As she made her slow, painful way back to the bed, she thought on her meeting with Arthur. His knowledge of Worldspeak had been impeccable—a fact she’d barely noticed at the time, but which seemed significant now. Unless the enemy had a much better reconnaissance ability than she could believe, they would not have had time to learn the human language that completely. The very fluency of the robot’s speech lent a certain credibility to what he’d said. But although he’d given her some information, their conversation had left her with at least as many questions as before.
If this was, indeed, a human-occupied world, neither she nor anyone else aboard the Thundercloud had known about it when they came down. Why was there all this secretiveness by the people in charge? Why did they let robots
