"Oh, I don't doubt the robot you have is innocent. What I'm wondering is, why didn't the robot prevent the deaths? If a second robot had been involved, as unlikely as it sounds, this one should have intervened. Has Sipha Palen told you much yet?"
"No. She wants us to run the excavation without any preconceptions. I can understand that."
"Get it done ASAP. I want to move this to the next level."
Derec raised an eyebrow. "What next level?"
"I'm sending you a packet to go over in private," Ariel replied. "About Nova Levis. Very interesting reading."
"The colony, or the lab you mentioned?"
"Both. The list of shareholders in the lab is intriguing all by itself. Chassik isn't the only surprise." She looked away for a few seconds. PACKET RECEIVED appeared along the bottom of Derec's screen.
"Got it," he said. "Be careful tonight, Ariel. We don't want to be deported for bad taste."
Ariel's eyes widened in mock surprise. "Derec, please! I? Bad taste?"
Derec smiled. "Forgive me. I do know better."
She grinned. "Have fun."
The screen went blank then, except for Thales' icon and the notice of the data packet. Derec plugged his personal datum into the board.
"Download the packet for me, Thales," he said. "I'll look at it later."
"I would recommend sooner," Thales said. "I compiled the raw data. It may be more relevant than you might think. "
"'Keep your mind on the robot,' Ariel said. I'll add it to the list, thanks. "
Lights winked on the datum's pad. He scooted his chair over by Rana. She worked with confidence, clearly in control, comfortable in her expertise. Better than Derec remembered, and he remembered her as being very good.
"I suppose," Rana said slowly, "that it's occurred to you that you're both being used."
"You think so?"
"You're being set up to take blame."
"That would be consistent."
"Then why are you going along with it?"
"It's a question of being deported now or later. The longer we put it off, the more chance there is to avoid it completely."
"You don't believe that, do you?"
"Shouldn't I?" She shrugged. "I suppose you're thinking that you might find something in this mess-" she waved at the screens "-that will make you so valuable to someone that they'll intercede on your behalf and restore you to former glory."
"Something like that."
Rana shook her head. "I can't imagine why. All I want to do is get away from this planet, and all you want to do is stay." She turned to look at him. "Why?"
"We've been over this before," Derec said uncomfortably.
"Yes we have. And you've never given me an answer. Excuses, reasons, justifications, but not an answer." Rana glanced toward the curtain that isolated them from the rest of the lab. "This planet has treated you pretty badly. Hell, it's treated me badly and I was born here; you weren't. I grew up on Earth and I have no place here. I'm leaving first chance I get, to go somewhere I might be appreciated."
"Aurora is just as bad in different ways."
"But it's not personal the way it is here."
"Who told you that?"
"My co-workers, for one. After they got over the idea of a Terran who understood positronics, they treated me as an equal. "
Derec shook his head. "No. You just haven't learned to read the signs."
Rana cut the air with her hand. "Stop. It is different because I have skills they value. Maybe it will be only more of the same in a new way, but for now it feels like respect. I already know what I don't have on Earth. "
"So what is your question?"
"Why are you so set on trying to stay here?"
"You think there's one answer?"
"No, but there's usually one thing that validates all the rest."
Derec stared at her, mind suddenly blank. "I never thought about it that way before," he heard himself say. He no longer looked at Rana, but at a point just past her right shoulder, as if waiting for something to resolve in the air behind her.
"I don't need an answer now, boss," Rana said. He refocussed on her.
"Um…"
"And I can manage this," she said, turning back to the console.
Conversation abruptly terminated, Derec went over to the gurney, annoyed and impressed by Rana.
Beyond the fabric curtain he could hear the other lab workers moving and speaking in low tones. He leaned on the edge of the pallet and gazed down the length of the robot.
"So where did you come from?" he muttered.
The torso showed age and use. Scratches gave the impression of a complicated urban map etched in bronze. The metal gleamed dully through patches of tarnish and encrusted grime. Plates covered linkages thirty centimeters below its arms that allowed extra limbs to be connected. The arms themselves, three-jointed and thick, ended in finely articulated six-digit hands. The legs depended from a rotating platform beneath the torso shell. Derec noted more removable coverplates on the platform hiding assemblies to which secondary legs or support braces or tractor modules or one of several other modifications could be fitted. The DW-12 was a large robot, two-and-a-half meters tall, designed for a multiplicity of heavy tasks in conjunction with human workers, very adaptable, with an advanced positronic brain that allowed for considerable independence and problem-solving capacity.
Vaguely humaniform, the head was little more than a protective helmet curving over the intricate sensor array behind the mesh-covered eyes. A complex architecture of connections rose out of the torso and joined the brain that lay within the chest cavity to the communications and sensory apparatus beneath the headcap. The normally thick column had been modified by the addition of accessory modules and cables. Normally, the "neck" would be covered by a smooth carapace, but the extra components jutted out like synthetic goiters, requiring a specially-fitted casement no one had bothered to acquire.
Derec frowned at the overall dirty appearance. This robot had been worked hard for a long time. Hiding it, as would be necessary on Earth, probably prevented the owner from caring for it as thoroughly as needed, but he would have expected Palen's forensics people to clean it up in the course of their inspection.
But no thorough examination had been made.
Derec started going over it more carefully.
He felt beneath the headcap for the release and flipped the cover off, revealing the strutwork that caged the components. He took a rag and small bottle of solvent from the workbench and lightly cleaned off grime from the smooth surfaces until he found the serial number. He jotted it down and went to the comm, where he fed it to Thales to be encrypted and sent to Ariel.
Derec made note of each component he recognized within the head. Optical and aural receptors and translators, UV and Infrared telemetric assemblers, gas traps linked to interferometers, location and attitude modules-nothing unexpected. He wanted to turn it over to get inside the torso shell, but not till Thales finished the excavation.
On its right side, below the accessory limb coverplate, new metal shone brighter than the surrounding surface. A fifteen-centimeter square area had been replaced, the weld itself invisible but for the age difference in the material. Derec went over the rest of the body for signs of recent damage, but found none.
He tried to imagine its last minutes. A chamber full of humans died around it. What would its reaction have been? Derec tapped his finger arrhythmic ally on the pallet.
One human had been assaulted: Nyom Looms had suffered a broken neck. And this robot had failed to protect her from an alleged second robot.
Which had now disappeared.
Ridiculous.
Derec turned over first one robotic hand, then the other.
A dark substance filled the joints of three fingers, palm-side, of the right hand. Derec tried to flex them open but the segments were too tight. He found a small flathead screwdriver among the tools on the workbench. He slid a sheet of paper beneath the hand, then pried one of the segments open and dug at the matter embedded within the joint. Flakes fell to the paper.