“Awake — oh?” someone squeaks behind me.

I do not jump off the container. It’s Bilbo, by daylight a rust-streaked iron centipede with a low-gee sensor head. “Yes, thank you,” I say as graciously as I can. “Where are we?” Looking past him, I see another column of containers vanishing into the distance. Creators know, this thing’s huge!

“On the northbound spinward freightmaster conveyance for Jupiter! ” Bilbo is chirpy this morning. “Half the containers on this beautiful machine are marshaled for the great jump into night via Marsport,” he adds. “I thought it would please you?”

“Oh, Bilbo.” I lean forward, smiling. “Thank you!” Best not to think about how I slept, insensate, as he and his friends lifted me atop the container. “That’s wonderful.” A thought strikes me. “But why are you…?”

“One yard’s as good as another!” he trills. “The bulls always come around dawn, besides. Best to be outwith their scope before the baton charge, indeedy.”

“How long…?” I’m all questions, I find, even though I’m running on an empty digester and a not-too-flush battery — the chilly Martian nights have really taken it out of my cells.

“Two days, maybe three.” He shrugs. I suppress a wince. (I’ve got four days to make it to my ship; it’s going to be tight. I can pay for a STO shuttle seat if I need to, if there’s no time to ride the Bifrost climbers, but… ) “Beautiful vistas, plentiful doss space, what’s lacking?”

“Is there anywhere to get a top-up?” I roll to my knees, take stock of the state of my clothes. My dress is filthy and torn, but it’s not quite as badly melted as I thought.

“Juice is over the edge.” He gestures at the gap between containers, and I swallow reflexively. “’Tis a socket above yon starboard buffer, free for the taking.” He does a sort of mincing sideways dance step, clattering on the container’s roof. “Welcome to my penthouse! The furnishings be sparse, but the view is unmatched, and the air’s as fresh and free as any.”

I spend the next two and a half days camping on the roof of a cargo container with Bilbo. To my surprise, it’s a good time for me. My thoughts keep circling back to Petruchio, and I keep gnawing at the wound, but it’s a hollow kind of pain. I know I’m in love with him — or Juliette is in love with him, and I’m absorbing the neural weightings from her soul chip, so I’m piggybacking on her love reflex — but I also know he’s unattainable, and when you get right down to it, what’s changed? I already knew my One True Love was dead. Now I know he’s heading for Saturn while I’m heading for Jupiter, he’s owned by my enemy, and he doesn’t want me anyway.

As the days pass, Bilbo tells me about himself, and I tell him about me, and we swap heartbreaks and laugh at each other’s tragedies. He’s about sixty Earth years old: the obsolete spawn of a lineage of miners, hardy souls built to gouge seams of carbon-rich goop out of near-Earth asteroids back when mining was a job for vermiform intelligences. (These days, they pick a small asteroid, spin a bag around it, add water, focus sunlight on it, then beam ultrasound into it until it emulsifies. Then they suck it dry.)

Sacks of semiliquid sludge that can be fed directly into the refineries’ maws may be an improvement over processed gravel, but it means unemployment for the hardy miners who used to slither between the bedding planes and wield drills and demolition charges.

“They let me go,” Bilbo declaims, turning the statement around to examine it from different angles. “They let me go.”

Actually, his owners abandoned him — along with the dozen sibs of his work gang — on a played-out seam inside a dirtball that was no longer economical to work. They even stripped out his slave controller to save money, for whips and chains are worth more than a broken down ex-arbeiter. It was an act of evil neglect that would have risen to the dizzy height of attempted murder had Bilbo and his mates been legal persons in the first place.

“But we sailed away, on a pea green sea, in a boat with a runcible spoon,” he sings to me.

I’m not entirely sure just how Bilbo escaped, although I am pretty certain that no runcible spoons were involved. Certainly he spent one solar maximum too many gripping the outside of a cobbled-together raft, bathed in radiation that turned his brain to the consistency of pumice and left him with the most peculiar speech impediment. He said it took him seven years to make landfall on a neighboring rock, by which time two-thirds of his mates were dead and half the survivors were insane. But having beached his raft at last, he strode ashore with a steely gleam in his eye and sold his damaged, prosody-infested tale to a yarn-spinning news server who paid him off with incorporation and a one-way steerage ticket as far as Marsport, from which he promptly descended — “I always yenned to see the world with an horizon a-curved!” — and fell in love with a bleak frozen desert crisscrossed by the steel tracks of destiny.

There’s not a vindictive strut in his fuselage, I’ll swear. Even now, thinking about him brings a tear to my eye.

I tell Bilbo my story — or as much of it as I think he can cope with. I leave out names and places and dates, and some of the most painfully intimate incidents, the petty tragedies and sordid wastes of a century and a half adrift without a destiny. But the pattern of it — of my pointless sojourn in the cloud-casinos of Venus, my alternating bursts of frenetic activity and depressive withdrawal back on Earth, and the frantic scampering and masquerading that I’ve been dragged into ever since Stone and the Domina clapped eyes on me seven months ago — I can share. Whatever goes into Bilbo’s spike-studded head isn’t going to come out of it again in anything like a decipherable form. He’s an enigma, but a friendly one, and I need a shoulder to cry on, even though it’s so cold up here that real tears would turn to crystal and shatter as they fall. And at night, we plug into the open socket on the back of the freight car and cuddle up together, sharing body warmth beneath the foam-foil wrappers. I’d share more if I could, but alas, he’s not equipped for physical intimacy — another of the evils his owners inflicted on him.

On the afternoon of the third day we roll toward a distant cliff on a horizon stained the ominous reddish gray of an impending dust storm. There’s a hole in the cliff, into which our train rumbles. “Your terminus is trip-tight opening off the light at the end of the tunnel,” Bilbo warns me after a while. “Be not afrit and embrace the encomium of your legions. Adieu!”

I think he means “good-bye.”

“Are you sure?” I shout, over the rumbling and rattling that rebounds from the walls of the tunnel.

“Adieu!” he says again, then points. I can feel the train slowing as it rises. Then the tunnel gives way to a canyonlike cutting, up which we grind at perhaps thirty kilometers per hour. A handful of minutes pass as the cutting grows shallow, and I see the horizon opening out over its rim — a horizon with a sharp cutoff. We’ve threaded a needle through the rim wall of Pavonis Mons, and we’re barely two hours away from the fringes of Marsport.

I take a deep, unproductive breath — the air is already vanishingly thin up here, barely of any use to my gas exchanger — and nod. “I’ll remember you!” I call. And then I pick up my shoulder bag and prepare to dive once again into the chaos of my secret-agent life.