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survive the machines that had hunted him. He knew
that the secret to defeating the machines involved first understanding them,
then outsmarting them. He believed the Bel Klaven made their war machines this
way to prevent them from ever becoming a danger to their makers.
    The
devices grew before him in ordered spurts. He fabricated the same pieces for
all of them in batches as he went, using his own portable fabricator configured
to emulate Terran materials and designs.
    At
some point, Magnus came into the cargo bay and watched Kirizzo work. Kirizzo
noted the healthy curiosity exhibited by his ally. As he finished a phase of
the construction, adding power units to each of the forty devices, one of
Shiny’s sensors routed an alert into his mind: it had detected the atmospheric
vibrations of Terran speech. The message was diverted into the cognition layer
which coated his long neural keel.
    “So,
Shiny, I could use your help with the walker here. I want to adapt its power
plant and these ingenious legs to my machine over here. I can’t interface with
either of them, though. They use your generic computation blocks, but I can’t
even tell if these blocks are working or broken. For all I know, I burned them
out or damaged them just trying to scan the insides.”
    Kirizzo
listened to the request carefully, yet he found the desired outcome to be
largely unspecified. Kirizzo wondered how best to put power in the hands of
Magnus to forge his own solution. That way, Kirizzo couldn’t be blamed for any
failure in the outcome. He pondered how to reply; the Terrans seemed to prefer
verbal communication even though their link devices were more useful. Kirizzo
replied by vibrating one of its guardian spheres.
    “What
is intended mission of the robot?”
    “I’m
going to bring it with us on the next expedition. Telisa and I could use a
safer way to scout ahead, and some backup.”
    Kirizzo
considered the oddity of the situation. He attempted to adapt Terran technology
in his drones, and Magnus was busy doing the opposite. He could understand the
motivation to improve the machine but, given the current objective, he had to
discourage the plan.
    “Potential
disadvantage to using this technology: Homeworld destroyers will detect it,
neutralize it. Optimal to avoid usage of other technology for the upcoming
venture.”
    “Crap.”
    “Shiny
does not excrete in the same manner—”
    “I’m
expressing irritation. And before you misinterpret that, I mean I’ve been
working hard to integrate this walker. Now you’re pointing out I shouldn’t do
that. And I asked for help as part of the deal.”
    “Shiny
suggest modular construction. Shiny-technology components could be swapped out
for Terran ones as necessary.”
    “Very
well. Help me out here. How should I interface with these legs? And this power
source is amazing. How long will it last?”
    “Please
wait.”
    Kirizzo
had just examined typical Terran methods of design and physical construction.
He now accessed several Terran robot manuals and examined their iconic methods
of presentation, interface, configuration, and control. This dovetailed nicely
with his own recent work on his probes. He simply had to expand his review into
the area of manuals and protocols the Terrans had designed for themselves.
Kirizzo created a model of the conventions used in the bulk of the manuals, fed
it to a translator, and created a Terran style manual for the hardware of the
walker.
    The
Gorgalan computing blocks were harder. Their capabilities were so far beyond
the controller used by Magnus, it would stretch the Terran’s imagination to
understand. Kirizzo decided to simply provide a step-by-step guide for
implementing the interface Magnus had created for the Terran machine on a
generic Gorgalan computation cube.
    This
took about fifty seconds, so at the conclusion of the work, Kirizzo simply
transferred the Terran manual and the guide over to Magnus.
    The
man stood up and froze. He didn’t say