pick me up,” M-Bot suggested. “I’ll feel safer away from this public launchpad. There should be some kind of wire or connection at the building that will let me access the station’s public datanet. We can begin looking for information there.”
12
“My scan is complete,” M-Bot said. “I have deactivated the surveillance devices I found inside the building, and I’m pretty sure I found them all.”
“How many were there?” I asked as I poked around the top floor of the embassy building myself, turning on lights and looking through cabinets as I did.
“Two per room,” M-Bot said. “One obvious one hooked up to the network. They would likely feign surprise if you complained that you’d found it, claiming it was just part of the automation of the embassy. Then each room had a second on a separate line, hidden carefully near a power outlet.”
“They’ll find it suspicious that we disconnected those.”
“They might find it surprising that we found them, but in my experience—which is, granted, full of holes and half memories—this is the sort of thing that we’re supposed to politely ignore they did, while they’ll politely ignore our interference in their plans.”
I grunted, entering what was obviously a kitchen. Many of the drawers and things were labeled. Turned out I could hold my translator pin toward text, and it would read out for me what the words said. One faucet was labeled water, another was labeled ammonia, and a third saline. It seemed this place was set up to accommodate a variety of different species.
M-Bot had been right about the private launchpad on the embassy’s roof. Once I’d landed him, I’d plugged him into the datanet, and I’d started looking over the building from the top down. I had left Doomslug in the cockpit for now.
“I’m taking a general imprint of the datanet,” M-Bot continued, “which will hopefully let us mask which information we’re searching for, in case they’re monitoring our requests. There’s a surprising amount on here. The Superiority seems very free with information—though huge holes do exist. There is nothing about cytonics, and there are government warnings shutting down any discussion of hyperdrive technology.”
“It’s how they control their empire,” I said, “by deciding who gets to move where, and who gets to trade. I suspect that if a species falls out of favor, their taxes for travel suddenly go up—or they suddenly find that transports are visiting their world far less often.”
“You’re quite astute with the economics of that,” M-Bot noted.
I shrugged. “It’s not so different from what the caverns did to my mother and me, preventing us from joining normal society by forbidding us to hold real jobs.”
“Curious. Well, you seem to be right about how they maintain power. I also found an interesting tidbit about their technology level, specifically regarding holograms. The Superiority seems to be about equivalent to your people in that area—and nothing I’ve been able to find indicates they have access to stealth and holographic technology equal to mine.”
“So . . . ,” I said. “No small hologram projectors like in my bracelet?”
“No. From what I can determine, they won’t even know to watch for what you’re doing. As far as they know, that technology doesn’t even exist.”
“Huh. Then where did you get it?”
“I have no idea. They hate AIs though. So maybe . . . maybe I was created to be able to hide. Not just from the Superiority, but from everyone.”
I found that strange, even a little disturbing. I’d assumed that once we escaped Detritus, we’d find that everyone had ships like M-Bot.
“Anyway,” he continued, “do you want to get a rundown of what I found about the Superiority?”
“I suppose,” I said.
“There are five main species leading the government,” he said. “Three you’re unlikely to encounter—there are very few in residence on Starsight. So we’ll leave out the cambric, the tenasi, and the heklo for now. Most relevant to you are the varvax, which you insist on continuing to call the Krell. They are the crustacean creatures with the exoskeletons. The other species is the diones. They’re the species that Cuna belongs to.”
“Some are crimson, others blue,” I said. “Is that like humans, with our skin tones?”
“Not exactly,” M-Bot said. “It’s kind of like a gender distinction.”
“The blues are boys, the reds girls?”
“No, their biology is very different from yours. They have neither sex nor gender until they breed for the first time, whereupon they form a kind of cocoon with another individual. It’s really quite fascinating; as part of the