“Delovoa, they’ll lock you up for a million years—if you’re lucky. Not to mention Garm will get in tons of trouble for not reporting it.”
“I don’t care.”
“We can talk about it another time. We need to get you two out of here.”
“We’re not a couple. This is my home.”
“Delovoa, think. You know this is true,” I said calmly.
Delovoa seemed defeated.
“Okay. Where are we going?”
“I have an apartment in the southwest we can use. But it’s a long walk. It should be about the last place anyone looks.”
He gathered up his meager things—a blanket and cot he had been sleeping on, a small bag of foodstuffs—and then walked past the robot and towards me on the ramp.
As soon as he reached the bottom, ZR3 turned and followed, each thunderous step reverberating through the floors.
Outside his house I checked the street and the area was clear, so I gave the signal for Delovoa to continue. The real trick was moving this robot all the way across the city with no one noticing. If anyone saw, that would certainly get people talking, which would alert any Navy spies that were here and render all this subterfuge pointless.
I crossed the road and waited for him. Delovoa stood in the door frame looking tiny. He had been in his basement so long he seemed almost afraid to step over the threshold.
But that fear didn’t last long as he bolted out and ran up the street away from me.
ZR3 literally burst through the doorway, wrenching huge chunks of metal frame. It then pounded after Delovoa, each step resounding like a blast from Garm’s artillery gun. It was amazingly quick, that Dredel Led.
I stood there with my mouth gaping watching them go, trying to comprehend just how bad things had become.
After a few stunned seconds, I hurried after them as they sped into the distance. Delovoa was fueled by his manic desire to escape his robot watchman. ZR3 was fueled by whatever ZR3 was fueled by.
Both of them were far faster than I was. The good news was it was no trouble tracking them. All of Belvaille is made of metal. The roads, however, are sprayed with some kind of semi-tacky composite material.
Every few years the higher traffic roads near the port got dissolved and reapplied. It’s incredibly hardy stuff. The city had a few monolithic tracked vehicles we used to transport infrastructure equipment and even they didn’t damage the roads much.
But ZR3 was practically punching holes with every step. I didn’t know how anything so relatively small could be so heavy. Or how it could even support that weight.
But such philosophical questions were a rather low priority at the moment. I could see people were waking up as lights turned on from apartment windows. ZR3 clanging past likely knocking folks out of bed.
Thirty minutes later I was now well behind them, and a few people came outside to ask me what was going on.
“Nothing,” I said, running past.
My yellow shoes, as predicted, didn’t last a few turns and I was wearing one around my ankle as the other flew completely off.
I couldn’t tell where Delovoa was going at first, as he seemed to be choosing streets at random. Occasionally, I’d see buildings with their corners twisted from ZR3 brushing past.
Delovoa’s destination slowly became clearer so I took a few shortcuts.
Inside my apartment, Delovoa was in my kitchen helping himself to some of my rations and ZR3 was standing on what was once my couch.
“Did you know you have a huge block of delfiblinium sitting here?” Delovoa asked casually.
CHAPTER 31
I wasn’t spending a lot of time at my apartment now that it was being systematically smashed apart by a giant, handless robot.
Delovoa was being stubborn by not leaving and knew I wasn’t about to threaten him with his hulking twin nearby. He was trying to force me into somehow solving his problem by making it our problem.
But if worse came to worse, I’d just move. He could keep the Dredel Led and my delfiblinium, and wouldn’t that be a nice chat once the Navy came knocking? But he seemed to be cooling down overall. I think he was just tired of sitting in his basement, and at least my place had easier access to a shower and food—even if it did mean my walls got hammered.
I visited Grever Treest to say I wouldn’t be able to help him with his drug storage issues, but he didn’t care. He had effectively used futures trading in the drug market by waiting a mere couple months during the purge and sold out everything at substantial profits. That entire room of drugs was gone.
He asked me if I wanted a complimentary chafze from his private store, some of the last on the station. I politely declined.
But he tipped me fifty credits for stopping by and asked where there was a nice neighborhood to move to in the north.