episode 04

Debriefing

The tent flap opened, spilling sunlight into the tent and momentarily blinding the Regulars and technicians within. General Morgon’s aid stepped inside, followed by a conferencing droid, it’s live-transmission LED burning a bright green. Jupiter One called his soldiers to attention. They were immediately waived back down by General Morgon on the droid’s front display. The conferencing droid – headless and indeed lacking any native intelligence of its own, was being remotely steered by the General. It moved in to get a better look at the jumble of wires and metal and synchros and circuit boards splayed out on the table before the technicians.

“What do we have here, a metal-head?” boomed the General, as only a general could, through the conferencing droid’s otherwise inadequate speakers.

The technicians stood at nervous attention, as Aiche, the senior tech, began rolling off all pertinent information for the General: time and place of discovery, time of delivery, a surprisingly thorough progress report and analysis and an estimated time of task completion. The General, currently in orbit around the desert planet, smiled to himself all the while; he secretly got a kick out of putting fear into the pseudo-military personnel on base – in person or otherwise – watching them stand at rigid attention while rattling off a litany of information he only half followed himself.

“Very well. Carry on, Senior Tech.”

And the technicians went back to work. Like a team of surgeons, they worked – drilling out rust-frozen bolts, removing panels, disabling power cords and bypassing data cords – nonstop for another half hour until they were finished. A fourth technician had entered the tent and set up a work station complete with display visor and controls.

Himself a history buff, General Morgon navigated the droid to stand beside Jupiter One, in order to ask a sideways question every now and then – an extremely informal debriefing indeed.

“They said it was in working condition?” asked the General, doubtfully, the droid’s cameras transfixed on the dissection in progress.

And Jupiter One chimed in, “Well, Sir, the strider has apparently been in a low-level, hibernation for for the past few weeks, according to the techies – that puts it fully operational up to the very end of The Last Battle. They, ah, don’t know why, but the droid seems to be stuck in this low-level mode. It managed a word or two, though. That was something …”

They sat for a little longer in silence, as the techno-surgeons were finishing up, hooking up the robot’s storage drives to their portable work station and power supply. As an afterthought, the General added, “Anything significant?”

“It just said the word, ‘worrisome,’ a couple of times, believe it or not,” Jupiter One smiled.

“Worrisome?” The green monochrome display on the conferencing droid showed General Morgon giving in to a smile of his own and then taking a sip from an oversize coffee mug. “This whole bloody mess is worrisome.”

The technicians interrupted at that moment: “General, I think we found the message it was carrying.”