XXIV

"So we just let this... this... impostor lead us down the garden path to who knows what end?" Jack spluttered when Fidda told them of her conversation with his robotic likeness. It wasn't that he did not admire Fidda's cunning avoidance of giving the robot her word while making it believe she had. Jack rather liked that part. He didn't really even object to having one of the robots show them around this place. It was simply a matter of which robot she had chosen.

"It's got to be better than following your bloody, damned broken compass," Fidda growled back, shaking the japanned box in Jack's face.

"Careful!" Jack barked, lunged and seized it with both hands.

"Enough!" Amelia snapped before something happened to the compass. It had led them to the correct planet and the correct location on the planet. She reasoned, therefore, it had to be working and would likely prove quite useful when they wished to leave. "I'm not as adamantly opposed to your plan as Captain Sparrow is, Captain Silver, but I have my doubts. Captain Sparrow, we still have the compass..."

"My compass, you mean, Commodore," Jack hissed.

"We still have your compass," Amelia allowed, though she did so with ill concealed aggravation. "We will use it to make certain of our course. That, at least, will reduce the risk of this machine leading us astray."

Fidda gave Jack a saccharine sweet, yet mocking smile, then jerked the compass from his grasp. Jack frowned in frustration, but clamped his mouth tight.

"We will maintain vigilance as we proceed," Amelia went on as if nothing had occurred. "Keep the machines in view at all times and your weapons at the ready. Remember, they may be faster and stronger than we are and apparently do not need light to find their way in these tunnels. It may be that they are simply programed to know their way around but they might also be able to see in the dark. Two of them are obviously armed. However, that does not mean they would need weapons to harm or kill us. Do not turn your backs on any of them."

"No, my Green daughter. Do not eat that one."

Alamimo looked up into the wise old eyes of her Brown father. He was crouched upon a heavy branch just above her in the tree they called home. She had been reaching for a particularly succulent maduixa. It was plump and dark red with the little seeds clustered all over it. She had eaten many, many berries of just this sort but her father looked gravely at her and shook his head. Alamimo drew her hand cautiously away from the berry. Her father dropped nimbly to the forest floor towering over her and lifted a twig between his fingers. He winked at her and gently pushed her behind him. She watched looking over his knee as he reached out with the twig and poked the berry. Faster than the eye could see, the clusters of seeds flashed out into gleaming spines that dripped some sort of clear liquid. Very slowly the spines retracted and her father turned to look down on her.

"Not maduixa," he said. "Sotvier. Very dangerous. The spines, they go through your hand. In a few heartbeats you are asleep. You never wake. The sotvier spreads its seeds through you, and in the spring they burst into the air and float on the wind. They grow like this one and kill another to make more of themselves."

"But it looks just like a maduixa, father," Alamimo said confused. "How can I tell the one from the other?"

"Two ways without touching," her father said and stepped aside so that she could look more directly at the berry. He laid his hand over her primary eyes, forcing her to look with her crown. She suddenly saw very clearly the bluish veins running over the surface of the berry. Her father removed his hand. "Maduixa is all one color."

"What's the second way?" Alamimo asked, interested.

"Sotvier never grows in clusters," her father said. "Only one berry. Only one leaf. Only one plant,"

"What do we do with this one?" Alamimo asked, now concerned.

Her father smiled and gave her another wink. A few minutes later they sat next to his small fire in his hut perched in a crook of the thickest bow of the tree. The fire burned low with very little heat and was contained in a large bowl made from river clay. On the end of a stick the sotvier roasted just above the flame. It hissed as its needle-like spines burned away. Her father rotated it back and forth a few times, examining it before plopping it down on a slice of the coarse black bread he loved to bake. With the flat of his knife he spread the berry's pulp and juices into a thin layer, then handed it to his Green daughter. Smiling, she took her first tentative bite and found it... ambrosia.

Lieutenant Alamimo rolled lazily onto her side, rousing herself from the very sweet dream and thinking fondly of her father. It made her slightly homesick, but the feeling was tempered with the comforting memories. She sat up smiling and stretched. Why had she been dreaming of her father and that sotvier she had almost been killed by? The one she had then eaten in a sort of triumph. She had not thought of her father since the night in the tunnel back on Azha when she had drawn on his teachings to deal with the two mercenaries in the locked storage room. Odd, she thought.

And then she understood.

"Why do you keep looking at me like that?" the Jim robot asked Anamaria sullenly.

"You remind me of someone," the girl said truthfully. "I haven't seen him in a while."

The truth was that Anamaria was slightly disturbed by the copy of her... Was love the right word? She supposed it was as good a word as any to describe what Jim Hawkins meant to her. He was brave and handsome and any girl would be more than happy to have his affection. This metal version of him, though, was not so very inspiring. She understood this machine was not an accurate copy of the man she knew. It represented a boy a year or so younger than she was. The machine slouched and often glared with a slightly endearing pout. It was handsome in a way, but it was also unsettling because it was not flesh and blood. She tried to think of it as a statue that could move and speak, and that helped her get her mind around it.

"Well, I've never seen you before." The machine turned its face in the direction they were going. "I don't want to go to the place Jack's taking us."

"Really?" Anamaria asked. She was trying to sound disinterested but wanted very much to know the machine's reason.

"Really," the machine said flatly. It gave her that disconsolate look again.

"Where would you rather go?" Anamaria asked.

"Out of here," the Jim robot waved a hand at the general darkness of the tunnel. "I want to go someplace that isn't so closed in. I want to do something that isn't boring. I'm tired of people telling me what to do and how I should act. I mean, why can't they just get off my back? It's not like they care about me, or anything. They just want to keep me under control."

Anamaria frowned at this. The Commodore had warned the party to be careful of these machines, but this one just seemed like an unhappy boy. She felt sorry for it. Almost, she raised her hand to comfort the robot, but stopped herself. It was not alive. It was repeating words it had been taught; what Dr. Doppler called programing. She thought she understood that, at least a little. These machines were like parrots. They had been taught words and phrases, and they seemed to understand what those meant, but they weren't really speaking or thinking. They were just repeating them the way a bird would if it were prompted. She considered how to use that to get more information from it.

"Have you ever been to this place Jack is taking us?" she asked carefully.

"I don't remember it," the machine replied. "I might have passed by it or something. I don't know."

Odd. Her question was fairly straight forward and yet the machine had danced around a straight reply. Anamaria had spent her life dealing with liars who were out to make a quick shilling or two and she knew how to lie herself. By seeming to answer a question, you could get a long way towards what you wanted or get a long way away from what someone else wanted from you. Anamaria was sure the robot had just tried to do the latter.

"Do you know what the place is?" she asked as if just passing the time in idle curiosity.

"A room," the robot said. "There are machines inside. I don't care."

"At least you aren't bored," the girl said casually.

"I'm always bored," it replied immediately. "I want to go someplace that isn't so closed in."

There! It had used that sentence earlier. Not just a sentence like it. It had been the very same words delivered with the same tone and inflection. She almost smiled knowing she had just learned something of the way these machines thought. Or seemed to think. And why was it that these machines kept repeating similar phrases? Jack's copy wanted to escape the tunnels. Amelia's copy wanted to explore and find a way to the surface. Doppler's copy wanted to see the stars with its own eyes. And this copy of Jim wanted to go somewhere that wasn't so closed in. These were all sentiments she sympathized with and if she had not been so wary of the machines, she might have offered to take them away from this strange, desolate planet.

Anamaria suddenly felt cold in her belly. Fear prickled at the nape of her neck. Something was very, very wrong with the room the Jack robot was taking them to. She flexed her hand on the stock of her musket and laid her index finger alongside the trigger. She would not be going down without a fight.

"That makes four turns into new tunnels since we left their room," Mr. Grugh said to Mr. Brraadtt.

Brraadtt munched the last few pebbles of the bite of stone he had just taken from the doorway. He looked at Grugh questioningly.

"I'm just tryin' to keep track of things," Grugh said with a nervous tinge to his voice. "Ain't right down here. Whole place feels funny. Me horns have been itchin' since we left the ships. Gettin' worse, it is. And I don't think where we're goin' is goin' to be any better. Mark me words."

"Words marked," Brraadtt said seriously. In fact, Brraadtt didn't care for these tunnels much either. He'd grown up cultivating mushrooms on his parents' farm and had spent many long years either digging new tunnels or tending the old ones. Stone and rock were part of his daily life back then. Part of his diet even now. But these tunnels and these rocks were not right. The stone wasn't alive. This world tasted funny. There hadn't ever been real life here. There had been water and that should have brought life but something had happened before it could. Something unnatural.

Thought observed the intruders and its units as they proceeded along the main access corridor. Thought had dictated the route in order to confuse the intruders should they suddenly decide to leave. Thought was learning much from these creatures. The vessels they traveled in were very interesting and the data Thought had collected from the information storage devices was vital to Thought's plans. Logic dictated that if Thought were ever to reestablish the empire and reclaim what the Wheir had lost, Thought must send out probes and colonizers.

Probes would explore and observe, reporting back to the Archives all they found. Thought would then determine the most useful worlds to send the colonizers to. Factories would be built and those would in tern build more Wheir.

Thought would be cautious. The Whier had overreached the last time. The Wheir had encountered machines the like of which they had never seen. They had required a new classification; Creatures. And it was Creatures such as the intruders that had opposed the Wheir. They had fought. The Creatures could master machines. The Creatures built machines. Such had not been the case for eons out of time. Not since the Masters had first made the Wheir. And the Wheir had continued after the Masters had gone. Thus was the superiority of the Wheir established. And so it would be again.

"This is it," said the Jack robot. It turned and smiled at Fidda and would have pinched her had she not slapped the hand away.

"The compass points right at it, Commodore," Fidda said with a nod.

The party stood before a large, unremarkable door. It was somewhat wider than the doors they had seen up to this point but it was constructed in exactly the same fashion, steel plate and rivets with huge hinges obviously capable of carrying the great weight of the door. A control panel was fastened to the wall on the right but there was only a dark rectangle in the middle, no buttons or switches or even lights to indicate how one might open the bloody thing.

"How do we get in?" Amelia asked the machines.

"Very curious, it is," said the Amelia robot as it examined the control panel. It waved a hand over the dark rectangle with no result. The Doppler robot peered closely at the panel but shook its head with a frown.

"Stand aside, luv," the Jack robot said with a broad grin. It waved the other two away with a hand and stepped a little closer before leaning down and whispering, "It's me, Jack. Open up."

Everyone including Brraadtt waited expectantly, but in vain. The door did not so much as shiver.

"Come on," the Jack robot coaxed. "You let me in the last time I was here, luv. Don't be shy."

"Mr. Grugh," Amelia said, clearly unimpressed with the robot's attempts. "Please examine the panel. See if there is anything you could do."

Grugh passed his musket to Brraadtt and got out his tool kit before pushing the rambling Jack robot away. The robot was about to protest but a hard look from Grugh gave it pause. Sullenly it stepped away fishing its empty bottle from its pocket and miming taking a long pull.

"Looks to be a magnetic reader, ma'am," Grugh said after a moment's consideration. He drew a disc from his kit and laid it on the dark surface. This he turned slowly in one direction and then the other. After that failed he drew out another, slightly larger disc. Repeating the process yielded no visible result. Grugh then took a cylinder out and placed it at the center of the disc before depressing a button. Instantly there was a loud clang from beyond the door. A moment later the steel barrier swung smoothly on its massive hinges revealing a dark void within.