Chapter Nine
We are receiving sporadic reports of nehrcom transmission glitches, of inexplicably weak and even lost transmissions. The problems seem to have nothing to do with our transmitting stations around the galaxy, since service personnel have checked and rechecked every one of them. The failures are few and far between, but remain troubling since nothing like this has ever occurred in the past. In their first decades of use, nehrcoms earned a reputation for perfect reliability and strong signal quality.
—Confidential internal document,
Nehrcom Industries
Early one morning, Noah awoke to the noise of men arguing in the corridor outside his cell. He tried to see them, but could not get an angle to see more than shadows against a rock wall.
“I received no notification of this,” a voice said. “I will have to check with Warden Escobar.”
“He won’t be in for hours,” a man said in a high-pitched, irritated whine. “We can’t wait that long, and I have an authorization that supersedes him anyway. Now, open the damned cells!”
“Well, I don’t know.…”
“Do you want to answer to the Doge’s office for your stupidity? They will not be kind to you, and could put you in one of these cells. If you are allowed to live. I am here on a Priority One assignment. Look at the authorization, you fool. If you can read.”
“I can read, I can read.” Noah heard papers rustling.
“Gad, you’re an idiot. The authorization allows me to take any and all prisoners, as needed, for work details. With the cessation of podship travel there is a shortage of slaves and imported robots to perform menial tasks on Canopa. Thus we are forced to draw work crews from Human and non-Mutati alien prisoners. Do you understand?”
Finally the guard said, “OK, I guess this is in order, but if there’s any flak over putting Watanabe on work detail, you’re taking it, not me.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
A loud click ensued, and then a slight dimming of the electronic containment barrier around Noah. The glowing orange bars disappeared.
“All right!” the high-pitched voice said, as the man pounded something metal against a wall. “Everybody out. It’s time to go to work!”
The man turned out to be a work crew boss, with a squad of armed guards. They herded Noah and the other prisoners out a side entrance. On the paved street, Noah encountered Anton in the midst of the prisoners. Approaching the younger man, Noah saw that he had a bright red mark on one side of his face.
“What happened to you?” Noah asked.
Looking around warily, Anton whispered, “They burned me with a laser on a low setting, threatened to blind me if I didn’t confess.”
“Confess to what?”
“To trying to assassinate the Doge. I told them that was preposterous. I only followed you to the pod station to make certain Tesh was safe. She was my only concern. I had no idea the Doge or Francella would be there, or that we would be arrested.”
“No, of course not.” Noah didn’t comment, but remembered noticing signs of Anton’s jealousy concerning his own relationship with the pretty young woman who had once been Anton’s girlfriend. While Noah had reached an understanding with her over the control of a podship, he’d never had romantic intentions toward her.
“There’s something I want to discuss with you,” Anton said. “I’ve been having memory problems, an ability to remember some things, while other details fade away whenever I try to recover them. It’s like … like my mind is playing tricks on me.”
“They tortured you,” Noah said angrily.
“Yes, but I started having this problem right after they took us into custody on the pod station. I recall trying to go to sleep in my cell that first night, with thoughts churning in my mind, but my brain wouldn’t work, at least not completely. I sensed things slipping away.”
“I’m no doctor, but it sounds stress-induced,” Noah said.
“We sure have a lot of that,” Anton said.
A guard pushed them apart with an electronic prod and shouting threats.
All of the prisoners were loaded onto a groundbus and whisked away to a walled compound just outside the industrial metropolis of Rainbow City. Noah recognized the area. He’d been there many times, under better circumstances. As the gates opened and the bus surged through, he saw a high, round tower ahead, which he knew to be one of the nehrcom transmitting stations for sending high-speed messages across the galaxy.
The work crew spent the rest of the morning performing landscape work and spraying poisons outside the transmitting station. Supposedly, this was to keep insects, small animals and plants away from the highly sensitive facility, which required an almost antiseptic environment. Noah had heard about this procedure, and had always wondered if it was one of many ruses employed by Jacopo Nehr to throw anyone off track who might be trying to figure his transceiver out.
As Noah sprayed a canopa oak, he forgot where he was for a moment and smiled at Jacopo’s eccentricities. Now the famous inventor was Supreme General of all Merchant Prince Armed Forces. Noah wondered how he was doing at that, and which planet he had ended up on when the podships stopped.
Preoccupied, Noah didn’t notice a black robot watching him intensely. The robot moved closer…
O O O
Moments before, Jimu had come out of the nehrcom building, having sent a cross-space message on behalf of the Red Berets. He had no idea what the message was, only that it was high priority. By definition, anything sent by this means fell into that category. Afterward, he paused to watch the work crew around the building.
It was almost midday, with low gray clouds that threatened to dump their moisture on the land.
Thinking he saw a familiar face in the crew of prisoners, Jimu had paused to search his internal data banks. Now he brought up the information: Noah Watanabe, along with a summary of his biography and the charges against him.
The blond, mustachioed man working near him also looked familiar. Moments later, Jimu had his name, Anton Glavine, and all of the particulars on him, including his parentage: Doge Lorenzo del Velli and Francella Watanabe.
Concerned about finding such high-security prisoners on the work crew, Jimu did rapid scans on the others. None of them were anywhere near the caliber of these two.
The robot was deeply concerned. This was important work at the nehrcom station, but he didn’t think that such high-priority prisoners should be included in the assignment. It must be some sort of a mistake.
He activated the weapons systems on his torso, and took custody of the two men. “You will come with me,” he said, in an officious tone.
Three guards approached, weapons drawn. Jimu had the prisoners behind him inside a crackling energy field, a small electronic containment area.
As he argued with the guards, Jimu opened a comlink to his superior officer in the Red Berets, and notified her of what he had discovered. “I thought it best to protect the prisoners, and then ask for instructions,” he reported.
While the dedicated, loyal robot awaited further instructions, more guards appeared and surrounded him. None of them were robots and he knew he had the weapons systems to blast through if necessary. But he maintained his mechanical composure—a standoff.
Twenty minutes passed.
Finally, Jimu’s superior officer in the Red Berets appeared, a self-important woman named Meg Kwaid. She marched up to him sternly, followed by half a dozen uniformed soldiers. A tall woman with curly black hair, she smiled and said, “That was quick thinking, Jimu. This will look good in your personnel file.”
She ordered Jimu to release the two prisoners, and when he did, she assumed custody over them. “This pair is going back to prison,” Kwaid said.
Just before departing, she took a third man into custody … the work crew boss who had removed them from the prison in the first place.
“No one told me they were high-value prisoners,” the man protested. “I was only ordered to get the work done, and I didn’t have the manpower.”
His protests were to no avail. The man was put in a cell just down the corridor from Noah Watanabe.
Jimu returned to his own assignment, with his career path enhanced.
O O O
Among the Red Berets, Jimu’s machines were unusual: they were “breeding machines” that could locate the necessary raw materials and construct replicas of themselves. Since joining the force, Jimu had been supervising the construction of additional fighting units, more than quadrupling the number of machines he originally brought with him from the Inn of the White Sun. All of Jimu’s machines serviced themselves, and made their own energy pellets from raw materials, including carbon and mineral deposits.
Now, with the high demand for laborers, he was ordered to increase his production rate, adding a new type of machine—a worker-variant—to the fighting units he had been manufacturing. As with everything he did, Jimu completed this assignment with utmost efficiency. In short order, he had full production lines operational, producing both types of machines.
For this, and for his quick thinking in the Watanabe and Glavine extractions, he was promoted to a fourth-level Red Beret. This gave him access to more of the secret rituals, language, and symbols of the military society. Jimu just memorized them; he didn’t really understand why people were so fascinated with such matters.
But Jimu had a continuing problem.
The sentient machines under his command were being mistreated, jeered at and kicked by many of the Red Beret soldiers, especially whenever the Human men drank. Too often, alcohol was thrown at the robots to see if they would short out—a bitter, sticky drink called nopal that the men favored.
Through it all, the machines still remained loyal to their Human masters, and so did Jimu. Their internal programming did not permit them to do otherwise, and they had fail-safe mechanisms to make sure nothing went wrong.
***