“If you don’t pick a good callsign, someone else will pick one for you. It’s how these things go.” I smiled, walking up to the ship, expecting him to go off on some tangent. But he was silent as I approached. Was something wrong?

“Well?” he said. “Well?”

“Uh…” What did I do this time?

“Are you excited!” he asked. “Are you just about ready to burst! Isn’t it great!”

Great?

The booster. I realized with a start. Rig had finished installing it. I’d done a terrible job of tracking his progress—I’d been so busy these few weeks. But his tools were gone, the area cleaned up, and a note was taped to the back of M-Bot’s fuselage.

Doomslug was sitting on the wing near the note. “Stupid junky piece of worthless imitation life,” she said in a fluting imitation of Rig’s voice. “Scud! Scud! Scud! Scudding scud and stupid scud!”

“Careful, girl,” I said. “You’ll get recruited for the ground crews with a mouth like that.”

She produced a sequence of bangs, mimicking the sound of a hammer on metal—something she’d probably heard a lot of the last few weeks.

I picked up the note. Done. the note read. I was going to take it up and test it, but I felt you should get the first shot. Besides, I wouldn’t put it past the AI to crash me on purpose.

Working on this ship has been the most wonderful experience of my life (don’t tell M-Bot that). The designs I’ve drawn… the things I’ve learned… I’m going to change the DDF, Spin. I’m going to transform the entire way we fly and fight. I’ve not only been approved for the Engineering Corps, I’ve been offered a position directly in design. I start tomorrow.

Thank you for giving me the chance to find, in this work, my own dreams. Enjoy your ship. I hope that it is, in turn, what you have always dreamed it would be.

I lowered the note, looking up along M-Bot’s dangerous, razorlike wings. The ship’s landing lights flashed on, setting a glow along his length. My ship.

My. Ship.

“Well?” M-Bot said. “Are we going to go flying?”

“Scud, yes!”

43

“Acclivity ring, online,” M-Bot said as we slowly rose into the air. “Booster and maneuvering, online. Life support, online. Communications and stealth features, online. Light-lance and IMP anti-shield blast, online.”

“Not bad, Rig,” I said.

“Destructors are still offline,” M-Bot said. “As are self-repair features and cytonic hyperdrive.”

“Well, since I still don’t know what that last one is, we’ll take it as a net win. Are your stealth features engaged?”

“Of course. You promise we aren’t going into combat today. Right?”

“No combat,” I promised. “Just a quick flight to test that booster.”

We rose through the fake ceiling of the cavern and I felt myself growing tense, excited. I’d been flying every day, but this was different. M-Bot’s control panel somehow made the most complex of the DDF ships seem simple, so I stuck to the buttons I understood.