I quickly swapped back to car mode, and waited for them to pass by. No such luck. The two cars—a slick sports car, and an SUV —pulled into the clearing where I was. And then they stood up into robots. Crud. I transformed to join them.

“There you are, Botnet,” the sports car one said.

Botnet? The schmuck who had this body called himself Botnet? Ejection was too good for him; I should have hunted down his persona cube and stepped on it.

He continued, “What’re you doing way out here? We almost couldn’t trace your transponder.” He snorted. “As if we needed to worry; I see you’re still active after all. Switched to the backup cube?”

Transponder? Double crud. I should have known. Ejecting the cube would have sent an SOS . They were right in a way; I was in his “backup cube.” He’d turned it into my cage, proving he was reckless as well as stupid.

Luckily the automech’s vocoder was still set to his voice. I hoped my social engineering skills were still up to snuff. This was going to be tricky.