“That’s not the only reason you called,” I say.

“No.” I can see the logic mill behind the imago switch streams; they’re responsive, but not truly conscious. “I’m still in… trouble I can’t go into, Freya, but you can help me with it. But you can only help me if you accept the Block Two upgrade and work with my friends. Do you understand?”

Oh great: moral blackmail. I admit I’ve been in trouble a time or two, but I haven’t needed bailing out of indentured servitude since the time when the baroque ensemble split up and I… no, I’ve mostly kept to myself. But I’ve got to admit, if I set aside my outrage at being used as camouflage by a cabal of scheming elder sisters, I’m curious about what this cryptic skill-upgrade package comes with, especially now I know that Juliette was one of the gang. “Okay, so you want me to load one of your Block Two sibs and keep working for JeevesCo. I loaded Juliette back on Mercury, you know? Is there anything else you can tell—”

I stop, balling my fists in frustration. The imago has autoerased, and I’m talking to dead air. What next? I wonder, staring at the ceiling and counting the seconds (thirty-two million, give or take) until our arrival in Mars orbit.

THEY’RE WAITING FOR me as I roll through the doorway, taking it low and fast: another pair of bonsai ninja, their camouflage suits shimmering in the light of the setting moon. They’ve got guns, and they’re sneaking up on the entrance, doubtless hoping to take me unawares. I don’t have a gun, but the baton in my left sleeve slides into my hand smoothly, and as I kick off, I’m already swinging it, feeling the depleted uranium sphere at its tip lance out toward the nearer gunman’s head.

There’s a sharp tug at my side, and he jerks sideways, neck bending unnaturally as I take another light-footed step, leaning backward to compensate for my momentum as I try to swerve the two-meter-long club toward his companion, who is bringing his weapon to bear. But my left leg chooses that moment to malfunction—

A blurred line flickers through my visual field and slices him in half as I topple over backward and land in the dirt.

The pain hits me then, intense and localized. I’m leaking perfusion fluid, blue and bubbly with squandered mechanosomes in the cold moonlight. I look up at the hissing roar and the familiar three-eyed face. “Babe?”

I struggle for words: parts of me feel wrong, and I can’t tell which. “Take the sampler, Daks; I’m a mission kill. The sextons will be here in a minute.”

Daks lands on top of me with all six legs extended and his fur bristling. “The fuck I will!” He sounds pissed off.

“Leave me!” I can feel the hollow thudding through the small of my back as the sextons leap into action. I try to reach inside my coat, but Daks is too heavy to dislodge. The damage must be worse than I thought. With any luck they won’t be able to add me to their picket fence. It’s a small consolation, and I hold on to it for a moment, but then I realize Daks is gripping my coat really tight. “Hey, don’t be stupid—”

Grit, dust, and dirt blows everywhere as Daks lifts off. It’s like being grabbed by a miniature tornado. There’s no way he could manage this in a full-gee field, and even here he’s got to be overloading his thrusters; I’m scared he won’t even make it to the edge of the garden—

But then I’m lying on my back again. I blink, making tears of antifreeze flow. My vision clears slowly as I hear the usually inaudible chatter of my subroutines taking stock. Anything else broken? No? Good. How’s the hole? Still leaking, down to 50 ml/minute. Bubbles of viscous silicone lube slide down my cheeks as I turn my head sideways. Daks sits beside me, looming anxiously across my visual field. “Babe? You alright? Talk to me! Babe?”

“I’m still here. Mostly. Take my soul—”

“We’re next to the spider and I’m out of fuel and I don’t seem to have packed my fission thorax. Can you get in?”

Shit. I roll my head the other way and try not to giggle as the landscape flips. Thud go the sextons, on the other side of the wall. I feel light-headed. Hey, this could be fun! The spider squats enticingly close, door open, amber light flooding across the ground between us — an impossible expanse of desert, continental in scale. The pain is making me woozy, so I switch it off — risky, but I need a clear head to manage what Daks wants me to do. I experiment, make my hand twitch. Hmm. “Watch me.”

It takes me uncounted minutes to roll over and crawl two meters. There’s a grinding sharpness in my left abdominal compartment, and my left arm feels like it’s about to come off. Something inside it is bent or broken, something major and structural. I listen for the thump of the sextons all the way, expecting a crushing impact on my back at any moment. But nothing happens, and after a while I begin to hope that Daks’s unexpected lift and my own enfeebled crawl have combined to bamboozle them. Finally — recovering from another head-swimmingly vacant moment — I reach out and grab the edge of the spider’s hatch with my right hand.

“Nearly there, Babe.”

“One day.” I make my arm bend. I don’t weigh enough here. Back on Earth I could just barely lift myself this way. Here… why do I seem to weigh too much?

“Nearly—”

I get my other, weakened, arm onto the hatch. My fingers don’t want to close properly, so I shove my wrist over the gap between hatch and windscreen. My right arm contracts, levering me upright as I struggle to get my damaged left arm braced against the rocky ground—

“One day I’m going to—”

“There!” Daks bleats encouragement at me.

“Tell you how much I—”

Flop. For a moment everything grays out, then I realize I’m sitting in the driver’s chair. My right arm is still locked on. I make my fingers let go, willing them, one by one, then reach down and tug my numb leg into position.

“Quickly!” I feel a faint vibration through my buttocks. “They’ve figured it out!”

“How much I.” Hate you, I think. “Love you,” I say aloud. I drop my good right hand onto the controller. “You tied down?”

“Yeah, Babe. Babe? Make it move.”

I squeeze the spider’s control nipple. Forget the cover story; we got the goods. “Home to Jeeves,” I slur. Then I go into preterminal shutdown mode, and nothing matters anymore.

THE VENERABLE GRANITA Ford takes almost the entire voyage to make her play for me. Her seduction technique is polished, professional, painstaking, and chilly in its perfection. I am helpless before her slow approach; it feels as if she knows exactly where I am most vulnerable.

(Or perhaps I deceive myself. Maybe she’s just spinning it out to relieve the boredom. In truth, ninety days in a metal bubble falling between worlds, with only scoundrels and their slaves for company, has left me fretful and frustrated. I passed through this stage years ago on Venus, where I was so unfashionable that eventually I almost convinced myself I no longer cared that nobody wanted me; but recent events have reawakened my need for intimacy. And among my kind, intimacy is a powerful and compelling drive. We need to be needed, and though we do not die for lack of sex, we become something less than ourselves.)

By seventy days into the journey, all Granita has to do is crook her little finger at me and beckon to set me all a-shiver. Which is exactly what she wants, obviously. Trying to resist your designated purpose is hard, and the stronger your eusocial conditioning, the worse it gets. A road grader with no roads to roll will be unhappy, but that level of frustration pales into insignificance when compared to one of my kind who is forced into celibacy. So I remind myself that what counts is keeping one’s head and one’s autonomy the morning after, and resign myself to an indefinite period of jelly-kneed hunger.