Tankred braced in his seat as the shuttle bounced and lurched through Farlong's atmosphere. He rubbed a palm on his pant leg and tried thinking of something amusing to talk about. He had almost wiped his hand on his shirt until he remembered he was wearing his prized Hammer Ring t-shirt from Chandra '52 tour, (not one of the printed bootlegs, either, but actual tour merch with the authenticity seals intact!) He made sure his coveralls didn't cover the logo or seals as he forced himself to think over the drone of wind whistling over the hull and the stabilizer buzz.

  He couldn't believe his luck, Ella was flying the shuttle today. He had to stop staring at the blonde wisp loose from her ponytail. He very much wondered what would happen if he reached out to tuck it behind her ear. Lose a hand, probably.

  Get it together, Tankred!

  He couldn't waste this rare chance to talk with her alone. He should say something. Something amusing, maybe funny or smart too, but above all else something interesting.

  He cleared his throat. "They say there's slugs down there are as big as groundcars."

  "Mmm," Ella said, and flipped a switch. Tankred's stomach dropped with the shuttle and bounced when Ella leveled out. His lunch started looking for an escape route, and he screwed his eyes shut as he swallowed and counted in his head until his insides settled.

  "Good thing they're vegetarians, right?" said Ella.

  Tankred opened his eyes as the turbulence disappeared and lush green eyes looked back at him in a mirror mounted over the viewscreen. He hoped the crinkle at the corner of her eyes was from an amused smirk and not a pity smirk. What was he talking about? Oh yes, slugs.

  "Vegetarians, right. And slow too. I'd hate to have to shoot one."

  "I didn't think they gave robot techs guns."

  "Well, no, not really but you'd be surprised what some of my tools could do." Had he really just said that?

  She glanced away. "Uh-huh. Well if you run into something you and your tools can't handle, be sure to call for a dust-off."

  "You'll come pick me up?"

  She fidgeted with a knob below a scope. "Whoever's on the duty roster, Tankred. After I drop you off, I'm supposed to pick up up the geology team eight hundred clicks north-east of here. So you might get the other shuttle."

  "Oh. Okay." He tried making it sound cheerful, casual even. He wondered if he was bothering her too much. He'd focus on his job. He'd make sure she'd see him focus on his job.

  He reviewed the file again on his cube. The Hammer Ring logo (synchronized to his shirt, naturally) dissolved at his touch, and today's work order appeared. Some dumb probe bot had an overload and exploded but not so badly it couldn't be retrieved for salvage. Really, it was a job a drone frame could have handled, but as Mona Lisa liked to remind its crew, if it wanted everything done by drones, why bother lugging biologicals around the universe?

  It gave him a job, though. He pulled up the details on the job and clocked the submind. Of course it was 342. Probe 342 had always been something of a problem child, the bot mind never quite melding with the frame it was downloaded into. In fact, most of the stickiest problems Tankred faced in as a tech had involved 342 in one way or another. Rather than relief, the thought of never working with 342 again saddened him.

  Ella flicked a finger against her scope's screen a few times and then slapped its panel.

  "Problems?" Tankred asked.

  "Sensors' glitching. They always give me Islesworth instead of DeVille."

  "Nothing but the best for clonestock. You should put in a request for an overhaul."

  She frowned. "The deck officer doesn't want to hear it. Just about bit my head off when I mentioned the port stabilizer was sluggish last time and was threatening to write me up and have my feed docked. If Davies wasn't there to smooth things over, she might have gone through with it.

  "Want me to take a look?"

  She glanced at him. "Are you rated for shuttle avionics, Tankred?"

  "Well, not as such, but it can't be that different from —"

  Ella turned back to the viewscreen. "Then don't bother. I'll let the ship know, and it'll take care of it, or Davies will." They punched through the cloud cover, revealing an endless steel-gray ocean dotted with whitecaps. "Get strapped in, lotta incoming shear. Touchdown in five." As if on cue, the shuttle began shaking and Tankred's stomach resumed its efforts to expel its contents by any means necessary.

  They circled the island once, a green dot a dozen clicks longer than it was wide. The skinny egg-shaped alien tower rose out of the dense jungle, its whorled and ringed walls made from the same white quartz and dark basalt as the rocks littering the island's beaches. Ella let out a low whistle and pointed at a gap in the jungle growth halfway between the tower and beach.

  "Looks like you'll be a while."

  Tankred twisted around. Something had left a fresh crater in the soil and denuded Farlong's palm-like trees and ferns, leaving only slender trunks standing and bone-white splinters littering the crater for tens of meters. It was an impressive screw-up, even by 342's standards.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "I guess," he said. Then he put his cube away and tapped the toolkit at his feet. "But Mona Lisa wouldn't assign me a job I couldn't handle," he lied. Mona Lisa always assigned him jobs as if it knew he'd make a mess of them.

  "Let's hope so. Ensign Davies will fury if you screw it up."

  Tankred sniffed. "Doesn't matter, he'll just find something else to dock me."

  "Don't be that way, Davies is tough, but fair."

  "Easy for you to say. He likes you."

  "Because I'm a damn fine pilot. Just do a good job, stay out of trouble, and he'll warm to you, you'll see."

  It might have been true for her, being cute, outgoing, and sharing Ensign Davies's sculpting vocation. Tankred by comparison had almost been recycled before decanting which had made him something of an oddity to the rest of the clonestock family aboard. He often wondered if his existence was somehow an embarrassment to Davies and the ship.

  Ella left him on the island's black sand beach and waved as she lifted off into Farlong's red-tinged sky. Tankred sighed and waved back, then stepped to the side as a dog-sized mollusk oozed by. A snail twice as large trailed behind it. Tankred got the sense he was watching a slow-motion chase over the beach's basalt and quartz cobbles.

  The crater was only a kilometer away but Farlong's heat and the hills made the hike through the dense jungle undergrowth miserable. The the coppery tang of the beach breeze gave way to an earthy-loamy odor of wet decaying vegetation and half-seen insects as large as his hand skittered away as as he pushed fronds and fan-like leaves aside. A honey-colored bug like a cross between a spider and millipede fell from above and rooted through his hair, tickling his scalp with prickled feet. He was glad Ella wasn't around to hear his scream and several seconds of jumping from foot to foot after flinging it into the underbrush. From then on he made sure to look up and thanked the stars Farlong didn't have flying beasties.

  The probe bot lay under a few centimeters of dirt, remarkably intact given the destruction around it. He picked up the ball-sized bot and turned it in his hands. The repulsor array looked burned out, its external manipulators were mostly sheared off, and there was a gaping hole where the fusion cells had blown out. But was there anything left in its tiny brain?

  He hooked up his diagnoster and ran a scan.

  "Unit designation: 342. Status: emergency shutdown mode. How about your error log? Corrupted — no help there. Comm system and networking fried, lovely..." He mumbled. "Memory's fragmented, but your processing core is still intact. I wonder..."

  His orders were to retrieve the bot and access its condition, but didn't say anything about repairing it.

  He pinged the comm on his cube.

  "Status?" Mona Lisa's melodic voice asked.

  "I have the bot, but it went into shutdown mode." Tankred said and attached his diagnostic's report.

  "Not unexpected. Secure the frame for transport."

  "Do you want me to fix it?"

  "Not necessary. Bring it back to the beach and wait for transport."

  "Well, how long will that be?"

  "The Isleworth will arrive in approximately one hour."

  "Couldn't the DeVille get here before then?"

  "I suppose, based on my current orbital position, that if the DeVille inserted in combat drop mode, degrading its operating effectiveness and requiring an accelerated maintenance schedule, and if I devoted precious cycles operating it myself since a biological pilot would be turned to jelly with to the g-forces involved, then yes, it would save you the inconvenience of waiting an extra five minutes, Technician."

  "I guess I should wait, then."

  "That would be best," Mona Lisa agreed. "And Technician Mathews?"

  "Yes?"

  "Do not attempt fixing that bot."

  Tankred lugged the bot to the beach, which wasn't hard, just a bulky armload and minor juggling of his tools. He found a spot on the beach far enough from the jungle and its creepy-crawlies and not too close to the giant snails and other assorted gastropods combing the rocks.

  "Well, little guy, it's just you and me," he said to the Probe 342. He cast his gaze over the water, seeing nothing but clouds and waves, the same uniform gray and it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. The hot wind blew off the surface, doing nothing to cool him down and coating the back of his throat with coppery salt.

  The novelty of setting foot on an alien planet faded and watching its inhabitants struggle for survival in slow motion became agonizing. He checked the time. Only fifteen minutes had passed. He turned and tried spitting the foul taste from his mouth and glanced back at the robot. His fingers twitched. The probe bot was the only interesting thing on the beach.

  "Ship says I can't fix you, but didn't say I couldn't keep troubleshooting your problems."

  Tankred opened his tool case and set to work. The robot frame had definitely taken a beating, but the hole over its reactor didn't look right. He couldn't put his finger on it, but that was no matter, the ship would know. The ship always knew. Doubtless Mona Lisa could discover as much about what happened in seconds as he could piece together in a week, but that was beside the point. The more he could do down here, the less work for Mona Lisa up there, and that was why inefficient biologicals like him were still useful, after all.

  The probe was in shutdown, but the diagnostic on his square indicated signs of activity in its processor, which wasn't supposed to be possible. Moreover, its memory was fragmented and spewing garbage code like a room full of idiots screaming at the top of their lungs. Switching the probe out of shutdown and rebooting its processor would tell him more. Was that fixing? It often fixed things, but it wasn't like you needed a tool for it. Usually anyone who called him over to fix something had tried that first, if they knew anything at all about robots. Many did not, sadly, and he once had a streak of five work tickets closed out just by recycling the problem bot's power switch.

  It didn't feel right though. There was something going on with this bot he wanted no part of.

  Besides, he sensed he would get in trouble, first with Mona Lisa and then with Ensign Davies. As much as he feared the wrath of an AI capable of denuding life from an entire planet, he feared Davies more.

  On the other hand, what kind of chump would he look like if Ella picked him up with a broken robot and he had to admit he hadn't even tried to fix it? Sure he was only following orders but he'd look like an errand boy, not the expert he was supposed to be.

  He had to at least turn the bot on and see what was going on. He could always put it back into shutdown mode.

  He typed in a quick command on his square and his finger hovered over the entry key. In his mind he pictured Davies scowl then the way the left corner of Ella's mouth turned up when she was amused or impressed. He had experienced Davies's ass-chewings before and survived, one more wouldn't hurt. But for one of Ella's smiles?

  He sent the command. The probe bot came online with an electric pop that sent a tickle through his arms courtesy of the backup battery grounding against the bot's casing. He jerked in surprise and his boot heel skidded out from under him. Arms pinwheeled and a palm skidded across a slimy rock before finding wet sand followed by the jarring crunch through his shoulder and hip landing on the rocky beach.

  At least no one had been around to see it, he thought as he stood and wiped his hands on his shirt.

  "Damn it!"

  Grease, mud, and slug slime streaked his Hammer Ring shirt and he knew the stain would never come out. Five hundred stads and ten cc's of standard feedstock, ruined. He pulled the wet material away from his skin and turned to the bot.

  "Just great. This is all your fault," he said.

  The probe along with his attached square lay at his feet, telltales still blinking. His diagnoser chirped, and text scrolled across the screen.

  SYSTEM>Reboot Complete

  ~Sorry, I've had something of a bad day myself, sent Probe 342.