"Beats the hell out of me. I sic him on the cluckers, I guess. After that, well, maybe they send in their landers again, or they drop more rocks on us ... but I figure that's better than what's happening to us now, dying by centimeters. Or maybe we kick their circuits the hell off of Cloud, and we start rebuilding. All I know is that anything that happened would be better than what we have now."
Shari was nodding slowly, thoughtfully. "I don't know if you have a chance of fixing whatever they did to him. It has to be a hardwired job, not software."
"I was thinking the same thing. One of the people in my block, back at the camp, was Hector's maintenance crew chief."
Shari's eyebrows went up. "A short woman? Dark hair? Muscles likeў"
"Alita Kyle."
"That's her!"
"Sometimes I think Alita knows more about the nuts and bolts of a Mark XXXIII than the guys who designed the thing."
"She's good. I worked with her on some upgrades to his infinite repeaters, oh, about a year before The Killing."
"You know, Miss Barstowe," he went on, "it occurs to me that we're assembling quite a useful Bolo operations team here. A bunch of us are former military officers, and we know combat tactics and theory. Me. Colonel Prescott. And General Spratly, of course. You know him?"
"I know he's the nominal commanding officer of the camp, whatever that means. I never met him personally when he was at Chryse, though."
"Hmm. And then there's Dieter Hollinsworth. His specialty is high-energy physics. Tamas Reuter. He was an astronomer, but he also knows math . . . and computer theory. And now . . . you, if you'll join us.
We could sure use a cyberneticist. Otherwise, we're shooting in the dark when it comes to figuring out what's wrong with Hector."
"I ... don't know."
"Don't know if you can? Or don't know if you want to?"
"I don't know ... if I can keep going on. Things've been . . . bad, lately."
"Well, there's always tomorrow."
"What do you mean?"
"Work with us, and you've got hope," he told her. "Something to hang on to, anyway. And if it gets to be too much, if the hope isn't enough . . ."
"I can come back up here. Tomorrow."
"Will you join our little cabal? Help us out?"
She took a long time to answer. "I'll... try," she said at last.
"Maybe we should get on back, then," he said. "I don't think the cluckers make rounds up here. At least I've never seen them. But we don't want to be caught inside Hector's fifty-meter perimeter."
She sighed. "Another swim through the sewer."
"Believe me," he told her. "You can put up with lots worse."
"I already have."
