—
I left the hotel room because the front desk called to say I had to check out or they’d charge me for another night. Then I drove Trigger to Armstrong Down 4. Or, as the locals called it, Little Hungary. The Hungarians owned all the metalworking shops. Just like the Vietnamese owned Life Support and Saudis owned welding.
I pulled up next to the workshop of Dad’s colleague Zsóka Stróbl, who was apparently named during a severe vowel famine. She was a pressure-vessel specialist. When Dad got a contract to install an air shelter, he usually bought one from Zsóka. She made high-quality product and Dad’s all about quality.
I parked Trigger and rapped on the door. Zsóka slid it open a crack, peeked out with one eye, and spoke with a thick accent. “You want what?”
I pointed to myself. “It’s me, Mrs. Stróbl. Jazz Bashara.”
“You are daughter of Ammar Bashara,” she said. “He good man. You were nice little girl. Now you are bad.”
“Okay…look, I want to talk to you about something—”
“You are unmarried and have sex with many men.”
“Yes, I’m quite the harlot.”
Her son, Isvan, had banged more dudes than I ever had. I resisted the urge to tell her. “I just need to borrow something for a couple of days. I’m willing to pay you a thousand slugs for it.”
She opened the door a little wider. “Borrow what?”
“Your HIB.”
Zsóka had been around for the construction of both Bean and Shepard Bubbles. Bubble construction is a hell of a job (pays well too).
She and dozens of other metalworkers had made the slightly curved triangles that stacked on a frame to form the hull. The EVA masters assembled the pieces and added enough rivets to make a shitty, leaky pressure seal. Then Life Support kept the bubble fed with enough air to counteract the leaks while welders made the real seals from inside. Dad made good money off those jobs, I remember.
Ethical metalworkers like Zsóka regularly inspect their work. But how do you look at the outside of the hull without being a trained, licensed EVA master? With a hull-inspection bot. “HIB” for short.
They’re really just R/C cars with claws instead of wheels. The outer hulls of Artemis are covered in handles to ensure access for maintenance. HIBs use those handles to get wherever they want. Seems inefficient, eh? Well, it’s the only way to climb up the side of a bubble. The aluminum isn’t magnetic, suction cups and propellers don’t work in a vacuum, and a rocket engine would be stupidly expensive.
“Why you want HIB?” she asked.
I’d worked out a lie in advance. “The Shepard relief valve is leaking. Dad was the one who installed it. He wants me to check the weld site.”
Keeping Artemis at constant pressure is tricky. If people use more power than usual, the city becomes slightly over-pressurized. Why? The power becomes heat, which increases the air temperature, and that makes the pressure go up. Normally, Life Support pulls air out of the system to compensate. But what if that doesn’t work?
So as a fail-safe, the city has relief valves in every bubble. If the pressure gets too high, they’ll open and let air out until it’s back to normal.
“Your father never makes bad weld. Must be other problem.”
“I know that and you know that, but we have to rule it out.”
She thought it over. “How long you need?”
“Just a couple of days.”
“One thousand slugs?”
I pulled out my Gizmo. “Yeah. And I’ll pay in advance.”
“You wait.” She slid the door closed.
After a minute, Zsóka opened the door again and handed me a case. I checked inside to make sure everything was there.
The mechanical bug was thirty centimeters long. Its four movement claws were folded into their stow position and the tool arm formed a “7” shape along the top of the robot. That arm had a high-definition camera on the end and basic clamping and grabbing actuators. Perfect for poking at things and recording the results—exactly what you need when remotely inspecting a hull. And also what I needed for my nefarious plan.
She handed me the remote—a sleek little device with knobs and joysticks surrounding a video screen.