Profiteer

Mosasa continued to work on his little particle beam.

 

“What’s he doing?” Dom asked the floating robot.

 

“If you tell me who you are.”

 

Dom looked at her. She shrugged. It was his show. She was scrambling to keep him from realizing just how out of her depth she was. Somehow she’d kept from locking up when they went over the beginnings of her plan—but the scope of the thing still scared the shit out of her.

 

An AI, too, why the fuck not?

 

“Come on,” said Random, “we are a team. And if Johann sent you, you want both of us.”

 

“Dominic and Tetsami,” Dom said. “That’s enough until we find out if you’re working for us.”

 

Tetsami nearly jumped when the robot circled around and stopped about three centimeters from her face. “Tetsami?”

 

She complimented herself for not yelping in surprise. “Y-yes?” she managed. Dom looked at her oddly, as if noticing her discomfort for the first time. Dom, she thought, can you really be that oblivious?

 

“I know that name—but then, of course I would—that is the same family I’m thinking of, isn’t it?”

 

Damn it. Tetsami was a common name on Dakota, but that wasn’t even common knowledge in the rest of the Seven Worlds. If someone bothered to dig into the history of the late twenty-first century, specifically the Genocide War against the Race, they might unearth a few important Tetsamis. Otherwise, for most people, it would be just a name. That was one of the reasons Tetsami had never changed it.

 

However, considering that the Tetsami genetics had been engineered for human-machine interface, and considering the peculiar rapport they achieved with captured Race AIs—

 

Of course this thing knew her. It had to be at least as old as the war.

 

Tetsami tried to say something, found her mouth too dry, and simply nodded.

 

“What luck. Someday we’ll have to talk shop, comrade—”

 

That thing was much too close to her. She could feel herself shaking. Dom finally saved her by saying, “You were going to tell us what he’s doing—”

 

“Oh, yes—” The robot sped over to Dom’s side and Tetsami could breathe again. It knows me, she thought, the damn thing knows me.

 

She backed up and sat down on a pile of dismantled armor. She ran her fingers over the scars left by dozens of micrometeors and listened to Random Walk with half an ear.

 

“—in other words, he’s trying to program an Emerson field to stop a bullet.”

 

“Engineers have been trying that ever since they could reproduce the Emerson Effect in the lab.”

 

“I’ve been telling him that,” said the robot, “but he’s convinced he can get the field to damp the kinetic energy of a particle.”

 

“I don’t see how. The effect is energy based, but if the field is on a massy particle’s frequency—”

 

“He’s finding it damn difficult—oh, boy. You better turn around, if this test is like any of the others ...”

 

Tetsami wasn’t facing the clearing, but she could feel the heat of the giant white flash that must have originated by the massive torus. Even though she was looking away, the reflection off the sandy ground dazzled her.

 

She turned around, rubbing her eyes, expecting to see the entire apparatus melted into slag. However the ring was still there, and Mosasa was next to it, looking at readout screens and nodding.

 

The floating robot tilted itself and rotated slightly, amazingly like a human shaking his head sadly. “He’s convinced it’s only a software problem.”

 

Tetsami stood up and walked over to Dom.

 

“What was that flash?”

 

Dom waved at the ring, “A force field converting a few micrograms of carbon into energy.”

 

“A field can do that?” She felt her hand going toward the personal screen on her belt. Suddenly she didn’t feel too safe with it on.

 

Dom smiled when he saw her hand move. “Don’t worry, a personal field—even a military-grade one—isn’t calibrated to handle the wavelength of a massy object heavier than an electron.”

 

“Besides,” said Random Walk, “a field with that small an energy sink would collapse from the overload. I better check with Mosasa before he becomes too engrossed with the data to talk to you two.”

 

The robot sped off toward Mosasa and the giant ring.

 

She kept looking at the torus. “That’s a field generator? When I first saw it, I thought it was the drive section from a spacecraft.”

 

“It is.”

 

Tetsami looked at him.

 

“Same technology that lets that box on your hip damp a laser beam lets that ring drive a sublight ship in-system. Plasma or hydrogen gas in one end, a coherent stream of high-energy photons out the other.”

 

“Uh-uh,” Tetsami said.

 

“You have some odd gaps in your knowledge.”

 

She shrugged.

 

“Your name seemed to mean something to the computer there.”

 

“I haven’t asked you about your past,” she snapped. She was sorry she said it. She should have glossed over the fact; instead she had drawn attention to it. However, Dom didn’t follow it up. He simply looked at her, nodded, and dropped the subject.

 

After a while, Random Walk led Mosasa up to them, and Dom got to make his pitch.