Re: The Show Must Go Off

[Herr D]

The Show Must Go Off–part twenty-four
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MCL-BeltMiner#C485640624

When I had ‘loaned’ Thrash the assembler droid, I’d added a sort of ‘shunt’ to it’s software, enabling it to go unidentified as a separate machine even while carrying on separate functions. So when I’d sent out for Thrash’s batter, I’d looked for a task being executed by an assembler droid with no machine i.d. Being in a panic, I’d not coded very tightly. So I’d found another assembly droid without an i.d. I was in enough of a state, what with a gun pointed at my face, that I almost postponed processing the data. That decision saved my life.
The assembler droid I hadn’t known about was running on it’s last few hours of battery. Those batteries sometimes hold a charge for ten years or more. I was bouncing the signal to try to triangulate it’s position when it completed reporting the nature of it’s failure.
WITHIN CAM RANGE OF GOAL. DID NOT REACH CACHE. LAST ARMATURE CEASED FUNCTION. POWER CONSERVATION MODE 3 HOURS AND 17 MINUTES REMAINING.
Cache?! Maybe it was something valuable? I could dig it out with another droid and buy my life with it? I sent it the simple command: CAM SEND and almost instantly realized what was up. It was an image in greenscale, obviously a night-vision filter, partially blocked by a mangled aluminum spar. Probably the same spar that had broken the bot. The image was of a mangled obsolete jumpership chassis full of freeze-dried human bodies. One of them had a spine bent almost double.
GameFace kept me looking like I wasn’t surprised or preoccupied. I glanced at the wall ‘casually.’ “Was it an Enforcer I knew?”
Jenko–who obviously wasn’t really Jenko–said “He ‘disappeared’ when we did.” AH. Confirmation. I nodded. Sometimes the best way to save a badly failing bluff is to act like you still believe it. “Are you going to tell me who YOU really are? I hadn’t planned on actually meeting any of you.” Here he snorted. “I thought you didn’t want to.” He blinked hard and too fast for me to move.
“What?”
I was scanning the image for clues of identity. “I don’t really know all I could about The Six. You obviously aren’t The Surgeon. Did he replace your ENTIRE spine? Impressive. No one else has ever done that!” And I smiled at him past the gun in my face. All I needed was about another minute.