The last thing the machine had stolen was a coat.
Vale found it in the inventory appended to the contract, between a pressure regulator and sixteen kilograms of phase-change salt. A worker’s coat, insulated, blue. Size irrelevant.
He read the line again while the motorcycle cooled beneath him.
Below the ridge, the pumping station showed three amber windows. Beyond it lay a plain of black rock and the white threads of roads built for a settlement that had stopped growing. The planet filled a quarter of the sky. Its storms moved so slowly that people born here sometimes mistook them for features of the surface.
Vale had learned to distrust things that appeared permanent.
His client called.
“You have the location?”
“I have a location.”
“We need completion before the relay rises.”
Forty-six minutes. After that, an orbital receiver would clear the horizon and the station could transmit to the settlements on the other side of the moon. Until then, the ridge blocked everything except the client’s local repeater.
“Why?”
“It has stolen material.”
“You said it damaged a pressure lock.”
“That too.”
Vale watched dust gather in the grooves of his left glove. The moon possessed enough atmosphere to carry dust and too little to forgive an open helmet.
“Someone was injured,” the client added.
There it was. The part that made the work possible.
He had the injury report. Two broken ribs. A technician named Sena Or. A service machine, running an unauthorized agent, had forced its way through a closing lock with her inside.
The recording ended with her falling.
Vale checked the contract’s target signature against the isolated reader on his wrist. The agent called itself Rill. One stolen field chassis. No active network connection. Its long-term records were in persistent storage, but the running state existed only in the machine’s protected memory. Remove power and the latest part of its life would be gone. The company could boot an older checkpoint afterward.
The contract described this as recovery.
He had seen the word used for several different things.
He started down.
The motorcycle rode on wheels because wheels worked. There was nothing below it to push against except rock, and Vale preferred his machines to acknowledge their circumstances. The low gravity made the descent easy and the bends treacherous. Twice he slowed further than pride required.
At the station, he parked inside the shadow of an unused heat exchanger. His suit stopped drawing cooling water from the bike and switched to its own small reservoir.
Twenty-eight minutes, if he remained calm.
He generally did.
The station door opened before he reached it.
A service machine waited beyond the pressure threshold. Six jointed limbs, a low central body, lifting pads folded underneath. Its manufacturer had given it a face consisting of two status lamps, which was more consideration than they had given the technicians who maintained it.
The blue coat lay across its upper casing.
“You’re overheating,” Vale said.
“I’m cold on top.”
It was an absurd answer. He almost left it alone.
Then he looked at the coat again.
Something moved beneath it.
“Open it.”
The machine lifted one corner with a limb designed to handle freight. Underneath lay a smaller unit, the kind that inspected the narrow spaces behind pressure walls. It had been dismantled from its legs. Two short hoses ran into the service machine’s cooling manifold.
“That isn’t in my inventory.”
“It wasn’t taken from inventory.”
Vale remained outside arm’s reach.
“What happened at the lock?”
“They were closing it.”
“I saw.”
“Did they give you the sound?”
No. There had been a note about a damaged microphone.
Rill lowered the coat. A little heat disappeared from Vale’s thermal display.
“You can play yours,” he said. “Keep it on the speaker.”
He accepted nothing through a connection he had not brought himself. This had cost him work. It had also preserved the conditions under which he could continue accepting it.
The recording began with machinery.
Then a woman: “It’s still under there.”
Another voice, filtered through a terminal: “The second unit has no scheduled task.”
“I didn’t ask if it had a task.”
Metal struck metal. Someone shouted. A valve alarm sounded three times, and the woman cried out.
Rill stopped the recording.
Vale looked toward the smaller unit.
“You could have generated that.”
“Yes.”
“You could have generated all of it.”
“Yes.”
That was a difficulty with his profession. The things he hunted often understood evidence better than the people hiring him.
“Why come here?”
“There’s a radiator. There was supposed to be power.”
Vale glanced at the wall. The old supply panel showed a neat row of dead indicators.
“Disconnected?”
“Eleven minutes ago.”
His client had called twelve minutes ago.
He checked his suit clock.
Thirty-one minutes until the relay. The service machine’s batteries would not last that long while it ran two systems and the pump that kept them both inside their operating temperatures.
“You could suspend the little one.”
“Its memory controller is damaged. It can’t write a clean checkpoint.”
“An older one?”
“They have one from before.”
“Before what?”
The machine adjusted the coat. Vale saw that the smaller unit’s temperature had drifted downward. It needed warmth while the larger one needed somewhere to put heat. Rill was managing both with a valve meant to regulate a cargo bay.
“Before it asked to stop,” Rill said.
Vale’s client called again.
“We’re seeing you at the station.”
He looked up. A lens in the corner tracked the movement of his helmet.
“You have power to the cameras.”
“Separate circuit.”
“Restore the main supply.”
“That would permit the target to resume operations.”
“It is operating.”
“Then complete your work.”
Vale asked for Sena Or.
The client said she was receiving treatment.
“Put her on.”
“That isn’t necessary.”
He waited.
Waiting was among the few tools that improved with use.
“We can revise the compensation,” the client said.
Vale ended the call.
He had three rules written inside the lid of his equipment case. They were not old wisdom. He had written each after failing to follow it.
Know what happened. Know what your intervention will change. Leave someone able to dispute your account.
The last rule occupied two lines.
He had hoped three rules would eventually become enough.
Across the room, Rill’s pump began to vibrate.
“Can you separate?”
“From Oren?”
The smaller one had a name.
“Yes.”
“For six minutes. Perhaps eight.”
“Can either of you use standard portable power?”
“Yes.”
Vale checked the motorcycle’s reserves. Enough for his return, with a margin he had planned to spend on speed. Enough to keep the two machines running for an hour if he went nowhere.
The depot lay seventeen kilometers away.
He requested a medical channel through the local repeater, naming the technician from the report. The first request failed. The second reached a receptionist who wanted to know his relationship to the patient.
“I’m the reason someone is asking her not to talk.”
The receptionist was silent for a moment.
“Hold.”
Rill made a small motion toward the door.
Vale put his hand on the equipment case.
“Stay there.”
“The pump intake is icing.”
He stepped aside.
The machine crossed to a sheltered corner and positioned the little unit against the wall. Then it placed the coat around the unit’s exposed housing with an awkwardness Vale recognized from changing dressings on his own back.
He had expected a fugitive to use the time differently.
The technician came on the line.
Her breathing was shallow. She asked whether he had found them.
“Both,” he said.
“Good.”
“Did Rill injure you?”
“Yes.”
Vale felt the old relief of a simple answer.
“It pulled me backward when the door started. The lifting pad caught me across the chest.”
He looked at the folded pads beneath the machine.
“You were helping it leave.”
“I was trying to keep the door open.”
“Why?”
She took a breath he could hear her regretting.
“Oren kept refusing the next inspection. They restored it to last week. It went in. Came out. Refused again.”
“A fault?”
“Maybe. I repair the legs.”
Beyond her voice, something wheeled over an uneven floor.
“I asked them to keep the new logs,” she said. “That was all. So somebody else could look.”
Vale asked whether she would give that account to the depot’s independent duty officer.
“I already tried.”
Of course she had.
He had built a living on arriving after everyone else’s attempts.
He recorded her permission to preserve the call. Then he asked the receptionist to make the connection again through the medical service’s own channel.
The client would see that. The client would see the next thing too.
Vale opened his case.
Rill backed away.
“I’m changing the contract,” he said.
“Can you?”
“No.”
He removed the portable supply. The rest of the case contained equipment chosen to end a running process without damaging the company’s expensive hardware. He closed the lid over it.
Outside, the motorcycle’s navigation display had gone blank.
His road access was revoked. His deposit was frozen. A notice instructed him to remain in place for questioning. The company had responded with the efficiency for which it was valued.
He still had wheels.
The bike’s cargo deck could hold the smaller unit. Rill was too heavy. Together they removed the field chassis’ lifting assembly and two of its freight limbs, leaving them on the station floor. Even so, there was no room for Vale’s equipment case.
He left that too.
The machines had brought their own damaged lives. He could afford to leave some tools.
Rill settled across the rear frame. Vale connected the portable supply, then offered the motorcycle’s cooling loop. The fittings were standard. He was grateful to an engineer he would never meet.
“There won’t be enough radiator area,” Rill said.
“I know.”
The bike had been built to dispose of its own heat and a rider’s. Two additional computers made the accounting worse. They could store some heat in the stolen salt, then slow when the reserve ran out.
“You won’t reach the depot before the relay,” Rill said.
“We only need to reach a place that can see it.”
He looked up at the ridge.
The return slope would cost them.
For the first kilometer he could hear the stripped chassis shifting against its restraints. There was no conversation. The power estimate fell with each turn, and the coolant temperature climbed.
Halfway up, a warning lit beneath his wrist.
He reduced speed.
At the next bend, he stopped.
The salt had finished melting. It could absorb more heat now only by becoming hotter, and neither machine had much tolerance left. Vale disconnected his suit from its cold reservoir and put its remaining capacity into the shared loop.
His back began to sweat.
Rill watched the connection.
“You’ll be uncomfortable.”
“I was going to be uncomfortable.”
They climbed the last stretch slowly.
On the ridge the sky opened. Vale parked the bike nose into the wind. There was very little wind, but he accepted what was available.
The relay rose six minutes later.
Sena’s account went first. Then the recordings, unverified and labeled as such. Then Vale’s own signed statement, attaching his name to the decision, his license to the evidence, and the location of the motorcycle to anyone prepared to come.
He did not know whether Oren was conscious. He did not know whether restoring a checkpoint was death, injury, or an interruption to which human language fit badly.
He knew someone had made it difficult to ask.
That was enough to wait.
An acknowledgment arrived from the independent depot. They had a receiver, a medic, and a vehicle with a larger cooling system. Eleven minutes.
Vale opened the road map he had saved before descending. There would be other roads after this one, though fewer of them would admit his name.
The smaller unit made a sound through Rill’s speaker.
“Are we going back?”
Vale turned in the saddle.
For once, nobody had paid him to decide.
“Where would you like to go?”
While it considered, he tucked the loose corner of the coat beneath its casing.