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"Have much experience with robots?" I ask as she moves around the Victory Arn gave it to the Ash Lord when he burned Rhea Mustang’s fingers play over the frost-hued es and Greens had a few robots in their engineering labs Ancient, rusted things that Father had refurbished and put in the hs to herself "He used to take me there back when I wore dresses and s I re about his paranoia, especially when Adrius tried restarting one of the combat models from Eurasia Father was convinced that robots would have overthrown man and now rule the Solar System if Earth’s eh

"What?" she asks

"I’reat ArchGovernor Augustus having nighthter seizes me "Does he suppose they’d wantwatches radually subsides I hold"Is he afraid of aliens too?"

"I never asked him" She taps the armor "But they’re out there, you know"

I stare at her "That’s not in the archives"

"Oh, no no I mean we’ve never found any But the Drake-Roddenberry equation suggests the mathematic probability is N = R x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L Where R is the average rate of star foralaxy, where fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets … You’re not even listening anymore"

"What do you suppose they would think of us?" I ask "Of e, and inexplicably horrible to one another" She points down a hall "Is that the training room?" She flips off her slippers and walks away down aa look back at hts come mutedly to life as we pass She slips ahead faster than I care to follow I find herroos line the wooden walls "The House of Gri to a frieze of a man in armor "You can see the Ash Lord’s first ancestor there Aucus au Grimmus, the first Gold to touch land in the Iron Rain that took the American eastern seaboard after one of Cassius’s ancestors, forget his nah the Atlantic Fleet Then there is Vitalia au Griht there" She turns to s you try to break?"

"It was Scipio au Bellona who defeated the Atlantic Fleet"

"Was it?" she asks

"I’ve studied the history," I say "Just as well as you

"But you stand apart from it, don’t you?" She paces aroundin It was growing up away from all this on your parents asteroid mine that did the trick, wasn’t it? That’s why you can ask a question like ‘What would aliens think of us?’"

"You’re just as much an outsider as I am I’ve read your dissertations"

"You have?" She’s surprised

"Believe it or not, I can read too" I shake ets I only smarts test"