"Ah," she says, nodding. "Do you have a ramp, or something? One of my crew has wheels."

"...one of your crew has wheels?"

"Two of my crew members are robots. One of them has wheels instead of legs."

"I don't have a ramp, sorry. How heavy is it?"

Envee needs a little bit to figure out weight conversions, but Callida names a figure soon enough. TN-R13 is the heaviest of her crew, but not so heavy as to break ramps and ground helicopters.

"...maybe the rest of the crew and me and the pilot and you all together can haul it?"

"No, it's all right, I can get it onto the helicopter without a ramp. It just finds my methods undignified and prefers to go places under its own power."

"I'm sorry, I threw this together kind of hastily."

"I think in this instance speed over preparation was the way to go. Speaking of, I'd like to be gone before the next group arrives; excuse me."

To the house! She has a crew to retrieve and a host to politely thank.

"I know that guy," Sondayo says. "I think we're related. I have no information on his politics but he was a dick to me in school."

Eyebrow raise.

"What kind of a dick?"

"Not the kind that gives me information about his politics. I'd rather you told him the housekeeper let you in and you didn't see me, though."

She nods.

"Certainly. I'll keep an eye on him. I've probably dealt with worse people. Anything in particular you think I should watch out for?"

"...This country uses a permissions system of population control. Gives blues who give those out a lot of sway over everybody else. I don't know what policies he backs in the Senate and if I did I couldn't distinguish principle from favor-trading, what I'd watch out for is people working for him, are they - desperate and scared and stressed out about being in his power."

"A good tactic, thank you. Would you like some anonymous way to contact me to send advice?"

"If you have one that'd be great. I've got email..."

"I don't think I could connect to a foreign system sneakily enough, but I'll probably acquire one eventually. I could give you an encoded comlink, but that'd be audio only, and there's a chance someone might detect the signal and trace it back to you, even if they couldn't hear what we said. Is 'email' secure?"

"Basically. It's not a one time pad but even governments can't casually read it."

"Ah. Okay. Then that would be appreciated. For when I eventually set that up."

He recites his email address.

Envee takes the time to steal her datapad and write out this in Amentan characters, then they depart.

Does blue-whose-name-she-does-not-have happen to care that she took so long in there? She has an overly excited doctor who is known to go on tangents, she can blame him. (He won't mind.)

"Is that somebody's vacation house?" he wonders. "Anyone home, or did they just go in to get out of the heat?"

"I believe so. The housekeeper let us in, if the owner was present I didn't see them. It was for the heat, we'd ah. Just been in that." She waves at the ship was very obviously on fire. "The air conditioning was nice."

"Air conditioning's a great invention. Out past the rainforest there's better weather," he promises.

"Oh good. Some planets are just misery all around."