...droid I have ever seen." Sharon thought as she turned the crab upside-down. The fact that, thanks to the Babel leech, she understood its ticks and rasps were nothing strange compared to the way UNA operatives sent out help. Since she was now alone again in the darkened storage hold, she held the robot crab firmly on a wall, just above waterlevel, and let it cling on the steel wall magnetically as the instructions on its belly said.
Sharon half-expected it to be a bomb of some kind, but instead it resumed clicking and whirring like R2D2.
" The Leviathan will be here soon. At the first sign of any agent of any Faction aboard it, report using the groundwave radio. Help will come in as soon as you report, so we can destroy or disable the Leviathan. End of line."
Well, this being 1958 nobody could recognize the Disneyesque quotation.
"Anything else?"
"This unit will self-destruct. Take the batteries out and place them into your plasma bomb."
Shortly thereafter, the robo-crab melted on the wall leaving a faint trace and three AA batteries. Sharon placed them into the lava lamp she had in her fishnet bag, and wondered how was she supposed to activate the thing without the batteries in the first place. I suppose that these UNA people don't get an operation right very often Sharon thought.
Not even a minute later, the door opens again. Three people are waiting -- one is visibly the commander of the installation, from both his posture and the decorations on his chest. He orders the two soldiers to fetch Sharon, and they move to do so.
Tue Sep 21 15:37:19 1999
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