need his help for this?”
“Tweaks are mostly dataside,” Zhi said, surveying the gear. “That I can handle.” Hopefully. But Solomon wasn’t any better at patching code together than she was. Zhi glanced up at Alpha Zero with a frown. If we can’t get the OS up, after all of this . . .
She pushed the worry down into the same pit she’d shoved the rage. Later.
“Looks like everything’s going neat-an’-clean,” she said aloud. “I’ll have Sol get in touch with you for those last few pieces. I’m sure you’ve got scholar stuff to attend to, yeah?”
Kas glared at her. “Are you going to cancel the bet? I got what you wanted.”
“Better not,” Zhi said. “Sorry. You could turn me in to the House otherwise.”
“I figured,” Kas said, with a long-suffering sigh. “In that case I’m going to stay right here, and make sure you don’t run out on me now that you’ve got what you want.”
Zhi wasn’t sure exactly how the scholar intended to stop her if she did want to welch on their agreement, but given Kas’s expression she decided not to argue. She summoned the cart to drop its load on a lifter in the corner, then rode up with the scrap to the gantry, where she could get to Alpha Zero’s cockpit. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Kas look around for a seat, then flop moodily onto a monocrete block in one corner. She pulled an old-style book from the pocket of her coverall and started reading, after a couple of false starts figuring out how to turn the pages.
Figuring that it was safest to ignore her for the moment, Zhi set to sorting through what Solomon had sent her. Mostly it was bits and pieces of machines that were broken but contained some infotech component that might be useful, so the first step was disassembling them to get at the intact pieces. This was long and tedious work, removing mag-screws and unsoldering boards one at a time until some critical processing unit or conduit came into view. Zhi bent to it diligently, a curl of smoke rising from her laser cutter to coil lazily in the air above her. From time to time, she glanced up at Kas, who was staring ferociously at her book, looking increasingly annoyed. Finally, Zhi couldn’t take it anymore.
“Not enjoying the story?” she said as she cut through the fasteners on a fixed-width six-way entangled bus.
“The what?” Kas snapped.
“The book.”
“It’s something about tribal warfare in the pre-spaceflight era. Spears and combustion engines, that sort of thing.”
“It looks like it’s bothering you.”
“It’s not bothering me.” Kas frowned. “It’s just broken, like everything else on this stupid planet. It doesn’t hyperlink, you can’t get definitions for anything, and I keep losing my place.”
Zhi tried to stifle a laugh, but couldn’t quite manage it. Kas shot her a nasty look.
“Like to see you navigate a six-sided political-romance-polygon sim,” the scholar muttered.
“Dunno what that is,” Zhi said, finally working the conduit free, “but it sounds killer, yeah?”
Kas looked back down at her book for a few moments, trying to focus, then let out another long sigh and tossed it aside.
“So what’s eating you?” Zhi said as she pondered the next piece.
“Apart from being blackmailed into helping with a crazy scheme that in all probability will ruin my career and get me sent for reeducation?”
“Sure,” Zhi said. “Apart from that.”
Kas looked up at her for a moment, as though considering her options, then slumped back against the wall. “I had a talk with the senior scholar on our mission this morning. She made it clear that I’m not going to be allowed to do any real work while I’m here on Earth, even if I manage to resolve this insanity.”
Zhi chuckled. “Off-worlders never do any real work anyway, yeah? You still get fed-an’-watered, so what does it matter?”
“It’s—never mind.” Kas settled her chin against her chest. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” Zhi said. “Picking these DNA capacitors off this thing is boring as slag, yeah?”
“I’d offer to help,” Kas muttered, “but I’m sure I’d only fuck things up.”
“Probably.”
There was a long pause.
“I’m a third-wave,” Kas said eventually. “Scholar Zychtykas Three. You know what that means?”
“Not really.” Zhi’s tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth as she extracted a particularly stubborn capacitor with a pair of fine-point tweezers. Tiny organic threads connecting it to the board snapped and curled up, one by one.
“It’s down to when your ancestors left Earth,” Kas said.