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"Don't--!" Gurathin began sharply, as I dropped to the floor in the middle of the basement.
I held up a hand and he fell silent, and I sent out my drones to form a perimeter in the small room of brick, metal, and stone. It was completely dark, but I could see in infrared, and apparently so could he; he must have augments for it, because he was looking at me -- or rather near me, in the way my humans had learned to do.
Not that he had much choice about moving his head too far. He was sitting upright, his hands held together with metal shackles, and the explosive, quite a lot of it, was wired into his data port.
"Are there proximity sensors?" I asked. I had no feed connection to him; the natural alloys in the soil shielded us, which was part of what had made him so hard to find.
"Not that I know of." He swallowed as I approached. "The others --"
"They're in orbit." I crouched down to inspect the explosive.
"Good." He didn't move other than to speak, holding himself tensely still.
His body quivered with the strain. This close, I could sense the tension in the electrical patterns of his skin, and a thin sheen of sweat despite the chilly air in the basement. Human nerves and muscles, I recalled, were not meant to hold a position for hours and hours the way a SecUnit could do by nature. He must have been doing that for a long time, all alone in this dark hole in the ground.
My drones moved closer, almost nudging into both of us.
"You should leave too," he said, looking at a point slightly above my left shoulder, even in the pitch darkness around us. Obviously he knew that I could see him, too.
"I should," I agreed. Since my drones had all but nudged up against us anyway, I used them to speed up my tracing of the wiring on the explosive device, building a circuit map in a dedicated processing workspace. "So what's happening now is that I'm going to disrupt the circuit, pull you out, and then reengage it. If I do this fast enough, it won't know anything has happened. If it does go off, my body can absorb the blast. I will cover you."
"SecUnit --"
"In three seconds." I'd found that it was most useful not to give humans too much time to think about this kind of thing.
One of the drones settled on his shoulder. His throat worked as he swallowed. He didn't speak. I knew he had his own accurate-to-the-second countdown, so there was no point in me bothering with it.
"Now," I said.
My drone dropped seamlessly into place, and I established the new circuit to the drone with a quick electric burst and yanked the wires unceremoniously out of Gurathin's head. He made a choked sound, and I realized I hadn't accounted for the bomb being wired into anything that had pain sensors attached to it. Now I had another reason to find and beat the shit out of the bastards who did this. However, in that couple of seconds, I was in the process of pulling Gurathin down to the floor while my drone finished connecting itself into the circuit and took over the function Gurathin had been providing.
We fell to the ground harder than I'd intended, though I kept myself from crushing him, just covered him with my body. I checked drone telemetry. My drones informed me that the swap had worked as intended. There was a slight messiness in the wires. I hadn't realized it was wired into anything organic, either. I guess sometimes I default to thinking of augmented humans as more like constructs than they really are.
I carefully eased off Gurathin. His neck was leaking and his skin was cold, and he shivered as he tried to rearrange his limbs. I remembered, also, that being in the same position for hours made humans, unlike constructs, very sore. But there wasn't much I could do about it other than raise my surface temperature, which I did, but it wasn't much help in a chilly place like this.
One thing, at least, I could help with. I sat up and gripped the shackle around his wrist carefully, waited a moment for him to adjust and then cracked it off, so his hands were separated and he could move them.
Gurathin raised his hand awkwardly to his neck and rubbed at the leaking place. "They said if I moved - if I even thought about it -"
"We are going out through the hatch." The sooner I got him out of this awful room that stank of governor module, the better. "I'll open it and then lift you."
"Okay," he said. As I got up to open the hatch again, he looked over at the drone wired into the bomb. It was the one that had been on his shoulder. "Are we going to leave it here?"
"That's its job," I said. "It's disposable."
"Yes, but -- can't we take it with us? Isn't there some way?"
I didn't want to leave it here, either, and I refused to have feelings about the fact that he cared about that. "Once we're up, if we leave the hatch open behind us, I can probably pull it out quickly enough that it won't be caught in the blast. But that's going to involve some risk to us. I won't be able to send it instructions down here, so I'll have to tell it when to pull out." I looked at him critically. "How fast can you move?"
"As fast as I need to."
"Fifteen minutes?" I asked. He nodded.
It occurred to me only when we were most of the way up the ladder, with Gurathin ahead of me and moving a lot slower than I wanted him too, that I could have given it any amount of time. I could have told it a week. We could go drop my humans off on the other side of the two-day wormhole trip to a less shitty planet, then I could come back and my drone would still be patiently waiting for me. There was no reason to risk either of us at all.
It was stupid to care about the drone being down there with the bomb, in the dark, because it didn't care. That was its job.
But Gurathin hadn't argued or said anything when I set it for fifteen minutes.
And we were much closer to the target time than I would have liked when we climbed up the top, into sun and grass. "Go," I snapped, pushing at him, and he ran awkwardly, stumbling, eyes half closed against the daylight glare. I was not going to pick him up and carry him if I didn't have to, but I steadied him by the arm. We reached a large rocky outcropping that ought to provide some shelter in case the blast reached us all the way on the surface, provided it didn't collapse the ground under us.
Gurathin half-collapsed next to me, panting and wincing. I asked him, because Mensah or Ratthi would have, "Are you all right?"
He gave me a disbelieving look. His face was pale, bruised, and smeared with dirt, his wrists were red from the cuffs, and he still moved like he hurt.
"That was a stupid question," I said, mostly to myself.
Gurathin started to laugh, just as our timers reached zero and the explosion rumbled below our feet.
We did not fall into a collapsing cascade of rock, which was good, and 1.4 seconds later, the drone zipped out of a roiling cloud of smoke pouring out of the hole and sped over to us. It settled on Gurathin's shoulder again.
I waited a little longer to see if the ground was going to remain stable, and when it did, I sent a rescue/recall order to the station above.