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For the rest of the afternoon I played around, pretending to be interested and, truthfully, feeling too excited to be bored. I even managed to wake up a ‘bot that swept floors, which Walter said would impress the Captain as it was something he could show off easily. It wasn’t hard, and the drone had done most of the work. When the work shift was over, we left the yard and started to walk back towards the lab.
‘How far is it to the palace from here?’ I asked.
‘Not far,’ Walter replied. ‘The buggies sometimes have to go a long way round. It’s actually closer to the yard than the lab is, if you use a few shortcuts.’
‘Why don’t we walk back?’ I asked, doing my best to keep my voice casual. ‘Or is it out of your way?’
‘Kind of. I still have to get back to the lab before I can go home.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. I still needed to be on Walter’s good side. I was disappointed, though.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it. It’s still early, and if I get back sooner I just have to do more work. I’ll show you the way.’
And I concentrated very, very hard on the route he showed me. I kept looking over my shoulder, checking to see how it would look going the other direction, and trying to memorise any obvious markers for each change in direction. It wasn’t until Walter pointed ahead and said ‘There it is,’ that I realised I could have told the drone to remember the route for me.
Walter had been right. The palace, or rather the entrance to the apartments adjacent to it, was no more than a twenty minute walk from the yard. There were guards all over the entrance, though, which worried me. Not for getting in, but for getting out.
We needed to do some fast talking, but we eventually managed to convince the Guards that I should be in there, and one of them left the door long enough to escort me back up to the apartment. I think what did it was me reminding them to send a message to the Exxoh to tell him I had come back without the buggy.
As soon as the door closed behind me, Pitr and Alyssa were dragging on my arms to pull me into one of the bedrooms. I went along, reluctantly. I was bone tired, and whilst I wanted to be in a bedroom, I wanted to be alone with the bed and soft lights, not facing my two friends who were trying to pump me for news.
‘But I thought you had a plan,’ said Pitr when I told them I had nothing new to say.
‘No,’ I argued. ‘You said I didn’t have much of a plan. I don’t have a plan. Not yet, anyway.’
‘There must be something we can do,’ said Alyssa, starting to sound angry and frustrated.
‘All right,’ I said, letting them feel I was giving in to them. ‘There is something you might be able to do.’
I told them about the messengers, and described in as best detail as I could what the uniform they wore looked like, and what colour it was.
‘If you two could start playing with the clothes machine and see if you can come up with something close to that, it would be a real help. I don’t think you should actually order any, but it would be good to know if we can make something that looks the same.’
‘We can do that,’ said Alyssa.
I needed time talking with the drone, and left Alyssa and Pitr to their own company. They seemed happy enough in it. I was almost certain that the Go-yen could not see or hear inside the apartment, because of what Walter had said about Messengers, but I wasn’t absolutely sure. That, and I didn’t want Pitr blurting something out where a guard could overhear. I lay on the bed, pretending to sleep, and woke the drone.
I had picked up two bits of essential information. With no debonder working, and with the only way they could change things being a pickaxe, the map in the drone would still be accurate. So the first thing I did was tell the drone to show me a route from the machinery yard to a place in a tunnel where there were no more intersecting corridors. It must have been a more challenging question than I thought, because the drone took several minutes before it flashed a small map up in my eyes with the suggested route marked in green. It was farther than I had hoped.
Next, I asked the drone if it had a plan of the building the apartment was in. It dug around for a while, then told me it did. Then I told it to find me a way to get out the back door, but that I couldn’t use the back door or the door leaving the apartment. It was still thinking about that one when I went to sleep.
When I woke, the drone was patiently waiting to tell me it had an answer. There was no way out of the apartment without going past the guards, nor was there any way out of the building without going past the guards at either the front steps or the service entrance. I wasn’t surprised. The upside was that the drone did have a good map of the building. I had a plan to get us past the guards at the back. All I needed was a lucky break to get us past the guards at our door.
It took me two more days to find what I was hoping I would discover, and that was a day longer than it should have done. I wasted most of a day digging through boxes of anonymous knickknacks and talking to each one to decide what it was when I could have told the drone to inventory everything it could talk. I found, and activated, a couple of useful gadgets, but I put these aside to use as a distraction later.
Mid-afternoon on the second day of the ‘big search’, the drone reported back with a list of working items. It pointed me in the direction of a thick stick about 15cm long, only a couple of millimetres wide at one end, then flaring out to as thick as my thumb at the other. I poked at it and it came back with the message that it was a ‘Detail Debonder’. I asked it if it had any usage restrictions, and it came back with a ‘no’. I had found it.
I figured something like this had to exist. Back home, for just about everything big, there was a smaller equivalent. I had pinned everything on this being true for the debonder. Now all I had to do was get it out of the building and back to the apartment.
I held the mini-debonder in my hand as I wandered around the shelves, apparently musing over which box to work on next. As I moved, I watched who was around and when they could see me, then I slowly, casually, smoothly moved through a blind spot, slipping the debonder into my pocket and picking something vaguely the same shape off the shelf without stopping. What I hoped was that nobody would see the switch, and that the debonder wouldn’t make a shape in my pocket. I had deliberately chosen loose trousers that morning, but all it needed was for the debonder to sit awkwardly, or to catch the fabric with a point and make it hang unnaturally. I had to fight the urge to keep putting my hand in my pocket to check it wasn’t sticking out.
As the day drew to a close I showed Walter the items I had found. Nothing proved to be interesting enough to bring Cmdr. Naal over to see, but they were enough that a report would go back to the Exxoh that I was still trying. And my tests on the analyser had shown a 2% rise each day, so it was unlikely that they would suddenly decide I wasn’t worth the effort. In the meantime I was building a reputation as being trustworthy.
I went back to the apartment, dragging the others into the bedroom as soon as the doors were shut.
‘We’re leaving,’ I said, a huge grin spreading over my face.