand after accessing more information on the public net. He began searching on uses of the word “faggot.”
But before Paladin could analyze what he found, Eliasz received a message from Thomasie on his mobile. The man glanced at it and stood up, his posture suggesting he’d already purged their strange exchange from his mind.
“OK, this is our last chance to squeeze any final bits of data from our friends at the Arcata Solar Farm,” he told Paladin, his hands feeling their way through his perimeter check ritual—head, belt, both shoulders. The sign of the cross. “We’re going to go in there and get as much as we can about where Jack might be headed. I’ll give them our final piece of IP and see if they’ll leak anything on their manufacturer in the Federation. You see if there’s anything else you can get out of the network.”
He reached over and touched the curved shell of Paladin’s shoulder unnecessarily. “You got that, buddy?”
“Yes.”
When the bot stood, he could see the complicated pattern of electrical impulses emerging like a fungible map on the crown of Eliasz’ head. But there were no answers in it. He could read anxiety there, and nothing more.
Thomasie picked them up outside their hotel in a worn, multi-use truck of the sort preferred by local farmers. It could seat four comfortably in the cab, but Paladin’s bulk relegated him to the cargo area. He could still hear and see everything that happened inside, but nobody would try to engage him in any part of the exchange.
With a novel feeling of surprise, the bot realized he preferred it that way. Paladin was developing a small repertoire of highly granular desires for random things, like riding in the back of a truck. They coexisted easily with mission-critical desires like preventing Eliasz from dying.
He scanned the public net for patterns in the use of “faggot,” analyzed the Arcata network for appearances by Jack, and wondered about personal preferences. His desire to survive, and to protect friendlies like Eliasz, were programmed into him at a deep level. He had not come upon those desires by discovering them over time. But a preference for riding in the backs of trucks? That was something no botadmin had implanted in him.
Overhead, the dome gave way to sky, and Paladin watched the pale bubble of Iqaluit recede slowly into rocks, grass, and farms.
When they arrived at Arcata Solar Farm, Roopa met them at the door in a state of complete alert. There were no feeds playing in the background, and there was an unfamiliar truck parked in the driveway. Thomasie looked as unruffled as ever, except for his artfully mussed hair, and said nothing as they passed the energy signature of Roopa’s weapons.
Inside they found a rapidly drying layer of water over everything: The sprinkler system had just watered the furniture. Youssef was there, his posture far more relaxed than yesterday, wiping a chair before sitting down with Bluebeard and Redbeard at a table whose legs grew thick, soft ivy.
“You’ve come back so soon,” said Bluebeard, offering Eliasz another slightly damp chair. Paladin stood behind Eliasz, continuing his search of the network and logging emotions in the small group.
“I realized I needed a bit more cash, after all,” Eliasz said, his heart rate and breathing carefully even. “Since I know that you’re good for the money, and you know I’m good for the IP, I thought you might be interested in a slightly different deal.”
Bluebeard gestured over a projector box at the edge of the table, which drew a black window into the air.
“Do tell,” she said.
“I’ve got a small molecule here that could be worth a lot of money. Basically, it’s a euphoric.” He thumbed his wrist a few times, and a white vector drawing of a molecular structure appeared in the floating window. Bluebeard looked at it, her eyes narrowing.
“I don’t want a flat fee. Let me help you distribute it, and cut me in on a percentage of the earnings. I really think all of us could get rich here.”
Bluebeard’s attention was wandering. “Interesting idea,” she lied, looking at the black window.
Beside her, Redbeard’s body told another story. He was intrigued. “It just so happens that we might have an opening for a distributor.” Redbeard looked sideways at his partner.
“Locally? Or would I need to travel somewhere to get this done?” Eliasz was looking for any geographical data he could get. But at the mention of travel, both pirates stiffened.
“What does that mean?” Redbeard’s heart rate elevated.
“Well, I’ll be honest with you,” Eliasz replied. “I’m not crazy about Iqaluit. Reminds me too much of… Las Vegas.” Selective truth-telling kept his biosigns even. “I wouldn’t mind going somewhere outside the domes for a little while. If there were some money in it for me, you know.”
“This is the kind of thing we’d normally fab down in Casablanca,” Redbeard said thoughtfully. “And I think if we did this—though that’s a big if—you would have to fetch it yourself.”
Bluebeard sighed. “Yes, our usual contact seems to have run into a bit of trouble.”
Now they had a lead on where Jack worked in the Federation. And apparently word had gotten around that she was a target, too. Eliasz must have let this information distract him, because his next move felt clumsy even to a HUMINT neophyte like Paladin.
“Where do you go if you get into that sort of trouble?”
It was a weird question, and the pirates were clearly puzzling over it when Paladin saw an encrypted message arrive. Bluebeard glanced at her watch, unable to control a brief spike in blood pressure. At that moment, Paladin’s access to the network was shut down. Somebody had found his backdoor. They might only have a few seconds before he had to go into full autonomic defense mode.
He partitioned his mind: 80 percent for combat, 20 percent for searches on faggots.
“This conversation is fucking over.” Bluebeard stood abruptly and aimed a blaster at Eliasz, while Roopa ran for Paladin from behind, her guns scoring his already-spread shields with fire.
Time was no more distorted than it always was: In one movement Paladin shoved Eliasz under the table and shot Bluebeard in the face with his chest weapon. She staggered back in a spray of cauterized tissue and guttering neuroelectrical impulses. Redbeard screamed, his blood-soaked body at last in harmony with his pseudonym.
Enough data had come in from Paladin’s search that he could start to build a taxonomy. Each use of “faggot” could be categorized, and he began assigning them to subcategories tagged with exemplary, recurring sentences.