“I . . . might have an idea,” I said. “But it’s probably going to be a tad messy. And dangerous.”
Rig sighed. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected otherwise.”
About an hour later, I climbed into M-Bot’s cockpit, nearly trembling with excitement. I placed Doomslug in the seat behind me, then did up my buckles.
My little cavern looked bare now that we’d packed up my kitchen and all of Rig’s equipment. We’d stowed what we could in the cockpit, and had hauled the rest out through the crack using my light-line. Rig waited a safe distance away. I got to do the fun part myself.
And, like most “fun parts,” it would involve breaking things.
“You ready?” I said to M-Bot.
“I have basically two states,” he said. “Ready, and powered down.”
“Needs work as a catchphrase,” I said. “But the sentiment is pretty cool.” I rested my hands on the control sphere and the throttle, breathing in and out.
“Just so you know,” M-Bot said. “I could hear what you two were saying earlier, when you were whispering. The part where Rodge said I was insane.”
“I realized you could probably hear,” I said. “You are a surveillance ship, after all.”
“AIs can’t be insane,” he said. “We can only do what we’re programmed to do. Which is the opposite of insanity. But . . . you’d tell me, right? If I start to sound . . . off?”
“The mushroom thing is a little over the top.”
“I can sense that. I also can’t help it. The mandate is very strong inside me. Along with my pilot’s last words.”
“Lie low. Don’t get into any fights.”
“And wait for him. Yes. It’s why I can’t let you reveal me to your DDF, even if I know it would help you and your people. I simply must follow my orders.” He paused. “I am worried about you taking me into the air. Did my pilot mean ‘lie low’ as in ‘stay underground,’ or did he merely mean ‘don’t let yourself be seen’？”
“I’m sure he meant the second,” I said. “We’ll just do a quick flight around the area.”
“It will not be ‘quick,’ ” he said. “With only maneuvering thrusters, we’ll fly about as fast as you can walk.”
Good enough for now. I engaged the acclivity ring, raising us smoothly. I pulled up the landing struts, turned us around in a slow circle, then dipped us to one side and then the other. I grinned. The controls were similar enough, and there was an energy to the responses that my Poco simply didn’t have.
Now, how to get out of the cavern. I tipped the acclivity ring backward on its hinges, which in turn tipped M-Bot’s nose up. I launched the light-lance, spearing it into a cracked portion of the ceiling. I pulled back, using the rotational thrusters, then lowered the power of the acclivity ring. That gave us some force, even without a booster.
The light-lance went taut. Dust and chips of stone streamed down from the ceiling. Doomslug mimicked the sound from behind me, fluting in an energetic, excited way.
A portion of the ceiling collapsed in a shower of rock and dust. I disengaged the light-lance, looking up through the hole. There was no skylight nearby, so above was a dark uniform greyness. The sky.
“Can your hologram create a projection of a new roof?” I asked M-Bot.
“Yes, but it will be less secure,” he said. “Sonar imaging can see through the hologram. But . . . It feels like so long since I’ve seen the sky.” He seemed wistful, though he would probably claim that was some kind of programming quirk.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Come on. Let’s fly!”
“I . . .,” M-Bot said softly. “Yes, all right. Let’s go! I do want to fly again. Just be careful, and keep me out of sight.”
I raised us up through the hole, then waved to Rig, who was standing with our things a short distance away.
“Engaging stealth mechanisms,” M-Bot said. “We should now be invisible to DDF sensors.”
I grinned. I was in the sky. With my own ship. I slammed the throttle forward.
We stayed in place.
Right. No booster.
I engaged the maneuvering thrusters, which were intended more for fine-tuned positioning than they were for actual movement. And we started flying. Slooooooowly.
“Yippee?” M-Bot said.
“It is kind of a letdown, isn’t it?”
Still, I did a small loop for Rig, with diagnostics running. When I completed the circle, he gave a thumbs-up, then settled his pack on his shoulder and started hiking off. He had to get back to Igneous to return the sealing equipment.
I couldn’t quite persuade myself to land. After all this time, I wanted to fly a little longer with M-Bot. So I grabbed the altitude lever. The control sphere could make the ship bob up and down, powering the acclivity ring for the finer points of dodging. But if you wanted a quick ascent, this was the way.
I eased it toward me.
We shot upward into the sky.
I hadn’t expected it to work this well. We rocketed upward, and I felt g-forces slam into me, forcing me down. I cringed, noting how fast we were going, and eased off the lever. That kind of g-force would . . .
. . . crush me?
I felt the acceleration, but not nearly as much as I should have. I couldn’t be pulling more than three Gs, though I felt like it should have been much more.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Can you be more specific? I have over a hundred and seventy semiautonomous subroutines that—”
“The g-forces,” I said, looking out the window, watching the ground retreat at an alarming pace. “I should be blacking out about now.”
“Oh, yes. That. My gravitational capacitors are capable of belaying sixty percent of g-forces, with a maximum threshold of well over a hundred Earth standard. I did warn you that your ships had primitive systems for handling pilot stress.”
I let off on the altitude lever, and the ship stopped accelerating.
“Would you like to engage rotational g-force management for further help withstanding the forces?” M-Bot asked.
“Like where my seat turns around?” I asked, remembering what Rig had explained about M-Bot. Humans didn’t do well with g-forces in the wrong directions—it was much harder for us to take downward forces, for example, because they pushed all the blood in our bodies into our feet. M-Bot could compensate for that by rotating the seat, so that I took the forces backward—in a way easier for my body to handle.
“Not for now,” I said. “Let me first get used to how you fly.”
“Very well,” M-Bot said.
We quickly reached 100,000 feet, which was around the highest that we flew DDF ships in regular situations. I reached to decelerate, but hesitated. Why not go a little higher? I’d always wanted to. Now, nobody was there to stop me.
I kept us going, soaring upward until the altitude indicator hit 500,000 feet. There, finally, I slowed us, admiring the view. I’d never been so high. The mountain peaks below looked like nothing more than crumpled-up paper. I could actually see the planet curving—and not merely some faint arc either. I felt as if I could stretch onto my toes and see the whole planet.