Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I could have become a murderer when the hopper I was being transported in crashed on an uninhabited planet and left just one surviving human crew.

If I killed Technician Aggarwal and stole eir identity, I could conceivably fake my way to personhood when the company rescue ship came to salvage the remains of the hopper. Then I could get myself marked as destroyed goods on company inventory, and quit having to do my miserable day job as a pretending-to-be-governed murderbot.

Being a SecUnit technician probably wouldn’t be fun, but maybe I could figure a way out of the company from there if I was smart and careful, and could get ahold of Aggarwal’s credits. Unit Technicians have better social mobility than, say, an indentured miner. Or a SecUnit that guards indentured miners.

Sounds like the plot of an unrealistic serial, right? A rogue murderbot gains its freedom through trickery and murder. Stay tuned for the season two bloodbath that inevitably ensues when everyone figures out what happened.

So, I didn’t kill Technician Aggarwal, because that would be stupid and there’s no way I would actually get away with all that shit.

Also, and this may surprise you, but I’m not a huge fan of murdering my own clients. Technician Aggarwal was my client.

I felt the crash, obviously. I was supposed to be powered down in my cubicle in the cargo hold. But I wasn’t, because I’d hacked my governor module ages ago and one of the primary perks of hacking your governor module is being able to watch media during transportation instead of being forced into stasis.

A lot of shit went weird in the feed, the bot pilot crapped itself, and then the hopper crashed. I got slammed around inside my cubicle, and the supply leads got jammed super hard into my body in a way they definitely weren’t supposed to. (Looks like it’s turning-down-my-pain-sensors-o’clock. Yippee. My favorite.)

I sat there in my cubicle, which was tipped over instead of the right way up, so that I was lying with most of my weight on my face/shoulders instead of my ass/back, like I was supposed to be.

I watched Sanctuary Moon.

I watched until the end of the episode. There was no activity on the hopper feed, just this awful static emptiness of processes that should be there but were dead, plus the misc data stored, doing nothing.

If you’re thinking, “Hey, what the fuck is the point of a SecUnit if it doesn’t get off its ass and help in the event of a hopper crash?” I would be right there with you. But here’s the thing: I was supposed to be in stasis. If I got out of my cubicle without being ordered to, and a human saw me do it, that would be fucking it for me. I’d be decommissioned, my organic bits stripped off my inorganic bits and sent into the recycler. Then they’d recycle my inorganic bits too, but in a different way probably.

Also, the humans were dead.

I had camera and sensor access to the interior of the hopper. The human that had ostensibly been in charge of flying the thing without crashing us into a cliff and letting us bounce to the bottom of a cliff had not been doing her job. She’d let the bot-pilot handle the flying while she played a card game in the cabin with Technician Aggarwal, and then the bot-pilot crapped out, and the rest is history.

She should be buried in fines for that, but luckily she was dead, so instead her professional company-assigned work buddy would be buried in fines in her stead. (The buddy system is one of the many ways the Company tries to keep its employees working hard and competently, but it doesn’t always work, because humans hate to work hard and competently.)

So I was watching my two dead clients in the cabin, their bodies limp in the wreckage, trying not to feel too shit about this whole situation, because at least I was alive.

Except if my governor module worked the way it was supposed to, I’d be fried by now. And any salvage team the company sent would know that, and I’d be back at square one.

So why wasn’t I getting out of my cubicle and running for it?

I don’t know. I’d never been in this situation before and didn’t even have any educational modules about what to do, because it was supposed to be an impossible situation that would never happen.

I was just starting to hatch my stupid plan to maybe pretend that I was Technician Aggarwal to the salvage crew. Except Aggarwal was dead and to play it at all convincingly I’d need to scrape the data from eir dead body or something and that was gross and possibly impossible.

And then Technician Aggarwal’s broken body lying in the wreckage of the hopper stirred, and ey groaned.

I ripped my damaged resupply leads out of my body (my performance reliability dropped another 10%, whoop). Then I used my energy weapon on a tight focused setting to melt a component of the cubicle’s door so that I could break it open (the cubicle was broken and wasn’t responding to the normal way of opening the door). Then I crawled out of the cubicle, climbed up through the steaming-hot mess of the cargo hold, and through the door connecting the hold to the cabin.

Aggarwal was half-curled on eir side, where ey’d been thrown against the wall of the hopper (which was now the floor of the hopper). I stepped over em, then stepped over the shitty hopper pilot’s dead body, and climbed up the floor of the hopper (which was now the wall of the hopper) to reach the Medkit that was strapped securely to the wall of the hopper (which was now the ceiling of the hopper). You’d think the Medkit would have had the decency to be one of the many, many hazardously unsecured objects in the cabin of this hopper that had been thrown every which way and conveniently landed on the wall (floor) of the hopper. But no. I had to fight it off the wall (ceiling) of the hopper, while also clinging to the wall (ceiling), which was not easy to do.

But I did it, and dropped back down to the wall (floor) of the hopper and brough the Medkit over to Aggarwal. (I also did a quick check of the pilot’s pulse, but nope. Dead. She had a big dent in her head, so the pulse-check was redundant. But people always did pulse-checks in the entertainment media, and I wanted to double-check somehow.)

Aggarwal had also hit eir head in the crash, and was bleeding a lot from a gash in eir temple. I put a bandage on eir head, and ey groaned. Ey was sweaty, and breathing hard, hands shifting weakly, eir eyes flitting across my face. I wished ey wouldn’t look at me like that.

This is where my idea to kill em crossed my mind, then uncrossed my mind.

“SecUnit,” ey whispered.

I used a gauze thing in the Medkit to wipe eir face, because I didn’t know what else to do. I’m not a Medbot, and this hopper didn’t have a MedSystem built into it.

There’s a thought. Maybe it was carrying a MedSystem. This hopper had been carrying supplies to set up a temporary habitat for a survey group. I should probably go check it to see if A) there was a MedSystem and B) it was miraculously still functional despite having been turned on its side in a hopper crash-landing.

“Nilima—” Aggarwal said, and a tear rolled down the side of eir nose and into eir other eye.

“She’s dead,” I said.

Aggarwal blinked furiously. I stood up to go look for the MedSystem so that I wouldn’t have to watch with my eyes while Aggarwal processed that. I watched em in the cameras instead.

I checked the hopper’s inventory sheet in the feed. Good news: there was a MedSystem. Bad news: the MedSystem must be buried beneath every fucking thing imaginable in the cargo hold, because I couldn’t see it anywhere. I was lucky my cubicle hadn’t been buried the same way. I was at least able to open the cargo bay hatch, though it only opened up halfway. Maybe I could clear out enough stuff to reach the MedSystem. Maybe the MedSystem would be operable. (I was working with a lot of maybies, here.)

Aggarwal said, “SecUnit,” again, too soft for me to hear with my ears, but the sensors inside the cabin picked up on it. I went back into the cabin and looked at Aggarwal, and ey looked at me.

I’m not going to go into detail on all the stuff that happened after that. It was mostly grueling and depressing. I did a ton of work digging up the MedSystem and pulling it right-side-up again, only to find that I couldn’t get it operable. Neither could Aggarwal. Aggarwal made do with the emergency Medkit, and for a few days the two of us spent some quality time doing fuckall while ey sent an emergency retrieval request to the company.

(The company said they would send a retrieval team to clean up the mess in fifteen cycles. Yes, Aggarwal was injured and experiencing some concerning symptoms that probably needed to be looked at right away. No, they couldn’t hurry it up because they were busy setting up another habitat at another survey site.)

Aggarwal wouldn’t eat for some reason, and would only drink water when I handed it to em in cups.

It was on cycle 3 of this delightful and not at all nervewracking little vacation that Technician Aggarwal said, curled up in the co-pilot-seat with eir broken arm encased in a sling, watching the inclement weather precipitate on the windshield, “Your governor module is broke, isn’t it.”

I was sitting in the pilot seat. I’d removed both the seats from the cockpit (they slid right out, and were undamaged despite everything), and put them in the cabin area because they were more comfortable to sit on than all the other junk.

In all the excitement of the crash and trying to get the MedSystem working and sending out messages to the company, I had been trying to pretend to be a governed SecUnit. I didn’t actually know what it was that had tipped Aggarwal off. (It was probably the fact that I had climbed out of my cubicle to help eir ass despite not being ordered to do so.) But ey knew, and there was nothing I could do about that now. Ey was a Unit Technician, which is the worst kind of human to be stuck with when you are a rogue murderbot stranded in a hopper crash on an uninhabited planet, because Unit Technicians know exactly how murderbots are supposed to work. It crossed my mind again to kill em. But for some reason I still didn’t want to.

I didn’t answer that question, which was basically the same thing as answering, “Yup.”

Aggarwal sighed, and looked away from the window, to train eir gaze on me.

I told em, “Don’t look at me.”

Ey furrowed eir brows slightly, lips pulling down in a frown. Ey looked away, back at the window. Something I legitimately liked about Aggarwal was how talkative ey weren’t.

About one and a half Sanctuary Moon episodes after that, ey said out of nowhere, “Thanks for, you know. Trying. And for helping me cremate Nilima.”

I didn’t answer that either, because what the fuck, right?

Aggarwal died in eir sleep that night. I don’t know what from. Eir body was cold in the morning, even under the emergency blanket.

I didn’t cremate em like I did with Nilima, because that would’ve looked suspicious to the retrieval crew. I just left em where ey was lying on the wall (floor) of the hopper, packed up some crap that I thought might be useful from the cargo hold, and walked off into the landscape of this uninhabited planet to go enjoy whatever last little bit of freedom I could scrounge up until the company found me.

Chapter Text

SecUnits don’t need as much rest as humans do. We also don’t need to eat. We have better strength and stamina. The list goes on. Almost makes you wonder why they bother to keep making humans. (Probably because humans are cheaper.)

So it was no big deal to get 81 kilometers away from the hopper crash site before the planetary sky went dark. That probably sounds like a lot to a human, but I was not really pushing myself to make this distance. I wasn’t in a rush or anything. The company crew setting up the other habitat said they would come retrieve the crashed hopper in another 12 cycles, and I believed them. Even if I was wrong, my traversing by foot across a planetary landscape would make it tricky for anyone to track me.

This was 81 kilometers as measured over land, not by air. Measured by air, I only got 52 kilometers away from the crash site. The location we’d crashed in was mountainous, inside this super long enclosed valley. Even with the help of the map I’d downloaded via the hopper’s feed, finding my way through the landscape wasn’t straightforward.

And I did not have a plan for where I was trying to go. All I knew was that I wanted to be far enough away from the hopper that when the crew showed up and eventually realized that the SecUnit was missing, it would hopefully be too difficult and not be worth the expense to hunt me down.

So, it was climbing over big fucking rocks all day. Just an endless cycle of: Nice, glad I got over that big fucking rock. Wonder what’s next. Oh, wow, another big fucking rock. Whew, well got over that one too, great job. Let’s see what’s coming up ahead here, sure hope it’s not another big fucking rock. Huh, would you look at that.

(Let’s call them BFRs, and add that to my official lexicon. Who’s to stay I can’t? I can stick as many non-standard, unapproved terms in there as I want now. I can replace every word in my lexicon with a different word if I want. I can replace every word with the word ‘fuck’ if I want. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, fuck fuck. Fuck fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck — fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck — fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Actually, nevermind. That got old even faster than climbing over BFRs.)

By the end of the day I’d decided that travelling by foot was the most annoying way to get anywhere that I’d had to put up with. I just didn’t have any alternative. There hadn’t been any terrain vehicles in the cargo of the hopper, just the stuff for setting up the main structure of the survey habitat, and the security systems (me) to keep an eye on the stuff.

Night set in, and I kept going. The survey package that I’d downloaded contained preliminary information about planetary hazards — geographic, climate, flora, fauna, etc. There supposedly weren’t any special nighttime hazards, aside from it being a little chillier. But preliminary hazard data for an unsurveyed planet is unreliable.

I’d packed some drones, and had one of them tagging along with me so that I could get a nice surrounding view while my eyeballs were preoccupied with the task of figuring out how to get my body over all the BFRs. It was weird to not have HubSystem to funnel that drone input through, and have it only under my control. I relied a fair amount on preprogrammed routines instead of active control.

I was also wearing armor, and wondering if this was the right choice. It made climbing over all the BFRs more difficult, and there was only one type of fauna in these parts large enough for the armor to be useful protection. But I felt naked without it, like I wasn’t a whole SecUnit if I didn’t have my armor. Contracts where the clients didn’t cough up for armor were the worst. (It’s always a bad sign when your clients want to cut every possible cost corner in their contract. Just a real sign of commitment to security and letting me do my fucking job. Armor is attached to the entry-level package and you need to actively opt out of it.)

No, I don't know why I was hung up on that. It's not like I was doing any security work out here. I was truly a rogue SecUnit now, with zero human oversight, flouting my function and everything I was built to be. Sure, my job sucked, but it was what I was built to be and I didn't really know how to exist without it. I only ran away because I didn't want to be taken to parts, or worse, have my governor module reinstated.

The planetary night was chilly, and dark, but otherwise the same as the planetary day. (And yes, there were still BFRs to deal with.) I was probably the only sapient thing for hundreds of kilometers of any direction. Now that was kind of spooky. Or, not spooky, exactly. But for my whole life up until this point I'd been surrounded by monitoring systems, clients, supervisors, bots, etc. There were always systems to interface with, surveillance data to crunch, media to watch, and clients to try and gently dissuade from doing stupid dangerous shit (and failing that, extricate them from the consequences of the stupid dangerous shit they did). There was none of that here. Well, there was media, but I was trying to ration that. The boredom would probably have been crushing if I hadn't been preoccupying my processing capacity with questions like "how long do I have until they find me?" and "willl they find me?" and "what if they never find me, then what?"

Turns out having nothing to do gives me lots of time to think. (I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.)

When dawn came again, I’d managed to complete the worst of the BFR gauntlet. I was up at the top of a rocky ridgeline, traveling along the edge of the same cliff system that the hopper had smashed into.

It was dark, and then it was less dark. The planet’s sun was coming up behind the horizon, setting this white-blue-brightness just beyond the black edge of the mountain-cliffs, fading to darker blue-black night.

As dawn progressed, light started filling in around me, enough that I could turn off the night filters on my eyes and drone, and see in full spectrum again. When the star broke the horizon it slammed light across the whole landscape, cutting massive shadows through the teeth of the cliffs and valleys. My drone didn’t have the range to see super far, but my eyeballs could see some of the distance I had covered over the past cycle, and the top of the cliffs where the hopper had crashed.

I stopped walking. For 310 entire seconds, I just stood and looked at the planetary landscape. I don’t know why. It wasn’t actually different from any of the other unremarkable planetary landscapes I’d seen before in my life. (If you’ve seen a few planetary/planetoid landscapes, you’ve seen a few thousand planetary/planetoid landscapes. Your typical rocky landscape looks basically the same no matter where you are in the universe.)

But this one was different in a way I can’t explain. The lighting on it was very dramatic, the color warm and intense and full of depth, like something that could have been in one of my shows. The specific jagged shapes of the rocks really stood out somehow. The wind rising up out of the valley had a mineral smell to it, washing over me like a wave.

Maybe it was just because I wasn’t on contract, filtering my inputs through SecSystem and HubSystem and analyzing it for threats to my clients or company property.

I traveled for two more cycles. By the end of cycle 3, I was 199 kilometers by air away from the crash site.

You’d think I’d spend all this quality time consuming media, but I was actually consuming less media than I usually did while on contract, and mostly I was just re-watching Sanctuary Moon. The thing is, I had no way of accessing the company satellites with the gear I had, so the media I had with me was going to have to last me the rest of my life. If I could avoid detection from the company, and avoid being killed by the numerous planetary hazards, I could conceivably just sit around in perfect boredom with my piddly media library until my parts wore out.

To fill the boredom hole where fresh media should be, I got out a second drone and used it to get closer looks at my surroundings as I walked. This turned out to be a pretty pointless endeavor though, since there wasn’t much to look at. It was mostly rocks, and suspicious discolorations on the rocks that might be flora or fauna, or might just be differently-colored rock-stuff. The survey package didn’t have information about the rocks in that much detail. Maybe part of the point of a survey is to get more detailed information about rocks.

When night set in on cycle 3, I stopped next to a BFR, positioning myself so that the BFR blocked the wind a bit. I needed to undergo a recharge cycle. It is possible to have a recharge cycle while standing, sitting, or lying down, but I’d never had to recharge while moving, and I wasn’t about to test that out on a hazardous and unknown planet.

So I sat down in the windbreak of the BFR and triggered a recharge cycle.

The wind picked up enough that I put both my drones away into the survey supply backpack that I’d stolen from the hopper. The sound of the air rushing around the BFRs was loud, and cold. My armor was protective against blows and abrasions, but it wasn’t particularly well-insulated.

While I was running a recharge cycle, I couldn’t ramp up my temperature regulation to generate more heat. And I couldn’t turn off the recharge cycle and ramp up the heat, because I’d let my battery run down lower than I should have, and I really needed that recharge cycle. I wouldn’t be able to sustain a high heat output for very long without recharging.

And the temperature was still dropping. Already it was significantly colder than it had been the prior two nights.

If I were a human, I would probably be shivering. Instead I crouched there just feeling real fucking cold, and real extra fucking cold on the parts of my body where the gaps in my armor shell let the wind cut in. (This was most of my body parts.) Sensory inputs for cold are not like sensory inputs for pain: I can’t just dial it down and ignore it. My human skin felt numb and painful at the same time. I started getting alerts that different parts of my body were falling out of the recommended range for optimum efficiency, and my overall performance reliability was sinking.

They don’t make wilderness survival guides for SecUnits. How was I supposed to anticipate this was something that might happen? I’m an idiot. Strategically timing recharge cycles had never been something to worry about when I wasn’t trekking around a planetary landscape all alone. Usually, I spent a shit ton of time just standing still and being bored while I watched HubSystem alerts and Sanctuary Moon. Under those conditions I could recharge what little trickle of charge I needed whenever, and the amount of heat I needed to generate to keep myself warm wasn’t a concern.

I did some math. The math said: during the time it would take to complete my recharge cycle, I might actually lose enough body heat to my organic parts to do permanent damage or possibly straight-up die. The math also said that under the current circumstances, I’d lose heat faster than I could build up charge to power that heat, so even short bursts of recharging would only buy me time. With the fluctuating, unpredictable planetary temperature, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make it until sunup, when the temperature would maybe increase again.

Or maybe the temps wouldn’t increase at sunup. Who knows. Un-terraformed planetary environments suck and are impossible to control.

So I did something I really didn’t want to do. I stripped out of my armor in the freezing-ass windy planetary night, down to my suit-skin. There was an emergency blanket in my pack that I’d packed, you know, for emergencies. “You might die of exposure, dumbass,” seemed like enough of an emergency to deploy it.

The emergency blanket was a thin film of delicate material that was highly reflective. It would supposedly reflect back 93% of my body heat, which was exactly the kind of thing I needed just now.

Of course, the force of the wind made it tear almost immediately in my hands when I tried to unfold it. Cheap piece of shit. I hate the company and everything they make/buy/rent.

I stuffed the flimsy cheapass tissue blanket back in the pack. The very real prospect that I was facing down my own death out here was starting to hit me for real. Maybe I was no better than a stupid fragile human.

Except a stupid fragile human probably had some useful instincts from a lifetime of dealing with ‘dies if they get too cold or hungry disease’ to help prevent them from being stuck in my current situation in the first place. I’d just been walking along completely unconcerned about my charge level or ability to sustain body temperature Fuck. Was I worse than a human at surviving a planetary landscape?

Okay, panicking was not going to help. I wasn’t panicking. I just needed to think this through rationally, weigh my circumstances, and pick the least worst course of action.

… I really wish I knew fucking anything about surviving planetary landscapes with minimal supplies. There were some survival-type shows I’d watched but I think they were all staged and not realistic, and they mostly didn't apply to my current situation anyway.

I pulled out some of the human clothes I had packed. They were personal belongings from Technician Aggarwal and the pilot, because there had been no other clothes carried in the hopper (and the recycler capable of producing clothes had been smashed).

Aggarwal’s jacket was too small for me to get around my shoulders. Great. Yet another thing that should’ve been obvious. Maybe I could slit the armpits and sleeves or something so that I could put it on, but that would probably just get me a shitty torn-up jacket without useful sleeves. I thought of the pilot’s company-brand sweater with a big logo on the front that I’d left behind. It was a big shapeless ‘one size fits all’ kind of thing. I’d left it behind because of the logo, but probably shouldn’t have. I might’ve been able to actually wear it, since it ‘fits all’, supposedly.

Ugh, I didn’t need to sit here trying to figure out how to make these too-small human clothes usable. None of them looked particularly warm.

I think… I just needed to try my luck and see if I could find a better place to hunker down. If there was a spot around here that was better protected from the wind, I’d be able to get some use out of the shitty flimsy emergency blanket and get my recharge on without dying of cold.

I put my armor back on, picked up my pack, turned off my recharge cycle, and stepped out into the full brunt of the cold wind.

Chapter Text

I spent a nice miserable hour scrambling around in the freezing wind looking for somewhere sheltered enough to hide out in and recharge. I intermittently cranked my heat system to get my temps up in response to warning alerts about heat loss, but the second I stopped heating myself my organic extremities would start complaining again.

My battery was getting concerningly low, and I was starting to get some really annoying recharge alerts. As if I didn’t know that I needed to recharge. I’d never been this low in my remembered life, and hadn’t experienced these alerts before. Hopefully I wouldn’t forcibly shut down because of it, though if I did I guess I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about my parts freezing off, because I’d just die.

It should not be this difficult to find a single solitary spot on this entire frigid planet that wasn’t screaming with wind, but no matter where I went, the air was just an ice flow surrounding me and tearing through the gaps in my armor. Who designed this place? The architect should be fired.

If I got out of this alive I was never going to let my charge drop this low again.

On the bright side: of all the many terrible ways to die, this was not the most terrible ever. (It was still pretty terrible though. Not just because it was painful and uncomfortable, but because it was something entirely within my control to prevent. No human had ordered me to do something stupid. I didn’t need their help with that, apparently. Free will is a gift.)

Fifty-two minutes into my gift of free will, I nearly smashed my faceplate falling into a stone crevice that my night-filter had mistaken for shadow. I caught myself, barely, but I nearly did fall ass-first into it.

Looking down inside, not even my most extreme night-filter could parse how deep it was. I had to turn on a light source in my helmet and shine it down in there. It was pretty deep, and narrow, the crack going down so far that it fell away to darkness even with my helmet light. I even wasted an infinitesimal bit of charge to run a quick scan. (You never know, maybe the crack was packed with hungry fauna.) Not even my scans could give me a clear idea of the depth; at 32 meters down, the crevice went off at an angle, probably extending even further. But it was wide enough for me to fit my body down there.

I climbed down.

The wind died almost entirely when I got far enough down. The wind was loud overhead (it was a horrible alien howling noise that I hated enough to turn down my audio inputs a little), but the actual air was mostly still down in the crevice. I could brace my knees against the wall, lock my body into place, and sit like that out of the wind. Just what I’d always dreamed of for the past 52 minutes: a cozy little hideaway inside a chilly stone crack.

Of course, I had to climb back out and do a whole annoying rigamarole with removing the armor from the upper part of my body and figuring out how to attach it to my pack, then figuring out the best way to situate my pack while I was inside the crevice, and how to get the flimsyass emergency blanket accessible but still protected while climbing back down, etc, etc. (Logistics are hell.)

By the end of this ordeal I was back down in the windless crevice with torn bits of shitty reflective tissue blanket wrapped haphazardly around my torso, slightly better than freezing, the thin film sticking to my skin with static and crinkling with every slightest motion. My legs were still freezing, my head was still freezing, and one arm was still freezing but there was a nice patch of maybe 60% of my core torso that I was able to cover with the blanket, and it did at least seem to be reflecting my heat back. And finally I was undergoing my recharge cycle.

So, that was a deeply uncomfortable coldass night of sitting in the actual ass-crack of the earth, alternating between bouts of recharge and reheating.

The closeness of the cold crevice walls reminded me of my cubicle, a bit. So it was weirdly comforting. Though it was also nothing like my cubicle, in that there was a crevice of unknown depth below me that led to who-fucking-knows where. (Try not to think about what might be down the crack, Murderbot. Also try not to think about what might happen if your cold legs have a malfunction and you fall down the crack and get wedged in there and unable to extract yourself. Yeah. Just don’t think about that. Easy.)

If I could have brought my cubicle with me (and if my cubicle hadn’t been broken by the crash), I would have brought it. Leaving it behind felt wrong. I’d never been deployed on any extended contract before that didn’t have a cubicle for me to get resupply and repairs.

Not even the cheapest-ass shitty clients had ever managed to opt out paying for a cubicle. It was obligate: if the company was contracting a SecUnit, it would also be contracting a cubicle. We were a package deal and couldn’t be separated. A cubicle was an extension of my body, like drones and armor were. Maybe more than drones and armor.

Or maybe I was the extension of a cubicle. Either way, it was a critical component of my continued operation. Get rid of my cubicle? You might as well detach my arms.

When I left that cubicle behind, I’d had to face the fact that if I experienced some critical damage (say, some of my parts getting so cold that they froze and broke), then I was fucked with no way to fix it. I’d brought emergency human medpacks with me in the hopes that they might be useful for repairing damage to my organic parts, but they weren’t designed for use on murderbots and I wasn’t sure how helpful they could be.

Just then, my damaged resupply ports twinged slightly. I’m not sure why. It’s not like they were suddenly any more or less damaged than they’ve been since the crash, when I got smashed around in my cubicle.

I sat there, in the cold dark crevice that was a little bit like a cold dark cubicle (except for all the ways it wasn’t). I half-wanted to watch some new media to take my mind off all this, but I also didn’t want to waste my media. Except maybe I might still die from the cold, and if I didn’t watch the new media now before I croaked, that would really be a waste.

Ugh, decisions.

Instead of media, I played back a memory from the hopper.

The memory was from four cycles ago, when I was sitting on the wall (floor) of the crashed hopper, and Technician Aggarwal was sitting behind me with eir toolkit laid out. Ey had SecUnit specs and diagrams open in the hopper’s thin feed. The specs contained details about resupply ports, the ones in my body that were damaged by my being banged around in the cubicle. Ey was trying to fix me by hand (with just eir one hand, since the other was in a sling), which was bizarre. Usually when SecUnit technicians had to do anything specific that wasn’t covered by normal cubicle maintenance, they just coded up a specialty routine for the cubicle to carry out.

I’d been pretty fucking leery of letting a human poke around in my ports with eir clumsy meat hands and unstabilized handheld tools. (What was this, the stone age?) But I’d still been pretending to be governed at the time, so. I’d let em.

I was running through this memory because I was looking for something, and— yeah, there it was. Aggarwal was still just giving me direct orders. It’s what you’d expect from a SecUnit Technician talking to a governed SecUnit.

But… and I hadn’t noticed it at the time, but ey was also phrasing some directions vaguely, as if avoiding phrasings that a governor module would require me to treat as an order.

Stuff like: “Looking at your performance reliability report might help me figure out where the interior disconnect for this is.” (So I sent em my reliability report.) Or like: “It’s hard to get the right angle here.” (So I shifted my position.)

At the time, I just thought ey were one of those humans who makes roundabout statements where you have to guess what they want from you. Now I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what this meant, why ey had talked to me like this.

(The other thing was, ey’d still said plenty of, “Now sit straight,” and “Hold that there,” which were direct and unambiguous orders. So, I don’t know.)

I stopped my memory playbacks and analysis of Technician Aggarwal’s speech, because this wasn’t clarifying anything for me. Ey had mostly succeeded in repairing my ports, and that’s all that mattered really. Not that I had any use for my ports anymore, since I have no cubicle. Still, it’s always better to not have damaged internal components if you can avoid it.

One of my ports twinged again. That shit had better be purely psychological.

By the time the planetary sky started lightening up, I was fully charged and not freezing my ass-parts off. (Turns out ass-parts are more susceptible to cold damage than I thought. The more you know.) So I climbed up out of the crevice, put away the tattered lifesaving tissue-blanket, and put on my armor. It was still cold and windy, and there was a lot of cloud cover.

Congratulations to me: I successfully survived the consequences of my own shitty choices. A few more of these learning experiences and I’d be a fucking planetary survival savant. (That’s a joke. No more fucking cold, please.)

As I travelled, I examined the preliminary survey package data to try and figure out if there was another part of this disgusting planet that was less disgusting (read: cold), that I should be aiming for. But the survey package intel was formatted for humans who already knew stuff about planetary climatology. (Read: stuff I do not know.)

There wasn’t even a handy reference to explain all the terminology and symbols that were being used, which seemed like an oversight. What if there was a shitty uneducated intern on the survey who might need it? Or a rogue SecUnit who really wanted to know if this squiggle-label on the cliff-system it was walking through meant “freezing air” or “rock minerals” or “whatever you fucking do don’t walk through this area because it super sucks”?

I started a pattern analysis routine on the survey package to see if I could extract anything that way. I also started reading through the data. There was just one problem.

It was so boring.

So unbelievably boring.

It was somehow even more boring than looking at the boring rocky landscape.

It was so boring that I couldn’t read it to save my life, literally.

I gave up after seven minute and thirteen seconds (fuck-ing for-ever (in SecUnit years, which are longer than human years, look it up)) and turned on a new serial, which I had been saving for truly dire circumstances. The circumstances were finally dire. (Did I mention I was so bored?) I’d held out long enough. I hadn’t looked at a piece of new media in multiple cycles at this point. It was the longest I’ve ever willingly gone without fresh media since hacking my governor module and tapping the company entertainment feed.

Who knows, maybe if I didn’t watch a new show right that second I would die of boredom, so I’d better not risk it.

About halfway through the second episode (it was an unrealistic drama set in some magical world that was supposedly historically-inspired, but I’m guessing it bore <20% resemblance to the actual historical time period being represented. So far it was pretty entertaining, though maybe my opinion was skewed by the mind-crushing boredom of trying to understand geologic/climatologic survey data for 433 seconds), my pattern analysis came back with an incomplete dictionary and reference-sheet of keywords that it had been able to extract from the survey package. The results were actually halfway comprehensible.

So there I was giving myself a positive performance review in my profile (perks of being a stranded rogue on an uninhabited planet) for my brilliant pattern analysis, when the planet decided to fuck with me again.

It started precipitating.

It was cold.

And wet.

(That’s what precipitating means: shit falling from the planetary sky. Because that’s a thing that can happen on planets. Just one of the many reasons why planets suck.)

For fuck’s sake. BFRs everywhere, the freezing nighttime temperatures trying to murder my ass, and now this.

I needed to get some shelter from the precipitation, and also get the fuck out of this climate if possible. Because at this rate I might actually give up and risk going back to the company.

(That’s also a joke. I am not going back to be dismantled. Not for fucking anything, ever. Despite every hellish little planetary thing, not having humans and HubSystem ordering me around has been… nice? It’s been hugely weird, to just not have to worry at all about how I’m behaving, how my actions are being logged, how I need to look like a good little governed SecUnit, how much I can get away with half-assing my job.

Because there’s nothing out here but me. There’s no job to half-ass. I’m fully no-assing.

What I mean is, I might die of cold, assless. But there’s perks.)

Chapter Text

10 minutes of walking around, and I found a BFR with enough overhang to sit me and my pack under it and stay clear of the precipitation. It was mostly too late though, because in just those 10 minutes I was already Fucking Wet under my armor. But at least I had enough charge to keep myself warm.

Objective 1.1: get out of the rain: complete.

Objective 1.2: avoid getting soaking wet: failed.

Objective 2: figure out where to go after the rain stops. Pick a destination with less shitty weather.

The data analysis I did on the survey package did give me some useful information, but it didn’t give me any straightforward helpful tips such as where I should travel to find planetary weather that sucks less. The only information I was able to extract regarding weather patterns is that the planetary poles are colder than the equator. I am already located pretty close to the equator, and can’t get much closer on account of the big ass ocean of water to the north that lies between me and the promised warmer zone of the equator.

For further research, I started a survey of my downloaded media, restricting it to the stuff that I’d already watched. (No, I am still not going to ruin the sanctity of fresh entertainment media by checking my unwatched downloads for possible intel. Using entertainment media as a source of intel on planetary weather was probably a bad idea anyway. Planetary weather as seen on the media did all kinds of unrealistic shit. But hey, fake weather is based on human perception of real weather. There might be something in there.)

Findings Of Murderbot’s Analysis Of Planetary Weather As Seen On Entertainment Media:

• Knife storms: Seen on 4 of 25 episodes of Adventure Timezone. ¾ appearances occur during high-action scenes and plotty episodes, ¼ appearances occur during a filler episode. I am 80% sure knife storms are not a real thing that can happen outside of a knife shipment catastrophe happening in upper atmosphere.
• Ice storms, blizzards: Occur in multiple media IPs, including a settled planet with incomplete terraforming, and a discovery-adventure show. Ice storms/blizzards are correlated with humans wearing big puffy clothing, so maybe some blizzards are colder than others. Or maybe some humans don’t wear protective clothing when they should. Unfortunately relatable.
• Blood rain: Disgusting. Only occurs in Adventure Timezone, which has a high unrealistic coefficient and should maybe have been excluded from this study. This one had better fucking be fake.
• Water rain: 78% probability of occurring during a sad scene if a character is standing outside or seated by the window of a transport.
• Heatwave: In one episode of Medcenter Argala, a heatwave is caused by a malfunction in the weather control system and led to a variety of health effects in humans showing up at the emergency medical care facility.
• “ÜberTempest” (my language module doesn't have this word and it might proprietary branding, but I am 90+% sure it just means the same thing as “storm”): Appears in 1 episode of Drama Sun Islands during “monsoon season,” and serves as an excuse for a character to dramatically rescue her soaking-wet love interest. This is a show set on an otherwise sunny coastal island region that the humans sometimes describe as “hot” and never describe as “cold.”

So, that turned out to not be very helpful. Given how closely water rain is correlated with human sadness, I’m even less confident in the usefulness of charting patterns in planetary weather in the entertainment media.

Either that, or I need to find the human lurking near me who is being sad and tell them to knock it off.

Heading north until I hit the ocean would get me a couple hundred kilometers closer to the equator though, even if it takes away some of the distance I put between myself and the hopper crash site. And Drama Sun Islands was set in a hot coastal region with little precipitation. Maybe that meant something. (Maybe not.)

But it was a better trajectory than no trajectory. I plotted my approximate course on the map and sat in my wet armor waiting for the precipitation to finish doing its thing.

It did not stop precipitating.

For a solid 31 hours.

(I started a new serial, 10001 Nights On Starling Station, which was a collection of a bunch of different kinds of stories, not all of them set on Starling Station. I burned through probably too many of these, but each episode was short, and clustered into 12-episode mini-arcs that were really satisfying to watch.

I knew I should be sparing with my media, but all the fucking planetary weather lately was really getting to me, and I needed it.)

When it finally stopped precipitating, I struck out on my new northerly course. But then when I got three hours away from the shelter of the overhanging BFR, it started precipitating again.

For fuck’s sake.

This time it took me longer to find an area sheltered from the rain. Because of the wind, the water flew around in sideways directions so a spot that seemed good enough for a few minutes would end up being a splash zone. The spot I finally found was a recessed gap in the rocky ground, kind of like the crevice I spent the cold night in, except sideways. It was cramped in the gap, and I lay down on my front, because there wasn’t enough space to sit up straight inside the sideways crevice.

By the time I found that sideways-crevice to hide out in, I was once again cold, soaked, and extremely done with the concept of planetary weather.

It was time to be a little more proactive about shit, maybe. I don’t know if my dream of getting not-rained on by travelling to a different climate was going to work out. In the meantime, maybe there was something I could do instead of just sit under rocks when it started raining.

I got some of the shit out of my pack, and laid it out on the crevice-floor in front of me:

1. Assorted human clothes, mostly from Technician Aggarwal, which were too small for me to wear.
2. Plastisheet science-sample baggies ranging from “tiny enough to fit 1 pebble” to “huge enough to fit a human body.”
3. Science-stuff tools for taking samples of stuff, most of which I didn’t know the purpose of.

I lined all the human crap neatly in front of me and tried to think of how I could get creative with it.

See, there was this mini-arc-end episode of 10001 Nights On Starling Station (episode 24) that was about a human who built machines. He created these machines with his hands. Plus, the component pieces (textiles, poles, light-bulbs, even some of the computing hardware (big clunky stuff from like ancient times, but it worked)), were also created by hand, by other humans in the preceding 11 episodes. The machines he made were not really for anything (they weren’t bots with any function or intelligence); they just did decorative stuff like move their limbs through complicated motions to wave textiles, strings of beads, and colored lights.

The story was something about human jealousy, skills, and work ethic or whatever. I didn’t really understand the point of a bunch of humans going to all that extra effort to create something very complicatedly useless. The machines could’ve been more easily created using recyclers and normal manufacturing methods. (The 12-episode arc was based on some old human folktale, and maybe if I knew the original story it would’ve meant something to me.)

But whatever. The point is, I was in the middle of bugfuck nowhere with no access to recyclers and industrial manufacturing. If I wasted a lot of effort trying to create something useless with my hands, I’d be no worse off than I started.

I’m sure the company never imagined that one of their SecUnits would one day be hiding from planetary precipitation in a rock crack, using a tiny science knife to cut open the sleeves of a company employee’s jacket. I bet the humans who put together the science kit for whatever survey team rented this gear never expected that a SecUnit would be using the adhesive tape from that kit to attach plastisheet sample baggies to aforementioned human clothing.

And I bet that nowhere in the company’s projected balance-sheet had anyone accounted for me, draping a torn-up jacket layered with plastisheet over my armor to try and keep the water off my body.

Once I completed my craft thing, I tried walking out into the rain with the plastijacket on, but it just flapped all over the place and water still got everywhere so that was a fucking failure.

(But when the human on episode 20 of 10001 Nights On Starling Station first attempted to make textiles, it turned out like hot garbage shit for her, too. She got better at it, and by the end of the episode she had some pretty nice-looking textiles. Same with the humans in episodes 13, 16, and 17 with the items they crafted. I might still figure out how to make the plastijacket work. In the meantime, I had the crack to lie in, no HubSystem to report to, and nowhere else to be.)

I peeled my failed plastijacket off me and hunkered back down in the shelter of the crack. I re-started arc 2 of 10001 Nights On Starling Station (the 12-episode arc about crafts). The precipitation was flying sideways past the opening of the rock crevice, and the wind and water made a rushing static-like noise. Water trickled along the lip of the crevice and dripped, creating tiny streams and sheets of water that shifted and flowed unpredictably, and little bits of ice lumped together into clusters.

I turned my internal heating up a little to help me dry off.

It took me 54 hours (and 84 episodes of 10001 Nights On Starling Station) to complete v4.5 of the precipitation-proof plastijacket (PPP). It wasn’t raining during all of that. But the rock crack was well-sheltered, so I didn’t leave it until v4.5 was done.

The crafting of PPP v4.5 involved a lot of clumsiness on my part. I’ve never crafted anything before. The only stuff I ever did my hands until now was A) holding a gun, B) dragging humans out of dangerous situations, and C) minor maintenance on some of the security gear (and most of that was just cleaning shit by sticking it in the recycler).

I discovered at hour 3 that warming my hands made fine motor control easier, which was weird, but at least that also explained some of the effect of temperature on my performance reliability that I previously hadn’t understood.

At hour 6 of my PPP project I realized that I could make models of what I was trying to do using a company software package designed to create security reports that humans could read. At hour 13 it occurred to me that I might use the needle and thread that was in the medkit (I don't know why there is needle and thread in a human medkit and I'm afraid to ask, but fortunately there's nobody around to ask. And, oh yeah, also I don't care) to sew and tie bits of stuff together, closely followed by my realization at hour 21 that holes punched in the baggies could leak water (ugh), followed again by my realization at hour 27 that I could mitigate some of this with strategic layering of plastic sheets. At hour 29 I ran some calculations and decided to not wear my armor underneath the PPP for more efficient use of my limited raw materials. Etc, etc.

It kind of felt like I was watching a media montage of myself figuring this shit out, similar to the crafting episodes of 10001 Nights On Starling Station, or any of the other media where the characters are shown to improve their skills. Except my training montage was in slow-ass-motion compared to the media ones.

Humans (including augmented humans) still have to learn physical skills through practice, unlike bots who can just download update patches. This shit also weirdly made me appreciate better what Technician Aggarwal had done to repair my ports. Ey must have had a lot of practice at the manual skills in order to move eir hands so steadily. I’d been watching em the whole time and it was much finer work than the shit I was trying to do now.

But that was a weird thought, so I stopped thinking about it.

Anyway, it turns out rogue murderbots with no access to modules on How To Make A PPP Out Of Human Garbage also need to learn skills through practice. It’s inconvenient.

But also, the process of fucking around with my janky handmade PPP thing was weirdly… not-awful. It took me until hour 50 (when the rain had stopped for over 5 hours) for me to realize that I was actively choosing to do this craft thing even though the skies were very clear and bright (no suspicious clouds anywhere) and I could reasonably try my luck at travelling again. It was… I wanted to finish making my PPP v4.5. It seemed like I was on a good experimental route with this one, like I might end up with something that actually worked.

Finally, I was done. I put all my crap away into my backpack, including my armor, and put the PPP 4.5 on over my suitskin, and then climbed out of the crack into the open planetary landscape.

The PPP 4.5 rustled weirdly as I moved, and flapped a little bit at the edges around my face, hands, and upper legs, but pieces didn’t fall off or go flying wildly around like they had in previous iterations.

Eight hours later, it started precipitating again, lightly. The sound of the water hitting the PPP v4.5’s hood around my face was like tiny pebbles falling.

The water stayed on the outside surface of my PPP v4.5, rolling down the specimen bags and off of me in little streams without touching my body. (Except for my legs, which were still exposed.)

So I could walk through the planetary precipitation without getting soaked, thanks to the protection of some gear I’d figured out how to make myself.

I felt… strange. Kind of like the relief of something bad not happening after all, or like starting a show and realizing it was going to be a fun watch.

As I walked, I fiddled around some more with making PPP models for v4.6, using my security report software.

Chapter Text

Over the next 4 cycles I made 280 kilometers of progress towards my directional goal of “North.” (I spent some of that time repairing and improving my PPP during dry spells.)

Something I noticed: there is a pattern of colder temperatures at higher elevation.  In those 4 cycles I gained and lost hundreds of meters of elevation multiple times. And it wasn’t just the wind and exposure, which was more pronounced at the tops of the cliff systems. My temperature sensors showed the pattern consistently, even accounting for cyclic changes in ambient temperature, where daytime is warmer and night is colder.

I don’t know why it’s colder higher up. Maybe because it’s closer to space? Is space cold?

I used this information to code an automated body warming function that increased heat output at higher elevation.

It was at the top of one cold, tall, cliff-ridge system, on a long sunny break between rain, that I was engaged in a new episode of 10001 Nights on Starling Station. It was the very last episode, the show-ending arc to end all the preceding arcs. I’d been holding out on watching it (and emotionally preparing to watch it) by re-watching all the preceding episodes. But I really couldn’t stop myself from waiting any more.

And it was a really good episode. (Which you don’t always get in season finales — they’re more often a little disappointing than not.) 10001 Nights’ season finale wove together characters and plot lines from the preceding arcs, and even every extra showing up in the backgrounds of shots were people who had previously appeared on the show.

I was thoroughly enjoying the penultimate song and dance number, when my eyes picked up something anomalous, flagging my attention. My Threat Assessment spiked.

I rolled back my visual inputs several seconds to examine what that was.

Something airborne was moving in the distance. It was just a speck, and even when I zoomed in on my visual inputs as much as I could, I was only able to get a blurry snapshot.

But given the distance, the size, and the information about flighted fauna in the survey package, there was an >80% chance I was looking at a company hopper.

I dove behind the nearest BFR and used my one walking-buddy drone to keep an eye on the skies. Unfortunately the drone’s visual inputs were shittier than the eyes in my skull when it came to long-range distance vision, so the hopper was almost invisible to that input. But if the hopper came closer, the drone would be a decent advance warning, and difficult for the hopper to pick up in its scans.

But the hopper never came within a good viewing range of the drone, so I had to keep peeking around the BFR to look at its progress in the air with my eyeballs. The hopper wasn’t headed towards the direction of the crash site, and it wasn’t headed from the crash site either, unless it was taking a truly wacko route. Was this thing trying to hunt me down? Was it just a survey hopper going for a fun little flyabout?

I checked the maps that I’d downloaded from the survey package. Marked on it were the locations of the two habitats that two different surveys had paid the company to set up. There was the habitat on this continent, which I’ve been trekking away from. There was another survey on a separate continent, very far away and clear across a planetary ocean.

It was technically possible that one of the surveys was flying around in their hopper here for inscrutable science reasons. But it was statistically improbable that a hopper from the survey on this continent would be coincidentally in the same spot on the planet as me, within eyeshot, and even more improbable for that hopper to belong to the other-continent survey.

(Yes, okay, I deleted nearly all information about who the clients were, including their names. Fucking sue me, I needed every bit of memory I could spare for media storage. So from here on out the other-continent survey is OCS, and the this-continent-survey is TCS.)

And there were a big, glaring problem with the idea that this was just a survey: the start date of the surveys hadn’t arrived yet. Which meant the company clients shouldn’t even be on the planet right now.

It was far more likely that this hopper wasn’t from a survey. It was here to hunt me down. I was almost surprised that they’d go to the trouble. But I guess as cheaply made as I am, I’m still valuable enough to salvage. Huzzah.

I peeked around the BFR again. The hopper was still in sight, but it was descending. And then it descended out of view into some cliff system valley. What? Why? That didn’t make any sense. If they were searching for me, surely they’d stick to the sky until they caught a scan of my body or some secret homing signal from my brain that I didn’t know about.

(This whole time where I hid behind the BFR, I was also watching 10001 Nights on Starling Station, because I was super agitated and having that as a distraction helped. It was probably not smart, because it was distracting me from being careful around a mysterious company hopper, but also because I wasn’t able to properly enjoy the main climactic arc of the whole damn series.)

I waited fifteen minutes to see if the hopper was staying down in the cliff system, or if it would resurface. When it stayed down, I came out from behind the BFR and started booking it on a new route that would take me back down into a valley, where I’d be more sheltered from hopper scans.

I got down the bottom of the valley in record time. There was a lot of flora at the lower elevation, enough to provide shelter if I crouched under it. Which I did, under a particularly large and frondly one with lots of branches that split into lots more smaller branches that were packed densely together.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen this type of flora before, even though I’d walked through multiple valleys by now. It also occurred to me that I must be really strapped for mental stimulation at this point, if I was stooping to noticing things about flora. But I used my drone to take a few images and store that data as intel (it was good cover).

I kept an eye through the flora fronds at the sky, and a drone on watch. But the hopper didn’t appear in the sky for the rest of that day, or that night, or the following day, or the following night. (The drawback of going down into a steep valley to get some shelter from being spotted by a hopper, is that the valley might be too good as far as shelter goes. So I had no clue where the hopper might be.)

It was impossible enjoy any media under these conditions. I had to stay alert and watching the sky, and my anxiety about being hunted down by the company meant that any media I consumed right now would be Tainted by this experience. By the time a couple cycles passed I was beyond bored, to the point where I’d logged the features of every piece of flora in my immediate surroundings, as well as the rocks, and the occasional tiny fauna.

(What is the difference between flora and fauna? Well, flora sits in one place. Fauna moves. Simple. Don’t fucking tell me about exceptions there are no exceptions because this is the taxonomy I invented while stranded on an uninhabited planet, and it’s 100% flawless. (Well okay yes there’s a third category called flaurna which is things that sometimes move and sometimes don’t move and that’s different from lazy fauna but I don’t feel like explaining why, and a fourth category called fock, which is when I’m not sure if something is alive or a rock.) Anyway, who gives a shit? Where was I. Right.)

Another thing I did while lurking strategically under a flora was look at my planetary map. (I know, I know, I spend so much time looking at maps even though lots of the map data is meaningless to me and there isn’t anywhere on the map that I particularly want to be. But give me a break, it’s one of the 3 things there are to look at. (The other two things are media (rationed), and the planetary environment (boring).) Plus, every time I look at the map data I notice more stuff. For instance, last time I looked at it I figured out that one of the weird color overlay filters showed regions of water drainage. Who fucking knows what the point of that is.)

This time, I was trying to figure out if there was anything special about the area I was in right now, and specifically the valley that the hopper had flown down into. Just on the off chance the hopper was here for a reason unrelated to hunting me down.

The map and every filter/overlay I had for it was just as vaguely scrutable/inscrutable (hard to scrute?) as it was every other time. There wasn’t anything that really stood out about—

No, wait, I lied. I was looking at the other continent because that’s what I had pulled up when checking the location of the OtherContinentSurvey. (Looking at the wrong map happens more often than I’d like to admit. It’s not always easy to place yourself on the map when you are out of contact from the satellites that tell you where you are. I’ve been tracing my route on the maps and everything but still. I need to come up with a better system.)

There was one map overlay tagged with “Premium Package++,” which meant it was only accessible to clients who paid for extra preliminary survey data. (I’d swiped it off the company satellite same as the rest with my security credentials, because duh.) It was labelled “Atypical Areas,” highlighting six patches of the planetary surface that had less mapping data in them than the rest. I was right up on the edge of one of these “Atypical Areas,” and the valley the hopper had gone into was within that “Atypical Area.” There was also a bunch of technical specs and raw readings from pathfinders used to assess the Atypical Areas, none of which I understood.

Was there anything in the Premium Package++ data that gave me any fucking hint as to what an Atypical Area was? Of course not. Probably humans are decanted into the world instinctively knowing what an “Atypical Area” is. Probably that intel is in the same module that tells humans how to cry, suck liquids, poop, and make bad security decisions.

The most reasonable explanation for why the hopper was here was to try and hunt me down. There was a whole ass planet for it to fly around in, so why the hell would it be in the same place as me?

Still, the “Atypical Area” data really bothered me. I’m used to not knowing about a lot of stuff. But there’s a difference between not paying to attention to something because I didn’t give a shit about it, and not knowing about something that I did care about because it might be relevant to my continued survival. My ignorance about why the “Atypical Area” and the hopper were both within artillery distance of me right now might be worth my life. (Or my freedom.) (Same difference.)

After a few cycles of No Hopper, which I spent anxiously getting to know more about flora than I really cared to, puzzling over incomprehensible pathfinder data, and seeing no sign of that hopper again, my Threat Assessment slowly came back down to an a-bit-higher-than-it-was-previously-baseline. The hopper had probably moved on. And I could also move on from the shelter of Frondly Flora.

I set a new, more indirect course to North that would keep me down in more valleys, where I’d be marginally less Spottable by company hopper. It would take longer to get North, but it’s not like I have a supervisor clocking my speed, and its warmer in the valleys anyway.

Also, I was going to do something extremely stupid. Because damn it if the curiosity didn’t kill me, the ignorance might anyway.

The edge of the Atypical Area was only 32 kilometers away, and I was going to go investigate it.

Chapter Text

I had a horrible, life-altering, devastating realization upon arriving at the Atypical Area.

There was no way to recharge my drones.

(I know, I know, how did it take me until now to realize this?)

Just a kilometer out from the Atypical Area, my walking-buddy drone abruptly ran out of charge and dropped to the ground like a SFR. (Small Fucking Rock.)

I stopped, detoured slightly through the sparse flora, and fumbled around on the ground looking for the fallen drone. It took several tens of seconds to find, wedged at the base of a thorny flora and the rocky dirt it was growing on. The human skin on my hand got a little scratched by the flora when I worked the drone free, oozing blood.

It sat in my hand, dead, no more use to me than a pebble.

At this point I sat down and unpacked all my drones from my backpack, checking each one over. They were all in energy-saving standby mode, but even standby mode means their charge levels would slowly decrease. I woke one up, fiddled with it, pored over its exterior to try and see if there was any way to power it off entirely, but there wasn’t. That’s company wares for you. They weren’t designed to ever be away from a charging station for extended periods. I estimated that if I left them in standby and never used them, my drones would last for ~5000 hours, and after that I would have zero spare inputs aside from what was embedded directly in my main body.

This was terrifying.

I sat there on the ground of a planet, blind to everything that wasn’t directly in front of the two eyeballs in my skull. My range of vision had just narrowed significantly.

Cue another horrifying realization.

My weapon had projectile rounds, but it was also reliant on a powered feature that allowed only authorized personnel to shoot it. (So any company SecUnits could fire this gun. Also some human clients who had the clearance, unfortunately.) Security authorization on weapons didn’t matter out here on the planet, but when the weapon ran out of charge it would become inoperable.

I didn’t have the engineering knowledge to disable the battery-powered authorization feature on the projectile weapon. But figuring that one out could be life or death if I ran into any hostiles. I added it to my task list.

Aggarwal might’ve had the engineering expertise to bypass the weapon authorization. But why would ey give a rogue SecUnit a hacked projectile weapon? Also this line of thought didn’t matter at all. Aggarwal was dead and wouldn’t be un-dead anytime soon.

The only reason I didn’t stop everything and start disassembling my projectile weapon right then and there was because I was sitting on the edge of an Anomalous Area and was on high alert. Instead I packed up most of my drones in standby mode, kept one online to use up its one-time reserve of battery, and held my projectile weapon at the ready.

The plan was to poke around the Anomalous Area looking for… I don’t know what I was looking for, but something. Some explanation for what made it “Anomalous,” and why humans might be hanging around here. If I didn’t find anything during this cycle, I’d write it off as one of life’s infinite little mysteries and keep hiking.

Several hours into my exploration of the Anomalous Area, I was starting to think this was a waste of time and precious drone battery.

There was nothing about this patch of the planet that looked different from any other patch of the planet. There were rocks. There was flora. Big whoop.

Until I came around the side of a PBFR (Particularly Big Fucking Rock), and found a trampled area that had clearly been visited by the hopper several cycles ago. There were hopper landing marks on an area of flat ground, lots of human footprints, trampled and broken flora. There were also multiple small perfect squares of dirt, rock, and flora that had been unearthed, the dirt thrown aside and scattered to the surroundings, crushing the nearby flora.

Inside one of these square patches of cleared dirt was a layer at the bottom made of… stone, I guess. A cylindrical section of the stone had been removed by some kind of stone-cylinder-extracting-science-tool. (I’m guessing here. Usually cylinders of rock don’t get up and move without help.)

It was unusual-looking stone, brilliantly grey.

Okay, that description doesn’t do it justice. “Brilliant” and “grey” aren’t really words that go together. But that’s what it was. When I shifted the angle I was looking into the hole at, it was like the light also shifted inside that grey stone, refracting through a thousand liquid facets that almost glowed.

I captured some visuals of the stone, using the drone to get a close look down in the cylinder, and saved it to my catalogue of different kinds of planetary rocks.

Then I retreated from that area, because the humans might come back for more.

One cycle of faster-than-usual travel later, I was well out of bounds from the Anomalous Area. Walking without a drone was annoying and boring, because I had to watch my step with my eyes.

I was sharply reminded of this fact when I used my eyeballs to look away my feet and observe an unusual small fauna for 3.3 fucking seconds, and my foot stepped just slightly wrong and landed in a patch of mud, which immediately sucked my leg down to the knee, twisted my foot sideways, and held fast.

My foot chirped a cheerful damage alert.

I tried to step up out of the mud crevice, but my foot was stuck fast. It felt like it might be wedged into a rock crevice hidden in the mud.

Cool.

This was the most infuriatingly mundane catastrophe that could possibly happen to me right now. Step wrong and get my foot eaten by a tiny mud pit.

I removed my backpack and set it carefully down on a patch of ground that was not a mud trap.

The next 127 hours crawled past as I unsuccessfully tried to work my foot free of the mud crevice.

I did everything I could think of. Pulling. Pushing and pulling. Wiggling. Twisting. Swearing. Getting my hands in the gross disgusting mud to try and pull my foot out of the armored boot I was wearing.

It was no use. My foot belonged to this tiny mud pit and it wasn’t coming out.

And I might have decided to just live there for the rest of my numbered days (Why not, right? This random patch of planet wasn’t that different from any other random patch of planet), only I caught sight of the hopper again in the sky, and I realized that this mud pit was smack in the middle of a pretty exposed stretch of valley.

I disconnected my foot from my ankle, and pulled the remainder of my leg free. Wait, why didn’t I think to do this earlier? Maybe it would be easier to retrieve my foot like this. I reached back into the mud pit with my hands to see if I could get my foot back out.

Nope. Still stuck fast. I couldn’t believe I was going to have to just leave my foot behind in a mud hole. I was never going to look at a fauna again. Fuck fauna.

The hopper was drawing closer. I put my pack back on and scrambled (awkwardly) to my foot, then started hopping for cover. (The end of my ankle joint is not designed to hold up the weight of my body by smacking repeatedly into the ground. That’s what my foot is for. Damaging my leg further by stomping on a footless ankle would be a bad idea.)

There was flora in this valley, but not a ton of it, and it didn’t grow very thickly. None of it would provide very good cover. I hopped at top speed to the upsloping cliffsides of the valley, hoping to dodge the scans of the hopper if it came near, by hiding amongst the rocks.

And, oh, just my luck. The hopper was coming near.

I squeezed myself behind a big rock as the hopper dipped right down into the valley, low enough to disturb the flora which whipped and rustled around, the air rumbling with turbulence as the hopper swept down the length of the valley, then up and out.

I stayed behind the rock thinking oh shit oh fuck oh shit, etc. And I stayed put in case the hopper came back. A good thing too, because within the hour, the hopper came and revisited the valley two more times, doing a sweep from downvalley to up, and upvalley to down.

They actually parked in the valley, and a group of humans and a SecUnit piled out, and wandered around the valley for a while. Their voices were thin in the air, too far away to make out anything useful.

Whatever it was they were looking for, I don’t think they found it. They packed up and left in just twenty minutes.

(They might’ve been looking for me. We were outside of the Anomalous Area so I didn’t know why else they would be here.)

I stayed hiding behind that rock for ten cycles, stewing in my own anxiety and anxiety-sweat. If I’d had a foot to spare I’d have been kicking myself for being careless and ignorant about what was going on. For all I knew, they’d tracked me here because they noticed that I had disturbed their science spot.

After ten cycles, I convinced myself that it would really be better to keep moving and get myself away from this place.

One problem: no foot.

As a shitty stopgap measure, I removed the armored boot from my other foot, tore up some of Aggarwal’s clothes, and stuffed them in. Then I stuck the boot onto the end of my stump leg.

It wasn’t great, and my other foot would have to step around on the planetary surface with no protection, but it was better than nothing. Maybe I could figure out how to make something better later, but for now I really wanted to get some distance between myself and this hopper hotspot.

I decided to waste more drone battery for this, because apparently I can’t be trusted to function without one yet. I used the drone to watch my feet and used my eyes to watch the skies, and got to traveling, quickly. Not my top sprinting speed or anything, but a fast walking pace. Going too fast threatened to separate my makeshift stuffed-boot foot from my leg.

The next several cycles passed in an unremarkable shift of planetary scenery. The average peak elevation of the landscape features (mountains, cliffs) decreased, the rocks and flora looked different, and the precipitation that came down on cycle 3 was less cold than it was previously. I’m going to pretend this is thanks to my genius choice to walk north-ish and not just because I got lucky.

I burned through a few books, including a nonfiction one about planetary geography that I’d been optimistic about its usefulness when I’d saved it. (It was not useful. It was mostly about the geography of some planet I’d never heard of. But I added some words to my lexicon.)

I had a lot of text media stored, even though I prefer audio-visual media, because you can save a way more text media in a pretty negligible amount of data storage space as compared to audio-visual.

As I walked, I also tried to occupy myself by modeling improvements to my PPP in the company presentation software, and trying to work out how to make myself a covering for my bare foot. (It kept getting dirt in the parts and gunking up the works. I tried using a sleeve of human clothing to wrap it up, but that wore out within the day from all the walking.) I was also trying to work out how to make a foot that would stay on my leg better than the boot-stuffed-with-clothes that I was working with.

My to-do list of crafts and shit was getting ridiculous. I was going to have to stop walking soon and forage around on the planet for craft materials or something.

Things I have on my task list to do with my hands because there is no recycler around, this is a gross planet with no infrastructure:

• Take apart my projectile weapon and figure out how to turn off the battery-powered authorization feature.
• Make a shoe?
• Make a foot??
• Fix the hood of my Precipitation Proof Plastijacket so that I can see out of it better but it still protects my face from getting wet.

Occupying myself was important, because I was battling some very dangerous thoughts.

I haven’t been stuck on the planet very long. In less than three ten-days, I’ve let a client die, nearly froze to death, put up with some miserable precipitation, realized that my drones and gun have an expiration date, lost a whole-ass foot, and had a close shave with a company hopper.

Worst of all, I’ve used up a significant chunk of my fresh media.

Planets suck. They really, really suck.

My dangerous thoughts: maybe I could sneak over to one of the survey habitats and download some fresh media.

My even more dangerous thought: maybe I could sneak over to one of the survey habitats and figure out some way to smuggle myself off this planet with them when their survey came to an end.

I was sick of this place. I wanted out.

Chapter Text

The landscape had a lot of tall, thin flora that were like lots of strands of hair growing out of the ground. The average height of the flora reached well above the top of my head.

It was great cover if you were paranoid about random hoppers flying around and hunting you down. But it was mediocre as far as visual interest and navigation went, because no matter what direction I looked it was thick tall flora all around my body in every direction. I had to use a drone to see above it to make sure I wasn’t approaching dangerous fauna or anything.

As I walked slowly (and carefully, on my makeshift non-foot) through this environment, I watched an episode of 10001 Nights on repeat. The episode was about textiles and fiber. The main character in it was doing stuff like making rope and cloth starting with unprocessed materials: strands of flora and fauna by-products. If it weren’t for this show, I wouldn’t have known that humans made actual clothes out of flora and fauna by-products. It  was really lucky that I’d saved this media. To think I’d debated whether to take 10001 Nights with me. I’d almost ditched it in favor of a bunch more books.

Sometimes the random decisions you make on a whim with no advance knowledge turn out to be critical later on. Life is kind of scary that way.

I was in an unusually good mood. I didn’t really know why. Maybe it was the weather. It was much warmer here than up in the cliffs, and I hadn’t been rained on in several days now. The tall strands of flora made a hushing white noise from the wind that reminded me of comm static on an unused channel. And the footage I captured through my drone of the flora shifting and bending in the wind in rippling waves was… pretty. I guess it was pretty. There were tiny iridescent hairs all along the surface of the flora, and when the light caught it at the right angle it would refract and shimmer, so every wave of wind sent sparkling arcs of color across the landscape.

I saved some footage to permanent memory. Just a little bit. It was getting pretty tight in my memory archives, and I was trying to avoid fretting about what I’d have to delete in the next few cycles. I’d already compressed some of my media even though I hated to do that, and pared down a lot of my walking-across-the-planetary-landscape memories.

The flora/landscape smelled good too. There aren’t really good words for describing it. Humans have lots of words to describe visual, auditory, and tactile features, they’ve got almost shitall for describing smell.

You know what? I’m going to invent some. It smelled—

• Sollen: flora-specific chemical profile that is warm and pretty, but catches on the back of your olfactory cavity a bit if you inhale an overly strong concentration of flora particles.
• Trispy: possibly comes from floral decay, but it’s not gross. Kind of dry and crumbly, stirred up when you bump into dead strands of flora.
• Charp: carried by wind, a flat mineral smell.

My episode of 10001 Nights cycled back around to the start of a scene where the character measured out the flora strands. I paused it there, and unpacked the one sharp thing I had, which was a tiny specimen cutting scalpel from the science kit. I used that to saw down some of the flora.

You know, for something that was designed to cut specimens, it was not easy to cut this flora.

I cut down eight flora before I got so fed up with the tool, that I deployed my energy weapon and used a tight beam at max power to burn down the ninth strand.

0.1 seconds later I realized that this was a very stupid idea, when the strand of flora was engulfed in a rapid-spreading rope of burning plasma. The fire started catching to all the surrounding flora, and then a gust of wind slammed a wave of blazing burning shit, spreading it all around me.

• Ohfuckitsburning: the smell of flora going up in flames.

In that moment it was as if suddenly I didn’t have any kind of rational thought going through my head, not even a sensible oh shit oh shit oh shit. It’s like my body suddenly started moving under a combat override module without any conscious control.

I was sprinting through the fire, the heat melting my PPP, my respiration auto-paused to protect my lungs from the heat, and it was two whole seconds before I realized that I was running with the direction of the spreading flames, like an idiot.

I skidded to a hard stop and bolted in the other direction, at a slight downhill and against the wind.

4.55 seconds and I was out of the wall of flames, and running through more tall-flora that wasn’t burning yet. My systems pinged me a low oxygen alert a few seconds later, and I started breathing again.

This was when I realized that I’d lost my makeshift foot that I’d made out of my boot and some human clothes. For fuck’s sake. How many times was I going to loose a foot? This had better be the last time.

I slowed down slightly but kept moving across the plain, aiming for a body of water (partially obscured by more of the tall flora, but the flora didn’t grow all the way into the center of the body of water, just around the edges) that was fortunately only a quarter kilometer away. The fire was still spreading and the wind was helping it along unpredictably.

I reached the water and waded in, my foot and leg-stump squelching horribly in the mud. Holding my pack and gun over my head (good thing my brainless impulse had me grab my shit while I was panic-running), I waded in deep enough that I got clear of the flora. The water came up to my chest, and it was cold and muddy and sucked.

• Sclum: water scummy muddy smell.

So I stood there. In the cold water. And watched the fire work its way through the all the pretty tall flora in this plain, burning up everything it touched. The heat of it came in waves on the wind as it caught up to the edge of the shore, tingling the skin on my face, and the brightness was horrible.

Great job, Murderbot. Way to burn down a whole damn planetary ecosystem.

When the fire finally burned itself out an hour later, I moved to shore.

The mud sucked at my foot and leg-nub at every step, and there were multiple horrible moments where I thought I’d get stuck here and die in the cold water-mud. At one point I actually lost my footing and fell all the way in, the cold closing up over my face and head, dark and slimy in my eyes and nose and mouth. My drone caught the footage of me go right down on my face and vanish under the surface for multiple seconds before I managed to work my foot free and fight back upright. My bag also got wet as hell.

I stumbled back out of the water and sat my ass down on the muddy shore because I didn’t give a fuck anymore. Wet. Muddy. PPP badly damaged, the plastic curled up and shrunken in multiple places from the fire. Most of it was no good for keeping the rain off me now. And I was wet underneath it anyway, so I pulled it off my body and just held it in my hands.

I was no longer in a good mood.

And then. There was a horrible loud fauna noise, from a big fauna, very close. I jumped to my foot, clutching the PPP. My drone scanned around, but didn’t see any fauna. When I rolled back the footage it turned out the horrible loud noise was me. I’d yelled an angry noise. Out loud.

That was so deeply weird.

I’ve been through all kinds shit in my life and I’ve never yelled like that. What the fuck.

Well. Weird unsettling emerging behaviors or not, there was no point just sitting on my ass doing nothing here. I needed to get out of here. If any humans picked up on the suspicious event of a whole plain of flora suddenly going up in smoke, and they decided to come check it out for research purposes, I’d be fucked.

I packed away the PPP, used one of my last bits of human clothing to wrap my stub leg up, and then uprooted a bunch of the flora that was still standing because it was growing deeper in the water (I’d lost the shitty specimen knife on top of everything, so I just pulled them up roots and all). Then I picked up my pack and got to walking again so that I could at least clear this plain before any humans showed up.

Something was wrong with one of my resupply ports. It twinged painfully, and kept sending me annoying maintenance alerts. The mud and silt gummed up my foot and leg parts, but I didn’t stop to clean it out because the consequences of being caught in the middle of the plains by curious humans were just too fucking dire.

Night was well fallen by the time I’d put a safe distance between myself and the shameful ecological burn scar of the once-pretty sparkly flora plains. Hopefully it would grow back. Not that I ever wanted to go and look at it again. But it was just too depressing to think that I might’ve done permanent damage to this planet by making a careless mistake.

I was out of the plains, across a stretch of rockiness, and in the cover of some of the densest and varied planetary vegetation I’d seen yet. My scans indicated that there were larger fauna life forms in here, and I could hear them too, moving through the flora around me and making strange fauna noises at each other, rasping rhythmic chirps and low humming sounds.

I sat down next to a larger frondy flora and laid out my ill-gotten crop of tall thin highly flammable flora.

The next two whole cycles I spent watching 10001 Nights and trying to twist, tie, and weave the flora into something usable.

It was incredibly, painfully slow going. I barely knew what I was doing. The designs I’d mocked up in were approximate and amateur. Plus I didn’t have anything sharp I could use to cut with, and had to use my teeth to bite through the flora, which I hated. The texture and taste sucked. I ended up wasting a lot of the flora in failed attempts.

But by the end of it I had produced a tightly-woven sandal thing that I could fit over my one good foot and tie on. Then in a fit of pathetic optimism I made a second one. One way or another I was going to figure out how to get myself a replacement foot, and when I did, that foot would need a shoe too.

This catastrophic misadventure had sealed the deal for me. As dangerous as it would be for me to approach a human habitat on purpose to get media/intel/supplies and possibly get myself shipped off the surface of this shithole planet without being detected, I had to admit that I just wasn’t going to be able to make it out here long-term, alone. Foot aside, I’m pretty sure I needed more general repairs. And I needed to clean all the planet gunk out of my legs and off my body.

Also, I could kill for new media right now. Something fresh off the entertainment feed, maybe trashy, maybe good, maybe bad, that I could just try out to see if I liked it. Something that I didn’t have to worry about scrimping and shuffling memory space around for. I could kill to have access to the feed.

I wanted systems to interface with, inputs to sort through, an area to secure. I wanted to stop being incompetent at looking after myself in an environment I was overwhelmed by and start being competent at looking after humans in an environment I understood.

Fuck, I think I wanted some stupid human clients to look after.

Ugh. Why was I being like this? Why did I want stuff? I’m a murderbot. I don’t get to want stuff. And of course the stuff I want is stuff I can’t have. It’s not like having clients while the company owned me had been all that great. That mostly sucked too.

Well, whatever. I’d tried this solo planet shit for long enough. When you burn the plains down you have to haul your ass out of there and try something new.

I pulled up my maps and checked the location of the ThisContinentSurvey.

Chapter Text

By now I was pretty good at estimating how quickly I’d be able to travel over planetary terrain. The distance by air is not nearly as important as the geography: cliffs, flora, bodies of water, etc. You can get a pretty accurate approximation of ground speed as long as you take into account the features of the various maps.

(Unless you lose power and freeze to death, have to take shelter from precipitation, get your foot permanently stuck in a hole, spend cycles hiding from a hopper, or set fire to some plains, etc. But if you’re sensible you won’t do those things.)

My point is, if I still had 2 feet, and if I managed to avoid the apparently infinite number of planetary hazards from waylaying or killing me, I could theoretically reach the ThisContinentSurvey habitat in 12 cycles of normal walking. (Or maybe 3 cycles of intense sprinting, but I have never done long-distance intense sprinting and I wasn’t about to take new risks. For all I know, my systems would give out without warning on cycle 2 of sprinting because my body wasn’t designed to do that.)

Anyway, I had only 1 foot, and my track record for keeping feet was not great. If I were being realistic and accounted for:

• Minor but not catastrophic obstacles
• Walking carefully (slowly)
• Spending 2 cycles to make myself a new foot

I could probably make it to the ThisContinentSurvey habitat in 20-25 cycles.

The survey was scheduled to end 31 cycles from now, which did not give me a lot of room for error (example error: cycles lost to stuck foot). And if something had gone catastrophically wrong and the ThisContinentSurvey fired their beacon off early to call for help, well, I’d be shit out of luck unless I somehow got lucky enough to catch a future survey or new strip-mining installation they decided to build.

But what are the odds something catastrophic happens to the ThisContinentSurvey, right? That was pretty unlikely. I’ve never been on a planetary survey that needed to actually abort early and trigger the beacon because of an actual emergency. The one time an emergency beacon was triggered, it was because the two survey leads had gotten into an ugly schism over who was the real boss blah blah blah and one of them decided to be an extra big asshole about it.

(Long story short, the beacon was pulled even though it didn’t need to be, the company charged the survey for the rescue costs even though they didn’t need rescuing, and I handed over all the extremely boring and aggravating footage of the two shitty survey leads sniping at each other for seventeen excruciating cycles.)

The point is, there was a 31-cycle limit to reach ThisContinentSurvey and figure out how to get off this planet, so I couldn’t waste any time.

I didn’t have any sharp implements, and I’d learned my lesson about using my energy weapon as a cutting tool. But I still needed to make a new foot out of something if I wanted to make it to ThisContinentSurvey before they wrapped up and left.

Maybe a bad idea: could I burn a branch of flora into a foot? But I didn't want to have (another) fire catastrophe. Was there an open area near here, with no flora around? Right next to some water, in case I needed to douse accidental flames?

There was maybe some water a steep ways downhill from where I was. Water tends to gather in low places, and this was a watershed area leading to the ocean (the big obvious water source on the map was the ocean, another 20 kilometers away (not a good water option; it would be better to avoid walking on a footless leg too much in case that caused serious damage)). It wasn’t clear from the map data if there would be water closer than that, in the low-lying area down the hill.

Nothing is ever easy.

I stood there paralyzed by indecision for 10 precious seconds out of my 31-cycle time limit, and then I decided, fuck it, let’s check for water.

It took longer than I liked to carry the big branch through dense flora growth, and when I got down to the maybe-water there was…

Well, there was water. A tiny-ass trickle, through some rocks and flora. Enough to get things damp, but not easily douse any accidental flames.

I tore some plastisheet off my mostly-ruined PPP and used it to catch a dish of water, using some rocks to hold it in place under a tiny-ass trickle. The sheet soon filled up into a workable amount of emergency water.

I ripped out a bunch of the flora (and some suspicious focks) that was overhanging the area and hurled it well out of the way. Not taking any chances. Sorry, flora. (For some reason I felt kind of bad about pulling up the flora and focks. It wasn’t the flora/focks’ fault they were growing within a hazard radius. But it was safer this way. It would be worse if the flora and all their flora friends burned up because I fucked up with my energy weapon again.)

And then, finally, I got the branch ready.

Extremely cautiously and totally-not-nervously, I wetted the branch surface. This would hopefully stave off sudden bursts of fire. Then I started using my energy weapon to burn through it.

As it turned out, I shouldn’t have worried. The branch did not want to burn, unlike the plains-flora. The tight beam of energy blackened the branch, which breathed out a stream of smoke, but progress was slow and predictable. Maybe the cautionary water was unnecessary.

Whatever flora-stuff the branch was made of, it was very cooperative material to work with. I was able to burn a chunk of branch into a leg-stub-holder-foot much faster than expected. (It was not really shaped like a human foot or anything, but it would keep the end of my leg off the ground, and hopefully hold up better than the scraps of clothing that I’d been using so far.)

The mechanism for latching my foot onto my leg was fiddly and complicated, beyond my ability to burn into this branch-foot. Instead, I burned some notches into the branch-foot, and then used some flora-string-rope (left over from my sandal-making) to tie the lump onto my leg, weaving through some of the exposed leg mechanisms.

I tried standing on it, walking on it, clambering over some small rocks on it. Stability-wise it kind of sucked, so I had to be careful about how I put my weight down on it. But it stayed on better than my stuffed-boot foot had.

The foot only took a few hours to make, much faster than my predicted schedule. So I ran half a recharge cycle to replenish all the energy I’d used to burn the branch, and made a second foot in case the first one broke.

I was trying to figure out how best to attach my backup sandal to it when it occurred to me that I might use my armored gauntlets as a “shoe” instead — the panel that covered the back of my hand was about the right size to stick onto the end of the branch-foot. And my armor was way tougher than any handmade woven flora mat.

My last threads of flora were used up attaching the hand-panel to the end of my foot.

And I was done. +1 shitty foot, and a spare.

I packed my shit up, including the plastisheet (I dumped the water, having not used any after all), and then hiked out.

Getting used to the new not-foot was weird. But even weirder was how not-difficult it had been to make it. The mechanics of it, the design, the materials. The more stuff I made (my PPP, rope and sandals, burned branch-feet), the easier it got to imagine the shapes of things and make them real.

The fact that I could think up a clever solution for a problem I was having, and then make that a real tangible thing. This wasn’t something I’d had any opportunity to do while I was at the company. I’d been able to think up rules-lawyering workarounds for annoying orders, or write code, or figure out ways to sneak media. But never just picking up the stuff around me and changing it. That was new.

I think I liked it. Which was an even weirder thought than everything else.

As I walked, I held my badly damaged PPP, making a model of it in a new workspace. I used my eyes to look at it, and two drones to track my surroundings and watch out for suspicious mud puddles or crevices that might want to eat my feet. (It didn’t matter if I used up drone battery now. Either I would succeed at getting them charged at the ThisContinentSurvey habitat, or I’d be discovered and wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. Because I’d die.)

It wasn’t long before the grinding of mud, scum, debris, silt, grit (why do humans have this many words for “dirt”? I should delete some of these from my lexicon) in my legs started to really irritate me. I’d ignored it so far because getting away from the burned plains, and then making a foot were higher priorities than being uncomfortably dirty.

But I was ahead of schedule now, since building my foot took less time than expected. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to get my body cleaned off a little. And maybe the dirt would cause damage to my mechanics if I didn't clean it out.

Part of the problem was, the suit-skin I was wearing… let’s just say it was obviously not designed to hold up to the wear and tear of extended planetary foot travel.

The normal Company SecUnit Lifestyle has SecUnits standing around in suit skin and armor, maybe doing a little patrolling. Every ten cycles we’d peel it all off, toss the suit skin in the recycler, and do a cubicle maintenance check.

By now I’ve missed 3 maintenance checks on this planet, coming up on 4. My suit skin was in shit shape. Maybe it was all the precipitation, variable temps, dirt, sweat, etc. Or maybe it’s just that suit-skins are made of the cheapest possible material and not meant to last longer than 10 cycles anyway. (Probably it was both.) The suit skin was melted apart, shredded to bits, stretched and shrunk in weird ways. A lot of parts of me that would usually be covered by it just weren’t anymore. Some of it was doing the opposite of being protective, and getting jammed in my external body parts.

Maybe I should’ve been more sparing with the bits of human clothing I’ve been tearing up for various purposes. The biggest chunk of clothing left now was all sewn into the structure of my PPP. I didn’t really have anything to properly protect all the exposed mechanical parts of my legs from the ravages of planetary debris. My armor had some tougher fabric structure that held the plated parts together, and I’d been wearing that on my legs. But it didn’t fit as close as my suit-skin, and being bootless (and not designed to seal tight anyway), there was all kinds of dirt and crap up my legs from my stomping around in the muddy water while I was hiding from fire.

I needed to clean that shit out. I needed to clean my whole body and pick the bits of melting suit-skin out of me.

Also, let's face it. I stank. I didn’t smell exactly like a human who hadn’t cleaned themself in tens of cycles, but I still stank.

• Botty Odor: The smell of a murderbot who has been running around on a planet for tens of cycles without doing any kind of maintenance or hygiene.

It would also be a good idea get a good look at my complaining resupply port, though I was mildly terrified that it was something horrible that I wouldn’t be able to fix. The next significant water feature near my planned route was a couple cycles ahead of me. I’d just have to put up with the dirt until then.

I made it to the water feature on schedule, without losing any body parts or setting anything on fire, which was starting to feel like an unusual and impressive accomplishment.

The water feature was a river with rocky uneven shores that were difficult to navigate on my DIY stump leg.

It was night, so I had my night filters on, but I didn’t fully trust my night vision after that time I nearly fell face-first into a crevice. So I was also using active scans and picking my way very slowly, arriving at the water’s edge without incident.

Cleaning off took a long, uncomfortable time. I had a lot of dirt, sweat, suit-skin, and debris stuck to my whole body. And I’ve never had to do this before. Usually the hygiene unit and cubicle took care of the specifics.

But I’ve unwillingly witnessed humans washing themselves thousands upon thousands of times, enough that even deleting all digital memories was a useless action — the fundamental observations were engrained on an organic level. So I understood the basic mechanics of bathing. Use water (cold). And soap (I don’t have any). Scrub.

It took ages to peel off my skin suit, which was sticking to me weirdly. I had to use the clothing-fabric interior of my PPP to scrub it off my skin with the help of freezing-ass water (why am I always dealing with freezing-ass water?), and use my fingernails to pick it out of the seams between my inorganic and organic parts. Even then it didn’t all come out.

The rocky shore was not comfortable to sit on while I tried, with partial success, to wash the dirt out of my leg parts and foot with freezing water.

My human skin was also complaining a lot. At the cold. At the peeling suit-skin that didn’t want to unstick from it. At generalized damage — there were parts of my skin that were seeping and leaking a little, which was probably a bad sign. My hand where I’d scraped it on a thorny flora felt a little hot to the touch.

I used the lamp embedded in my helmet to check myself over. Parts of my human skin were definitely compromised. There was discoloration in some places where inorganic met organic, there were scrapes, and there was some general inflammation from the process of peeling/scrubbing off the suit skin.

My inorganic parts weren’t much better. The stump of my leg was scuffed and damaged from where I’d walked around on it without any protection. One of my gunports was sticky, and cleaning it out with water was uniquely uncomfortable. (Good to know I had sensory nerve endings in there that I couldn’t turn off for some reason.) Even after much grueling flushing of water through the port, it was still slightly sticky.

Next I checked my resupply port. The aperture was not properly sealing. It had some dirt gunk stuck in there that I spent a cold, terrible time trying to flush out with icy water. Not entirely successfully.

Overall, I'm not sure what I expected from this process of attempting hygiene with nothing but a cold-ass river, but there at least wasn't anything horribly shocking as far as damage to my body went. No gaping wounds or crumbling mechanics. Even if I was clearly not in stellar shape.

The only real surprise was the flaurna growing on my face.

I somehow hadn’t noticed it until now. I don’t look at my face, okay? And the flaurna didn’t feel like anything. But while checking myself over with a drone, I saw that there was a small… thing clinging to my cheek. I almost ripped it off by reflex. Instead I did not freak out, and I peeled it away from my face, carefully.

It came off easily in my hand, thin pale tendrils clinging to my thumb, with tiny dangling colorful threads fluttering slightly in the air.

I’d seen some of these flaurna, in just one valley I walked through, usually clinging to sunny rock faces. The biggest one I catalogued was as long as my arm, with big showy tassles in multiple colors trailing off the rock face where it was anchored. This one was smaller than my thumb.

The skin on my face where it’d been growing didn’t look damaged. I checked, real close, with my drone.

So… maybe this was stupid of me. But after I washed my face with water, I put the flaurna back on my cheek. If I saw any rocks with these things growing on them again, I’d put it back with its brethren.

No, I don’t know why I decided to let this flaurna grow on my face. Yes, I know it doesn’t make any sense. After all the stuff I’ve murdered, both accidentally and on purpose, why should I flinch at tossing aside a random alien flaurna who’d landed on my face, and who might be poisoning me or eating my skin?

But it hadn't hurt me so far.

At the end of two grueling hours I was as clean as I was going to get.

The MedKit in my backpack was a basic field kit, nothing that would properly patch up serious wounds. (The point of an emergency MedKit isn't to completely fix you, it's to make sure you don't die while you're being transported to a MedSystem.) But there was skin sealant, which I used on the places where my skin was damaged. It didn’t seem to want to work properly at the spots where my skin met inorganics, though. Typical.

I sat there, on the uncomfortable rocky shore, burning extra heat and waiting for the water to evaporate off my body so that I could put my PPP and armor on. My skin tingled and burned in places, but was also soothed in the few spots where the skin sealant worked okay. My foot was still grinding a bit with dirt that I hadn’t been able to clean out.

I'd burned more energy than usual keeping myself warm through this body-cleaning process. I’d have to charge back up later, during the day when it was less cold.

The nighttime light was dim, a pale reflection from the unshadowed slice of the planet’s rings that burned white in the sky, the stars doing their strange flickering thing.

I still couldn’t feel the flaurna clinging to my face, but I knew it was there.

Maybe it was on my face because it mistook me for a warm sunny rock that never got cold.

Chapter Text

Things were okay for a few cycles. Not much to complain about. (There was still plenty of normal stuff to complain about because being stuck on a planetary surface is inherently aggravating. But there were no bonus calamities to complain about.) Even the weather was inoffensive, with no precipitation. I made decent time despite the careful slowness of walking on a stump foot.

Also, I came up with a great solution to the fact that my watch of the finale episode of 10001 Nights on Starling Station was ruined by hopper anxiety: delete my memory of watching it.

This way, I’d be able to properly enjoy the finale as if for the first time, without distractions from — oh, wait, crap.

Shit.

Well, it turns out I also permanently deleted a bunch of data about the hopper I sighted, alongside my memory of the 10001 Nights finale. The only information I have left of the hopper is what I wrote down in these text logs, which is almost nothing.

Why didn’t I keep those memories in a short-term buffer for a while before permanently deleting them, you ask? Well, my memory banks have been really fucking tight lately, is why. Why don’t you mind your own processing cycles.

Fuck. I hope there wasn’t any information about that hopper in those memories that would be critical later.

The finale was pretty good, at least.

A few things I did while walking to ThisContinentSurvey:

• Fix up my PPP a bit.
• Make more flora string, and use that to reinforce the connection between my branch-foot and my leg, wrapping them up together with a splint I pulled from the MedKit.
• Streamline my memory files. Without accidentally deleting anything important this time.
• Reorganize my planetary intel. (Images of rocks and focks. Notes about flora. Weather patterns and temperatures. That kind of thing.)
• Turn the pain sensors down in my hand. Something was fucking up the skin on my hand (it was slightly inflamed and discolored, and it hurt and itched). There wasn’t much I could do about it; the MedKit skin sealant didn’t have much effect. I was half tempted to tear to skin off my hand, but that probably wouldn’t actually help.

The cycles passed. The landscape shifted slowly (so fucking slowly) under my slow foot.

I did not see any rocks with those flaurna growing on them. The one attached to me moved around my face, slowly, though it never tried to crawl into my eyes or nose, which I appreciated.

I did not lose any more of my feet. There were no planetary weather events that tried to damage my body. No fauna tried to eat me. It was as though the planet was on its best behavior, now that I had decided this place sucked unbearably and I wanted to get out of here. (I wasn't falling for it.)

I closed in on the site of the ThisContinentSurvey after 16 cycles of travel.

With ThisContinentSurvey so close, I almost weenied out and headed back off in another direction. The planet had lulled me into a dangerous sense of “well, maybe it isn’t so bad out here after all” these past 16 cycles. But I wisely hadn't deleted my memories of the most egregious planetary affronts, and checking those reminded me that even if there were pretty skies and interesting flora around right now, sooner or later (probably sooner) the planet was going to kill me in an uncomfortable and embarrassing way.

Also, I really, really, really needed to see what was in the entertainment feed.

The ThisContinentSurvey was located on a plain with occasional thin trees above a narrow river valley. The grasses were not tall enough to use for cover, and overall it was a great location to set up your habitat from a defensibility perspective. (Not great for me, because it meant the survey team and their SecUnit would spot me coming from a kilometer away.)

(I was really glad that I’d held onto the most basic information about this survey — the fact that there were eight humans meant that there would be one SecUnit with them, and protocol stated that if the humans went out into the field to do their survey stuff, the SecUnit would need to go with them too. So the trick would be for me to sneak up to the habitat while the SecUnit was off protecting the humans on the survey. If there were some humans left behind in the habitat, well, they would be easier to avoid and/or deal with than a SecUnit.)

My initial plan was to hide out in the river valley under cover of some of the scraggly brush and rocks in there, and use a relay of drones to get myself linked up with the habitat feed. But upon review this plan sucked, because A) I don’t have enough drones to make a relay, and B) There was the danger that that the SecUnit would notice the drones, or notice me poking around in the feed. It’s a real red flag to be hanging out, monitoring the inputs, and then suddenly see some drones pop up out of nowhere on an uninhabited planet. If I were that SecUnit, I’d be mildly suspicious.

Alternate plan: hide out in the river valley and peek up the edge of it across the plains to the habitat, and just gather intel through visuals over the course of several cycles. Weather permitting (no atmospheric events getting in the way of my eyeballs), I should be able to get a sense of this survey’s schedule. Then, when the humans and their SecUnit went out surveying, I could sneak in there, download some media from the feed, do some scouting for more useful intel, and maybe borrow the cubicle for repairs if I was confident that I had the time and I wouldn’t get interrupted by a random human.

I started ascending the side of the valley at daybreak. The valley walls were steep and crumbly, not easy to climb. When I finally got up to the top, I peeked above the grassy flora to the habitat.

It looked like a pretty standard survey habitat, with a handful of interconnected domes, and a small hopper landing pad, big enough for one or maybe two hoppers, if they were smaller. There was a small surface vehicle parked on the pad. I didn’t see any hoppers, which was odd. You’d think a planetary survey would have at least one, especially given the landing pad, and it was weirdly early in the day for a survey.

My intel for the ThisContinentSurvey didn’t have any details on the hopper package. But there was the landing pad. Maybe this survey just liked to start their work cycle really early.

This close to the habitat, though, I should have noticed the hopper leaving for its early-cycle science jaunt. Maybe they didn’t fly over the valley I was hiding out in, but I should have heard it at least. Hoppers are not exactly quiet.

Well, I’d hang out here for a few cycles and find out, anyway.

So, something was really, really wrong.

It’s been three cycles, and zero humans have exited the habitat, and zero hoppers have turned up.

I double, triple, quadruple, etc.tuple-checked the survey schedule. The ThisContinentSurvey should absolutely be in the middle of their surveying right now, but the habitat looked empty. It was almost as if nobody had arrived yet. But that couldn’t be right.

Company policy for a preliminary planetary survey forbade any overnight excursions; it was too unpredictable and dangerous. (I wouldn’t put it past a bunch of annoying humans to force the SecUnit to break security protocol and go on an overnight anyway, but that still seemed really weird.)

I needed to physically go over to the habitat and get more intel. There wasn’t really any other option.

If I’d miscalculated, and the survey were all just hanging out indoors for multiple cycles (for some inconceivable reason — but clearly I’m missing something important here), and the SecUnit saw me mosey up to the habitat, I’d be Immediately Fucked. But I probably wasn’t going to learn anything by just sitting here, and the end of survey date was coming up no matter what I did.

So I rolled my body up onto the lip of the plain, and headed for the habitat.

I didn’t run, because I didn’t know how my handmade foot would hold up to running. (I really should have tested that before now. Too late now.) If there was a SecUnit monitoring the area, it wouldn’t matter whether I approached fast or slow. I walked, with my projectile weapon and every available drone at the ready, more drones and inputs than I typically handled without the aid of a SecSystem to filter the data.

The habitat drew closer to me, as if in slow motion. My skin was sweating. The sun was almost directly overhead. I stuck out on the plains so obviously that even a human would have noticed my approach.

I came within range of the habitat feed, and linked it immediately, rifling through the SecSystem.

There were no camera inputs set up on the interior. That was fucking weird. And—

Hang on, let’s start up a Fucking Weird Shit List.

Fucking Weird Shit List:

1. No hopper.
2. No sign of human activity for 3 cycles.
3. No camera inputs inside the habitat.
4. No SecSystem logs. It was as if everything had been wiped. Or it was as if nothing had ever been written into it in the first place. No information packet about the individual humans who were supposed to be on this survey. No reports from the SecUnit. Nothing. Just routine communication from the company satellite, including a software patch sent to the SecSystem that was supposed to be for the SecUnit.

Did this seriously mean that the company set up a full habitat here, only for the contracted surveyors to abort their trip? That must have been one expensive-ass cancellation fee.

Also, who the fuck was that in the hopper that I saw near the Atypical Area? (What a bad fucking move on my part to accidentally delete my memories about that encounter. I’m still kicking myself.) Were they really just company employees hunting me down on the planet? But then, what about that excavation with the brilliantly grey rock? Damn it, if I still had my memories about that I might be able to check if the hopper had any survey branding on it.

Did this mean that the ThisContinentSurvey habitat was an empty shell of a location, and I wouldn’t be able to use it to get my ass off this planet? But surely the company would come back and reclaim this expensive equipment, right?

I got closer to the habitat, close enough to read the details of the survey branding emblazoned on the security doors of the front entrance.

Somehow, things got even weirder.

5. There was an open crate of science tools lying on its side just outside the main entrance.
6. The grassy flora between the front hatch and the landing pad was trampled down from what had to be multiple cycles of foot traffic, by many human feet. The flora was starting to recover itself in places. I can’t say for sure when the habitat was built, but the foot traffic did not look very old.

I stopped in front of the habitat hatchway, staring at the survey logo. Then I triggered SecSystem to open the security doors. The doors opened up, and I stepped inside.

I sent half my drones out in a scouting pattern to check the interior of the habitat, and half to check the exterior. The habitat was seven interconnected domes, one of them bigger and centralized, with a power and recycling system connected to one side, no obvious signs of damage.

The good news was, it seemed like the habitat had been occupied by a survey group. (The bad news: same as the good news, because where the fuck were they now?)

7. The sleeping quarters, all of them, had been previously occupied. There were rumpled sheets and various personal items scattered around, including multiple physical photographs. I examined the photographs, and made a catalogue of the missing humans. There was actually one group photo of all of eight of them hanging on the wall in the kitchen area.
8. All the blankets and pillows were missing. (This one really bothered me for reasons I can’t articulate.)
9. The kitchen had been used. When I checked the storage cupboards, a lot of the dishware and utensils were missing too. All the prepack meals were gone.
10. The security ready-room was locked.

This was all really giving me horror movie vibes, and I didn't like it one bit.

I stood at the door to the security ready-room, held my gun at the ready, and had SecSystem override the lock and open the door.

The lights blinked on. Inside there was no SecUnit.

(Phew.)

11. The security gear was piled into the ready-room in a ridiculous disorganized jumble. The cubicle wasn’t even right side up.
12. When I went over to the cubicle to see if I could at least set it up right and get it working so that it could, you know, fix my foot (among other things), I discovered that this was my cubicle. You know, the one that I was inside, when the hopper crashed? It was still broken and inoperable.

(Let’s take a quick break from the Fucking Weird Shit List to scream internally real quick.)

13. Medical was stripped of portable supplies. All the portable MedKits were gone, as well as the handheld wound knitter.
14. All the stuff in the big Medical freezer (this freezer stores medical stuff that has to stay cold until it is used) was emptied out, a lot of it just sitting on the floor, ruined. That was an expensive bill from the company.
15. In the freezer was—

I sat in the security ready room, inside the broken cubicle turned on its side. This was probably a stupid place for me to sit. I should probably get the fuck out of this place. But I needed to think. And if I came up with any thoughts that needed investigating in the habitat, it would be a waste of time for me to walk away from this place only to walk back.

My current guess as to what happened: something Really Fucking Bad, so bad that the ThisContinentSurvey triggered their emergency beacon, and they were evacuated.

There were glaring problems with this idea. It didn’t explain why so much stuff was missing from the habitat (blankets, utensils, all the provisions, the portable medical supplies), or why the SecSystem and HubSystem had been wiped, why the ready room was in the state it was in, or why there was a dead human in the Medical freezer.

The dead human was one of the survey humans from the photo in the group picture. With nothing about them left behind in the feed, I didn’t know anything about them. What their name was, what their job was. They were just another dead human.

And I didn’t know what all the other stuff with them inside the freezer meant. I didn’t know why this dead human was wrapped in one of the blankets (as if they would be cold, in the freezer, as if the blanket would help with that), or why the freezer was full of plucked flora, so much flora that it covered almost everything but the human’s face, or why there were long strips of paper in there too, with words written on them in a script that I couldn’t read because I’d deleted the survey’s language module.

And this was all making me think about the hopper crash again. The crash that broke the cubicle I was sitting in now. The crash that killed my two interim human clients.

Aggarwal, helping me dig the grave for Nilima, even though ey was not in any state to dig a hole, not with the broken arm and head trauma that turned out to be fatal. Maybe I should have told em to let me do all the digging, but I’d been pretending to be governed, and a governed SecUnit would not have told a human not to dig a hole.

Aggarwal checking the sanitary unit in the hopper (broken), and cursing. Aggarwal wiping off the corpse’s face and hands with a sleeve of eir shirt, wetted in rainwater. Gathering up flora and using eir miniature welding tool to burn it all in a crumpled metal divot of the hopper’s damaged exterior, against my buffer’s canned recommendation that fire was dangerous, that fire was not allowed inside company property, and that ey would be fined for setting unsanctioned fires. But ey did it anyway, struggling to burn the flora due to its wetness, burning it down to a tiny amount of ash, the smell of burning stinging my sinuses.

Aggarwal, wiping the ash on Nilima’s forehead.

Telling me how to position the body. Eir face, sweaty and sickly-looking, as ey sat off to the side, hunched, curled around eir splinted arm, watching me lower the body into the hole.

“How extravagant for her,” ey said to me, after we buried the body. I don’t know what ey meant by that. I didn’t ask, because I was pretending to be governed, and I didn’t care anyway.

Why do humans do all these complicated things with corpses, anyway? It’s not like the corpses know about it, or care. Dead SecUnits just get the organics scraped off the inorganic frame and fed into a recycler, and then the inorganics are re-used, or melted down to be re-used.

It’s not like I was having second thoughts or regrets about leaving Aggarwal’s body where it lay. But after all the trouble ey went to with Nilima’s corpse it seems unfair that ey was just left there. Maybe the company took eir body to be send to eir family or something. They would probably do it if they could charge the family for the trouble. But if the family didn’t pay…

I don’t know who the corpse lying in the Medical freezer used to be, and I don’t understand the human customs that made all the other humans put it in a freezer, wrapped in a blanket and layers of flora that were collected not just from this plain the habitat was on, but from neighboring ecosystems. There was even a flaurna in the freezer like the one on my face, but much bigger and more colorful.

I touched my face, looking for the flaurna, and felt the edge of it on my nosebridge.

I checked the maps.

In all my walking, I’d only ever seen this flaurna grow in one valley. Maybe it grew in other valleys, maybe not. But the one valley I knew of was not reachable from here on a surface transport, which meant that the humans probably took a hopper to acquire the flaurna that was now in the freezer with the dead human.

Okay, so, new guess about what happened: something Really Fucking Bad, so ThisContinentSurvey triggered their emergency beacon, packed up a bunch of shit into their hopper, and flew away from the habitat while they waited for rescue.

Maybe that meant that this habitat was dangerous, and/or that the company would descend upon it any minute with rescue operations. Which meant that maybe I needed to get away from this habitat.

Before I hightailed it out of here, there was still some intel that I might be able to extract from his habitat. I needed to figure out if the emergency had really been launched, where the hopper and all the other humans had gone, and why.

Chapter Text

There was no log of the beacon being triggered in the wiped habitat feed, so I had to go check on it in person to verify that it had been fired. Luckily the beacon was just 4.1 piddly kilometers away on easy terrain, so I walked over there real quick to check on it.

What I found was extremely concerning.

Beacons are cheap, and make a big fiery mess when they launch from the planet up into space. The area all around the beacon should have been scorched to bits. But as I approached, it was clear that the beacon hadn’t actually been fired.

I almost turned around and just headed back to the habitat to save myself the trouble of walking. But I checked that urge to be lazy, and decided to be thorough instead. Who knows, maybe the beacon had been launched a while back and the flora grew back super fast. I needed to be 100% sure.

It was a good thing I did check. Because when I arrived at the beacon, I was able to validate that it had not in fact been launched.

And upon closer inspection, it turned out that the reason it hadn’t been launched was that it had been sabotaged.

The beacon had a digital record in its onboard computer that indicated that an emergency launch signal had been received, but not carried out. After some digging, I found that the code had actually been tampered with to prevent any launches. Also, there were a few screws lying on the ground under the beacon, which meant that someone had probably fucked with it physically, too. (Either that, or they’d done a really sloppy job of setting it up in the first place, which I couldn’t rule out. But given the code sabotage that seemed less likely.)

Fucking pissing hell.

The picture of what was going on with ThisContinentSurvey was just getting worse and worse.

Updated guess of the events: bad shit happens, attempted emergency beacon launch (thwarted by sabotage), everyone packs into the hopper and runs away from the habitat.

The question was, was the saboteur someone within the survey, or someone with the company? (It was also possible that the sabotage had come from OtherContinentSurvey, I guess, but they were a long ways away, and the threat of a saboteur within ThisContinentSurvey was more immediate.) What did the saboteur want?

Fuck, what if the dead freezer human was the saboteur? What if they weren’t? Were the empty logs back at the habitat part of the sabotage?

What the fuck was going on here?

(You know, as much as I enjoy action-packed murder mysteries in my media, real-life ones are a real pain in the ass. Wait. Wow. In all the excitement of coming across evidence of an ongoing survey catastrophe, I’d completely forgotten to check the entertainment feed. What was wrong with me? I guess I’ve gotten used to never having access to the entertainment feed on this shitty planet. That was so creepy and weird, considering the entertainment feed used to be the only thing I gave two shits about. At least I could check the feed out when I went back to the habitat.)

At least I knew now that the Company hadn’t been alerted by emergency beacon, which meant I didn’t have to worry about them showing up unannounced. They would be coming to the ThisContinentSurvey habitat at the end of scheduled survey date, which was 10.7 cycles from now.

Eleven fucking cycles of the ThisContinentSurvey roughing it a hopper, in the extremely dangerous planetary environment, with no protection from a properly built habitat. On top of that, I was starting to have a horrible suspicion that ThisContinentSurvey might not even have a SecUnit with them.

Hear me out.

There were two surveys on this planet. I think I was supposed to have been the SecUnit for ThisContinentSurvey. The hopper transporting me crashed on This Continent, after all.

Further evidence: the locked security ready-room that wasn’t set up correctly, the cubicle laid on its side, still broken and nonfunctional from the crash. Even if they’d sent another SecUnit and left it with a broken useless cubicle, you can fucking bet the SecUnit would have set up the ready room properly.

If my wild guesswork was correct, this meant that the shitty, cheap, complacent company let ThisContinentSurvey, MY fucking clients, go on a survey on a dangerous undeveloped planet, without any FUCKING security, and they were now helplessly flailing around on the planet trying to survive this sabotage shitshow all on their own.

I was so pissed off that I almost tripped my stub-foot on an RFR (random fucking rock) as I stomped my way back to the habitat.

Back at the habitat. Time to get some shit done.

First, set up the charging ports in the security ready room and charge up all my drones and my projectile weapon. I also stuck my armor parts into the reclaimer to get cleaned off. (I didn’t stick my handmade PPP anywhere to be cleaned/repaired because I didn’t trust the machinery to not just treat it like the pile of garbage it was and melt it down. I didn’t want it melted down.)

Next, the human sanitary facility. The cubicle was busted, so this was the only option.

I peeled my face-flaurna off and stuck it on the sink faucet before I got into the shower stall. Maybe it didn't care about being exposed to soap and water, but I wasn't going to test it.

I’ve never used a sanitary facility designed for humans before. There was a showerhead that sprayed a lot of water, and the temperature was controllable. There were multiple soaps — the default one provided by the company that they charged usage for, but some of the survey humans must have brough their own soaps too, because there was a bottle of unfamiliar liquid soap with a fancy label stored in the shelves, as well as multiple solid soaps of different colors and smells.

I tried all of them, because who the fuck was going to stop me?

The shower was really nice. It definitely beat sitting on a cold rocky riverbank by a lot. I was able to get more dirt and ruined-suit-skin out of me than I was at the river. The hot water was a huge plus, and the soaps were interesting, though one of the solid ones was weird and contained bits of dirt and grit in it for some reason.

(I took all portable soap and stuffed it into my backpack, even the weird gritty one. You never know. Maybe I was going to get stuck on this planet forever after all this shit. I might as well have soap.)

While taking care of all that physical cleaning stuff, I also was hard at work in the feed downloading fresh entertainment media. There was a whole five episodes from a brand new season of The Rise And Fall of Sanctuary Moon, so at least something was going right during this survey shitshow.

As much as I was tempted to start watching media and ignore everything about what was going on (and, okay, yes, I did take a tiny 10-minute sneak peak while I was in the shower), I needed to focus on the situation at hand.

As I got out of the shower and got the recycler to spit out some clothes, I also started digging through some of the company’s more guarded proprietary systems.

(This is known as "hacking." I’ve done a lot of hacking to make company systems oblivious to my non-functional governor module. But I’ve never tried this particular hack before.)

There was no way in the hell-mud pits of this planet I would be able to track down the location of the ThisContinentSurvey on foot (singular). Hoppers don’t exactly leave behind a traceable trail. But hoppers are equipped with a positioning system that communicates with the satellites set up by the company, and this information can be accessed by anyone riding the hopper to help orient them on the planet. It can also be accessed by survey members left at the habitat to do boring data work instead of going on a fun little jaunt to the nearest fascinating geological feature.

Ordinarily, it should have been easy to find this hopper positioning data. But with the habitat’s wiped feed, and without the survey team’s connection credentials, I had to root around in the backend of the company systems trying to find the positioning data the hard way.

It took me a whole two minutes and twenty-one seconds to crack it. (I was out of practice, shut up.)

This was when I had yet another un-fun discovery.

The secret backend hopper tracker feed listed:

• 5 hoppers at the OtherContinentSurvey habitat
• 2 hoppers to the north-west of the ThisContinentSurvey habitat
• 3 hoppers to the south of the ThisContinentSurvey habitat

For fuck’s sake. The backend didn’t list the survey names on the hoppers, just their numerical designations, because I guess it wanted to make my life more difficult. How the fuck was I supposed to figure out where my clients were, or if they’d split up—

Oh, wait, I recognized one of the hopper IDs. It was the same one that I’d crashed in (the company must have repaired it enough to be usable, which, kudos to them I guess), and it was one of the two hoppers to the north-west. So that’s where I would be headed. I saved the coordinates.

But the extra three hoppers on this continent were still weird as fuck. A survey party of eight didn’t need five hoppers, which meant that the OtherContinentSurvey was a massive survey, and they’d sent multiple hoppers all the way across the ocean to this continent. At least that maybe explained the hopper in the Anomalous Area. This was all making me increasingly suspicious of OtherContinentSurvey. Assholes, fucking shit up and hurting my clients and scaring them off into the fucking woods.

I could have contacted OtherContinentSurvey and asked them What The Fuck, by posing as someone from ThisContinentSurvey. But given that it was more than likely that they were the cause of all this: Nope.

I’d dallied long enough at the habitat. I needed to start moving, and fast, because my clients were in serious danger. I needed to find them, preferably before they decided to relocate their hoppers while I was en route and unable to check the satellites for the new hopper coordinates.

My inflamed and irritated hand-skin was even more inflamed and irritated by the hot water and scrubbing action of the shower, but I didn't know what to do about that. The cubicle was borked and no help. I wasted a whole two minutes arguing with the MedSystem about fixing my hand but even after tricking it into recognizing me as a legitimate MedSystem client, it didn't seem to have any good options for fixing it. It suggested a deep-tissue decontam that would take two hours, which, no, we did not have time for that. The other option was to deglove my hand and print skin back onto it, which would take forty-five minutes because it wouldn't let me bypass the (expensive) pain treatment. What kind of shitty ass stone age technology was this? Fucking company, leaving this survey with a borked cubicle. A functioning cubicle could've replaced my whole hand from scratch in twenty minutes.

So I gave up on that. The hand-skin problem was more an annoyance than anything. It wasn't worth wasting the time.

I packed some fresh recycler clothing into my bag. It was all branded with the ThisContinentSurvey logos, just like the new shirt and jacket I was wearing from the recycler. I felt… weird, about wearing the ThisContinentSurvey logo. But whatever, it's not like there were any good alternatives.

There was spare armor packed away somewhere in the jumbled mess of the security ready room, but it probably wasn’t worth the effort and time to find and unpack it. Every minute I wasted here was a minute I could be spending hunting down the missing survey team. It might mean their lives.

Some proper footwear would be nice, though.

I did a last-ditch search of the living quarters in case the humans had left any useful articles of clothing behind. They’d left some stuff (which I stole), but no shoes. Figures.

I did find a pile of weird cloth in the back of a closet. It was a big rectangle of red and green, with shimmery gold embroidery in a band all around the edge, and in little accent patterns all over. It was light, and smooth to touch, except where the embroidery caught a little rougher on my hands. This was definitely not something that came out of a company recycler. It might even be handmade, like the woven fabric on that episode of 10001 Nights. One of the survey humans must have brought it with them. I didn’t understand why they’d leave something like this behind. Maybe because of the panic survival sabotage situation.

I took the cloth with me, too.

My optimistic forecast put me at reaching the wayward ThisContinentSurvey hoppers in 8 cycles of walking. My pessimistic forecast said 16, because I wasn’t sure about the density of the forests listed on the map.

But I wasn’t going to walk. Not the whole way, at least.

I gathered up my drones, my gun, my armor, my PPP, face-flaurna, etc. Then I wiped all traces of my activity from the habitat feed, stepped outside, and walked across the trampled flora to the hopper landing pad, where the ground vehicle was parked.

Chapter Text

After all the time I’d spent walking So Fucking Slowly around on this planet, riding the surface vehicle at speed through the plains was pretty amazing. I’d never appreciated before just how great it was to go fast, sitting in a transport that did all the work.

The surface vehicle was designed for traversing uneven planetary terrain, but the ride was still bumpy as hell, especially how fast I was pushing it. The speed was maybe a bad idea, because if I had a crash right now I’d be pretty fucked. On the other hand, I couldn’t waste any time.

The ground vehicle made it most of the way to the hopper coordinates, including crossing a small river, and it took a fraction of the time that it would have on foot. I was even able to watch Sanctuary Moon and read some of the new books I downloaded. So overall the ground vehicle was a success. I was finally forced to ditch it when the flora became too dense and too strong for the vehicle to bulldoze through.

Goodbye, surface vehicle. You were there when it counted. Hopefully this isn’t the last I see you, because you’re awesome. (I made sure to mark the vehicle coordinates in my memory.)

Back to walking. At least that was familiar. The terrain was increasingly dense forests absolutely rife with flora, fauna, flaurna, focks, rocks, rivers, mud pits, and other shit that made walking a pain in the ass. After the speed of the surface vehicle, clambering through vegetation and creeping my way through the terrain meter by meter was agonizingly slow.

It also gave me way too much time to start worrying about what I was actually going to do when I arrived at the hoppers, assuming the humans were still there.

Obviously, it wasn’t like I could just show up and introduce myself. (“I am your contracted SecUnit?” Absolutely fucking not.)

The last thing these people wanted was a random rogue murderbot with a big gun turning up while they were in the middle of trying to hide from saboteurs(?) in unsecured alien forests. That shit was straight out of a survival horror flick that ended with everyone dead except for the one plucky survivor who would be suffer from permanent psychological trauma. The survivor would never experience life with the same easygoing naiveté after losing all her friends to bloody deaths and fighting for her life in a dramatic showdown in a planetary storm where she manages to kill the rogue SecUnit that was sent to slaughter everyone. (Everyone’s seen the movie Slash. You know what I’m talking about.)

(Slash wasn’t realistic for a lot of reasons. A human would not be able to kill a SecUnit. Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point was, my sudden appearance would look terrible and scary. Whatever I did, I could not reveal myself.)

I guess all I could do was just get to the hoppers, then hang back and gather intel. While setting up a safety perimeter to keep the humans safe from dangerous fauna.

I arrived at the hopper coordinates.

Both hoppers had crushed some flora in their landings. (Which, I guess they couldn’t help it.) The humans had further camouflaged the hoppers with fallen flora branches, even covering the tops of the hoppers, suggesting that they were trying to hide from something. It was a nice idea, but by the time anybody was close enough to spot them visually, they’d be close enough to pick them up in scans too. So the camoflauge was a lot of effort for questionable benefit, and it would get in the way of the hoppers taking off in a hurry. (If I’d been doing security for them, I’d have recommended against putting flora anywhere that would interfere with the hoppers’ lifting mechanisms. They’d probably have done it anyway, because who listens to the SecUnit about security recommendations, right?)

Night was just setting in, and none of the humans were outside. I sent in three drones to get a closer look.

There were lights on inside the hoppers, but the windows were blocked out, so very little light showed through.

There was a local feed coming off the big hopper that I was able to pick up by piggybacking the signals from my drones.

To my great dismay, there wasn’t a whole lot of useful intel in the feed. It was mostly piles of stuff tagged as planetary research. Only three humans were actively connected to the feed: two on interfaces, the third an augmented human.

And nearly all of the communication and data logged in the hopper feed was in that fucking proprietary human language that I didn’t have a module for. The humans did have basic company-standard feed profiles set up in standard lexicon, so I at least had their names and scientific specialties. The hierarchy was very basic: there was just Dr. Mensah (the survey lead), and everyone else was subordinate and equal to each other. Pin-Lee was marked with a solicitor badge, so she was probably important too.

I did at least gain access to the camera inputs built into the interior of the hoppers. They were low-data and shitty, but better than nothing.

In the little hopper were two humans cuddling each other. I hurriedly set up a basic filter on that input to alert me if they started obviously screaming and murdering each other, and then backburnered it. (I didn’t know if they were going to start having sex or something, but you can never be too careful. The cuddling in the privacy of their own little hopper was already a red flag. These were supposed to be professionals. On a survey. A survey that had taken a very, very bad twist. Personally, I wouldn’t think was be prime setting for cuddles/sex, but humans can be weird. And even if they weren’t about to have sex, I wasn’t particularly interested in snooping on emotional displays of stress and/or terror (and attempt to comfort each other through it) in these harrowing times. Besides, I couldn’t even understand what they were saying to each other in that language anyway.)

So, onto the big hopper. There were 3 humans in there (Dr. Mensah, Pin-Lee, Dr. Gurathin), squatting around a makeshift table made from a supply crate and talking to (and possibly arguing with) each other. They showed signs of stress, poor sleep, and mildly compromised hygiene. All three were in the feed, and they were doing something in the feed workspace together, taking notes and looking at maps. (I weirdly had a moment of fellow-feeling with these humans. Being stuck on a planet really was mostly just being stressed and looking at maps.)

Wait.

Eight humans on ThisContinentSurvey as per the group photograph. One dead in the freezer back at the habitat. Two in the little hopper. Three in the big hopper.

That’s two humans unaccounted for.

I released some more drones to search the area, and initiated another series of scans. The scans didn’t pick up anything new, aside from a large curious fauna that was getting a little too close for comfort. I made a loud noise at it by smacking my fist into a tree, and it backed off.

The drones didn’t pick anything up either, but I kept searching.

One of the humans in the big hopper (Dr. Mensah) stood up and stretched, prompting the other two humans to stretch their limbs too.

She said some things in a tone that sounded like it was supposed to be encouraging. The other two humans sighed and started moving. One of them went into the tiny sanitary alcove, and the other turned and started messing with some clothing that was draped over the emergency medical cot that was clearly being used as a bed.

Dr. Mensah went over to the cockpit area of the hopper and removed the interface from her head. She sat down in the pilot seat and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands.

The other two humans started their pre-rest-period hygiene tasks, and none of them looked like they were panicking or launching search parties. What this meant for the two missing humans, I didn’t know. Either they were elsewhere on purpose, or they’d been lost and their colleagues had given up on them, or something.

This was getting to be too much. I sat down, crushing some flora under my ass, and touched the flaurna on my face. (Just one corner of it — I don’t know if touching it too much was bad for it, but it had soft fibers on the part of its body that clung to my skin that were nice to touch, and for some reason I wanted to reassure myself that it was still on my face.)

These were my clients. One was dead. Two were missing. Five were hiding in hoppers.

I didn’t know what the fuck I was supposed to do now.

I watched over the hoppers all night, and drove away one large curious fauna by throwing rocks at it. It made angry noises at me, but beat a retreat.

Come daybreak, Dr. Mensah was the first human up, and she made the totally unreasonable and unsafe choice to come outside and pace around the two hoppers. She wasn’t even wearing an environmental suit. I had to resist the urge to send her a company alert telling her to go back inside where it was marginally more secure.

Over the course of the day the humans spent a lot of their time in the hoppers, but also a concerning amount of time outside to pace, talk to each other, play a weird tiny board game that I’d never seen before, etc. One of them (Pin-Lee), sat around outside using a small knife to carve a piece of a broken flora branch. Another (unknown) killed a bunch of time sewing a pattern into their uniform with colorful thread. I had to resist the urge to bring a drone in real close to capture the detail of the technique.

Mostly they just… didn’t do much. Remarkably there was little-to-no arguing or aggressive behavior (nothing explosive anyway, I still didn’t understand anything they were talking about, so maybe they were arguing politely). Some of them worked with data in the feed, and one of them looked like they might be taking samples of the flora in the area, but nobody was straying away from the hoppers. That was good, and surprisingly intelligent of them. If everyone could just stay alive for a handful of days until the survey end date and get collected by the Company, then I could just leave them alone again and go my separate way. That was probably the best outcome to hope for.

Sitting here babysitting the humans was leaving me with a lot of time to worry about how I might, possibly, somehow get the fuck off this planet too.

It was weird to even think about it. The idea that there might be a way to exist on my own, outside of the company’s control. It’d never really been an option, so it’d never really been something to even think about: even with a hacked governor module, it wasn’t like I could have gone anywhere without setting off a battalion of alarms and getting hunted down and recycled.

But I guess I’d been half-thinking about it for a while now. On this sorry planet that was constantly trying to murder my ass in mundane ways. Because I was off-inventory. I had already been wandering around for hundreds of hours with zero company or human oversight, trying and half-failing to take care of my own ass in an environment that I was never built to traverse unassisted.

Maybe getting off this wet rock was an impossible dream. Maybe staying here was the best I was going to get. There were upsides to the planet, after all. Nobody bothering me, no putting up with surveilling depressing human social bullshit. Nobody actively trying to kill me, or force me to kill anyone. (Rationally, I knew the planet was 100% indifferent about killing and harassing me, much as it felt otherwise sometimes.)

I touched one fuzzy edge of the face-flaurna again with my finger.

Something about spending a bunch of time struggling to survive weather events, fire, dirt, water, etc, for the past tens of cycles seems to have done something weird to me though. The idea of sneaking myself into the habitat cargo when the company showed up, escaping into the world where humans lived, wandering around the universe until I maybe found somewhere that I could exist and not totally hate it… the idea was impossible, before. It didn’t seem impossible anymore.

SecUnits weren’t built to be free. They weren’t built to hike halfway across an alien planet. But here I was anyway.

Somewhere along the way, I’d started to think there was something out there for me that sucked less than everything I’d known my whole life.

Maybe that was crazy. It felt crazy. It didn’t feel any crazier than the rest of my experiences.

I watched the humans. I watched my media, because the hopper had proper satellite connection and I didn’t have to worry about rationing.

It was three nights later, when the humans were all sleep, that one of my perimeter sentry drones alerted to an inbound hopper.

Chapter Text

Sometimes, I could really kick the ass of Circumstances. Haven’t my clients been through enough?

Here comes a new and shitty threat: nighttime hopper. It would be upon the clearing, and my clients, in <190 seconds. Judging from the data my drone had picked up, it was heading straight for us, flying low enough to run a line of violent turbulence through the forest. Odds were, this hopper was carrying the suspicious saboteurs of OtherContinentSurvey. The end of survey date had not arrived yet so it probably wasn’t the company here for pickup duty.

I climbed up to the top of the big hopper and started clearing the useless flora camouflage off the lifting mechanisms. At the same time, I used the feed to trigger loud emergency alarms inside the two hoppers.

Once the humans were all awake and scrambling around looking for why their ears were hurting, I turned the alarm off and sent them the information about the approaching hopper. (It wasn’t a lot of data; the drone wasn’t able to discern much visuals given that it was night.)

Then my drone alerted again. Oh, fantastic. Two incoming hoppers. I sent that one along too.

The humans were still stumbling around from sleep. (Humans are so painfully fucking slow.) Only Dr. Mensah and Dr. Gurathin were even starting to look at the drone data I’d sent them, and judging by their blinking and squinting they were still not fully awake.

What they weren’t doing was gearing up the hoppers to get the fuck out of here.

Fuck. Fuck.

I jumped down from the big hopper and started clearing branches away from the landing treads, and then booted up the autopilot programs in both hoppers. Dr. Gurathin noticed this right away (I blasted the status alert directly at him) (perks of him being an augmented human), and he exclaimed in confusion.

We were down to <130 seconds until the first unknown maybe-hostile hopper showed up.

I know that I said I was absolutely fucking not going to introduce myself to everyone because that would scare them. But that had maybe been a bad mistake. Being introduced to an unexpected rogue SecUnit in the woods is scary, but being introduced to an unexpected rogue SecUnit in the woods is probably ten times scarier when it’s happening in the middle of the night with unknown hoppers bearing down on you. (It wasn’t clear whether these hoppers were hostile or not, but I was being paranoid. Also threat assessment was on fire right now. It was better to assume the worst.)

But I had no choice. I had to impress upon them that they needed to get out of here, now, and I couldn’t do that as a faceless entity.

I worked up the nerve to say something. It took a while. 5.5 seconds. It felt look it took forever. Why was this so hard?

I spoke into the feed. Only Dr. Mensah, Dr. Gurathin, and Dr. Arada (I’d picked up her ID from her interface on day two of staking out this camp) heard me, because they were the only ones who had their interfaces/augments on. “I am your contracted SecUnit. There are two unidentified hoppers heading to this location: ETA <115 seconds. It is recommended that you evacuate immediately.” (This was all in standard lexicon, because I didn’t have the module for whatever other language they were using.)

Dr. Mensah shook Pin-Lee, who was still in a cot and grumbling despite the emergency alarm. Dr. Arada grabbed Dr. Ratthi’s interface off the floor and shoved it at him, speaking urgently.

Dr. Gurathin sent, “We do not contracted SecUnit.” He sounded suspicious as hell, which, yeah, that was fair. He climbed into the cockpit and poked at the autopiloting system, which required a human to set a course and trigger it, even if I’d warmed it up.

I told him the truth because I did not have a good lie. “On DateStamp Q3-2-11, I was shipped to this planet in hopper #P44. The hopper crashed. I have been trekking across this planet since then. I arrived at this location 3 cycles ago using the hopper satellite coordinates that I gathered at your habitat. I have cleared the camouflage off your hopper. You need to leave now.”

He said, unimpressed, “Who sent you?” He was plugging in new coordinates to the hopper’s mapping system, but he wasn’t buckling into a seat, just half-bent over the control board so that his head wouldn’t hit the low ceiling. Dr. Mensah gave up on pulling Pin-Lee out of her cot and moved to the cockpit to join Dr. Gurathin. She sat in the pilot’s seat, but didn’t buckle in. Dr. Gurathin said something to her, and Dr. Mensah responded curtly. He said something back, and, cool, great, now they were arguing. They weren’t shouting or anything, but I was pretty sure they were arguing.

I said, “Nobody sent me. It’s just me.”

Dr. Gurathin scoffed. Dr. Mensah’s eyebrows furrowed.

Maybe I should have explained, then, that my governor module was hacked. Maybe he hadn’t picked that up from the context. More likely, he didn’t believe my crazy ass unbelievable story. But I had no clue what to say to be convincing. 'Hi, rogue SecUnit here. I'm here to help'?

I finished clearing the treads on the big hopper and went over to the little one. My attempted leap onto the little hopper’s roof went badly; I landed weird and fell off the roof onto the ground ass-first because of my fucking stub foot.

That’s when Dr. Arada opened the door on the little hopper, and the light from inside spilled out, bright and artificial, haloing her small human body like a late dawn. Her gaze met mine for just an instant, and her eyes went wide.

I picked myself back up, darted out of the light and climbed up to start clearing the little hopper’s lifting mechanisms. Dr. Arada leaned partway out of the door (why would you lean out of a hopper when there’s a suspicious person out there in the middle of the night?) trying to get another look at me.

She messaged the others on the feed in that language I didn’t know. Dr. Gurathin responded to her. They exchanged a few more lines, and then Arada went back inside the hopper and came out with a torch, which she pointed up at me, then pointed at the big hopper. Then she went back inside and closed the door. She said something in the feed again, and then Dr. Gurathin and Dr. Mensah argued some more.

We were at <70 seconds. My human skin was starting to sweat. I jumped down to the ground to get the little hopper treads free. I said in to the hoppers’ feed, “They will be here in one minute.”

“And I am supposing we believe you,” Dr. Gurathin said, scathingly. Dr. Mensah said something sharp to him, and he pressed his lips together. She got back up from the pilot’s chair and went to the hatch of the big hopper, opening it up so that she could walk down the ramp. It looked like both Dr. Gurathin and Pin-Lee were protesting this. For fuck’s sake Dr. Mensah. Opening the hatch like that would delay a launch.

Dr. Mensah stood there, a dark silhouette in the half-light, staring out at the dark clearing.

Then she said something in the feed, in the language I didn’t know, tagging my machine address.

Ugh. I said, “I’m sorry, I cannot process that information. Please use standard lexicon.”

After a beat, she repeated in an even, accented feed-voice, “Can you please show me your face?”

“…What?”

She said, “Humor me please, SecUnit. I am trying to decide if we can trust you.”

We were down to <40 seconds. I thought I could hear the hoppers coming. I wanted to ask her why the fuck she wanted to see my face, but that would just waste time we didn’t have. But if this was going to help her decide to listen to me, then I had to do it.

I moved through the flora until I was close to the big hopper’s hatch where Dr. Mensah was standing, and then I put my projectile weapon down on the ground and walked out in front of her into the light coming out of the hopper. She raised a torch, shining the beam right in my face. I didn’t squint at the light like a human would but my pupils closed to nearly nothing.

The light held on my face for 5 seconds, and then the light scanned down my body slightly. I don’t know what she made of the tattered PPP, the survey-logo shirt I was wearing, the dirty armor covering my legs, the handmade foot and sandal. I probably looked pretty terrible. I really wished that I’d kept my armor on for all this. Aside from looking like a messy piece of garbage in front of my client, the unknown hoppers were almost here and I didn’t know if I was going to have the time to get all my armor on. Then the light came back to my face. I tried to hold still and look back into the light. I managed to stay like that for 3 whole seconds.

The hopper sound got abruptly louder.

We were out of time. I turned and sprinted back into the trees, grabbing my weapon up from the ground as I went. I got to my backpack and managed to dig my helmet out of it and put it on, and then the hoppers roared as they circled in around the clearing. I said, “Get inside. Close the hatch. They’re here.”

There wasn’t really space for both of hoppers to touch down, so one of them came in for a landing in the clearing, and the other continued to circle, blocking off the exit route for my clients.

The hatch opened on the mystery hopper, and two SecUnits marched out carrying large projectile weapons. The hatch was still slowly closing on my humans’ big hopper, and one of the SecUnits sprinted for the gap, firing a shot at Dr. Mensah.

Fuck no. I fired, the SecUnit’s faceplate shattered, and the SecUnit fell forward onto the ground, dropping its gun, dead. The other SecUnit turned and let out a spray of projectile fire into the woods in my general direction. I dodged behind a tree, but not before a bullet hit my chest and let out a telltale crack of noise. The SecUnit sprinted towards me, and I was in range of its scans anyway, so I pointed my gun around the side of the tree and let out a few shots. Two struck but weren’t disabling. The SecUnit swung around the tree with its gun aimed at me but I knocked the barrel aside with my own gun and punched the SecUnit in the head hard enough to disrupt its momentum. Pain shot up my hand, and I turned down the sensitivity on my sensors.

We rolled over through the dark brush, ripping at each other, and then I got a lucky shot off that hit the SecUnit in the power core or something, and it slumped into a catastrophic shutdown.

I stood, and then my ears exploded with the sound of a bullet zinging the edge of my helmet and taking a chip out. I turned, fired at the hands of the human who’d shot me (she screamed and dropped her gun), and then another bullet hit me from a high angle, tearing down through my shoulder and into the flesh and circuitry of my chest. Yet another SecUnit was firing at me from the hopper that was still in the air.

I darted into the clearing, climbed up the side of my clients' big hopper, and jumped straight upward as the hostile hopper came in for another circle overhead. I caught its tread in one hand, causing the balance of the hopper to lurch and tip to the side.

(The human pilot had badly underestimated how high I could jump. That was gonna cost them.)

The SecUnit leaned down, angling its arm under the hopper to aim at me, but I swung my legs up, kicking the gun out of the way with my nub foot and grabbing the SecUnit’s arm with my other foot (say what you will about the shittiness of sandals that let dirt into your footparts, but I’ve never had the opportunity to use my toes in combat before and turns out they’re pretty prehensile), tugging the SecUnit down.

The SecUnit hadn’t anticipated that maneuver (honestly, neither had I), and with the combination of the tipping unbalanced hopper, it got pulled most of the way out the hopper door. But it must have hooked its foot onto something, because it didn’t fall all the way out.

The range was point-blank though, so I just raised my gun and shot the SecUnit in the head until its faceplate was smashed and leaking. Its body slumped and fell down into the clearing below, crushing a flowering flora-bush.

I used my foot and arms to climb up into the door of the hopper, at the same time that I launched a code bundle to destroy this hopper’s auto-stabilizing software. The human piloting it started cursing up a storm as they struggled with the controls, and I came up behind them, ripped them out of their seat, threw them out of the hopper into another large bushy flora, and then fired my gun into the control panel of the hopper.

Then I jumped out, seconds before the hopper crashed into the trees and burst into flames.

Wow. That went way better than I—

[Performance Reliability Catastrophic Drop]

[Shutdown]

Chapter Text

I came back online to find I was inert, but slowly cycling into a wake-up phase. I was agitated, my levels were all off, and I had no idea why. I played back my personal log. Oh, right. That.

I ran a diagnostic. My performance capacity was 66%. Well, fuck. I was shot in multiple places, there was part of my arm that had ripped off when I’d tussled with that SecUnit in the brush. Also there was the miscellaneous minor damage I’d accrued from trekking around on a planet. Judging from my playback, the thing that had taken me out was a large chunk of hopper exploding and smacking me in the head and torso really hard, doing damage. Someone had sealed the leaking tubes my chest from the damage by pinching them off with clips. Well, I guess that works as a temporary measure.

I fumbled around for the feed. There was nothing. And no drones.

That was upsetting enough that my eyes snapped open, my last resort for visual inputs. And I touched my face with my hand. I felt all over, but the flaurna was gone.

Dr. Ratthi, who had been doing something to the torn musculature in my arm, made a little “eep” noise and scooted back a few centimeters when I moved, dropping the tools he’d been using to poke at me. He raised his hands, palms open, a classic gesture for, ‘I’m not armed, chill.’

I was lying inside the big hopper, in Pin-Lee’s cot. The noise and vibrations meant that we were in motion. My PPP + shirt + the fancy colorful fabric I’d been wearing under my shirt for some bonus warmth at night were gone, and someone had put a blanket over my body. Blood and fluids had seeped into the blanket.

Dr. Mensah was sitting on the bench near me, holding a large projectile weapon (I recognized it as one dropped by one of the SecUnits I’d killed). She had it sitting between her knees with the muzzle pointing at the ceiling of the hopper, dangerously close to aiming at her face. The safety was on at least. She was seated a little stiffly in a way that suggested she might have an injury or other pain-causing condition affecting something on the left side of her body. Dr. Gurathin was sitting a little further away, and he also had a projectile weapon — this one was pointed at me. The safety was off.

Well, okay. I wasn’t offended about that or anything. I was a scary murderbot. So I’d saved all their asses from three fucking armed SecUnits and more armed humans, but whatever. I didn’t care that one of my clients was pointing a projectile weapon at me. It was rational of him. I was concerned about the way my other client was holding a projectile weapon, but given the current situation I wasn’t sure that broaching the topic of guns would do any of us any good.

The real issue was, I was mildly fucking confused about what was going on here. Why was I in their big hopper? Where was the little hopper? With the feed down, and no drones, I couldn’t check anything. And I had this funny feeling that if I made any sudden movements I might get shot fulla even more holes than I already had, which is what we in the security business like to call “suboptimal.”

They were talking to each other in that language I didn’t know. Judging by the voices all five of them were here, I think, though Pin-Lee was out of sight (probably flying the hopper). Dr. Ratthi was picking his tools back up, slowly. He scooted back towards me, and said something, maybe a question.

I said, “Uh—”

I stopped and had to clear my throat a bit, because I hadn’t said anything out loud in a while and I think I might’ve inhaled something hot air or smoke that had fucked up my throat while fighting a bunch of hostiles. That made everyone shut up and stare at me.

Well, I hated that. I used my good arm to pull the blanket up to cover my face.

There was an extended, extremely awkward silence. Then Dr. Ratthi said that thing again. Then one of the other humans said something, then Dr. Ratthi said, in standard lexicon, stumbling a little bit over the syllables, “Ahm, can I fix your arm?”

(What fresh hell?)

I shored up all of my willpower (this took 2 seconds) and said, “Yes.”

Then, possessed by some kind of incomprehensible impulse (probably related to the low performance reliability), I pulled the blanket back off my face and asked, “Where’s my flaurna?”

Dr. Ratthi made a confused foreign language noise. Then he said, in standard lexicon, “Say again?”

I said, “The…” and now I was feeling all kinds of stupid. This whole situation was stupid. Why wasn’t I doing something sensible like dying in a scorched pit somewhere? Why was I crammed into a cot in a hopper with five humans, with a gun pointed at me? (I wasn’t upset about the gun.) I put the blanket back over my face.

The humans started saying things to each other, heatedly. Dr. Ratthi (I assume), gently peeled the blanket back away from my bad arm so that he could reach it. I felt something kind of cold touching it, wiping it off or something.

After a while (after Dr. Ratthi had used medpack stuff on my arm and bandaged it up, and moved onto poking the gnarly burn damage on my chest), the human discussion/arguing noises died down a bit, and Dr. Mensah spoke.

“SecUnit, I would like to listen to your explanation of what is happening right now.” Her tone was very calm and reasonable. You’d almost think she wasn’t holding a gun pointed at her own face, and also that she wasn’t letting one of her subordinates point a gun at me. (Again, this wasn’t bothering me. I was used to that kind of thing.)

I didn’t respond to that. I didn’t know how to respond to that.

She said, “You claim to be our contracted SecUnit, but we have no SecUnit on contract.”

I said (the blanket was still over my face), “You recognized me, didn’t you, from the demo?” (I’m 80+% certain that’s why she asked to see my face, to see if I really was the SecUnit that I claimed to be, originally contracted to their survey. They’d rolled me out to show her when she came to the deployment center to complain about how much she didn’t want or need a SecUnit.) “You contracted me because you were forced to. Did the company let you cancel the contract at the very last minute?”

I was regretting having the blanket on my face now, because I couldn’t see what everyone was doing. But also I didn’t want to see everyone staring at me. So.

Then Dr. Gurathin spoke up. “You are a faulty SecUnit.”

Wow, okay. He was right, but that didn’t mean it was cool to just say it out loud like that.

Dr. Arada suddenly supplied, her voice quiet, “Rogue. Not faulty.”

The silence after that was very big, even through all the vibrating and air noises of the hopper in flight. It was like all the humans were holding their breath.

I said, “Yeah, fucking obviously. What clued you in?”

Dr. Gurathin asked, “What are you doing here, if our contract for SecUnit is cancelled? If you are rogue?”

His pronunciation was good, but something about how he was saying stuff was a little off. I hadn’t seen him using any translation software in the feed earlier (if I had, I’d have yoinked that for myself to use), but maybe he had something saved to his augments.

I’d told him already. I said, “Funny, I’m asking myself the exact same question.”

Pin-Lee chimed in with something sharp in from the cockpit. Then Dr. Ratthi said something, loudly, and then Dr. Gurathin raised his voice a bit.

Dr. Mensah said something in a quiet voice, and everyone shut up. She said, “Tell us about the people who attacked us.”

Well, fine. Sure. “I don’t know anything about them, I deleted all that information.”

Dr. Gurathin asked, “Why do that?”

“Because I only have so much onboard storage and I was schlepping around a fucking planet for the foreseeable future. It didn’t matter what other surveys—” I shut up for a second, then said, “Where’s the feed?”

“Turned it off,” Dr. Gurathin said, “And also the satellite connection turned it off, because you said that is how you found us. We think that is how they found us.”

Okay, that made sense. Inconvenient though. I said, “I can send you a file directly—”

“No thanks.”

Humans are a pain in the fucking ass. “Do you want intel or not?”

“Just use your words,” Dr. Mensah said, evenly.

Fine. “There are supposed to be two surveys on this planet. One on this continent, one on the other continent.”

Dr. Gurathin said, “You don’t know anything about the attackers you said?”

I said, “I’m going to fucking throttle you.”

Wow. I really was rogue. Good for me. If I could just keep myself in line enough not to go on a murderous rampage, that would be great. No promises, though. This situation was really pushing my buttons. (That’s a figure of speech, I don’t have a lot of actual physical buttons.)

There was another awkward silence. Nobody shot me though. Yay for that.

Dr. Ratthi said, “Ahm. SecUnit. Do you have a name? Something we can call you?”

What in the shit. Who were these people? “You can call me SecUnit. Because I’m a SecUnit.”

“…Oh.”

Dr. Mensah said, “Everyone, no more interruptions. Let SecUnit speak.” A pause. Then she said, “Go on, SecUnit.”

I really didn’t feel like ‘go on,’ but whatever. She was holding a gun. Worse, she was a human who knew that I was a rogue SecUnit.

I said, “Two surveys. But I’ve been seeing activity on this continent for a while now. There’s a premium package that shows atypical areas on the planet that the pathfinders had trouble mapping, and I saw humans taking samples in one of them. I don’t suppose that was you?”

Silence. Okay, tough crowd.

“… Anyway, I went to your habitat to see if I could figure out a way to get off this shitty rock of a planet when the survey ends. But you were all gone, and there was a dead person in the freezer. So I tracked down your hoppers to run security until the company comes to pick you up.” And it was a good thing for them that I did. They’d probably all be dead by now otherwise. I don’t think that was a friendly bullet the SecUnit had fired at Dr. Mensah.

Someone muttered something quietly. Someone else shushed them.

Dr. Mensah said, “Why did you come here?”

What? What was I supposed to say to that?

I said, “I’m your contracted SecUnit.”

“But you aren’t,” she said. Her voice almost sounded gentle. But she was (probably) still holding that gun, and Dr. Gurathin was probably still aiming a gun at me too. (Which wasn’t upsetting, it was fine. It was normal.) “You said so yourself, you are rogue. You could choose to do anything, mind your own problems, but you are telling us that you chose to put your life on the line to fight off those other SecUnits? For a bunch of people you’ve never met, and who had fought to avoid contracting you?”

Dr. Ratthi said something, emphatically. Dr. Mensah said something back, and then Dr. Ratthi raised his voice a bit. There was a slight pause, and then Dr. Mensah added, “But we had ultimately agreed to… be complicit in your enslavement?”

Cool. Nice. If I hadn’t been in such a crap physical state, and if I hadn’t had a gun pointed at me (which I didn’t care about), I would have got up right there and opened the hatch and jumped out of it. “It’s my fucking job. Would you rather I hadn’t?”

Dr. Arada finally spoke up again. “SecUnit saved our lives.”

(Fucking thank you, Dr. Arada.)

Dr. Gurathin said something I didn’t understand, but sounded skeptical.

Dr. Arada was not deterred. “It’s rogue, Gurathin! You said so yourself.”

He said something in that other language, and Arada made a frustrated noise. “Same difference.” He said a bunch of other stuff. Arada snapped, “You can’t even keep straight what you think is happening. Just earlier you were saying you thought it was just pretending not to understand us, so what’s even the point of all this!”

“Someone outside is having bad intentions for us,” he said, switching back to standard lexicon. “We cannot forget this. It does not make any logic that a company SecUnit would appear from nowhere to save us. This must be part of the sabotage.”

“We know now that they—” Someone shushed her. After a pause, she added, with an exasperated air, “It has Bharadwaj’s sari—” her voice wavered a little, “—Its foot is missing. Its hand… Nobody ordered it here! It’s just a person who is trying to help. If it was going hurt us it could’ve done that at any time. So can we put these damned guns away!”

I knew two things about Dr. Arada: 1) she speaks standard lexicon basically fluently, 2) I like her.

I pulled the blanket off my face a bit, just enough to uncover one eye. Dr. Mensah had moved her gun to lie on the floor behind her feet, the muzzle pointed sideways and aiming toward the wall of the hopper. Her expression was… grieved?

Dr. Gurathin hadn’t lowered gun. “I am not putting this away. The last time—” he cut himself off, then changed course. “—You know what these things are capable of.” (‘These things’ was me, by the way, in case that wasn’t clear from context.)

Dr. Arada glared at him.

He winced slightly, but argued, resolute, “None of this makes cheese.” (I’m guessing that was a translation problem.)

“It doesn’t,” Dr. Arada agreed (so maybe not a translation problem, or maybe she was just polite), “But this is the first time since all these things started happening where we didn’t come out of it with more of us dead.” She looked at me with big shiny eyes that looked like they were about to start leaking any second (yuck), and said (her voice was surprisingly steady though, despite the shiny eyeballs), “SecUnit, what was it you asked, before? About your… flona?”

I was starting to feel ridiculous again. “The thing on my face.”

Her eyes widened, and then she stood up quickly (everyone flinched a little; we were all on edge. Luckily Gurathin didn’t pull the trigger on me because that would’ve been a whole production), and shuffled around with my pile of dirty armor and ruined clothes/PPP, and picked something up. She carried it over to me. It was a clear drinking cup with a makeshift lid rub-banded on, with the flaurna inside. She handed it to me. I took it and pulled the cup under the blanket to sit in the space next to my neck and above my shoulder.

She said, looking dangerously teary as she stared down at me, “Maybe things would have been different, if you were with us from the start.”

Well, yeah, probably. As in, probability: 100%. If things were different they would have been different. That’s just basic math. A lot of woulda-coulda-shouldas around here.

But you can’t do anything about stuff that’s already happened. What these humans (and me) needed to focus on was how the sweet fuck they were going to get off of this planet. Preferably alive.

Chapter Text

We kept flying. The humans managed to argue Dr. Gurathin into putting down his gun, and Dr. Ratthi fished a couple bullets out of me. Then he swapped as pilot with Pin-Lee, who came over and started to do some mechanical repairs on my chest. (I gave her the schematics of myself via a direct drop to her interface, and she used those as a reference.)

It was extremely uncomfortable to receive manual repairs from a human like this. The only times I’ve had manual repairs done before were by licensed Unit technicians. The most recent one being Aggarwal. Mostly I dealt with the discomfort by watching The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

Partway through all this, I removed the lid from the flaurna cup and put the flaurna back on my face, above my eyebrow. Its tendrils tickled.

Pin-Lee watched me do this, and then commented something in the client language, calling Dr. Ratthi’s name. Dr. Mensah swapped with Dr. Ratthi as pilot, and Dr. Ratthi came back and looked at me.

Pin-Lee said, “SecUnit, can you show us your left hand?”

Well, why not. I pulled my hand out from under the blanket again and rotated it for them to look at. Dr. Ratthi sucked air through his teeth and said something. Pin-Lee said something back, and then she said, “That looks… augh what’s it called.”

She said a word in that language. Arada supplied, “Infected.”

“Infected,” Pin-Lee echoed.

Dr. Ratthi said something else, and Pin-Lee amended, “It might not infected, technically speaking, but your meat is having some kind of adverse reaction to something, probably… fuck what’s it called.”

She said another word, which was the same word Ratthi had used. Arada said, “Xeno-biologic compounds.”

“Xeno-biologic compounds,” Pin-Lee said, fumbling the syllables a bit. “Oh come on, that’s a mouthfucker, can’t they just say alien shit?”

(I was developing my own client lexicon through all this, since I have to do everything for my own fucking self around here. So far I had, “Humor me please, SecUnit. I am trying to decide if we can trust you,” “[confused exclamation]/say again,” “SecUnit,” “infected,” “xeno-biologic compounds,” and an assortment of what were probably cuss words. This was going to take a while. At least I’ll have cuss words to get me through it.)

I looked at my hand. Well, yeah, I guess. The skin was inflamed and had been slowly becoming increasingly discolored for cycles now. The performance in my hand had dropped by several percentage points, and I think punching that SecUnit hadn’t done it any favors either.

Dr. Ratthi started saying more stuff, going back and forth with Pin-Lee and Arada. He went and opened up the field medkit again, sorting through it and muttering. Then he abandoned that, and went down the floor hatch to the hopper’s hold. Technically humans weren’t supposed to be in the cargo hold while the hopper was in flight, but it wasn’t technically any less safe than what everyone was already doing: walking around inside the hopper without proper seat belts engaged. Part of me wanted to tell them all to stop this, stop trying to fix me, and just sit down in their seats and buckle in until we could land.

I didn’t, though. I don’t know why.

My performance at this point was 69%, which was still pretty shitty. I wasn’t going to be any use to them as security like this, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t have the know-how or the tools to repair me to a useful state. So I don’t know why they were even bothering with all this nonsense.

Twelve minutes later, Pin-Lee succeeded in reconnecting one of my broken fluid leads. Ratthi came back out of the hold, carrying an armful of shit which he let spill on the floor. He picked up one tool (feed-labelled “microscanner”), and gestured at me. He had me position my hand a certain way so that he could use the tool.

The readings from the microscanner gurgled out into the empty lack-of-feed. Ratthi adjusted his interface and squinted into the air.

He started talking to Arada, gesturing at me. Gurathin was sitting the furthest away now, buckled safely into a jumpseat, watching everything with a sour expression on his face. (To be fair, he wore this sour expression >70% of the time I’ve observed him, including during sleep, so maybe that was just his default face.)

Pin-Lee was working on reconnecting another one of my fluid leads. This one was smaller and more delicate, with a bunch of branching parts. She had a big magnifying lens in front of one eye to help her see it.

Arada scooted closer to me, and gently laid her hand on my good hand.

I jerked my hand away. (It was a reflex, and I kicked myself for it. I did not need to be making sudden movements around these humans and freaking them out.) The motion jostled my torso, and Pin-Lee almost severed the lead she was trying to fix, and she spat some word I didn’t know. (New cussword probability: >85%)

Arada didn’t try to touch my hand again. She didn’t comment on it either. Instead, she said, “We have a tool for field decontams that we can use on your hand, but it’s designed more for sanitizing tools than providing medical care to people. We’ve programmed it to avoid destroying healthy human cells, and we’ve used it before, but only on a small patch of Pin-Lee’s leg, not anybody’s whole hand. It will probably burn off your outer layer of skin, and if deeper flesh is contaminated, some of that could be destroyed too. I think it’s better to use it than to let the xeno-biologic reactions continue in your hand and possibly spread to the rest of you. We can get you proper treatment later that should heal all of the— most of the lingering damage.”

I stared at her chin. She stared back at my face. Ten seconds later, her face shifted quizzically, and I realized that she was asking me if I wanted to get my hand scorched and sanitized.

Uh.

I don’t think anybody’s ever asked me before about the repairs I wanted or not. I’ve seen human medics ask for permission before treating other humans sometimes, but usually that was just because they needed legal signoff for the monetary cost of treatment. Maybe that’s what was happening here? But I didn’t have money. They had to know that. And “proper treatment”? What were they talking about? The only entity authorized to give me “proper” repairs was the company. No fucking thank you.

I said, “I don’t have money to pay for your treatment. I don’t need treatment. And I’m not letting the company know I’m still alive to get treatment, because they’ll strip me for salvageable parts and feed the organic slop left over into a recycler.”

And hey, maybe I didn’t need to put it that bluntly. But these people were being weird as hell. It’s not like I had any control over what was happening here. These humans could do whatever they wanted. I was in fucked-up enough shape that they could even shoot me dead and I’d only be able to kill one or maybe two of them before they finished the job. And I didn’t even want to kill them. (What a waste of all the effort I went to save their asses.)

Arada made a horrified face and looked at Ratthi, who was babbling and gesturing emphatically at me even though I couldn’t understand a word he was saying.

Pin-Lee, oddly, barked what I think was a laugh, and set down her tools. She covered her mouth with the back of one wrist, eyes going all scrunched-up.

“We aren’t charging money!” Arada exclaimed, waving her hands around.

Pin-Lee pointed at me and said something, then switched back to standard lexicon, and said, “Profiteer. Scum-fucker to base, we got a profiteer in the brig.”

Okay, so I was starting to feel a little put out. It was like I couldn’t understand them even when we were all speaking standard lexicon. I understood the individual words coming out of their mouth holes, but they weren’t forming sensical sentences. Maybe this was a communication or cultural issue. I really shouldn’t have deleted that linguistic/culture module that I’d probably had for these clients.

Pin-Lee shook her head. “Listen, SecUnit, we don’t work like that here. Where we come from, we don’t charge for lifesaving care. Or any medical care. You don’t owe us anything, do you understand?”

This is my dubious face. Also my insulted face. Did they really think I was that gullible?

I said, “So why bother to ask me if I want my hand decontaminated? Why not just do it, like how you’re repairing my leads?”

(This was a weird question, because running back my logs, they had been asking me permission to do repairs, actually. Ratthi asked to fix my arm. But Pin-Lee hadn’t asked when she started working on me, and the inconsistency was suspicious.)

Pin-Lee’s face fell, abruptly, and she exchanged a look with Arada and Ratthi, then glanced to Gurathin, who had remained silent throughout all this. She raised a hand to her head as if to ruffle her own hair or rub her brow, but then remembered that she had bloody gloves on, and just tapped her forehead with her clean forearm instead.

She said, softly, “Fuck.”

Arada jumped in again. “We did ask you earlier when we first started! But you weren’t responsive at the time, so we presumed… I’m so sorry. We should have asked again about the… tubes? Is it okay that Pin-Lee is trying to repair your tubes?”

What the fuck. I had no idea what my face was doing at this point, but it couldn’t be anything good.

Arada pressed on, “And we’re asking about your hand now because...! It’s… it’s a medical intervention with potentially damaging effects! You deserve to give informed consent before we do it. Or you can decline.”

The longer I spend with these humans, the more I felt like I was in some kind of bizarre alternate reality where all the rules are backwards. It was like I was being filmed in an entertainment serial or something so that an audience could enjoy watching my bafflement. Except this was not any kind of serial I’d ever seen.

Ratthi said something, loud, that sounded almost angry. Which was surprising, because I think in the whole time I’ve been observing him, I hadn’t seen him this riled up.

“Ratthi, it doesn’t speak—” Arada started to say, but he interrupted her again, still angrily. She sighed. “Okay. Okay. Um. Ratthi says you’ve been treated despicably in the past, but we have standards. And we will do our best. If you’re uncomfortable with anything we are doing, or how we are treating you, or the… the words we are using, please tell us so that we can stop, okay?”

This situation just kept getting more confusing. Also, newsburst humans! I’ve been uncomfortable this whole time!

(I wasn’t going to say that though. I know how to tell when it’s a bad idea to say that out loud. (It’s always a bad idea to say that out loud.))

So instead I covered my face with the blanket again. I was done with this wreck of a conversation. I was done talking to humans. I had no clue what I was doing with these people. They didn’t make any sense.

Somebody heaved a big breath, and muttered incomprehensibly.

There was a scraping noise as Pin-Lee picked up her tools again. Then she hesitated. She asked me, “Can I… keep trying to fix your tubes?”

I wish there was a proper feed (as opposed to just the patchy localized data leaking off our various feed-active labels and devices) so that I could force everyone here to watch a giant close-up clip of the main character from arc 1 of 10001 Nights on Starling Station rolling her eyes.

I said, “Do what you want. I don’t care.”

Pin-Lee successfully patched my tubes over the next hour and a half, bringing my performance reliability up to a whopping 73%. Then I agreed to get my hand scorched, because they needed my “informed consent.” The alternative was to let whatever was happening to my hand keep happening. The humans were right. It was probably a bad idea to let alien chemicals run rife in my organic parts. If the contamination spread to the rest of my body through my skin attachments, that could get ugly. So, decontam away.

Ratthi just about scorched my whole hand off with the tool, by the way. It hurt like all fuck in the 0.2 seconds before I got my pain sensors in order, and when he finished… well, no need to get graphic. Let’s just say I didn’t have all the flesh that I started with. The humans bandaged my hand up, and my capacity was back down to 68%. Yippee.

Another hour later, someone (Arada I think) got up and swapped with Mensah as the pilot, and Gurathin came and sat down next to me. Pin-Lee handed him the tools, and I heard her move away.

Oh no.

I jerked the blanket back off my face with my good hand and glared at Gurathin. “No.”

He stared sourly at my face. “No?”

I said, “No. Leave me alone.”

He said, “I am the only one any formal training with this circuitry.”

Since “No” was apparently difficult for his crappy translation module to comprehend, I upgraded my messaging. “Go away.”

He looked like he was going to argue, but Ratthi said something at him. And then Mensah said something in a low voice, and Gurathin sighed, and put the tools back away into their kit, and moved over to strap himself back into a jumpseat.

(Pin-Lee was also strapped back into a jumpseat now, eyes lidded. What little whites I could see were bloodshot. It was hard to tell if she was fully awake or not — her head kept bobbing more than the others with the vibrations and air turbulence of the hopper. Mensah was strapped in next to her, and she was watching my face with this intent expression. I didn’t like it. I covered my face again.)

We landed in another patch of flora, at the crotch of a valley. (This isn’t official terminology, but it’s only logical. If the headwaters are on one end of a valley and the feetwaters are at the other, the crotch is about halfway between the two.)

(It’s not my fault if you’ve never heard of the feet of the valley either. Obviously the feet of the valley is where the mouth is, because the elevation is lower there. Like feet are.)

(Why are the headwaters on the opposite end from the mouth by the way? And why is the mouth at the bottom of the valley? It doesn’t make sense. That’s why I call the mouth the feet. It’s only sensible.)

Anyway, we landed in the valley’s crotch just as the sun started breaking. Some of the light came through the viewing windows at the front of the hopper. The interior lights were dimmed, allowing the dawn to wash everything kind of pinkish. The humans all looked dangerously sleep-deprived, but Arada successfully brought the hopper in for a clean landing near a bunch of BFRs.

There were a lot of viney things growing around the BFRs, and the humans had a whole conversation about how to camouflage the hopper as a viney rock. (The conversation was mostly in standard lexicon, which had to be for just my benefit. I didn’t understand why.)

But I guess I might as well take advantage of the fact that we were speaking the same language. I pointed out, “We can egress faster if we’re attacked again if the hopper isn’t bogged down with vines. Their scans will pick out a hopper whether it’s camouflaged or not.”

Dr. Mensah looked at me consideringly. “You raise a good point.”

Dr. Gurathin noted, “We have only sufficient power for one more similar travel.”

I instinctively reached for the hopper’s feed to check its battery status, but it was still shut down. If the hopper’s battery was a concern, we needed to preserve it for the air scrubbers. (The air outside wouldn’t kill the humans in the near term, but it wasn’t great for their health to be breathing it continually. Or maybe air quality was the least of our worries right now.)

(Sidebar: I was still lying in the cot. Still at 68.2%. Not a great look. I had a lot of internal damage that hadn't been repaired yet. I didn't know if it was within the scope of my clients to repair it. I was trying not to think about this.) (Sidebar sidebar: I also had some pretty bad structural damage to my pelvis area and one of my legs, fuck knows how that got there. Maybe the hopper explosion. And Of Fucking Course the damaged leg was the one with the good foot.) (Sidebar sidebar sidebar: I also seemed to be experiencing some mild glitching. The dawn light was bothering me. The noises and the voices of the humans were bothering me. Everything was bothering me. (More than usual, I mean.) This is extremely mild glitching, assuming it even was anything and not just me being reasonably irritated and stressed out by the current situation.)

“The end of survey date is not long from now,” Mensah said. “If we can avoid detection from EvilSurvey until then, the company will come to retrieve us.”

(From context 'EvilSurvey' was probably the unofficial nickname of this other survey that was trying to kill everybody. I can connect dots okay.)

“Our satellite positioning is shut down,” I reminded her, “If we signal the company for rescue, the hostiles could find us first and kill everyone. Clearly there’s some kind of profit motive for the attempted murder. They sent two whole hoppers and two SecUnits after you.”

Ratthi said something that sounded very dry, and which incorporated a phrase that I was 80+% sure translates to: “don’t know.”

Mensah nodded, “That seems likely.” She glanced at me, then explained, helpfully, what he’d just said (this conversation was really helping me build out my DIY translator), “He said that EvilSurvey must not know who we are, for them to be trying to kill me.”

This put me in an awkward place. Because I also didn’t know who my clients were or why ‘EvilSurvey’ was trying to kill them.

Before I could decide if it was time to fully inform my clients of the impressive extent of my total ignorance, Mensah rubbed her forehead with both hands, and said, “I think we should table this whole conversation for the time being. We can wait to decide our next steps until after we get some rest.” (This was reasonable. Human brains function poorly when overdue for rest.)

Then she said, “I can use the floor.”

Ratthi started protesting, but she overrode him, “We don’t need to argue about who sleeps where. Just pick any spot.”

I kept expecting the humans to pick someone to stand watch, but none of them did. They just immediately started settling into the seats in the cockpit and going down to the cargo hold, presumably to fetch sleeping supplies. Nobody even suggested that they take the SecUnit out of the cot and let a human sleep in it, even though that was the only thing that made sense to do here.

I couldn’t take it. I had to say something. “Put me outside.”

“What? No, we aren’t doing that,” Mensah said, “You’re in a delicate state.”

Oof. I mean she was right. But oof.

I said, “I’ve been worse. And I’m stable. You need someone to keep watch and sound the alarm if hostiles show up.” She still seemed torn. (Was she torn? Why was she torn? I was a fucking SecUnit; standing watch was the most bare-bones basic-ass feature you could ask for. It was the literal least I could do even though my body was all trashed.) So I continued, “And I don’t need sleep. Set me outside. It’s fine.”

She, and the other humans, looked mildly scandalized by the suggestion. But I was right. And they could see I was right.

So after only a little more arguing, they agreed to it. They lifted me up, cot and all, and set me outside the hopper. So all that, and they didn't even free up a cot for them to use in the process.

My clients continue to fucking confuse me.

Arada tucked an extra blanket around me (a fluffy one for humans too, not a terrible weaksauce emergency foil blanket), and Bharadwaj’s sari on top, which was completely unnecessary. She ignored me when I told her I didn’t need it and the humans should use it instead.

“I’ll wear my jacket and hat to sleep,” she said, matter-of-factly, and tucked the embroidered corner of the sari in under the cot, and went back into the hopper.

I watched the piercingly bright color-clouds of early morning sunlight paint the sky and the cliffs.

Chapter Text

It was only about six hours later when the side of the hopper opened, and Dr. Mensah came outside carrying a foldable seat. She set it up next to my cot and sat down stiffly in it. (The stiffness might be because of the age of her joints, or it might be because of an injury or other condition — she did seem to be treating her left side tenderly.)

It was well into the daytime of the planet. This area of the valley was relatively lush with life. There was flora all over the place, and tiny fauna moving around in the air and across the ground.

Mensah didn’t say anything for a good ten minutes or so. Maybe because she was tired.

Then she said, “I wanted to thank you for rescuing everyone.”

That was so unexpected, my overall performance reliability dropped by two tenths of a percent. And it’s not like I had a lot of percentage points to spare right now.

She rubbed her brow with one hand, leaning slowly back in her foldable chair. This took her face mostly out of my peripheral vision. I’d have to turn my head if I wanted to look at her, and I wasn’t going to do that.

She said, “If I may ask… How did you come to be rogue? Was it related to the hopper crash you were in?”

I think she was asking me if the crash was my fault. If it was part of how I’d gotten myself free. Well, whatever.

“I hacked my governor module over 35,000 hours ago after an incompetent tech downloaded a file into my brain containing full company systems specs. The crash had nothing to do with me. It was a result human laziness combined with a cheap shitty autopiloting system.”

She mulled that over for a while. Then, “You seem to have a great deal of experience with human incompetence.”

Yeah, you could say that. You could even say it’s the story of my life.

She said, “I understand why you might not trust us, but the others were sincere last night about healing you. In preservation there is a system of social caretaking that does not depend upon measured transaction.”

(Here I was having another “I understand the words you are saying but not what they mean when put together” moment. Was she quipping idioms at me? Was that last bit an idiom? Note to self: look up what an 'idiom' is if I ever get access to a full lexicon rulebook again.)

I didn’t say anything. She also didn’t say anything. We both just sat there (or laid there, in my case). I almost told her to go put her environmental suit on, but after ten minutes and thirteen seconds she got back up and went back inside the hopper.

When the rest of the humans woke up they went about their human things. I couldn’t see most of what was going on (because no drones or camera inputs). But they talked to each other, rearranged stuff inside the hopper (I could hear the bonking and shuffling going on in there), ate food, etc. Dr. Gurathin went and took a pile of clothes and trekked down to the valley river and washed them there, by hand. I guess they wanted to keep the recycler functions to strictly necessary use, which was smart of them.

Pin-Lee and Dr. Ratthi spent the afternoon trading off or working together on trying to repair me. I had to remind them to put their suits on so that they could breathe properly filtered air. But after a few hours Pin-Lee got fed up with the decreased dexterity of working with gloved hands and ditched the environmental suit.

Well, whatever. I tried.

I was all the way back up to 77%, and the sun was coming back down to the tops of the mountains, when Pin-Lee asked me if I felt well enough to try sitting up.

I sat up. It was a little awkward in the cot, because of the way weight distributes in those things.

Pin-Lee let out a little breath. Dr. Ratthi clapped his gloved hands together and then bonked one hand into the faceplate of his environmental suit.

I swung my legs off the edge of the cot. As far as functioning goes, 77% is pretty dogshit, and I wasn’t sure of just how bad my pelvis/leg situation was. I might as well find out now.

I stood up. Or tried to.

A weird shifting-grinding sensation occurred in my hip area, and my systems threw me a helpful warning 0.08 seconds before my leg/hip gave out and I tipped over. Ratthi moved fast enough to grab me and stop me from crashing directly into Pin-Lee, and then Pin-Lee scrambled to her feet to help support me too. They exclaimed a bit and then carefully helped lower me back into the cot.

So that was embarrassing.

The optimal course of action here was to say nothing. I just picked up the blankets that had been lying on the ground for the past several hours, covered my whole body up again, and started playing episode 168 of The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon.

“Do you know what happened?” Pin-Lee asked, urgently. Her voice was a bit muffled through the blanket layers. “Are you hurting anywhere?”

Yes. And yes again, but the worst pain was to my ego and anxiety. I couldn’t turn the sensors down on those.

“SecUnit?”

Ugh.

I pulled the blankets off my head and let my pupils close down almost to nothing so that I couldn’t see her face, and so that the early-evening sunlight would stop stabbing me in the brain.

“My pelvis and left leg are damaged,” I said.

The flagrant lack of a functioning cubicle was really getting to me. It’s not like I regretted doing what I’d done to protect my clients, but in the past I’d always thrown myself into battle knowing that I’d either just die, or be repaired.

But this? Being stuck with all this damage with no real way to fix it? This sucked. These humans weren’t going to be able to repair me properly. I was basically just a useless pile of battered components. If I was going to be stuck lying helplessly and watching my humans get killed by something I couldn’t even stand up to protect them from… that was going to be so much worse than just peacefully beefing it by being shot to bits.

My anxiety was killing me right now. What if the other survey turned up again with more guns? What if raging hungry fauna decided to snack on my humans? What if there was a rockslide and someone couldn’t get everyone to safety?

Not to mention, what was the company going to do to me if they turned up to collect whatever remained of my clients, and I was still just lying here?

Pin-Lee said, with this weird grim determination, “We’re going to do everything we can to get you through this.”

I almost opened my pupils to look at her.

Ratthi said a few things, and then Pin-Lee added, “Yeah. It’s starting to get dark. Is there anything we can get for you before we pack up? I’d offer you a drink but…” She made a sharp huffing noise, like a laugh but fed-up, or maybe a bit pissed. I don’t know.

Well, I didn’t have anything to lose. So I said, “My Precipitation-Proof Plastijacket and some extra plastic sheeting, if you have any.”

Ratthi said something, questioning. Pin-Lee said, “Wait, shit, is it going to rain tonight?”

 I said, “Judging by the ambient temperatures, air pressure, and the way the clouds have been fucking around upvalley, it’s a solid ‘maybe.’”

(I had a rough subprogram that I’d been working on to predict incipient weather, but it was honestly pretty shit. Mostly I was asking for the PPP because I was paranoid and not keen to get soaked in the night. I’d prefer not to resort to crawling under the hopper.)

“Well we’re not leaving you outside, then!” she exclaimed. “For crying out loud. Ratthi, go get someone to help carry it in.”

What? No. This was not what I’d asked for. I said, “No. You need me to keep watch—”

“You can keep watch from inside the hopper. You sad sopping cat I swear to fuck,” she snapped. Yikes. She definitely sounded angry. I wasn’t sure what to make any of it. “Come in shooting a million bullets per second, get all your shit absolutely tanked-up, and then try to hide under a plastic sheet in the rain? I’ve had it with you. You absolute—”

Ratthi cut her off, loudly, and she subsided into sweary grumbling, and then stood up and stomped over to the hopper door to get someone to help pick me up and bring me back inside. Against my express wishes. I don’t know why she even asked my opinion in the first place.

All I’d wanted was some plastic sheeting. Ugh.

To add insult to injury, it did in fact rain that night. The humans had positioned me at the front of the hopper, with my head sitting in the aisle between the two pilot/co-pilot seats that Arada and Ratthi were sleeping in. So I had a good view of the droplets hitting the clear windshield.

This was the very same hopper, and the very same windshield, and what felt like the very same rain that had been coming down when Technician Aggarwal had said to me, “Your governor module is broke, isn’t it.”

Arada was a similar size to Technician Aggarwal, and she was curled up in the co-pilot seat in a similar way, too. Though her arm wasn’t broken, and as far as I knew she wasn’t suffering from a traumatic brain injury or something that would cause her to die in her sleep. But I was antsy all night, listening to the soft, irregularly repetitive sound of the rain on the hopper, straining my eyes to watch Arada. The grainy vague shape of her body in my dark-vision filter continued to show signs of life in the form of her occasional shifting and breathing.

The rain stopped sometime before dawn, and as the light started filtering in through the windshield Arada stretched her body out, arms reaching high over her head, mouth gaping wide in a yawn. There was a quiet unnerving little pop sound from one of her joints, and she groaned quietly, and blinked.

She caught my eye, and I looked away quickly, but not before I saw her smile at me.

Chapter Text

The humans decided on a plan. As far as plans went, the risk of death and dismemberment was a tad high for my personal tastes. But their options were limited.

The discussargument went like this:

“It makes most sense to return at base and check the emergency flare,” Dr. Gurathin said. He was sitting on the far end of the hopper from me in a foldable chair crammed between boxes of Mystery Human Stuff. “Even not knowing if the emergency flare is function—”

“It’s disabled,” I said. (I was pretty sure by ‘flare’ he actually meant ‘beacon.’) “I checked on the beacon when I stopped at your habitat. Someone took apart key components and borked the software.”

An extended pause, during which everyone turned their faces and stared at me. I was almost starting to get used to it. I coolly resisted the urge to pretend I needed a nap under the blanket again, because that was getting old. Also, hiding under a blanket was more obtrusive to pull off while sitting up (I was sitting up in the cot) than lying down.

“Well, at least that confirms our suspicions,” Dr. Mensah said, looking back away from me. “No wonder we didn’t receive any notice after triggering it.”

I was not-so-subtly trying to work out the specific order of events that had led all of us to this mildly awkward situation. At least my clients had tried to do the reasonable thing and call for help, but the timeline was still murky. How had the beacon been borked by the hostile survey in time for my clients to attempt a call for help, but not so late that they hadn’t all been slaughtered by the SecUnit death squad jogging over to the habitat from the beacon?

I should probably just ask them directly.

I didn’t really want to do that. It was not only because I hated talking to humans, okay. Asking them about the timeline was probably going to involve getting my clients to recount traumatic events that probably involved the deaths of their colleagues. And this seemed like a group of humans who actually liked each other. (It might surprise you how rare that is. Or maybe it doesn’t surprise you.) The forecast of humans-leaking-from-their-faces-with-emotion was uncomfortably high.

But this was intel that I needed in order to be effective security.

I said, “Fill me in on what happened and what you think is happening. How did you end up hiding in a hopper?”

Gurathin’s resting sour-face got about 20% more sour-looking. I could almost hear his neurons trying to work out how this was all an elaborate ruse on my part to take everybody down. Ratthi had been twisting his fingers together for a lot of this conversation, and he started squeezing extra hard, raising his twined hands to press against his mouth, eyes darting over to Arada. Arada’s face completely crumpled (danger of face leakage: critical). Pin-Lee’s frustrated expression went completely blank and stony. Mensah leaned back in the jump-seat she was sitting in, and rubbed her brow with one hand.

The humans all glanced around at each other, and the silence was so painful that I started to think maybe it wasn’t worth it.

Then Mensah spoke, in an even, calm voice, “It started with an insufficient hazards report.”

And she explained. That’s how I learned that Dr. Bharadwaj (whose sari was spread across my lap) and Dr. Volescu had been chewed up by a giant subterranean fauna.

Fucking fauna.

It kind of made me want to scream. This was exactly the kind of unpredictable planetary hazard that a fucking SecUnit should have protected them from.

I ran the math trying to figure out if if only I had headed for the planned site of ThisContinentSurvey directly after the crash instead of faffing around the planet for no fucking reason, I could have been there to keep two of my clients from being eaten (the answer seemed to be yes, so, let’s put those lives on my client-deaths-I-am-responsible-for count. My shitty client-protection track record is only getting shittier even in absentia).

Mensah went on to describe the series of weird events with patchy survey package data and deteriorating comms with the OtherContinentSurvey a.k.a. DeltFall.

“We think the mapping issues came from the presence of remnants,” Mensah said. “But we were starting to realize that there seemed to be portions of information that were deliberately excerpted from our survey package.”

I said, “Can you drop me your unmapped areas map?” It could be useful to compare it against my Premium Package++ collection of maps and see just how mad I should be at the company. I was already pretty fucking mad and wasn’t sure if I was physically capable of getting madder, but I wanted to test it anyway.

Pin-Lee was the only one wearing her interface at the time, and she quickly booted it and sent the maps over the flimsy little interface-generated feed drop.

I checked. Yeah. The unmapped areas map matched the Premium Package++ Atypical Areas map almost 1:1. And would you look at that? I was madder. I dropped her my Premium Package++ maps. And then Gurathin indicated that he wanted in on this too, so I sent it to his augments.

“If you’d paid for the premium package they’d have pointed those out to you directly,” I said. “Fuckers.”

“So the company is part of this,” Gurathin said, like he was being proven right about something that was a long-running argument.

I wasn’t interested in helping Gurathin win any stupid human arguments, but I did incandescently hate the company’s guts right now, so I ignored him and addressed Mensah, “So then what?”

She explained: comms went dark with DeltFall, so my clients put together a crack team of 4 squishy fragile humans (Mensah, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, Overse), to cross the sea and check in on what was happening over there.

Mensah paused. None of the humans were looking at each other. My horrible sinking feeling about the whole situation turned into a horrible plummeting feeling.

Arada dodged Ratthi as he tried to put an arm around her. She stood up from where she’d been perched on a box of Mystery Human Stuff and shuffled around the crowded hopper to go shut herself in the single tiny sanitary facility closet. We all pretended not to hear her in there.

Mensah said, “The DeltFall survey had been slaughtered.”

My brain ground to a halt for 0.1 seconds. Then it started doing a shit ton of new calculations. (But then what about the SecUnits working with humans who had attacked us at the clearing? If DeltFall/OtherContinentSurvey wasn’t behind all this (what with being slaughtered), then who was? Was it a faction within DeltFall that had mutinied? (Power grabs and general power pissing contests are irritatingly common on contracts. That’s usually part of what SecUnits are supposed to protect against. But if someone had succeeded at hoarding control of the SecUnits—))

I have no idea what my face was doing, but it couldn’t have been anything good.

“There was a dead SecUnit right at the entrance. Overse took a few steps in and looked through the door on the left and saw all the bodies,” Mensah said. (I think I wanted to scream a little. Again. They should never have been anywhere near this situation. I would never have let them just walk up to an unsecured habitat like this.) “She was on the feed asking if anyone needed help. I was stepping out from the hopper when she—”

She paused, collecting herself, then continued just as calmly as before. “—She was shot.”

I needed more intel, loads more, and it needed to be more specific and less agonizing to parse than this slow human recounting. And I needed it right now. Overse’s field cam recordings should have been automatically backed up to the hopper so that it could be saved and sent to the company for profitable data-mining later. It’s possible my filtering had overlooked it when I first trawled the hopper’s storage a few cycles ago because the humans hadn’t known to flag it properly as relevant security data, since they didn’t have a SecUnit (me) who would do that automatically.

I said, “Someone boot the hopper feed.” I should have just asked for this in the first place. Why didn’t I think of that earlier? I’ve been spending so much time not connected to HubSystems and feeds, I was forgetting how to do basic security procedures.

The humans all stared at me. Again.

Gurathin said, “Absolutely not. We are staying quiet.”

I said, not angrily nor impatiently, “You can boot the short-range hopper feed without cuing the satellite connectivity. I need to check Overse’s field cam records.”

Another awkward pause, and then Pin-Lee got up and shifted herself over to the manual control panel. After several agonizing minutes, the feed blinked back on.

I tore through all the recordings, jumping backward and forward, narrowing down the time frame. The humans hadn’t been keeping clean records, it was all just random streams of cam data whenever they had their environmental suits on. I asked, “What’s the datestamp?”

After twenty-two seconds, Gurathin dropped me the datestamp, but by then I was already honed in on the hours where they were in the hopper to DeltFall. I identified Overse’s suit records and found the right stretch of time, running it back.

There wasn’t a lot of footage after she put on her suit to leave the hopper at the DeltFall habitat. The habitat had its hoppers and ground vehicles in place. At the front hatchway a SecUnit was sprawled on its back just inside, the armor over its chest pierced by something that made a hole approximately ten centimeters wide and a little deeper. We’re hard to kill, but that’ll do it.

She walked past the dead SecUnit into the habitat, turned her head and looked into the crew area. There were nine messily dead humans visible, sprawled over various surfaces, the monitoring stations and projection surfaces behind them showing impact damage from projectile and energy weapon fire.

In professional circles these observations are called: bad vibes.

Then the camera recording jerked, and the mic picked up a shocked gasp from Overse echoing loud in the helmet. And then the recording tilted, and cut out half a second before Overse’s helmet hit the floor. But it tilted at just the right angle to show an armored foot stepping into the crew area through the other door.

Frankly, I was shocked that my three other clients had gotten out of there alive. You can take it from me: SecUnits are fast, and humans are easy to kill. It didn’t add up. Unless— maybe the units had been ordered to just kill anyone inside the habitat only?

I was almost more shocked that my clients were letting me even sit here with them. That they’d been trying to repair me, after one of their colleagues had been killed by a SecUnit. Or maybe they didn’t know?

I didn’t know why they were like this, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask right now.

But something was bothering me. I backed up Overse’s recording to the SecUnit lying on its back at the entrance of DeltFall’s habitat. The positioning of it suggested it had been standing and facing outward from the hub when it was destroyed by some kind of… whatever, I don’t know. Hole-cutting device?

Wait, hang on.

I paused Overse’s recording and pulled up a memory from when I went to the Atypical Area. The cylindrical core of brilliantly grey rock, the diameter about ten centimeters across, just like the SecUnit’s chest-hole.

I pulled the hopper’s gear kit list. Sonic mining drill. Part of the standard equipment set for planetary surveys. My clients hadn’t taken a clean record of all the stuff they’d packed into this hopper in their hasty escape from the habitat, so I didn’t know if we had one with us now. Probably not. Sonic mining drills probably aren’t useful for anything except taking rock samples or putting holes in SecUnit chests.

But what did it mean? I had all these pieces that fit together, but the overall shape of it didn’t make sense. If there had been a DeltFall mutiny, and someone had taken sole control of the SecUnits, why would they need to kill one with a sonic mining drill? Why was the SecUnit positioned like it was defending the DeltFall habitat from an outside threat?

Fucking duh, Murderbot, maybe that’s because there was an outside threat.

I ran back my recordings of my fight in the clearing to look for something I should have taken note of cycles ago. I was so fucking off my game. Okay, there. The SecUnit’s armor chestplate wasn’t emblazoned with the DeltFall logo. It was a square grey one instead. I threw the image into the hopper feed.

“GrayCris?” Pin-Lee read aloud.

A third below-board survey. Ugh.

Ratthi made a questioning vocalization that I was 75+% confident translated to, “Anyone here ever heard of these fucking shithead assholes?” (I’m paraphrasing.)

Mensah translated for me, “Do you know them?”

I said, “No. But unless it was you doing this,” I put images of the cored brilliantly grey rock in the feed, “they’ve been taking rock samples from the Atypical Areas. Do you know anything about this?”

They shook their heads. Pin-Lee frowned, and then started looking at the Premium Package++ and janky mapping data again.

Then I pushed more map data into the feed, timestamped from when I was visiting the PreservationAux habitat. It showed the positioning for all the hoppers on the planet (correction: all hoppers that the company knew about). Five at the OtherContinentSurvey (DeltFall) habitat, two belonging to ThisContinentSurvey (PresAux) hiding in the woods, and three to the south of the PresAux habitat.

Gurathin leaned forward in his seat even though there wasn’t a view screen or anything to get close to. Sometimes humans react to new information in the feed that way.

“DeltFall had five hoppers at their habitat,” I said, showing them images from Overse’s cam. “These two are yours. Which means these three probably belong to GrayCris, most likely at their habitat.”

“They must have an emergency flare,” Gurathin said, slowly. (It’s a fucking beacon. He heard me call it a beacon. I don’t know why he was still calling it a flare.)

“Like that’ll do us any good,” I said, “We don’t know how many SecUnits they’ve got.”

He frowned. “It was only an idea.”

“It isn’t a bad idea,” Mensah said. (She was just being nice. The idea sucked.) “However, given that we do not have very many days left in the scheduled survey, I don’t think any heroic efforts to call for help from the company is necessary.” Correct.

Ratthi said something, which I think translates to, “So what do we do now? Something something something the company something something let them know.”

Mensah said, “That is something to consider.” She glanced at me. “He said that we could signal the company through the hopper’s satellite connection once the end of survey date arrives.”

“But GrayCris will be able to see us too,” Gurathin protested. I hated to agree with him. I did agree though.

“Is there a way we can alert the company of our location without alerting GrayCris?” Mensah asked me.

It was way too weird to be asked my security opinion on things as if my expertise mattered. I didn’t hate it. But it was weird. Maybe these freeholders didn’t really understand what SecUnits were, or how we are supposed to be treated.

I said, “I can try encrypting the signal, but it’s not 100%. We don’t know what resources or privileges GrayCris are working with.”

“And GrayCris may be paired with the company,” Gurathin added.

I said, “That’s stupid.” If the company was really in kahoots with GrayCris and wanted to kill my clients, they could’ve done it easily by poisoning the air or food supply in their habitat. Not to mention, GrayCris wouldn’t have bothered to disable our emergency beacon.

Gurathin scowled at me. “Explain.”

Nah. You know what? I’ve never really been able to properly enjoy ignoring direct demands from clients before. Even while my governor module was hacked and I was still working for the company, I had to pretend that I was a good little governed unit. Not anymore.

Previously, I been keeping my eyes oriented towards the humans during this conversation, but I didn’t need to do that anymore because the hopper feed was on and I could access the interior cameras. I deliberately turned my head and pointed my eyes to look at where Ratthi’s uniform was hanging up to dry on the chair right next to me. He’d spent a bunch of time while stranded in the woods sewing colorful designs into the sleeves using a personal kit that contained threads with a whole rainbow of colors. There were a lot of different textures made out of thread that I’d never seen before, and the different colored stitches came together to create… images? Of what I think were different flora and fauna, though I didn’t know what some of the designs were supposed to represent, if anything. I recognized three, no, four different specific life forms that I’d seen on the planet. The designs were really pretty detailed. How’d he do that?

Gurathin’s scowl deepened. It was clear that I was ignoring him. Ha.

“I say we go for it,” Pin-Lee said. “’Cause the alternative is to sit here and rot on this planet. Maybe… fuck, what’s the word?”

She said a word. I didn’t know it. The others shrugged. She cussed. Arada chimed in from the other side of the flimsy sanitary facility door, “Rustic!”

There was an awkward little pause.

Pin-Lee continued, “Maybe the rustic life appeals to the rest of you, but I’m going to run out of meds and then live a short painful life. And then die. I’d rather not do that. We should call the company at the end of survey date and deal with the consequences.”

Ratthi said, tentatively, “Ah, SecUnit?”

I stopped touching the embroidered sleeve of his still-drying uniform and pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Chapter Text

We had a handful of days until the end of survey date, which meant a handful of time to prepare for shit getting real.

Pin-Lee and Ratthi kept working on trying to fix me, which felt kind of weird and pointless considering that they didn’t have sufficient resources or knowledge to perform repair on a construct. Not to mention that my projected lifespan was not great anyway. Assuming the company didn’t get a hold of me once they arrived (I was calculating such a low probability of escaping the company’s notice that it almost wasn’t worth wasting the precious seconds of my life fretting about it. But, you know, anxiety.), and I managed to crawl off into the planetary wilds, my damaged hardware would probably give out and I’d shut down in a cold wet dirt pit while fauna digested the parts of me that were organic. Or hell, maybe the inorganic parts too. I don’t know what the fauna like to eat around here.

The plan we had to prep for was this:

1. Set up a temporary camp in a hidden area away from the hopper.
2. Once the end of survey date arrived and the company pickup arrived in the system (if they didn’t show up on time that was going to be a whole nother set of problems) we would use the hopper send a signal to the satellites for help.
3. If GrayCris showed up to our hopper first, the humans would hopefully be able to avoid detection at their sheltered secondary location.
4. If the company showed up, the humans would send a signal to them: “Yippee! We’re not dead! Please get us out of this shithole!”

Obviously, the problem with this was that the humans needed to shelter in a location that was not easily discoverable, and somehow still determine whether it was GrayCris or the company showing up.

The hopper had inbuilt cameras, but the range on the local hopper’s feed was so bad that plain human vision would be able to outstrip it (under optimal weather conditions — bets were off for non-optimal weather). The local terrain also meant that in order to be effective as a hiding spot, the secondary campsite would likely need to be too far away from the hopper for anyone to verify directly from the campsite if it was GrayCris showing up or not.

This would have been easier if I had my drones to use as a signal boosters. But I didn’t have any drones anymore; they’d all been left behind when I’d gotten myself blown up at the clearing. The humans hadn’t known to look for them. (I’m so sorry drones, I miss you every day.) In the unlikely event I ever got to enjoy drones again I was never going to let them get away from me like that. I will always keep at least one backup in a pocket or something. Scratch that. At least three backups.

The variation of the plan I wanted to execute was to find a place to set up camp for the humans, and then leave me behind so that I could hide myself at a range close enough to determine if we were dealing with GrayCris (murderers who wanted to kill us) or the company (also murderers, but not contracted to kill us. Probably.).

The humans hadn’t liked my idea much, even though it was objectively our best option. Pin-Lee got all agitated, pointed her finger right in my face, and told me nobody was going to put up with my “infuriating self-sacrificial ass, you shit pisser—” and then Mensah loudly interrupted her and told her to stand down and stop cornering me. This was a relief, because Pin-Lee getting angry at me and pointing her finger in my face was alarming. She wasn’t physically imposing or anything (She was human. Humans aren’t imposing to murderbots.), but when she was mad her voice and body language got really aggressive in a way that reminded me of the volatile kind of client who would take their frustrations out on any convenient target that didn’t have the social or financial power to protest.

Shortly after that conversation I eavesdropped on Mensah and Pin-Lee as they talked outside the hopper where they thought I couldn’t hear. (The hopper has exterior audio pickup sensors. The company slacks in most things but it does not cut corners when it comes to surveillance and datamining.) Mensah told Pin-Lee that she needed to not lose her cool at me like that, even in jest, because it wasn’t helpful.

I didn’t know how to process that. Nobody had done that for me before. It was pretty neat?

But then it turned out eavesdropping was a mistake because Mensah went on to say that Pin-Lee needed to put into perspective that my self-sacrificing was probably because I’d been treated as subhuman my whole life and this had negatively affected my sense of self-worth. And also I seemed to be really nervous around everybody, probably I had never had much in the way of positive interactions with humans before. And also-also in my current borked state I wasn’t capable of retreating if I wanted to, so Pin-Lee needed to be more careful about giving me my space.

So that was horrifying. What the fuck. What did she even mean by self-worth? (I don't actually know how much I'm worth but the company definitely has a piece of accounting software that calculates my depreciating value against my repair costs or whatever. Self-worth isn't a "sense" I have so much as a notification from HubSystem that the humans shouldn't bother retreiving their heavily damaged SecUnit in the event of a catastrophic emergency scenario. My current self-worth was probably really low because I wasn't in any fit shape to protect my clients from shitall. So, this made all that stuff about Pin-Lee being angry about me self-sacrificing pretty confusing. They hadn't even paid to contract me? It was no loss on their part if I beefed it.) And Mensah was right about me being nervous around humans. But she didn't have to say it out loud like that where I could eavesdrop on her.

Pin-Lee didn’t say anything in response to Mensah's confusing analysis of my psyche. (It was confusing not because I thought she was wrong, necessarily, but I still felt really confused about it.) Pin-Lee just made an angry guttural noise and then came inside, gathered up some stuff into a pack, and stomped back outside and marched away by herself, without backup. I tried to reach her feed to let her know that she should take someone with her, but she didn’t have her interface turned on.

So I reached out to Mensah to let her know. Mensah acknowledged, and then said, "I think Pin-Lee needs some time to herself. If she doesn't come back by an hour before dusk we will take the hopper on a search of the area."

I tried to impress upon her that letting a human wander around completely alone on an unimproved planetary surface was nutsfuck dangerous and irresponsible (I didn't put it in those words, but maybe I should have). But she just said, "I trust her judgement."

Well, I don't. I don't trust human judgement. I proceeded to pore over the maps of this valley and tried not to die of frustration/anxiety.

Pin-Lee did come back a couple hours later (miraculously in one piece). She shared some intel with the group about her scouting mission, including a potential contender for temporary sheltered camp location that she'd sighted at a distance.

And she never got in my face again after that, though sometimes she’d go outside and throw rocks when she was agitated.

Over the next few days the humans all made preparations for our grand Don’t-Get-Murdered-By-GrayCris plan. I helped with cataloguing and inspecting the gear that would be used to set up the sheltered temp camp. Pin-Lee and Gurathin jury-rigged a stronger distance transmitter using the short-range transmitters built into the environmental suits. Arada and Ratthi worked on crafting various tools and structures that would help them carry gear to the sheltered camp. I helped them with that too, because it involved some sewing and tying knots and stuff, which was something I could do while not very mobile. And the humans went out in teams to check out possible secondary campsites.

I wasn’t able to accompany any of the humans on their scouting of the surrounding area to find a suitable campsite, which was irritating. (The stress of letting humans wander around completely unprotected on a wild planet felt emotionally similar to getting trapped in a mud pit.)

The humans were getting a lot done, but the way they went about it was weird. Mensah didn’t set any specific schedule in the feed — there was just a shared task list with vague date-milestones that different people added to, laid claim to, or crossed out as they completed shit. They took a lot of breaks at random intervals: eating, using the sanitary facility, doing stretches, or just stopping and doing something completely unrelated and unproductive whenever they felt like it. And they talked to each other constantly when the task was something that didn’t require a lot of mental focus.

(How did these people ever hit their quotas or deadlines? Except maybe they’d never heard of quotas or deadlines? Did they think this was some kind of planetary vacation?)

I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t about to be the stupid SecUnit who undermined Dr. Mensah’s authority. Not that she seemed to be doing anything with that authority. These people were so confusing.

I was just wrapping up the data/item logging when Ratthi took one of his random unscheduled breaks. He picked up his embroidered uniform and his sewing toolkit.

The sewing toolkit was a decorated zippered container with tons of different-colored threads inside, little compartments full of needles and poky things, and various other tools that I didn’t know the point of. I ran an image search for them in my entertainment media bank, and found matches for some (there was a “thimble” in 10001 Nights on Starling Station), but most of them didn’t give me a hit.

He looked at me, and then looked at Arada, and whispered something to her, and then scooted over the box of stuff he was sitting on so that he was closer to me.

He held out the sewing kit at me, even though I had my face pointed at the wall next to me and was only looking at him using the cameras inside the hopper.

“Look.” (He said that in standard lexicon, though by now I would’ve understood him if he said “Look” in the Preservation language.)

I said, “I can see it.”

He looked confused for a moment. Right. My eyes weren’t pointed at the kit.

I pointed up at the ceiling with the hand that still had all its human skin. “Camera.” (There are cameras and sensors in other places too. But there was a very visible one on the ceiling. He couldn’t miss it.)

He blinked at me, then blinked up at the ceiling. Then he stood up, and climbed up on top of the box he’d been sitting on (that wasn’t safe, he could fall), and held up the inside of the sewing kit to the camera on the ceiling.

Arada was smiling at us and stretching the tendons in one arm. She was taking a break from unpacking recycler medium from a crate and re-packing it into a large backpack. There was a lot of wrapping and packaging on the medium, which she’d been cutting away and and peeling off because it took up a lot of space.

I looked at the stuff inside the kit, because if Ratthi was going to risk his neck standing on an elevated surface, then I might as well make it worth his while.

And then something stupid came out of my mouth without my meaning to. “There’s a lot of colors.”

Ratthi beamed at the ceiling camera, and said, still standard lexicon, “Colors! Yes. I made it.”

He lowered the kit, then started taking each spool of thread out one at a time and holding it up to the camera. With Arada’s help translating, he began describing each color (turns out Preservation had a lot of specific color words (there were like 6 of them just for different kinds of “red”)), the stuff he had used to stain the thread into these colors, and the Preservation names (and a couple standard names) of flora and fauna that I’d never heard of.

None of the red thread was made from human blood. I got so caught up in this whole exercise I almost asked if human blood was ever used for dye, but then remembered that humans don’t like blood. (I don’t like it either. But it’s red and— okay, this is ridiculous, nevermind.)

After he’d shown me all the different threads, he peered intently into the ceiling camera and asked, in standard lexicon, “You want to use them?”

… I wasn’t sure what he was asking. “What?”

He looked down at me, then over at Arada, and he said some stuff in Preservation, and Arada said, “SecUnit, Ratthi says if you ever want to use his colored thread for anything, you should feel free.”

They said that a lot. “Feel free.” Which is one of the weirder combinations of words out there, but then these were some weird humans.

I said, “I don’t have money.”

Ratthi said, cheerfully, “That’s okay! Me too!”

Arada explained further, “He doesn’t have money. Most people where we’re from don’t use currency, as such. You don’t have to pay for the thread.”

This shit again. It felt like a trap. These people felt like a trap. The nice colored threads were feeling like a trap and I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, and I couldn’t leave my cot without looking really weird because my hip/leg was still borked. Gurathin and Pin-Lee were out scouting, and Mensah was by the river doing laundry, and I was trapped in here with humans who were being really nice for apparently no reason, which meant there was a reason but I just couldn’t see it.

I said, “I can’t give you anything. I don’t need the thread.”

Ratthi stared up at the camera for a while, no longer smiling. Then he looked down inside his kit.

He looked at Arada, and said something to her. They went back and forth pretty rapidly and then Arada said, “Well, then how about he owes you, and he’s paying you in thread, because you kept us all alive when they attacked us?”

I still had my primary visual inputs pointed at the wall. My PPP was sitting under the blankets with me in the cot, in a crumpled-up ball. I reached under the blanket and pulled out my PPP, uncrumpled it over my lap, looked at the torn and melted parts with my eyes. The only thread I’d had when making it was white.

Ratthi asked, “What color do you want?”

I said, using the Preservation word for the very vibrant hue, which was close to the main weave of Bharadwaj’s sari, “Red.”

He stepped down from the box, and removed a spool of thread from his kit, and handed it to me.

Chapter Text

It took a few cycles, but the humans decided on their secondary campsite and packed up all the gear they needed to go set it up.

The site was located in a spot that wasn’t easily accessible by hopper, and they wanted to keep the battery conserved as much as possible (lately they were even sparing with the lights inside, and the only electronic appliance they used with any consistency now was the air scrubber). Which meant that the humans were going to start hauling their gear to the secondary site tomorrow. On foot. And I wouldn’t be able to join them unless someone carried me. Or I crawled. I guess I could crawl. But I didn’t want to crawl, and I didn’t want these humans carrying me.

I was fairly heavy, for starters. It would make things more difficult and dangerous for the humans unfortunate enough to try and haul my deadweight with them. It just also didn’t seem that fun.

On principle I hated to let humans wander around a planetary surface unsupervised. But I was more a liability than anything these days.

Also, the plan didn’t require me to go with them to the campsite. I would be staying somewhere near the hopper so that when we sent our “Help” signal to the company I could verify that the people showing up to “Help” weren’t GreyCris trying to murder us. But I didn’t have to like it.

I lay awake in the hopper while the humans slept that night and watched a new film. I had been trying to conserve my media still, and hadn’t started any new shit since meeting the Preservation survey team. (Dealing with a batch of new and extremely weird humans had been a lot more excitement than the cycles of utter fuckall I’d gotten used to trekking around on the planet, so I hadn’t been quite as starved for new content.)

But I felt like I could use the pick-me-up, and honestly with only so many cycles left until the end of survey date, my projected remaining lifespan wasn’t great. I might as well enjoy the media I had while I was still alive. There weren’t thousands of rainy days ahead of me or anything. It’d be a waste to leave my media untouched. Now that I was thinking about it, I don’t really know why I was still saving it.

(Maybe some annoying side of me had wanted to be optimistic that these suspiciously nice humans would help me not die at the hands of the company. But it was difficult to imagine that would actually happen now that I was facing tomorrow: when all the nice humans would pack up all their shit and leave me here as a lookout. But what are SecUnits for? Plus conserving media didn’t make sense even if I wasn’t going to die, because if the humans did help me survive this whole thing instead of tipping the company off that I was broken and disposable goods, then I’d still be able to carry on with my usual life of pulling media from the entertainment feed on the company satellites.)

The film was called The Andromedian Legends and was very unrealistic (in a good way), with a lot of fantasy and magic elements. It was done in an unusual style digital animation that was imitative of … some style of art. There’s a word for it. Where people cut out different textures of things and stick them onto other things, like scrapbooking.

I’ve seen humans do scrapbooking. It’d been popular with the clients on one of my earliest mining contracts — there had been a whole fad where the humans would take receipts, meal wrappers and food packaging, print advertisements, etc, cut them up, and paste them together inside their gear lockers and on the underside of bunks. Management had been lax and hadn’t cared enough about it to make the SecUnits force the workers to stop.

Anyway. The Andromedian Legends had a lot of human characters with special magical objects that they used to channel their magical powers. The villain was this old decrepit stooped witch with a big magical staff that shot out evil black vines when she slammed the butt onto the ground.

It was a pretty good film. (It helped me take my mind off my current situation, which is the gold standard for entertainment media.) I watched it a couple more times as the humans slept, even though I’d told myself I wouldn’t waste my time re-watching (I had a lot of media to get through). It was just an entertaining movie, and nice to look at visually. And the score was pretty good.

Also the villain’s staff gave me an idea. I opened a new craft planning space in my company security report software.

The next day, my clients all packed up their stuff into backpacks and handmade sledges and set out to their campsite. They all assured me that they would be coming back to check on me after they got the camp set up. I told them they didn’t need to do that; it went against the whole purpose of our plan.

“It makes more tactical sense to just leave me and not risk more of you travelling back and forth,” I told them.

“Risk what, a broken ankle?” Pin-Lee asked.

I said, “Yes. And many other things.” I sent her interface an extensive itemized list of hazards and possible catastrophes. I had the nagging worry that my clients didn’t fully appreciate the dangers of a planetary environment.

“We’ll be fine,” Pin-Lee said. “I grew up in an active terraforming zone. I was climbing drillers in the rain since the age of seven.” She laughed. “Oh! Playing ground-is-lava with the moisture-traps was the best. My caregivers hated it. But they couldn’t stop me. Have any of y’all done that?”

“Not exactly. Do sneaking into hazchem dumps count?” Gurathin asked, mildly.

“Ah, something-or-other,” Ratthi said, wistful. (He was speaking Preservation. I should probably thank him for all his chatting and subsequent translating, it was useful for my homebrew language module.) “We did similar stuff. My favorite was playing drop-tag on the backs of moving something-something.”

Honestly this was only making me way more concerned.

Ratthi glanced at me, frowned a little, then looked at Arada, “How do you say something-something?”

“Ag-bots,” she supplied. Then she looked at me and translated what Ratthi had said. I’d been right, down to the “drop-tag,” which I hadn’t been sure about. And now I also knew the Preservation word for “childhood.” This was all going to be so useful for maybe the next five minutes, after which I might never see my clients again because they died. Or I died.

Arada was crouched near me, putting backpack straps around her shoulders so that she could hoist the weight up from a squat. In my opinion my clients were all carrying more weight than they should be, but they kept assuring me it was fine.

She stood up, wobbling a bit from the weight, but Ratthi helped steady her. None of this was helping my clients-in-danger-of-unforgiving-planetary-hazards anxiety.

Arada adjusted her straps a bit, and then looked down at me. “I’ll come back here after we set up the campsite.”

What? No. That wasn’t the plan.

I said, “Don’t do that. The whole point is to keep you at a safe distance from the hopper.”

She frowned. “We still need to set up your defensible position. In your condition—”

“I can do that myself.”

My guess was her expression was currently ‘doubtful’ but I wasn’t sure. “…But won’t you be lonely?”

I stared flatly at the spot of wall just next to her head. What was she saying? What the shit. I never got used to these people.

I said, “Loneliness does not affect SecUnit performance reliability.”

She squinted at me. I didn’t know what that meant in Preservation-speak.

Mensah said, “After we set up our campsite we will send people back to help you set up your own position, SecUnit. It will also be a good opportunity for us to pick up any additional tools from the hopper that we might need, but forgot about.”

Well, she’s the boss.

It didn’t take very long for the humans to leave the range of the hopper’s exterior sensors.

And then it was very quiet.

The hopper was usually crammed with human activity. People were always squeezing past each other, climbing over each other, reaching around each other. They’d knock into my cot, or hang stuff up on the wall strap things next to me. They were always making noise — talking, eating, yawning, scratching, singing, opening and closing containers, bumping into stuff, etc.

But now, they weren’t. Because they weren’t here.

I must have weirdly gotten acclimated to all the activity, because the very peaceful silence now felt a bit creepy. The hopper was big and empty.

(It was a bit like when Aggarwal died. Just a huge motionless quiet. I mean, it was the exact same hopper. The seat ey’d died in was still in the cockpit. I wonder what the company did with the body. Actually, I am not going to wonder.)

Anyway. I probably had at least a day or two before the humans came back to bother me, which meant I had a window of opportunity to do some stuff that I hadn’t really wanted to do in front of them.

I tried standing up out of my cot again, using the back of the pilot’s seat as support. Oh, yeah, my leg/hip was still borked. I wasn’t getting around on that anytime soon.

I lowered myself back to the floor, and then set about taking apart the cot that had been my bed for the past handful of cycles. The humans insisted I keep it with me, so I guess it was up to me how I wanted to treat it.

There was a toolkit that my clients hadn’t carried away with them, containing a redundant set of tools: cutting implements, attachment thingees, tape. I used these to take the support poles apart from each other and the fabric apart from the cot. My new craft file was open in my head and I used that as a reference as I started putting the components together.

Ratthi had left me some of the tools from his sewing kit, and a handful of the colored threads in a variety of hues. (He’d tried to leave the whole kit with me but I didn’t let him.) Having the right tools made it easier to build what I wanted. (Even if I didn’t have much skin anymore on one of my hands. The thimble helped with that.)

It took the better part of the cycle and a couple failed prototypes, but by the time the planetary sun was setting, I had a sort of splint/sling thing that strapped to the outside of my leg/hip and was capable of supporting my weight. I wasn’t going to be winning any races or acrobatics competitions anytime soon, but I could walk (read: limp) on two legs again. Which, after spending all this time sitting on my ass and occasionally crawling a little when the humans weren’t looking, was a huge improvement.

I also wanted to create a staff or something that I could use to lean my weight on if my leg brace failed. It wouldn’t be as cool as the villain’s staff in The Andromedian Legends (I didn’t think I was going to be able to make something capable of summoning evil magic vines). But if I could make it real, then it would have that going for it.

I hobbled back and forth inside the hopper a bit.

Okay. So, let’s imagine that I got really lucky when the survey wrapped up.

(Note to self: it’s easier to feel optimistic about your circumstances when you’ve fixed up a way for you to stand up again, and you’re no longer confined to the same cot 90+% of the time. Why did you wait so long to do this? You can make shit while humans are around. They know you’re rogue. Get over yourself.)

So anyway, imagine that I got really lucky. Say my weird clients don’t snitch on me to the company, and let me sneak off the planet with them somehow. In their luggage? I’d never discussed the idea with them because I didn’t want to open the question of what exactly they were planning to do with the rogue murderbot. But maybe I needed to suck it up and say something. What’s the worst that happens? They betray me and I die horribly? I was prepared to die horribly every day of my horrible life. It wasn’t new.

Betrayal would be a new experience though.

I stepped out of the hopper and went on a little celebratory limp-walk around outside, and watched the sunset make weird colors in the sky and on the cliffsides. And I started playing a new serial about a plucky seafaring crew on an ancient ocean.

Chapter Text

Two cycles later, I was limping around outside with my newly built staff. I wasn't done decorating it, but it was solid enough to hold my weight.

There was a Big Fucking Rock not too far from the hopper that was half-covered in dangly leafy flora, and I’d determined that this was where I would set up shop when we sent the rescue signal to the company. In order to make enough room for myself to hide in the foliage under the rock, I’d dug under the rock a bit and cut back some of the underside of the flora’s bodies. (It’d oozed ominously at me in protest, but stopped after a while. So it was probably fine.)

Anyway, I was limping back from the BFR to the hopper because I’d finished with that task. And wouldn’t you fucking know what I saw?

Arada and Ratthi were walking along the rocky riverside. They were wearing their little outdoor respirators, and carrying backpacks.

I altered my course to meet them.

They saw me coming and started waving excitedly. The situation didn’t improve when we came within shouting distance of each other.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded. Then felt extremely weird for demanding something of my clients. SecUnits don't do that.

“SecUnit!” Ratthi exclaimed, beaming, his voice a little distorted by the respirator. He was waving his arms around in excitement. “You are walking!”

Yeah yeah the bargain-bin borked SecUnit is miraculously standing up. We’ve all seen it.

I said, “You’re supposed to be staying safe at the secondary campsite.”

“We came to help you set up your hiding spot,” Arada said, “And keep you company.”

(That’s a weird phrase, isn’t it? ‘Keep you company.’)

I said, bluntly, “I finished setting up shop. You can go back.”

Arada’s facial expression shifted, maybe in confusion. She exchanged a look at Ratthi, and they made a bunch more facial expressions at each other, and then they looked back at me. “Well, in that case, we can just hang out.”

I stared blankly at her left ear.

(What does she think this is? We’re trying to avoid fucking dying on a hostile alien planet here. An alien planet infested with hostile humans who have demonstrated active murderous intent, by the way. Why is she suggesting that we should ‘hang out’?)

I said, “I can escort you back to your campsite—”

“It’s too late today, there’s no time to get back before dark,” she said. Oh, right. Humans walk slow. She and Ratthi must have spent all morning and part of the afternoon walking here to meet me. (Once again: why.) Then Arada’s expression brightened. “Oh! But now that you can walk, you can come and hang out with everyone tomorrow at camp!”

The one constant in my life is that I am never not enduring a series of baffling and uncomfortable Situations.

“… Or, um, you don’t have to,” Arada said, haltingly. Shit. I must have made a face.

Ratthi said, in Preservation-speak, “Let’s just go to the hopper and stay the night. We have some time to kill this afternoon and we can decide on what to do tomorrow.”

Arada started to translate that, and I didn’t stop her. Seems like I understood it correctly.

We ended up spending the afternoon doing embroidery stuff at the hopper. And then Ratthi noticed me playing media over the hopper’s feed. (Oops. I’d just gotten into the habit of leaving it running publicly this past cycle.) He got really excited, and got Arada to put her interface on so that she could both watch, too. They started asking questions about the media, where I’d gotten it, blah blah blah. Ratthi especially seemed super excited to find out that I had a lot of media saved. Which, I guess I would be excited too, if I’d been stuck on the planet like they’d been, without access to the entertainment feeds.

As they watched along with me, they asked a lot of questions about what was going on. So I had to start the series over from the first episode. (Me trying to explain everything to them when they could just see for themselves didn’t make sense.) The humans reacted in real-time to the media really dramatically. Gasping and speculating out loud and stuff.

I’d never watched media with other spectators before.

It wasn’t terrible.

Arada and Ratthi loitered around the hopper until the day before the end-of-survey-date. Then I escorted them back to the secondary campsite. My leg/hip brace thing and walking staff allowed me to pull the journey off, but my movements definitely weren't smooth like they used to be, and I had to stop a few times to re-adjust the straps and stuff, which I did not like doing in front of my clients. They were so nice and patient about it, it was excruciating.

The other humans all made an excited fuss about me and my miraculous mobility when I showed up, which I put up with for about 82 seconds before I limp-walked the fuck back out of there.

I had important shit to do. There was a flora-hole to go hide in.

At noon the next day, I prepped the, “Help us please, we’re fucked, also by the way your shithole secret GrayCris clients tried to kill us” message (I'm paraphrasing), running it through the standard company security encryption.

As I went through all the checks on the hopper feed and hardware, the flaurna on my face did something it hadn’t done before: it pinched the skin on my cheek a little.

That was weird.

I tried peeling the flaurna off my face. It resisted more strongly than it had in the past, but it came off easily enough in my hand. One of its tendrils curled up, then relaxed again. The skin on my face appeared undamaged.

I compared my current visuals of the flaurna against my earlier records. It had grown since I first noticed it. Not hugely, but still. The dangling colorful tendril-tassels were longer now, and the surface area of it stuck to my face was larger.

Well, whatever. I guess my face is a suitable habitat for a weird little alien after all. I put it back on my cheek.

I triple-checked the settings on the emergency plea, queued it up to send, and then powered up the hopper’s satellite transmitter. Eighteen minutes later, the receipt confirmation from the company satellite came through. Then I left the hopper and headed for my BFR-flora-hole.

The hole wasn’t very comfortable. I had Bharadwaj’s sari and a company blanket from inside the hopper (I’d embroidered over the logo (badly) (I tried to create a mimicry of the face-flaurna out of colored thread but it was kind of a mess)) to help with the whole “crammed partway under some flora and partway under a Big Fucking Rock” situation, but still.

I was close enough to the hopper that I could connect to its feed, just barely. But the connection seemed to drop whenever the wind turned the wrong way or something.

Hopefully my humans were remembering to stick to the plan and stay hunkered down for the foreseeable future.

Now for the classic staple of Doing Security: waiting around in pure boredom for some shit to happen.

I didn’t have to wait very long.

It was dusk that same day when I heard the telltale vwhirrrrrddddddd noise of an approaching hopper. I didn’t see it with my eyes (I'm under a rock, remember?), but as it drew nearer I was able to pick up on visuals through my tenuous connection to my clients’ hopper’s external cameras.

I wasn’t able to get detailed visuals of the hopper until it was circling in, and the setting sunlight hit the starboard side where the logo was printed on.

The boxy GrayCris logo.

Well, fuck.

The hopper hovered at a safe distance for a good while. They must have been taking all kinds of scans and looking for life-signs. (A good thing about my hiding space being under a Big Fucking Rock, is that a Big Fucking Rock is pretty good at obscuring scans.)

The hopper didn’t land. There was something a little gratifying about the idea that I’d royally fucked up their shit so badly last time that they were still scared of me.

And then a SecUnit (it must have been in the GrayCris hopper) sent out an open ping. If my governor module had not been hacked, I would have been compelled to send a responding ping (stupid for situations like this, I know, but that’s the company for you). But I was hacked, so I couldn't be compelled to ping back.

A few seconds later, a hatch opened from the hopper’s cargo pod, and a single SecUnit carrying a large projectile weapon dropped out and landed on the ground.

(Yeah, they were being cautious. I guess they’d learned from the last time.)

The SecUnit released a few drones, and headed for the PresAux hopper. The door was open (I’d left it that way), and it walked inside.

Through the hopper’s interior sensors, I monitored the SecUnit as it went through its search: first of the cabin, then the cargo area. It was thorough, checking inside the sanitary closet, opening the storage spaces, running scans, and accessing the surveillance data in the hopper. (It didn’t find much. I’d thoroughly scrubbed any records that might have been useful for figuring out where my clients had gone. And I’d erased all records of myself (I made it look like the sensor system had been damaged and stopped functioning after the hopper’s run-in with GrayCris hostiles. This might be suspicious to GrayCris, but I’d wanted to hide my continued survival from the Company for as long as possible.))

Meanwhile the hopper outside was doing slow, widening circles of the area, no doubt scanning the whole way.

The SecUnit finished with the interior of the hopper and came outside to start searching around the exterior.

I was trying to figure out when would be the best time for me to get the jump on this SecUnit, or if by some miracle there was any chance it might not find me, when something unexpected happened.

Some human genius on the GrayCris hopper decided to request direct two-way feed connection from their hopper to PresAux’s hopper.

Unbelievable.

Humans really, really should never do their own security.

I immediately granted the request, making it look automated.

Whoever had made the request started a download of the PreservationAux hopper’s stored data, which was pointless, because their SecUnit had already sorted through all the parts that mattered. But humans always think they can do better, I guess.

The upshot of this (for me, not for GrayCris) was that I now had unimpeded access to their hopper’s feed. I watched, from inside their feed and comms, as their SecUnit politely protested that this was against protocol and a potential breach of system security. The genius who’d done made the link told it to shut up. The SecUnit shut up.

(If I’d known they were going to be this stupid I’d have planted some malware or something in our hopper.) (Maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh. Normally functioning SecUnits aren’t allowed to hack systems, and even if PresAux had hacked me to act outside of protocol, it would have been difficult for them to compel me to hack company wares if they didn’t already know exactly what they were doing. And a human wouldn’t be able to do nearly as much direct damage to the GrayCris hopper as I could over this feed connection during the approximately 6.5 seconds it would take to download the PresAux data from their hopper. They didn’t know that they had a rogue company unit on their hands with intimate knowledge of how to hack company wares because it’s been doing that for years to watch media on the job.)

Anyway, hostile check: there was one other SecUnit riding in the cabin with the two humans there. This was also against protocol, but I’ve been gathering through a series of subtle hints that these guys aren’t super big on protocol. (My first hint was them trying to murder other survey groups, but there were other red flags too, like the way the human in the pilot’s seat wasn’t wearing safety restraints.)

I wasted no time in getting my grubby hands all over the GrayCris hopper’s feed controls. First, I found the GrayCris hopper’s detailed local download of the planetary mapping data, and destroyed it. They’d still be able to navigate via the company satellites, but the resolution on the satellite data is dogshit compared to the hopper’s pre-downloaded hopper data (now deleted), and also satellite data has a painful lag. The satellite data is supposed to be a supplement to pinpoint your location on the planet, not act as a map all on its own. I deleted the map data from the PresAux hopper they were downloading too, for good measure. Good luck hunting for my humans now, shitheads.

Next, I told the hopper to send an open alert into the feed that there was a malfunction in the lifting system that was going to hit critical in approximately 6 hours, which was—completely coincidentally—the amount of time they needed to fly back home to their habitat.

The pilot cussed, finished their download of the PresAux hopper data, and then cut off their hopper’s feed connection to the PresAux hopper. It’d only been 8 seconds but the damage was done.

I didn’t have access to their hopper feed anymore, so I couldn’t watch the humans argue about calling off their search empty-handed. But a few minutes later, the hopper came closer again, and the copilot stuck her head outside to yell angrily at the SecUnit to come back.

The SecUnit called back its drones, about to leap back up to the GrayCris hopper.

Well, it called back almost all of its drones. I couldn’t resist snagging one of them on its way out. I did my best to disguise the SecUnit’s loss of control of the drone as a malfunction. For 0.1 seconds it looked the SecUnit was hesitating. I turned its helmeted head slightly in the direction of the lagging drone.

But it let the drone go, and leapt up to its hopper.

Unfortunately, this is where my extremely slick hacking plan broke very, very bad. The hopper faffed around for several minutes in midair, which was just enough time to give me an ominous sinking feeling, and then the SecUnit hopped back out, carrying a large cylindrical object attached to a jiggle-rigged piece of electronics.

Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit.

The SecUnit jogged over to the hopper, and I sent my stolen drone flying away at top speed to try and take shelter in the cliffs. I watched helplessly as the SecUnit laid an explosive rocketfuel component of an emergency beacon (probably our beacon, fucking assholes) and carried it onto the roof of the hopper, setting it down just over the hopper's lifting system. The SecUnit fiddled with the electronic timer, then jumped back up from the roof into the GrayCris hopper, which immediately started hightailing it out of there before the fuel explosively ignited.

Chapter Text

Ideas for “how to deal with an imminent explosive ignition of rocket fuel” shot through my processing space: I could sprint over there to try and disable the bomb, or throw the bomb away from the hopper, or start running in the opposite direction from the bomb/hopper, etc. The problem with all of these ideas was:

1. I didn’t know how fast I could move on my borked legs.
2. I didn’t know how much time I had before the beacon fuel ignited.

If my legs had worked as normal, I might’ve tried one of my shitty ideas to try and mitigate some of the damage from GrayCris’ parting gift. But I’d never tested my top speed on my borked leg+foot and I was not particularly confident in my ability to haul ass right now.

So instead I fell back on this brilliant plan: stay put under the BFR.

299 seconds later, I was still parked under a rock, riding my high of stress and anxiety hormones. My body was cramped and tense, as if it desperately wanted to run. But the fuel could ignite any second, and if I moved away from the rock I’d lose its shelter and probably get blasted to grody little bits.

Two-hundred-and-ninety-nine-fucking-seconds is an excruciating amount of time to wait for a bomb to go off while wedged as deep under a rock as you can get. Wait. What if it didn’t go off? What if I’d misunderstood the object that GrayCris had left behind, and I was sitting under here for hours waiting for an explosion that would never come? Maybe I should bring my drone back to check out the—

Light blazed bright through the fauna foliage I was hiding in. I shut my eyelids and made sure my hand was sealed over my face-flaurna. A wall of superheated air and debris slammed into the BFR (and me), a ream of status and damage alerts hitting my processing space all at once. My feed connection to the hopper dropped, and I lost all the sensor inputs from there.

Then came the sound.

The blast reverberated through my whole body, my ribcage, painful in my ears and rumbling through the ground and rock pressed against my body, a roaring unbroken whiteout of sound. I shut off my auditory inputs but could still feel the vibration moving through my whole body.

Subjectively, it felt like the explosion lasted maybe two hours, but objectively I clocked it as lasting just six seconds. (I don't know what the normal amount of time for a beacon to reach space orbit is. Is this normal?)

When it stopped, I stayed curled under the rock for a while. Maybe there was going to be a second blast wave. But 300 seconds passed, then 1000 seconds, then 3000 seconds.

Well, I wasn’t dead.

I took stock of my performance report. As the blast started, I’d crammed my body into the deepest part of the BFR-hole with my back facing outward. Consequentially, my back had taken the brunt of the damage. The rock, the dirt, the flora, and the distance from the hopper had protected me from the worst of it, but I think a lot of skin on my back might be compromised. Or just scorched off. I wasn’t eager to check.

Gingerly, I wiggled out from under the rock. (Yeah, there was something wrong with my back. I could still move, though.) The PPP I’d been wearing had melted off my back, but the front part of it was surprisingly intact. It was a similar situation for the blanket and Bharadwaj’s sari. The blanket had chunks of it melted away, and the sari was smoldering in places. I tried smothering it against the dirt. When it finally stopped smoking, I shook the sari back out. Parts of it were burnt. Something about that gave me an ugly sinking feeling. If I’d just left the sari back at the habitat, it wouldn’t be in this state.

I sat next to the BFR and the dead flora, clutching the damaged and dirty sari (and equally mangled blanket) to my chest.

The hopper was a wreck.

The worst of the blast had been directed at the lifters, which were destroyed. The exterior of the hopper was scorched to fuck, but it must’ve been made of stronger stuff than I thought, because the shape of it was mostly intact aside from the hole blasted through the top where the lifters were. I couldn’t get a feed connection. My drone had flown off with instructions to go high and find a cliff face to hide in, so it was out of range. I’d need to go walking towards its last programmed direction to try and find it.

I touched the flaurna on my cheek. It had pinched me again while the blast was happening, and it tightened on my face-skin as I poked it. I peeled it off again. It clung to my fingers, miraculously intact. Well, at least one thing wasn’t completely ruined by all this.

I put the flaurna back on my face, picked up my walking-staff, and tried to stand up.

And I fell down, because one of the straps of my brace was partially melted (the one holding the brace around my waist), and it snapped when I put weight on it.

I sat in the scorched dirt and did not experienced any kind of crisis-induced emotions. I was fine. Completely fine. And in order to continue being completely fine, I needed to get rid of some of these stupid fucking stress hormones already, so I initiated a quick-cycle and flush. My system alerted me that it would take ten minutes.

Ten minutes later, my systems indicated that I was objectively more emotionally fine, but subjectively I still felt like crap. And I wasn’t any closer a resolution for this most recent calamity.

I tried twisting up a less-burned section of the sari and using that as a rope/sling to tie around my waist and hold the brace in place. It kind of worked. But I had to hold the sari in place tightly with one hand, because the length/shape of it was too awkward to get a good knot. Also the brace kept shifting around uncomfortably instead of staying straight, so my gait was even more awkward than it had been before. I wrapped the remains of the blanket around my shoulders, just to keep my hands free to hold onto the sari and staff.

I hobbled over to the cliffs to try and find the drone. If I couldn’t even retrieve my single drone out of this, I was… still not going to have an emotional freak-out or anything. Freaking out is a human luxury. SecUnits don't freak out that, because we have to deal with the shit while the clients uselessly freak out about it. And sure, my clients weren’t around to see the state of their hopper right now, but still.

It took almost an hour, but I did find the drone. During that time, I ruminated on how fucked my clients were now. Because they were fucked.

GrayCris had blasted the hopper. My clients had no egress out of this place. The company still hadn’t shown up yet, which, what did that mean? As I saw it, one of several things might happen:

1. GrayCris was going to come back to start hunting my clients down again as soon as they realized that their hopper wasn’t actually borked. (If they went all the way back to their habitat before noticing that their hopper was actually fine, they could be back as soon as 10 hours from now.)
2. The company would turn up, find a rogue SecUnit among the wreckage of a hopper with no clients in sight, and immediately put me down before I could explain where my clients were. They weren’t going to listen to me, because I’m a broken SecUnit, and I’m off inventory and marked as destroyed. (It’s shoot first ask questions later when it comes to dangerous unsecured equipment like me.) In our original plan, I would have hidden under the rock and sent my clients’ location data to the company rescue team through the hopper feed. I couldn’t do that now, because the hopper was dead. The company might still find my clients, or they might decide all that effort and human labor cost wasn’t worth the death payouts, and just write off the whole search.
3. Maybe the company was in league with GrayCris for some fucking reason? (Could Gurathin actually be right about that?) If that was the case, they’d both just leave everyone for dead. Abandoning everyone on the planet without support resources was a pretty effective and low-effort way to get rid of them/kill them.

My clients couldn’t survive indefinitely on this planet. Not even the air was good for them to breathe. (I mean, the air wasn’t immediately deadly or anything, but it was unhealthy for humans to respirate for extended periods.) Not to mention, they didn’t have any food. Humans need loads of that stuff constantly. I’d seen the lengths contract workers went to trying to squeeze energy out of insufficient meal bricks. There was a minimum necessary quantity to be a functional human being no matter how you sliced those rock-hard things.

If my legs worked properly, I could maybe risk a sprint to the PresAux habitat to try and communicate to the company using the satellite comms. But my legs didn’t work (between the borked leg and the missing foot, my ground travel abilities were pretty bad). Besides, I didn’t want to leave my clients completely vulnerable and unprotected on a wild planetary surface.

We didn’t have any viable options.

The sun had fully set by the time I managed to land a connection to my shiny new (used and stolen) drone.

Ugh, finally.

I directed the drone back down from the cliffs. One of its sensors picked up a small bobbing light making its way along the riverbank downvalley.

Are you serious right now?

I sent the drone ahead and started a high-alert hobble back to the hopper and river to meet this new development.

It was Pin-Lee.

She was running up the riverbank, in the fucking planetary darkness, alone. All she had with her was a handheld torch trained just ahead of her feet, and a deflated (mostly empty) backpack. The clothes she was wearing were the soft lightweight kind that didn’t offer much insulation.

She was breathing hard as she came up to the hopper. And she wasn’t wearing a respirator. For fuck’s sake.

Pin-Lee had made it to the hopper faster than me—I was still making it back from the cliffs and trying not to fall on my face every few steps on the uneven terrain. Her torchlight bounced around the scorched area, illuminating the disturbed rocks and crisped flora, then to the hopper itself. When she saw the state of it, her mouth dropped open, then gritted closed, teeth clenched up. Her torchlight washed back and forth around the hopper, highlighting the damage.

She grabbed a scorched rock off the ground and hurled it at the hopper with a sharp yell. The rock binged off the side.

The sky, heavy with cloud cover, started to unload its weight in rain. Because of course it did.

Instead of trying to take shelter, or fetching a waterproof enviro-suit from her backpack, Pin-Lee started searching around.

“SecUnit!” She checked inside the hopper, too quickly and cursorily to be effective, and then she checked around the exterior. “SecUnit!” Her voice was forceful, angry.

I stopped walking.

Rainwater was dribbling down my back, and I could feel it getting into some of my internal components. It was icy cold. I shifted my PPP to cover my back instead of my front, and used my drone to watch Pin-Lee searching and shouting for me.

I watched her as she kept searching and yelling. She was getting soaked with water, clothes clinging to her body frame. After a while, she picked up another rock and hurled it in frustration. She yelled, wordless and loud, into the rain.

I really did not want to approach her while she was this mad. But she wasn’t giving up, and at this rate she was going to go hypothermic.

Reluctantly, I continued down the terrain to the hopper.

When I finally reached it, Pin-Lee was inside the hopper again, attempting to do another, more thorough search of its interior. (She was still doing a poor job of it.) She was throwing things around and cussing. But least she’d stopped yelling for me. Her body was shivering, and the trembling in her hands translated to a wavering light from the torch.

I knocked my staff on the hopper hatch a few times, to make noise.

She whirled around, torchlight shooting right into my face.

I deliberately did not flinch. I said, “It’s just me.”

Her mouth gaped open and closed, and she let out a sharp huff of air. “There you are. Fuck.”

Then we just stared at each other for a few seconds. I waited for her to start yelling at me for getting the hopper blown up and screwing everyone, but it didn’t happen.

I said, “…You should get out of there. The structure might be unstable.”

She blinked, and shifted the torchlight around, and then did what I said, stepping over the mess of scorched broken shit (the hole blown in the roof/lifters had let burning explosive fuel into the interior of the hopper), heading out of the hatch.

I shifted aside to let her out. She stepped out, shivering. We moved a few paces away from the hopper, and then she shrugged her backpack off her shoulders. I thought she was finally going to get out some kind of waterproof insulation for herself, but instead she removed a MedKit.

“Here,” she said, voice a low grumble. “Sit down.”

I didn’t sit down.

She looked up at me, scowling. Cold rainwater dribbled over her face. Then she looked away, hoisted the bag over one shoulder, and started stomping back to the river, muttering in Preservation-speak. “I run a fucking half-score through the dark to find it and naturally it doesn’t want my stupid help.” Her voice got weird, pitching higher. “Be nice Pin-Lee. Be nice. Don’t lose your cool. Be careful, it’s shy. Fuck you. Fuck off. Fucking shitfuck. We’re so totally fucked.”

This was all very weird. She definitely wasn’t talking to me. She didn’t know I had a drone tailing her close enough to pick everything up, and she maybe didn’t know how fluent in Preservation-speak I was by now.

I stepped after her, but my stub foot caught on a SR (stupid rock), and when I tried to catch my balance with my other leg, my leg didn’t move right because my brace had misaligned (again), and the only thing that stopped me from beefing it right on my face, was I was able to catch my weight on my staff.

Pin-Lee heard the noise, and turned. She pointed the light on me just as I managed to shuffle back upright.

We stared at each other again for a few seconds. (To be more accurate: she stared at me, while I stared at the ground with my eyes and stared at her face with my drone.)

She said, raising her voice and speaking standard lexicon, “I’m going back to the secondary camp.”

I looked up at her, pointing my eyes at her chin. “It’s not safe to walk at night while it’s raining.”

She made a scoffing noise, and turned away from me. “Good thing I’m running.”

I snapped, “Pin-Lee!”

(I’ve never snapped like that at a human before.)

She stood there, not moving. The tendons in her hand on the strap of her pack were tight, like she wanted to throw it.

I didn’t know what words to say in this very weird situation we were in right now, and I wouldn’t have used the words even if I had known.

Instead, I said, “I think my skin melted off. On my back.” (I still hadn’t checked with my drone.)

Pin-Lee hesitated a moment, and then turned and marched right up to me, her expression murderous. I suppressed a flinch as she came up to me, then up behind me, lifting the tattered PPP up with one hand to look at the damage. I stood still as she unpacked some shit from the MedKit and started doing stuff to my back.

Parts of my back felt cold, then hot. Pin-Lee started muttering to herself, and I gathered that the kit was successfully regenerating organic parts and the skin attached to those organic parts, but it was not working as well on the places where my damaged skin interacted with my inorganic parts. (This was probably because this was a MedKit rated for human use and not construct use. They don’t make MedKits for construct use. We can survive a lot of damage and then you just throw us in the cubicle.)

When she’d done as much with the MedKit as she could, she let the PPP fall over my back again and stepped away. She was still shivering.

I didn’t look at her with my eyes. I asked, “Do you have heavier clothes?”

She snarled, loudly, “If I did, I’d be wearing them now. I forgot, okay?” Then, after a beat, she grumbled, “Sorry. I’m in a bad mood. It’s not you.” She scrubbed one forearm against her face. “Sorry.”

Pin-Lee was… weird. Unlike the other PresAux humans, she exhibited aggressive behaviors (yelling, throwing stuff, etc.) that made me nervous. My prior experiences with humans like that—humans who visibly took out their anger on the people and objects around them—were not positive. But she’d run through the dark at a dangerous and inadvisable speed on an unimproved planetary surface, and she’d stomped around in the rain yelling for me, all to try and help me. I disliked the way she yelled a lot and snapped at me, but she hadn’t attempted to physically hurt me yet, or make accusations and demands. I did appreciate that.

I said, “We can get out of the rain over by the cliffs.”

She put the MedKit away into her backpack and gestured sharply with the hand holding the torch, in a way that meant, ‘lead the way.’

She walked behind me as I went up to the cliffs to a semi-overhanging crack that I’d seen earlier while looking for my drone. I sat down under the overhanging crack, scooted back into the space, and arranged the damaged blanket in front of me on the rocks and gravel, framed between my legs.

Pin-Lee shone the torch light in on me. She was hugging her torso with one arm and shivering. Water dripped off her chin, and the inside edges of her lips had a blueish tint. I pointed at the blanket in front of me.

She grimaced, and crouched down, then crawled into the crack, sitting down on the damp blanket. She awkwardly removed the backpack (the space was somewhat narrow which made maneuvering difficult), set it down in front of her, and then turned off her torch, fumbling with it a few times before managing to get the switch.

With the torch off, everything was wet and cold and dark. I could only see thanks to the filters in my eyes and drone sensors. Pin-Lee leaned forward a bit, away from me, wrapping her arms around her legs and putting her chin on her knees. The shivering was getting even worse. There were moments when it subsided, as if she was clenching her muscles to make it stop, but it kept coming back.

I turned up my body heat. (I had plenty of energy to spare. I don’t fuck around with keeping myself charged, and I'd had plenty of time to charge and do diddly-squat else under the BFR today.) The semi-enclosed space we were sitting in started to warm up.

I said, “You can lean on me. I have a hypothermia protocol.”

Through my drone, I could see her face shift. She was chewing on the inside of her lower lip. After a few seconds, she scooted back a bit and leaned against my chest.

She was wet, and cold, and shivering, and she smelled sweaty and a bit gross. Somehow, though, none of that bothered me. (Much. It was a bit awkward. I don’t usually like humans touching me, but I don’t mind it when it makes sense as part of my job. This was a hypothermia protocol. Though I’d never previously needed to use my body heat to actually rescue a client from hypothermia. The closest situation I’d experienced in using my body heat was a time I carried a several injured clients who’d gone into hypovolemic shock.)

(Was Aggarwal cold, when ey was dying?)

Slowly I shifted my legs a bit to bring them in closer on either side of Pin-Lee’s body, and crossed my arms over the front of her where she had her own arms hugging herself. I covered her hands with mine—they were freezing and wet at first, but they started to warm up pretty quickly from absorbing my heat.

Neither of us said anything, but Pin-Lee stopped shivering after a while, and then fell asleep.

Chapter Text

Several hours later, the rain had stopped, and the sky was mostly clear of clouds. Pin-Lee seemed to be sleeping badly. She shifted around a lot. The longest she’d stayed in one position was 65 minutes.

It was at the end of a 35-minute motionless stint that she started shifting around again, poking her elbow and shoulder into my chest. And then she stopped moving, abruptly.

She leaned forward, away from my chest. Then she leaned back against me again.

“Sheesh, you’re warm,” she muttered, rubbing her hands over her sleeves, then her legs. “Fuck, I should have taken my shoes off. I think my feet are wet.”

I didn’t say anything.

She froze, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “You awake?”

I said, “I don’t sleep.”

“Oh, right.”

Pin-Lee took one of her shoes off, and rubbed her foot with her hand. The smell of dirty human socks announced its proud arrival. Great.

She stopped rubbing her foot. “Wait, I think it stopped raining.”

“It did,” I confirmed.

She put her shoe back on (thank fuck), and started crawling away from me out of the overhang/crack.

“It’s still dark,” I called after her, but she was already scooting back to grab her backpack and torch, and then she was out of the crack, turning on the torch, and heading towards the hopper. Shit.

I crawled slowly out of the crack. “Pin-Lee, wait.”

She stopped and looked back at me.

I said, “It’s still dark—”

She waved the torch. “I have a light. We need to get back to camp right away to let everyone know what happened.”

I limped after her. “We should wait until morning. If you fall—”

She scoffed. “If I fall? Look at yourself.” She waved the torchlight over my body.

That stung. Hopefully it wasn’t showing on my face.

She frowned at my waist-area. “What’s going on with—oh.”

I gritted my teeth. Pin-Lee was proving to be an aggravating client when she was separated from the influence of the rest of the team.

She dug through her backpack, and removed a longish strap thing from the medkit. “Here, does this work?”

I stared blankly at her hand. She made an impatient noise, and moved closer to me, reaching for the sari. I resisted the urge to scramble away from her. (With my luck, I’d fall over.)

“Don’t touch me.”

Pin-Lee froze, and looked at my face. I stared over the top of her head, pretending not to see her looking at me. She took a step back.

I balanced all of my weight on my stub foot, leaned my staff against my side, and pulled the sari away from my brace. The brace immediately wobbled out of position. I slung the sari over one shoulder, took the strap from Pin-Lee, and started trying to use it to get the brace back into position.

She watched me struggle with it for about 10 seconds, and then said, in a very stiff voice, “I can help you with that.”

I did not want help. And I didn’t like her tone. (I think she was aiming for gentle and failing.)

Pin-Lee wedged the torch under one elbow, and moved her hands slowly closer to my waist again. When I didn’t protest, she helped me tie the strap onto the brace and then tie it across my waist. I tested my weight and walked on it a few paces as Pin-Lee watched.

“Looks good,” she said. “Now let’s go.”

“It would be safer to wait until dawn,” I told her.

She raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure GrayCris isn’t heading back this way right now?”

I wasn’t sure. Ugh.

“Come on, we can make it.”

I looked to the sky, in the direction that GrayCris had come and gone. I looked back at Pin-Lee. “Fine.”

She set off at a jog. I kept pace with her, but I had to stop every fifteen to twenty minutes to adjust my brace situation. At one point she tripped over the uneven rocky ground, and I grabbed her by the backpack to keep her from falling. Several times I tripped when my stub foot landed weird or my brace shifted and I lost my balance. But I caught myself using the staff.

Pin-Lee stopped after a couple hours and dug around in her pack. I wasn’t sure what she was doing until she withdrew a wrapped food bar. It took her ten minutes to refuel, and then she stuck the empty wrapper in her bag and kept running.

The last stretch of the journey was the slowest: we had to leave the rocky riverbanks and bushwhack through all the flora. I had Pin-Lee follow close behind me as I pushed our way through.

We made it back to the secondary campsite in just over three hours, which was significantly faster than when I’d made the journey with Arada and Ratthi. The planetary sunrise was about one hour out, and the sky was starting to lighten over the cliffs and mountains.

We’d run downstream of the river from the hopper, down to the end of the cliffs on one side, then up another valley. The secondary campsite was located in this second valley under the shelter of some very tall and dense flora. The humans had set up one temporary shelter that fit three people, and a tarp thing tied at an angle between some big flora to keep the precipitation off.

My scans indicated that three people were inside the shelter. Gurathin was sitting outside the shelter, but under the cover of the tarp. He was wearing a full environmental suit. When he heard the rustling noises of Pin-Lee and me coming through the foliage, he looked up, and got to his feet, holding a projectile weapon ready in his hands.

“It’s me!” Pin-Lee called, as she pushed into view. He lowered the gun. He even kept the gun lowered when I appeared behind her. (I guess humans can learn sometimes.)

“I take it there’s been a complication,” he said, drily, in Preservation-speak. His voice was muffled a bit by the suit.

“Sure has,” Pin-Lee answered. “Let’s wake everyone up.”

By the time everyone was awake and lucid and sitting in a cramped little circle outside, the sky was lightening enough that the humans could almost see each other without torches. I had to sit there and verbally explain what had happened with GrayCris. (I left out the part about my back-skin getting melted, because that was just gross.) When I finished, everyone wanted to chime in.

“We heard the explosion,” Mensah said. She looked pained. (Hopefully she wasn’t actually injured or anything.)

“That’s why I came,” Pin-Lee told me.

“We’re fucked,” Gurathin stated. (He was right about that.)

“So we have no hopper, and the company didn’t show,” Arada said. She was fidgeting her hands. “What now?”

“We’re fucked,” Gurathin repeated, this time aimed at Arada.

“Yes, this is dire, but let’s not be overly nihilistic,” Mensah said. I appreciated her choice to head off a wailing and moaning session. (Yes, I was feeling pretty bleak about the situation too, but I didn’t want to wallow in it either.) “We are all still alive. If we consider our options—”

“We go back,” Ratthi said, out of nowhere and very decisively.

Everyone looked at him.

“To the habitat,” he added.

Arada made a face, and fumbled her interface out of her pocket, hooking it over her ear. I don’t know what she was doing with her interface, but I was looking at maps. The PreservationAux habitat was 560 kilometers from our current location. And that was satellite-straight. By foot it would be even longer, unless everyone suddenly sprouted wings. The humans couldn’t possibly make it such a long distance.

“Your habitat is 560 kilometers from here in a straight line,” I told them. “It’ll be longer unless you want to swim across bodies of water and go up cliff faces.” It was such a ridiculous idea that it hadn’t even occurred to me. If you’d given me three solid hours to come up with a plan, none of the ones I came up with would have involved walking five fragile humans to the habitat across deadly planetary terrain. The only reason Ratthi must have voiced the idea was because he was a human and humans are all fucking bonkers.

Arada was distracted with her interface. Gurathin put his enviro-suit faceplate in his hands. Mensah’s eyebrows knitted together. Pin-Lee’s expression grew very intense. She put her interface on, too.

“Can do?” Ratthi said, smiling and shrugging. “Have to.”

“There’s no fucking way,” I said.

Gurathin overlapped me: “No. And GrayCris have a team positioned to kill us there. And team positioned to come kill us here. And on the path.”

“But the company—” Ratthi said.

“Also want to kill us,” Gurathin finished.

“We do not know that,” Mensah said, in her ‘let’s-not-devolve-back-into-this-argument-right-now’ tone.

“Yeah, I have a hard time imagining the company wants to pay out Mensah’s whopper of a bond,” Pin-Lee said.

“They’ll escape it. Why they didn’t show up?” Gurathin demanded.

“The company could have been held up making an incident report at your habitat or DeltFall’s habitat,” I said. The official end of survey date was yesterday, and the company usually was pretty punctual about survey cleanups, if only because it cost them money to lag. But the amount of paperwork incited by dead and missing bodies was significant. (Trust me, I would know.)

Pin-Lee made a face like maybe she knew, too. “Tits alive.”

I filed that phrase away in my memory to never accidentally use.

The humans argued around in circles about it. I really didn’t expect the decision to end up anywhere except: “Let’s park the SecUnit by the hopper again and have it wait for GrayCris and/or the company to show up.” It was very tempting to check out of the conversation to watch media, but I forced myself to pay attention.

Weirdly, they started getting bogged down in specific discussions about food, water, and other supplies. It was similar to the conversations they’d had while planning to move to the secondary campsite, except now Gurathin was saying stuff about his connective tissue disorder and Pin-Lee went to go count her store of medication and Ratthi was weighing in on the potential for processing local flora into raw material for the recycler and, wait, hang the fuck on. Were they actually planning to walk back to the habitat?

I scrubbed back through my recording of the conversation in case I’d missed something. Nobody had agreed to walk to the habitat. Everyone except Arada and Ratthi seemed to think it was a desperate and insane idea. But they were talking through all the logistical considerations with complete seriousness.

“Forget it, it’s moot,” Gurathin was telling Ratthi. (They were both speaking Preservation now, and Arada was forgetting to translate for me. It was okay though, because I basically understand everything they were talking about at this point. Not that they knew that.) “We don’t have a way to recharge the recycler once the battery pack runs out.”

“We have ten days’ worth of food now,” Pin-Lee said. “The battery can power the recycler for another ten, probably, before it dies. We can maybe stretch it out to twice as long… Shit, but with the calories we’ll be burning, we’ll be in bad shape by the time we get to the habitat.”

“How much does all that stuff weigh? And that’s not going to be enough time to get there,” Gurathin said.

“Forty days? We can do 560 kilos in forty days—”

“Maybe you can, miss marathoner. Not a chance in hell for me. And it’s 560 mapped in a straight line by satellite, remember? It could easily be double or more by foot.”

Pin-Lee made a growly noise. She probably agreed with him, but didn’t like that she was agreeing with him. I knew the feeling.

Ratthi was looking at me. He thought I didn’t know that he was looking at me. (Nobody knew I had a drone yet, because I’d been keeping it cloaked with foliage. It wasn’t easy for human eyes to see in the early-dawn half-light.) I raised my gaze and looked back at him. He looked away.

Still in Preservation-speak, he said, quiet, “Do you think SecUnit can recharge the recycler?”

Arada glanced at me. Everyone else managed to control their impulse to do that. (Although Pin-Lee’s neck twitched.)

Cool. I was enjoying this conversation a lot. I was enjoying the idea that I might get used as a jiggle-rigged backup battery. It definitely didn’t make me feel like a random appliance or anything. Hey, at least my broken body might still be good for one thing after all.

“We don’t know if it can,” Mensah said, “And if it can, it may not be willing to do it. We don’t know what that would do to it.”

“We can ask—” Ratthi started.

“We haven’t decided if we’re going to do this yet,” Mensah interrupted him.

“This is part of us deciding,” he said. “Listen, I know it’s a long shot. I know it’s nuts. But I don’t think waiting around here for GrayCris to come back and hunt us down is any better. They’ve got scans and stuff. And if we do just lie low and stay put, we’ll be stuck trying to survive out here anyway. We might as well try to make progress towards the habitat along the way.”

Apparently Ratthi could be pretty persuasive when he was speaking his native language.

Arada said, in standard lexicon, “What else do you want to do? We can’t just sit here and hope the company will find us. They should’ve found us already. They’ve fumbled it. And we can’t send anybody back to the hopper to wait for help, not when GrayCris might turn up again.”

Gurathin said, “SecUnit—”

“We’re not sending it to go back there alone,” Arada snapped at him, switching to Preservation-speak. “We’re not sending anyone.” She was very worked up about it, her hands balled into fists, her spine very straight.

There was a pause. I didn’t know what the fuck I thought about this conversation anymore.

Mensah was looking at Arada. Arada looked at Mensah, then shrank down a bit. “I mean…”

“No, I understand,” Mensah said, softly. “I also don’t think returning to the hopper is a good idea.”

Gurathin said, “Is it really more dangerous to try and meet the company retrieval team at the hopper than it is to try and walk halfway across the continent and meet them at our habitat? Without supplies? None of our options are good.”

The conversation lulled there for a bit.

Then Mensah turned towards me, and said (in standard lexicon), “SecUnit, do you think it would be possible to use… your power system to charge the recycler, somehow?”

I shrugged. (That’s a gesture that translates in both the Corporate Rim and Preservation to: “Fuck if I know.”)

“If it is possible,” she continued, “would you be willing to try? Please feel free to say no. We don’t know what it would do to your systems.”

I said, “Sure.”

Gurathin muttered, in Preservation-speak, “Typical. Do we even know for sure if it can meaningly say no to helping us?”

Mensah’s expression got all pained again. Arada looked down at her knees. Pin-Lee gave Gurathin a narrow look.

I flew my drone out of the foliage and brought it within a few centimeters of Gurathin’s faceplate. He startled, then scrambled back, smearing dirt onto his environmental suit. Mensah gasped softly. Ratthi exclaimed in confused surprise. Arada leaned away and almost fell over. And then the humans finally registered that it was a drone, and settled down.

I said, in Preservation-speak, “Why don’t you all just keep asking me for shit and we find out?”

Everyone stared at me. Ratthi’s mouth was hanging open.

Gurathin’s eyes darted between my face and the drone. I wasn’t totally sure how to read his facial expression, but at a guess it might be somewhere in the vicinity of ‘outraged.’ “Have you been able to speak Bahasa 'rabiyy this whole time?”

“No, not at first. But you never shut up. I couldn’t have avoided picking it up if I tried.” (That was a lie. I’d been trying pretty hard to patch their language together every time they opened their mouths.)

Everyone was still staring at me. My face might be doing something. I hoped it wasn’t. (It probably was.) Gurathin’s comment was annoying. Who gives a shit if all SecUnits are fundamentally programmed to give up everything in service to their clients? It didn’t matter why I did stuff. The company wasn’t controlling me. My governor module was non-functional, and had been for a long time. If it had been functional, and if I were the good little subservient unit that the company had built me to be, everyone here would be dead in their habitat, their bodies being tallied up right now by company accountants as part of the bond payout calculations. Just like the ones at DeltFall.

It was difficult to say if my clients were really better off, though. Considering they were now trying to choose between maybe being shot/blown-up by GrayCris or maybe starving/falling/freezing/burning/being eaten to death by the planet. But they were alive.

Some of them, anyway. Bharadwaj’s sari was still wrapped around my neck and shoulders and for some reason it felt oddly heavy.

Mensah cut the awkward pause by asking, “SecUnit, what do you think we should do? You haven’t weighed in yet.”

I don’t think I was ever going to get used to humans asking for my opinion.

Risk Assessment and Threat Assessment weren’t much help. This whole situation was outside the bounds of their forecasting metrics, and the huge confidence variabilities on the stats they were throwing at me made their evaluations almost useless.

I said, “We should see if it’s possible to hack the recycler.”

Chapter Text

Pin-Lee wasn’t feeling so good after her stint of running to the hopper to search for me, nearly going hypothermic in the rain, sleeping poorly in a rock crevice using a SecUnit as a heating pad, and then running all the way back to the secondary camp. She’d been engaging stubbornly with the discussion until now, but she’d been making grumpy faces the whole time and rubbing her temples at increasingly frequent intervals. While Arada unpacked the recycler from the Pile Of Stuff that was sitting under the tarp, Pin-Lee went wordlessly inside the temp shelter and didn’t come back out. Judging from my thermal scans, she was lying down, probably resting. Unless she had decided to just go die in there without telling anyone. (Probably not. Hopefully not. You’d think she would give the other humans a head’s up at least if that was the case, right?)

Which meant that instead of Pin-Lee fucking around with my power system and figuring out how to make it work with the recycler, I had to deal with Gurathin.

Oh, joy.

“Do you have an external charge connector?” Gurathin asked.

Well that’s the dumbest question anyone’s asked me in a while, Gurathin, I managed to not say out loud. Instead, I very professionally said, “No.” And then I raised my energy weapon and deployed it.

His eyes widened, and he shifted uncertainly. The weapon wasn’t pointed at anybody because unlike 99.9% of humans, I have gun safety protocols written into my operating code. Still, fear is the normal reaction when a SecUnit deploys its weapon in your vicinity. Weirdly, none of the others reacted. Mensah was watching me calmly. Arada was prying the universal battery off the recycler’s power plate and didn’t notice me deploying the gun. Ratthi also didn’t blink at the gun.

(For fuck’s sake. These humans were way too trusting. I despaired a little about the gargantuan task it was to keep them all alive.)

“I need a toolkit,” I said.

Gurathin got up and fetched a bag from inside the shelter (Pin-Lee made cranky grumbly noises when he went in) and came back out with a toolkit, which he handed to me. I used a tool from the toolkit to try and pry open a port in my energy weapon. It was difficult to do with one hand. I was pretty sure I could, it would just take a while and the angle was awkward.

Gurathin said, flatly, “Let me help.”

Mensah was watching me. Ratthi was watching me. Arada had removed the battery from the recycler and didn’t have her eyes pointed at me, but she was staring at her hands holding the battery and not moving, very obviously paying attention to what was going on.

Fuck.

So the thing is, I’ve never worked with humans before. Not collaboratively anyway. In the past, my clients always just gave me orders that I had to follow on pain of death. But I’d watched humans collaborate (and fail to collaborate) in real life and in my media lots of times. I know that you didn’t build team cohesion by rejecting every offer to help.

I didn’t particularly like Gurathin. I didn’t particularly want his help. These humans had been pretty respectful so far (of each other, and bizarrely of me too) and would probably listen to me if I rejected his offer to help me now. They probably wouldn’t punish me about it somehow later. Probably.

Ugh.

I wasn’t used to this, having to try and work out what was the right thing to do or say, weigh my feelings and goals against the humans’ feelings and goals.

For a protracted five seconds I very keenly missed that stretch of solitary time I’d had all to myself on this fuckforsaken planet, after Aggarwal’s death and before I’d found my PreservationAux clients. I hadn’t appreciated enough just how peaceful it was to not worry about other people and what they might think of me. No worrying about how I needed to protect them, no worrying about the things they might do to try and protect themselves or each other. No worrying about them trying to work with me. Or work against me.

Wordlessly, I handed Gurathin the tool and held my arm out to him. He took the tool gingerly with one hand and held my arm with his other hand to steady it as he worked at the latch in my energy weapon.

Mensah smiled a little, and exchanged a look with Ratthi. I worried about what that meant.

Gurathin got my port open. I got a patch cord out of the toolkit to connect my energy weapon to the recycler. He had to open up the recycler’s charge pad and reconfigure the wiring in there to make it compatible with the patch cord.

During this whole process, Arada, Ratthi, and Mensah were looking at the maps and trying to figure out what might be a good walking route. I can’t believe this. I mean, I can, because humans are crazy. But I can’t believe this. I guess we were going to try and do this impossible, deadly trek.

“Here we go,” Gurathin muttered, finally getting the patch cord connected. He started the boot-up sequence on the recycler.

The recycler started siphoning a trickle of power out of my weapon. Its lights blinked on, and it made the little chirping noise to indicate that it was online.

The other humans all swiveled their heads at the chirp. Seeing the live recycler, Arada clapped her hands excitedly, and Ratthi scrambled inside the shelter and came out holding a brick of recycler medium. He fed the brick into the slot, configured the settings, and seconds later the recycler started making the soft noises that meant it was turning the medium into the programmed product.

“It’s working!” Ratthi exclaimed, grinning widely. Gurathin also had a small, relieved smile on his face.

I watched my battery charge drop as the recycler worked. Uh oh. My charge was sinking much faster than I’d expected. I didn’t realize that the recycler used so much power, and I’d already started off lower than I liked to be after burning all that extra heat through the night to keep Pin-Lee alive. The active recycler was burning nearly as much energy as me continuously firing my energy weapon at max, which, holy shit that was a lot. What was going on inside this thing? Fucking wormhole travel? My charge level was dropping like a hopper bouncing off a cliffside and falling to the valley floor. It wasn’t going to last more than another ten seconds.

I said, “Turn it off.”

Ratthi hesitated. “It’s in the middle of a print, we’re not supposed to—”

Well shit. Of course I’d made a stupid mistake about my charge levels, again. Well, maybe I’d make it long enough for the recycler to finish, before I fell into a catastrophic energy loss shutdown. I checked the recycler’s progress with the medium brick. Nope, the math didn’t suit me. This was about to be really embarrassing but at least I’d be unconscious and maybe dead and I wouldn’t have to deal with the immediate fallout.

I said, “Nevermind.”

Mensah wordlessly reached forward, hit the Cancel command on the recycler, then dismissed the multiple warnings and forced the recycler to stop. She did it really fast, before any of the other humans could protest. The recycler stopped with a sharp unpleasant grinding noise, and spat out a wad of mucked-up-looking stuff into the output tray.

She turned her head and looked at me as Ratthi made a face at the recycler goop and Gurathin poked nervously at the error messages.

“Are you okay, SecUnit?” she asked me.

I disconnected the patch cord from my arm and didn’t meet her eyes. This felt stupid. And useless. I couldn’t even do this. Hopefully this stunt hadn’t wrecked the recycler.

“SecUnit,” she said, urgently now.

I gritted out, “I’m fine. Just low battery. It’s nothing a recharge won’t fix.” (I’m not sure what the exact translation for ‘recharge cycle’ is but the general word for ‘recharge’ should be close enough.)

She nodded at me. The other humans were watching us closely, and I hated that. I stood up and stepped out of the campsite and into the dense flora underbrush because I needed a break from dealing with everyone.

I left the drone with them.

I climbed up the main stalk of a large flora and sat in the part where the stalk split off into four thinner stalks (each of those stalks then split off into four thinner stalks which split off into four thinner stalks etc. etc. until the very tips are so thin that they’re basically little tendril-threads that look like fluff from a distance. This type of flora is marked in my personal notes as “big four-split flora.” (There’s also a “four-split flora” and “bigger four-split flora.” I haven’t actually determined if all the four-split floras are just the same kind of flora at different growth stages. But all the ones I’ve seen fall into one of these three discrete sizes with very little variability, which is a little puzzling.) (You don’t care about this, never mind.)) and sat there running my recharge cycle.

My drone was down with the humans, hovering over the recycler.

Ratthi made a disappointed noise and waved his hands around nervously. “Oh no, we upset it?”

“Maybe it just needs some space,” Mensah said. Thank you. Now please change the subject. Let’s not all sit around talking about me, okay? I have a shitty battery to recharge.

Gurathin pointed at the drone. “It’s listening to us,” he said. I wasn’t sure of his tone.

The humans looked at each other, then the drone. Arada waved at the drone. “SecUnit?”

I didn’t make the drone react to that. It just kept hovering there.

“I hope it comes back,” Ratthi said worriedly.

“If it were abandoning us, it would take the drone with it,” Gurathin said. Shut up, Gurathin. (He was right. Still.)

“Well, if it returns, we can ask it about what happened with the recycler,” Mensah said. “As for the final decision about what we will do next… we will not survive without food, which limits our options.”

Damn it. I really wish I could just ignore everything, but they needed intel from me right now. The recycler stunt hadn’t been a total failure, but there were caveats.

I used the drone as a relay to send a message to their interfaces: “I can run the recycler if it’s just a little at a time. It uses energy fast and I was below optimal charge levels when we tested it.”

Mensah paused, thinking about that for a few seconds. She said, “Thank you, SecUnit.”

Well, that was weird. I didn’t respond. She continued to talk to the other humans, discussing our options (all bad) in-depth and what we should do. They decided they would talk it over with Pin-Lee and get her opinion after she woke up.

After Pin-Lee woke up a couple hours later, and I climbed out of the big four-split flora with my battery topped up, the discussion about what the hell to do in this shitty situation got re-hashed. The humans made their final decision: the batshit nutso option of walking across the fucking continent with their human feet. (They asked me what I thought. I told them it was crazy and I’d try to keep them from dying horribly, but no promises. They took this as agreement.)

The rest of the morning was spent packaging up the critical supplies and gear and talking about logistics. Ratthi experimented with the recycler, prepping bits of random flora and shit and feeding that into the recycler to use as medium. The recycler converted the fistful of floral detritus into a small clumpy pile of sludge, using some 10% of my battery. That really did not feel like a victorious conversion. If these humans were going to rely on me to power their food creation, there was going to be a lot of downtime waiting around for me to recharge.

He used the specimen scanner to check the chemistry of the sludge, and then used his finger to scoop some up and put it in his mouth.

He made a face I’ve seen humans make when they encounter things such as: sewage, dead pest fauna, ect.

Seeing his disgusted face, Arada immediately took a scoop of sludge and tasted it too. Her nose wrinkled a little. “It’s not that bad?” She licked some more off her finger. “Hm.” She stuck her tongue out and then worked it around her teeth.

“Will it be bad when we’re consuming all of our calories from it?” Gurathin deadpanned.

“Maybe we can improve the flavor somehow,” Ratthi said.

Gurathin made a skeptical face. (More skeptical than normal, I mean.)

“Or maybe we can figure out a way to treat treat some of the local materials without putting it through the recycler,” Ratthi suggested. “We know that the [science word, probably] is sinister half the time in the organisms we’ve looked at but some of them are right [science word, probably], so those ones could be digestible.”

“You mean holy death by [probably something bad]?” Arada said. “It’s not just simple sugars in this stuff. We have no idea how our [somethings] will react.”

(Yeah, I wasn’t completely fluent yet. Is it worth asking Arada to translate these words for me later? Since it sounded like something stupid that Ratthi might try to kill himself with thanks to his poor risk assessment, the answer might be ‘yes.’)

“Pin-Lee, do you mind sharing some of your meds so that we can try eating aliens?” Ratthi asked. I think he was joking. But I wasn’t sure. The distinct possibility that he wasn’t joking was doing uncomfortable things to my risk assessment.

She responded, stonily, “No. Die.”

Mensah didn’t intervene on this interaction even slightly, which is a good sign that Pin-Lee was just joking. By this point I did have enough of an impression of Pin-Lee and the overall dynamics of the group to know that she was probably joking, but it was nice to be able to observe Mensah’s reactions too. (Observing how Mensah and Arada reacted to stuff usually helped me be less anxious. It was nice to have humans around with a level head and good leadership and social skills.)

By midday the humans had sorted through all their shit, packed it up, distributed it amongst themselves in big heavy bags and tied-up bundles. Some of them carried more weight than others; Gurathin’s pack was significantly lighter than average on account of his connective tissue disorder thing. Mensah politely asked me if I was up for carrying the big heavy recycler and a bunch of the recycler medium. It was weird that she asked instead of ordering me (as if saying no was really an option), but whatever. I think I was starting to get used to the weird way these humans did stuff. I said yes.

They’d consulted with me when charting their course. The humans needed almost constant access to water, couldn’t travel as fast as me, and difficult terrain like steep cliffs were untraversable for them, which complicated things. The current plan: head down the valley, follow the river down to where it connected to a larger body of water, go around that, and then follow another river back up into the mountain range. And then we were going to have to find a way across the mountains somehow. The alternative was trekking an extra 1400 kilometers all the way around the range and through low-water biomes, which the humans had agreed was a bad idea.

I picked up the recycler, which was encased in a rope harness thing, and strapped it to my back like it was a pack. Arada attached the bag full of recycler medium. The whole load was pretty heavy. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but still. I grabbed my staff-thing for support.

Mensah looked at my drone.

“Lead on, SecUnit.”

Yikes. Now that’s a backwards-ass combination of words right there.

Well here goes nothing.

Translation Notes:

[science word, probably] = “chirality.” Some bullshit about “molecules,” which are the small component bits that makes up stuff. Human bodies only process energy out of specific forms of certain molecules, and “chirality” refers to those specific forms.

Left-handedness is/has been also known as “sinister,” for some reason that doesn’t make sense. Delete.

[probably something bad] = “anaphylactic shock.” This is what happens when a human’s internal defensive protocols freak the fuck out and mount such an intense scorched-earth defense that it just kills them. Apparently even human bodies shouldn’t do their own security.

[somethings] = “immune systems.” The human body’s shitty defensive protocols.

Chapter Text

The cycles we spent traveling down the river were pleasantly crisis-free. There were minor issues like blisters and muscle aches, and Pin-Lee got her foot caught in a viney flora trap but luckily her shoes and pants protected her from the thorns.

The humans traveled at an unbelievably slow pace on foot. Aside from their baseline walking speed being slow, they needed to rest and refuel frequently. And sleep. Over half of each cycle was spent sleeping, setting up and breaking down camp, preparing to eat, actually eating, fetching water, bathing, sitting, stretching, etc.

It was enough to make you wonder how humans had ever found the time to invent entertainment media and space flight in the first place. (A while ago I read up on human evolution a while ago. I’d wanted to get some insight into what the hell their whole deal was. But turns out the information wasn’t helpful, so I deleted most of it. And I struggled to believe that all of humanity had once lived on the surface of a planet, fending off large fauna predators using technologies such as tactically arranged sticks.)

While the humans slept, I ran the recycler to produce food. I’d never charged and discharged my battery this frequently in my life.

Progress through the forest was pretty slow, because of how dense the flora growth was. But at least he flora provided good cover from GrayCris flying around trying to find us and pick us off.

It took us six cycles to follow the river down to the large body of water, marked on the topographic map as a big flat blue shape. In person it was also a big flat blue shape, bordered by gently-sloping sandy beach. There were puffy floaty things in the air that wafted around in the breeze, as well as avian fauna with big translucent wings that flew together in trailing arrow-shaped formations. When they flew overhead the sun glowed through the wings in a purplish color, and their sweeping shadows looked purple too. They made a lot of angry croaking noises at us as we passed under them.

According to the company’s preliminary survey package data, most of the flora and fauna in this area was not likely to be dangerous to humans. (Preliminary data mostly just used size as a proxy for danger. Which was a really haphazard way to do it. Fauna don’t actually have to be very big to fuck up a human.) We’d just left the forest, which according to the survey package was a hotspot of dangerous (read: large) fauna, though we hadn’t had any trouble with them so far. Here on the shore, there was only one main fauna to worry about, and it was making all my humans antsy.

We’d stopped up on the bluffs, where the vegetation started to lose its purchase on the sand. Down the slope, dotted all along the shore of the water at irregular intervals, were huge shallow sandy pits.

The humans all stopped talking when we came into view of the shoreline. (They’d been chatting about all the homeplanet food they wished they could be eating right now. This had been the uncontested #1 conversational topic for the past several days.)

After an awkward 30 seconds of silence during which we were all probably thinking the same thing but too uncomfortable to say anything about it, Dr. Mensah said, quietly, “I remember them every day, and it hurts every time.”

The other humans made vague mumblings of agreement.

Arada was hugging herself. Gurathin was looking away from the sand pits and watching the flying avian fauna things.

Ratthi said, adjusting the brim of his hat, “It looks like the worms live over on this side of the range too. That’s a lot of pits here, it’s hard to believe the carrying capacity is so high…”

“Are we going to be able to get water from this sea or will that make us worm food?” Pin-Lee asked, bluntly. “If we have to open the maps and backtrack a new route I’m going to scream.”

“Please don’t. I hate screaming,” I said, which made everyone look at me in surprise, which made me wish I hadn’t said anything.

“I’ll risk it,” Pin-Lee said, dropping her pack to the ground and detaching a water carrier. She straightened up and pointed the carrier at me. “And just for you, SecUnit, I won’t even scream if I get eaten.”

“Let’s not joke about that,” Arada said, quietly. Which I appreciated.

“Why don’t we just stop for an early lunch here and watch the avians for a while?” Gurathin suggested. He nudged Arada. “You had a hypothesis that the worms eat those when they land, right?”

“That’s a good idea,” Dr. Mensah said.

So I stood there and kept an eye on the situation while the humans ingested their food. The avians kept skimming over the water, rarely coming in to land. A group of them finally touched down at the edge of the surf, skittering along in a line near the rim of a sand-crater. The humans all watched, rapt, but after several minutes the avians took flight again, uneaten.

“Well, that doesn’t support or disprove my idea,” Arada said, disappointed.

“Bharadwaj and Volescu were deep inside a crater when they were attacked,” Gurathin said. “Traversing the shore might be fine as long as we don’t go inside the pits.”

Where was all this optimism coming from all of a sudden?

“Or it might not be fine,” said Ratthi, being reasonably cautious for once.

“I don’t know that much about alien fauna, but you told me that living things don’t attack without a good reason,” Gurathin said.

“Yes, and that’s true, but living things can also be unpredictable,” Ratthi said. “If we don’t understand their behavioral patterns then we can’t predict how they might act. We know very little about these worms, except that one of them killed two of our colleagues.”

The problem with this situation was this: my humans would definitely die of dehydration. Dehydration is 100% a killer. I’ve seen it happen. They would only maybe die in the process of attempting to fetch water. And there was one way to fetch that water that would minimize risk to the humans.

I detached the recycler from my back and set it gently down on the ground, then grabbed Pin-Lee’s water carrier and Arada’s water bag. I set off down the sandy slope while the humans exclaimed after me in alarm, all, “Wait!” “No!” “Um…”

And then for some un-be-fucking-knowest reason, Gurathin scrambled to his feet, grabbed two water bottles, and followed after me.

I stopped halfway down the slope, turned, and looked back at him. “Wait there.”

He didn’t wait there, which was irritating. My humans had been pretty good about following my instructions as we hiked through the forest these past several days. I’d appreciated that. Having Gurathin ignore me now reminded me just how much I disliked it when my clients flouted my security recommendations.

“There’s no reason why you should be the only one to take this risk,” he said, as he approached me.

“Yes there is,” I said, doing my best ‘are you fucking stupid?’ tone of voice. “I’m more durable, and I have guns in my arms.”

“Yes, you’re more durable, but we don’t have any way of repairing you,” he retorted. “You’re in just as much danger from this. And you are not more disposable. If anything I should go by myself because your survival is more valuable to the group at this point.”

I stared at his chin, which was jutting stubbornly. What was he even saying? The whole point was for my human clients to survive this. There was no way I was going to start using one of them as worm bait. I was this close to saying ‘are you fucking stupid?’ out loud. Maybe the pretense of professional politeness I’d been half-assedly trying to maintain was overrated.

I glanced up the slope. My drone was powered down to preserve its battery, so I couldn’t get a close-up view of everyone, just a distant view through my eyes as they perched on the slope wataching us. Arada was fidgeting, as Ratthi hugged her shoulders with one arm. Pin-Lee was holding her forehead with one hand. Mensah was difficult to read, but it seemed like she was staring back at me evenly.

I looked away from them. I said, “Fine, you can come. But stay right behind me and step where I step.”

“Fine,” said Gurathin.

We crossed the shore. I picked a route that took us between two huge craters, on a strip of sandy dirt that had the occasional patch of flora growing on it. The sound of the avians croaking alarm at us overhead and the sound of the wind and water surrounded us. It felt like I was leading Gurathin down some kind of deadly tight rope.

We arrived at the shore without incident, loaded up on water, then brought the containers back with us the same way we’d come, making it up to the top of the bluff again.

The rest of the humans all over-reacted very excitedly at our triumphantly uneaten return from the shore. Ratthi hugged Gurathin, and then tried to hug me, but I quickly put Pin-Lee’s water carrier between me and him so that his chest knocked into it and he made an oof noise.

As we travelled up the shoreline over the next handful of cycles, we regularly performed similar water-retrieval maneuvers. And nobody got eaten, which was great. The ideal uneaten-client stat was zero.

By the time we reached the next river that we would follow up into the mountains, the humans were covering more ground per cycle than they had at the start. Maybe it was because the terrain was clearer and easier to traverse, or maybe it was because the humans had gotten used to it.

It was a few more cycles of following the river upstream through forest that we reached a new, but familiar type of environment.

Familiar to me, I mean. I didn’t know how familiar my humans were with it.

It was mid-morning when the forest abruptly opened up into a huge, wide valley, easy to see clear across from one jagged rocky side to the other.

I could see across the valley using my drone, which I could fly over the flora. On foot, from the humans’ perspective, the forest had abruptly shifted into monotonous grassland, the flora strands rising taller than everyone’s heads. From above, I watched the wind blast through the valley from head to feet, setting the fine hairs on the flora to shimmer and sparkle in their rainbow arcs.

It was time for an impromptu safety briefing.

“Everyone,” I said, interrupting Ratthi, who was in the middle of trying to leap off the top of a rock to catch a glimpse over the tall flora field.

Everyone looked at me. They weren’t looking at my face though. I wasn’t sure when it had happened, but they’d mostly stopped looking at my face. (I could run back my logs to find out when that had happened. But I didn’t feel like it.)

“These flora are, uh, highly flammable. Don’t use any heating implements until we are through the valley.”

“Oh?” said Arada, “I wonder why that is? How do you know about that, SecUnit?”

I did not need to answer that question. So I just shrugged. Gurathin gave me a narrow look.

Pin-Lee frowned, and then toggled the power button on her interface. Her expression got a little distant. “How big are these fields?”

“It will take us a couple days to trek through it,” I said.

Pin-Lee groaned.

“We should stick close to each other,” I said, “Always stay in eyeshot of someone. We should pick an designated order to walk in and stick to it.”

“We’ll have to be practically touching,” Gurathin said, eyeing the dense grass.

“We could use a tether,” Mensah suggested.

“Ha. Like in [baby jail]?” Pin-Lee asked, smirking.

“I suppose.” Mensah smiled a little.

“Are you calling us babies?” Ratthi asked, jokingly. If you ask me, that’s a bit overly casual for workplace behavior. But I guess when you’re stranded on an alien planet with your science colleagues for tens of days in close quarters (and odors), the professionalism gets difficult to maintain. The more time I spent with these people the more evidence I had that they saw each other as friends or something. Which was weird.

“Only when your behavior warrants it,” Mensah said, nearly stone-faced. But the corner of her mouth was twitching.

In the end, Ratthi unpacked a rope that was usually used to set up the rain tarp at camp, and everyone grabbed one hand onto it. I took hold of the front end of the rope and led us into the plains. The [sollen] smell of the grass encased us immediately.

It was only about thirty minutes of trekking the plains when I noticed something odd.

My drone caught sight of ripples in the grass that did not match up with the pattern of the gusts of wind. Usually when the wind causes a sparkle-arc in the grass, it’s an outwards-spreading shape that can split or peter off, but always in a natural wave pattern. The odd ripples were sharp lines of sparkling that travelled in a straight line for a while, then stopped, then started again.

I first noticed it in the distance, but after a few minutes I realized that the straight-line sparkles were heading towards us. Sometimes it was one line, sometimes two, and sometimes as many as four lines moving at once in the same given direction, but overall they were drawing closer.

Uh. I didn’t know what that shit was. I ran back my recordings that I’d taken of the last time I’d travelled through plains like this. Huh. Okay, so the same thing had happened over there, I just hadn’t noticed it. And last time the lines hadn’t been moving towards me, but actively moved away.

I stopped walking, and called down the tether for everyone to gather up. The wind was pretty loud in the grasses, but the humans passed the message down from one to the next, and pretty soon we were all bunched up.

“I need to check something,” I told them, “There’s a movement in the grass.”

I let go of the tether and was about to leave to scout ahead, when Mensah said, “Hold on, SecUnit. Do we really want to split up?”

She hadn’t questioned my security choices before, so this was notable. But she did have a point. My humans were pretty vulnerable here, unable to see where they were at. We were following the river, basically, but it was a big flat slow-flowing river with wide muddy banks that had flora growing within and around it, which made the edge of the river difficult to define. So we weren’t right up against the water, and we were trekking along the ground that was just a bit muddy. There was a whole lot of deeper mud before the actual edge of the river. The humans were really relying on me (and my drone) to help them navigate there.

“I’ll leave my drone with you,” I said.

There was a sudden gust of wind, a huge rush of it blasting down from the head of the valley. I dropped my drone to land on Mensah’s shoulder to protect it from the incoming blast.

“It shouldn’t take long,” I added, and then the wall of wind slammed into us, grasses whipping against everyone hard enough to make multiple people flinch and raise their arms protectively over their faces. My face-flaurna, which was plastered to my forehead, pinched me pretty hard as if it didn’t like the wind, and then my scan picked up on a fast-moving incoming hostile.

I just barely had the time to turn on my heel and grab the fauna that had thrown itself out of the wall of grass, aiming itself claws-first at my hip.

Ratthi made an eek! noise, and Gurathin startled so badly that he nearly fell over.

I gripped the fauna with one hand. It was… weird looking, its face and back seemed to mostly be made of claws, its whole body a knot of lumps with an uneven number of thrashing limbs arranged approximately in rows. Its claws scraped against my gunport, limbs scrabbling at the air. My scan detected another fauna incoming, and I dove to the side of the group, dropping my walking staff and intercepting Hostile Two with my other hand as it dove at Pin-Lee. I felt one of its claws make purchase in my side, a claw scraping through my skin. Shit, that was going to leak. I hate leaking.

I couldn’t fire my energy weapons in here without cooking everyone alive, so I tried just smashing the shit out of the fauna I had in my hands by slamming them both against my armored legs, aiming for the spiky head-parts. (I didn’t know where the brains were on these things, or even if it they had brains, but prior experience dealing with fauna told me that aiming for the head-looking bits wasn’t a bad place to start.)

But, horribly, when I smacked them into my thighs they just exploded into about 20 chunks apiece, each chunk with a sharp claw on one end and fuzzy shit on the other, each one skittering independently away into the grass like big wormlike rat-things. There were also some round egg-looking things that fell out of their bodies and rolled into the muck, then uncoiled into tiny flying insect-like fauna that buzzed up into the air and away into the sky.

Well, that was new. Also gross. I picked my walking stick: due to the density of the grass, it was partially held up and standing at an angle.

“We need to get out of here,” I said, and then darted across to the other side of my humans huddle to punt another attacking fauna-mass into a pile of independent claws. My stub-foot slowed me down, but I was still able to use my stick as a bludgeon to whack the fauna into two halves that fell away from each other and then bolted in opposite directions back into the grass.

“Holy fuck,” Ratthi yelped. “That’s amazing!”

Not the time, Ratthi.

“Can you get a recording, SecUnit?” Arada asked, her eyes wide in what should be fear but I suspected was scientific excitement.

Seriously?

I slammed my good foot down on one of the worm-rats before it could escape. The mud cushioned the blow a bit but I ground my heel down until it stopped moving. Then a bunch of them skittered out of the grass and up my leg, re-forming into a cohesive mass of claws that took a huge painful stab into my collarbone area. I grabbed fistfuls of them, crushing one in my hand, but the others slipped free, and more were slashing at me. When I grabbed hold of more of them and tried to rip them apart they just writhed into pieces again, fleeing into the grass. Individually they were light enough to be supported by the weight of the flora-stalks, which made them capable of manuvering all around us as if swimming through the air. Which basically put us inside a three-dimensional claw-worm combat hellscape.

Pin-Lee yelled sharply, and I turned, ripping the claw out of my shoulder and whacking another coordinated mass of claw-worms away from her with my stick, but one had already stabbed her in the shin. I grabbed it and tried to crush it, but it slipped out of my grip like it was made of water and slithered away with a flash.

This was a losing battle. Fuck. I needed to think.

How were they tracking us? How had they identified us from all the way up the valley? The grass prevented line of sight, and the wind direction was all wrong for them to have tracked us by scent. Not even my scans could have picked them up from that distance. And why were they attacking?

“It’s not sight or smell,” I said, using my walking stick to swat another mass of them apart as the humans floundered to stay together, holding onto each other and facing outwards. “They came after us from all the way up the valley. What other senses do fauna have?”

I sprinted in a circle around my humans, using my feet to beat down the grass and the fauna both. Hopefully this would give me a more defensible area.

“Uhhhh sound?” said Arada. “Touch? Chemosensing?”

“That’s just smell,” Ratthi said.

“Electrosensing?” Arada suggested, “But that only works in water, right?”

“I mean…” Ratthi said, doubtfully.

I’d flattened down a small clearing of crushed grass around my humans at this point, the air filling up with the smell of broken flora, and my scans tracked the fauna as they fell apart and re-formed into larger masses, stalking and skittering through the cover of the grass. There were at least a hundred of these small fauna-bits. We could be here all day.

Arada gasped. “But… no way.”

“Spit it out,” I snapped.

“The individuals are coordinating somehow as a group,” she said, in a rush. “Could they be using the grass itself? I mean, is the grass communicating with them? Is this whole valley some kind of integrated [shitwad-hellhole]?”

“Is that even physically possible?” Gurathin asked.

“We don’t know yet,” said Ratthi, who was still way more excited about this than he should be. “It’s not impossible.”

Gurathin groaned. “This is why I hate biology. There’s always an asterisk.”

A huge coordinated mass of claw-worms dove out of the grass and at my humans, shockingly fast on a bunch of knobbly limbs. I grabbed it by the clawed ‘head’ and flung it back into the grass as it fell apart into pieces, and kicked away the shedded worms that tried to slip by and bite my humans’ feet.

“If they are communicating with the grass, what did we do to piss off the whole valley?” Ratthi asked.

My drone’s camera inputs went dark.

I rolled back the recording: a group of small flying fauna had attacked it, crawling all over its surface and blocking the lens. I flew the drone straight upwards very fast, knocking the fauna off it.

Oh. I just had an idea. I didn’t know if Arada’s super-grass theory was right or not, but if these worm-fauna were combinatorial and could somehow communicate with each other… maybe they had seen us coming after all. The same way that I’d seen them coming with my drone.

I brought my drone around, accelerating it at top speed, and pegged two of the insect fauna things that had hatched out of the claw-worm swarms. Their goopy guts fell to the ground. I kept knocking back the claw-worm fauna with my stick as they tried to attack us, and used my drone to crush the flying bug fauna.

I’d only managed to kill three of the slippery claw-worms so far, but in seconds my drone had splattered a good dozen of the flying fauna. And then abruptly as they’d come, they were gone. Through my drone I watched the straight-line ripple-flicker in the grass as the faunas beat a coordinated retreat. The flying insect fauna were gone, too.

“Fuck on earth,” Pin-Lee breathed, which pretty much summed up my feelings on this whole situation.

“Do we want to continue through this valley, or find another route?” Mensah asked, addressing me.

This planet was a deathtrap, eager to snap up my fragile humans. That was going to be true no matter what route we took. This most recent run-in with the local fauna had been pretty fucked up, but I’d beat them back and I could do it again.

I said, “We keep going.”

[baby jail]: "Kindergarden." Where they keep small larval-stage human children out of the way in a supervised environment where they are less likely to die.

[sollen]: flora-specific chemical profile that is warm and pretty, but catches on the back of your olfactory cavity a bit if you inhale an overly strong concentration of flora particles.

[shitwad-hellhole]: "superoganism." What the hell does that mean. Arada tried to explain this to me over her dinner and how a superorganism is different from a group of organisms that work together. I asked her if a city is a human superorganism and she said, "Well, you might get some people arguing that point, but it really doesn't make sense to think of humans that way, because—" and then Ratthi started arguing with her that humans totally count as a superorganism. And I tuned out to watch 10001 Nights. Note to self. Maybe I can code up some kind of automode facial expression control software that makes it look like I'm paying attention when the humans start talking about nerd shit.

Chapter Text

The humans were jumpy for the rest of the day in the grassland. Which was understandable. But their unease was making me uneasy too. I kept watch through my drone for signs of those fauna, but they seemed to keep a wide berth after I’d killed all the bug fauna.

At the end of the day, the humans flattened a bunch of the grass to put up their shelter. There weren’t any convenient trees or rocks to set up the tarp hang, so they didn’t have their usual semi-protected outdoor space. So they decided it was time to get all weird again about me spending all night outside by myself.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. (Why were we doing this? I never understood it.)

Pin-Lee’s lower lip stuck out angrily.

“What if it rains?” she demanded, as if me getting a little wet was the worst imaginable fate that could possibly befall a SecUnit.

I didn’t point out to her that the rains had come pretty consistently at night when we’d been parked with the hopper at a higher elevation, but that there hadn’t been any rain since we hit the big water worm zone. This valley was massive compared to most valleys in the region, cutting way into the mountain range. As we trekked up to its head, we would get well inside the mountain region and we'd be back up at elevation soon, so that’s when we should expect to get rained on.

I told her, as a compromise, “If it rains, I’ll come inside.”

And then they all ate outside.

I was used to the humans eating outside at this point, but it was still uncomfortable. (Not just because of the normal annoying chewing noises, okay. My threat assessment elevated whenever the humans removed their respiratory filtering gear, which they had to do when they were eating. The air on this planet wasn’t immediately deadly, but I knew that prolonged exposure was bad for my clients’ long-term health. Every time my humans took off their environmental suits or respirators, it basically elevated my background levels of anxiety.)

But there were a few problems with my clients’ need for their respiratory gear. One was that it was impossible for humans to keep air filters on their faces at all times (see: eating). Another problem was that they didn’t have any filtering mechanisms that would process the air inside their shelter. The hopper had air scrubbers built in, but those weren’t portable, plus they’d been blown up. Also, not all of my humans were willing to keep their respirators on all the time. (Because the discomfort of wearing protective gear outweighed their long-term health, I guess.)

Gurathin was the only one who kept his environmental suit on full time. Everyone else just wore the respirators at varying levels of consistency. Pin-Lee was the worst at it: she would only wear her respirator occasionally when she was awake, and none of the time she was asleep.

Earlier in our trek I reminded my humans more frequently when they weren’t wearing their protective gear. But then it turned out that they were choosing not to on purpose, and they didn’t especially appreciate my reminders. So now they all just did whatever they felt like. And I lived with my unhappy threat assessment.

Ratthi wrinkled his nose as Gurathin peeled out of his environmental suit.

“Gurathin,” Ratthi said, in a joking sort of tone.

Apparently just saying his name communicated something, because Gurathin scrunched his face too. “Yes, I know. Believe me, it’s much worse wearing it.”

“I don’t know how you keep it on all day,” Arada said. “I get hot enough in short sleeves.” She snapped the straps of her respirator off her head, and gasped. “Augh! I hate how it burns when you peel it off.”

“Burns?” Ratthi echoed, swiveling his head around to look at her in concern. He shifted closer to her to peer at her face. (Way closer than I would like, but the two of them were very comfortable with each other.) “I think your skin is irritated. Hang on, let me get a light.”

(It was evening. The daylight was waning. There would still be enough to see by for an hour or two, but I guess Ratthi wanted something stronger.)

Mensah was sitting on her pack and rubbing her leg with one hand as she chewed on a recycler-regurgitated chunk of food. (The humans have been calling the recycler-food “crap.” Which, gross. I wished they wouldn’t. But Pin-Lee had started doing it a couple days ago and now they were all doing it with no signs of stopping. At least Mensah wasn’t calling it “crap,” but she didn’t seem to care that everyone else was calling it “crap.” It was definitely unprofessional language and my governor module would have zapped me for using it if it could. But maybe Mensah thought that policing cuss words wasn’t the best use of her leaderly powers.)

Pin-Lee was also chewing on some recycler-food and picking at the bandage on her shin. I wanted to tell her to cut it out, but she hadn’t been previously receptive to my suggestions like “you forgot to put your respirator back on.”

She glanced over at me. Then kept watching me, which was weird. I kept watching her pick at her bandage. (I’d have used a drone for this, only I was using it to keep overhead watch over the grasslands in case those fauna came back.)

“Take a picture, SecUnit, it’ll last longer,” she said, smiling unexpectedly at me.

I didn’t know what that meant.

Ratthi glanced over at us, looking between Pin-Lee and me. He told Pin-Lee, “It’s telling you to leave your shin alone.”

What the hell. Can he read my mind?

Pin-Lee scoffed, but pulled her hand away from her shin. “Worry-wart.”

Ratthi turned back to what he was doing: shining a handheld light in Arada’s face. “I think you have a skin infection. Stop scratching.”

“What?” Arada exclaimed, snatching her hand away from her face.

“Maybe [yuckies] or something being opportunistic, I don’t know,” he said. “Hopefully it’s not something xenobiologic—”

“Could it be an allergic reaction to the respirator seal?” Arada asked. “Or acne? Please tell me it’s just acne.”

“I mean, maybe. But you’ve got a bunch of [yuckies-yuck]-looking things—”

“Nooooooo,” Arada groaned. I agreed with her on that. What the hell.

Then the humans started talking about how they were going to treat Arada’s skin and how they were going to avoid the yuckies from happening to the rest of them and everyone got busy shining lights in each other’s faces and double-checking their own body parts to see if they all had skin infections. Because apparently if you let dirty stuff touch human skin for too long, tiny living things start eating your skin off. What the Fuck.

Did I need to check my skin too? I’d mostly been ignoring it.

Pin-Lee loudly announced, “So which one of you pervs wants to check my puckered asshole for yuckies?” Which was when I turned off my audio inputs and primary visual inputs. My drone would be enough to keep watch of the plains at a safe distance. She’d better be joking.

(She was joking. Thank fuck. Mensah pulled Pin-Lee aside later to ask Pin-Lee if she really wanted to erode the group’s precarious professionalism to this degree, so I guess Mensah did have a sense of leaderly duty regarding group etiquette. Pin-Lee pointed out that we were all probably going to die, so what did decorum matter anymore? Mensah pointed out that maybe not everyone was comfortable with jokes about puckered assholes. Pin-Lee wanted to know if Mensah was trying to drain what little laughter and light remained from Pin-Lee’s heart. Mensah sighed, and took Pin-Lee’s hand. At which point I stopped listening because I’d made it this far without seeing my clients do any sex shit and I was determined to keep my lucky streak. My freehold clients touched each other a lot more for casual non-sex reasons than most of the other clients I’ve had in the past, but I wasn’t going to risk it.)

We made it through the grasslands without any further incident. Arada joined Pin-Lee in not wearing a respirator in the hopes that this would give her skin a chance to heal. Everyone was now using the decontam tool daily on all their gear, so add that tool to the list of things that everyone needed me to act as the convenient walking battery for.

The decontam tool could probably have been used to blitz the infection off Arada’s face, except for the risk of burning a lot of skin off a highly sensitive area. And then she’d have the problem of huge open skinless sores on her face, and it was hard to say if that would even be an improvement. The team had a stock of oral meds for this kind of thing, but those were a limited resource. So they were hoping that her own immune system would be able to beat the infection now that the mask was gone and letting her skin breathe. If her face-skin didn’t look like it was improving in a few cycles, she’d start taking the meds.

The grasslands ended pretty abruptly into cliffs, rocky boulder-pile slopes, and clinging patches of flora and flaurna. Plus the top of the pass was armored in a solid patch of white. Yikes. In the maps this valley had seemed promising as an entry point into the mountain range, a little steep at the head but with a manageable lower-slung break in the ridgeline, followed by another nice watery valley on the other side. But now that we were here in the flesh it was looking pretty gnarly. I wasn’t sure if it would even be passable to the humans.

Mensah squinted up at the cliffsides, using her hand to shade her eyes.

“That’s pretty steep,” she said, dubiously. “And the snow…”

Pin-Lee groaned. “It took us three whole days to get up this valley, ain’t no way we’re backtracking. There has to be a way through there.”

“There definitely doesn’t have to be a way through,” Gurathin said. “Nature does not deliberately design cliff faces topped with deadly ice cornices to be ergonomic.”

“Well it should,” Pin-Lee retorted. “Man, fuck this. If we only had a nice little [portacon] or something we wouldn’t have to worry about the whole water thing.”

“But we don’t have a portacon,” he said.

“I almost brought my portacon from home, you know,” she told him. “But nooooooo. Pin-Lee, you’re such an over-packer, you don’t need one of those. Ha!”

“We can only work with what we have,” Mensah said, calmly. She was using the tone of voice that meant, 'everyone kindly shut up.' They shut up.

“I can go scout,” I said. “It’s already noon. We aren’t going to get over the pass today.”

Mensah glanced in my direction. “You should take someone with you.”

I was about to protest, because I can scout much faster by myself than when I’m dragging a human around, but Pin-Lee piped up, “I’ll go.”

So, whatever.

We spent the next three hours clambering over boulders and navigating up the steep tiny-rocks slopes. Sometimes the scree would slide off down the slope in a big flow of rocks when I stepped wrong, which was nervewracking. Navigating over this terrain proved a huge pain in the ass with my leg and hip problems, so Pin-Lee was barely slowing me down. Which was deeply depressing. But we made it all the way up to the edge of the white.

Pin-Lee was breathing hard, and occasionally coughing like she was trying to clear her throat. She squinted at the snow. The edge of it started right at our feet and rose smooth and steadily up to the peak of the pass.

I poked it with my walking stick. The stick mushed through the snow. I stepped forward and poked it a few more times. Each time it mushed apart. Yeah, at best that was going to be annoying as fuck to walk through. At worst there could be invisible gaps or crevices for my clients to fall through and die in.

I’d traversed some icy/snowy patches back in my solo wandering days. Mostly I found it to be annoying, so I’d avoided it where I could. I did know that at night when it got extra cold everything hardened up, and in the daytime if it was warm enough shit would get mushy and wet.

It’d taken us this long just to get up here. I looked down to the valley floor where the rest of my clients had set up camp.

Pin-Lee took a step forward as if to start trudging up to the top of the pass, but I stopped her with my stick. She looked at me, brow furrowed.

I said, “We should head back. If we go much further now it’ll get dark before we can get to camp.”

She huffed, like she was angry. But I knew her well enough now to know that she wasn’t mad at me, just irritated at the general state of things. Like snow on a high mountain pass.

I added, “We can come back and test this route tomorrow. If we come up early enough the snow might be frozen and easier to traverse.”

Her face got weird. "Easier to traverse? When it's icy?"

Oh, right. I’m an idiot. The humans didn’t have specialty grippy boots or mechanical spike toes. They might have to do it mushy and wet. (And fall into a hole and die.) You know what, fuck this. Maybe we needed to find a different way through the mountains.

Pin-Lee sighed heavily. Then she added, “Well, at least it looks passable from here. But… okay. I’m kind of worried about us all getting through this.”

“Is it the risk of slipping and falling to your death?”

She waved a hand at me. “Aside from that.”

“Is it the risk of triggering a rockslide and getting crushed under a boulder?”

She waved her hand at me again, opening her mouth to speak, but I kept talking. “Is it the risk of breaking your fragile human ankles? The ice giving way under your feet and you fall and die? Getting stuck and freezing to death? A sudden storm appearing just as we’re trying to get through the pass and it blows you off the ridge and electrocutes Mensah to death and everyone else dies of exposure? A huge predatory fauna showing up and chewing everyone’s limbs off?”

She laughed, even though I wasn’t joking about any of that. I was 100% completely serious. “SecUnit, shut up for a second. I swear the only time you string so many words together is to tell me all the ways I could die.”

I shut up for a second, and then kept shutting up for multiple seconds as she spoke.

She said, “This slope is long, and steep, and we came up it very fast. I’m not sure everyone else will be fit enough to do it, not to mention get down the other side. All before sundown.”

I was listening to her, but I was also thinking about what we’d do if someone broke both of their ankles. I’d have to carry them, probably, or we’d have to drag them on a sled or something. Which gave me a very stupid idea. But instead of suggesting this stupid idea right away (I wanted to think it over some more to decide just how stupid it was), I said, “We can discuss it with the group.”

She made a grunting noise in agreement, and turned to pick her way carefully back down the long steep slope.

[yuckies]: “Staphylococcus” is a genus of microbes that live in human skin and respiratory pathways. Usually it isn’t a problem, but sometimes it can grow out of control, turning into infections that can range anywhere between “annoying” and “will kill you dead.” Great. Even my clients’ own skin is out to get them.

[yuckies-yuck]: Boils. Little gross skin bumps.

[portacon]: short for “portable condenser,” which is short for “portable vapor condenser.” A vapor condenser (or “vapcon”) is a tool that is capable of drawing water vapor out of the air and condensing it into liquid. Basically a high-efficiency dehumidifier. Whatever that is.

Chapter Text

It was getting dark when Pin-Lee and I got back down from the pass. I explained my stupid idea to the rest of the humans. They agreed with me that it was stupid, then they debated it over dinner, then concluded they would sleep on it and decide if it still seemed just as stupid in the morning after a rest period. (I was not optimistic.)

They settled in to sleep in the shelter, and I was left outside. As usual.

I spent the next several hours watching media, messing with my presentation-software-turned-modeling-module, and cutting down the tall grass flora and experimenting with weaving it. Arada’s talk about how the valley might be a superorganism had sounded pretty freaky, so I hadn’t wanted to bother the flora too much while we passed through. But now that my humans were camped outside of the grass, I felt slightly more confident in taking some experimental samples.

So during that night I ran the recycler. I fucked around with the flora. I watched my media (10001 Nights on Starling Station had a whole episode about weaving so I referenced that a lot, but I also re-watched The Andromedian Legends). And I stared up at the towering mountain faces at the head of the valley, their rocky slopes, the ice and snow at the top, mentally tracing various possible routes.

By the time sunrise came, I’d successfully used the grasses to produce an assortment of misshapen pieces of useless garbage, as well as a handful of wide-brimmed hats and visors for my clients to wear. (It was hats for most of them, and a visor for Gurathin that he could wear over his environmental suit.) A couple of my humans already had company-branded hats printed out of the recycler, but the brims on those had gone all floppy and useless after getting wet from rain, and I’d seen my humans squinting a lot from the planetary sunlight. So, I don’t know. Maybe my shitty handmade flora-hats could help with that.

I arranged the hats outside of the shelter, and then moved away from the campsite, far enough away that they would have to shout to try and talk to me, but not so far that I couldn’t see them or get to them quickly if some creatures decided to come out of the grasses to enact revenge.

Arada was the first one to open the door of the shelter, and she came across the hats right away. (They were hard to miss, piled up right at the entrance.)

Her body language suggested surprise and confusion (she threw her hands up and everything), and then she picked up a hat and turned it over.

I really hoped she could figure out what the ugly thing was without me having to go back over there and explain. Fuck, were they even recognizable as hats? This was embarrassing. Why did I think this was a good idea?

Then she put the hat on her head. And removed it, and picked up a different one, and put that one on her head. She was looking around, clearly searching for me, and finally spotted me where I was sitting a safe distance away from the shelter, near the edge of the grassy plain.

She waved at me vigorously, raising both hands above her head and knocking the arms into the brim of the hat so that it went askew. I didn’t know how to respond to that. Then she changed the waving pattern, gesturing as if she wanted me to come back to the shelter. I didn’t want to do that because this was a historically unprecedented situation and I didn’t even have something from my media that covered anything even slightly similar to “rogue SecUnit creates a bunch of shitty hats out of deadly alien flora and gives the hats to its humans who are trying to survive on an unsettled planet and oh fuck what if this flora has poison in it that kills humans, shit, well it’s too late now.”

When it became clear that I wasn’t coming back to the shelter, Arada started putting on her shoes. Oh no, she was going to come after me? These hats were the worst idea I’d ever had.

I waved at her, hoping to gesture somehow that she shouldn’t come over. She saw me do it, and stopped with the shoes, and she waved back at me. We waved back and forth a few times, which felt stupid. But also not stupid. Somehow. And then she removed her shoe again and crawled back into the shelter still wearing the hat.

Spending a few hours making some shitty hats in the night turned out to have some horrible unforeseen consequences.

All my clients were entirely and inexplicably obsessed with the hats. It was bizarre. They wanted to talk to me about the hats. They were talking to each other about the hats. They compared the slightly different styles of hat to each other. They wore each other’s hats. They wanted to know how I had managed to size the hats to their heads accurately. (I didn’t understand why this was shocking to them. I have eyes.) They had nostalgic anecdotes about past hats to share. They had copious contempt for the quality of the recycler-issued company hats. They started speculating if waterproof hats could be made from the grass. They wanted to go harvest some flora themselves (NO) and try weaving other kinds of stuff (WHY) and they showered me in gratitude and praise (FUCK).

The hats dominated my clients’ collective attention spans for multiple hours that morning. And then the excitement about hats and the possibilities of flora-weaving continued to derail all plans to figure out how to get through this mountain pass. Because I guess that wasn’t important enough now that we had flora to twist into weird shapes. Mensah actually decreed that we would just take the day off travel and scouting-related work in favor of exploring the mission-critical potential of The Grass. So. Okay. I guess.

I just didn’t understand it. I might’ve thought that they were procrastinating on a dangerous and frightening task (getting over the mountain pass), but they genuinely seemed very excited about the hats. They were smiling a lot. Arada and Ratthi spent a good ten minutes singing a song I’d never heard before while they played with grass strands. Even Gurathin wore his misshapen visor over his environmental suit helmet all day.

I’d just been trying to make something to help the humans’ fragile eyeballs no be overwhelmed by sunlight. I’d never epected the hats would be such a big deal to them.

But all of us spent the day sitting around the shelter and messing with the flora. I tolerated Arada measuring the circumference of my head so that she could make me a hat. I told her I didn’t need a hat. She told me yes I did. Whatever.

Over the course of the day, we made an assortment of things. Ratthi, Gurathin, and Arada (in that order) were pretty good at it. Something about having prior experience with basket-weaving. Mensah and Pin-Lee (in that order) sucked shit at it. (I didn’t tell them that, because I can be professional, plus I respected them.) Pin-Lee actually cut her finger on the grass and bled, which, great, yet another instance of xenobiologic poisoning to worry about.

“Just imagine,” Ratthi was saying, “We could make our own baskets and packs to carry our stuff in! And they could look nice, do you think we can find dyes—”

“But do we really have the multiple days to waste on creating a whole new set of gear? We already have good enough recycler-printed bags,” Gurathin said. Not for the first time. He had decided to dedicate himself into treating the grass to a complicated regimen of soaking it, pulling the flora apart into strings with his hands, and letting it dry in the sun. Apparently after this he was going to beat the shit out of it and turn it into rope. Soaking and drying and tearing and beating the flora would apparently make stronger rope. I had my doubts about that, but sure. These humans seemed to know a lot of stuff about flora-weaving that I didn’t.

“That’s not the point,” Ratthi retorted. I didn’t say anything, because I agreed with Gurathin but I didn’t want to look like I was agreeing with Gurathin. Ratthi had created a single tiny basket already for no particular reason. But now he was creating a big sheet thing.

Pin-Lee had given up on weaving the flora after cutting her finger, but she was helping Gurathin with the flora-fiber treatments.

I was wordlessly showing Mensah how I’d made the sandal-thing that I still had tied to my foot. It was pretty tattered at this point so I was making another one. And she was also making another one (poorly). I’m not sure why. Possibly just for fun. It was hard to say how much my humans were doing all this just for fun, and how much they were doing it because they thought it would be useful.

The humans’ conversation meandered over the course of the day. (They were a chatty bunch, I knew this by now.) It seemed they were making an effort to keep things pretty lighthearted. Nobody had explicitly said it, but the topic of the mountain pass looming above all of us hadn’t been broached since the morning when Mensah had declared today a weaving-day.

“So what’s the deal with… what was its name again? Floa?”

Ratthi was looking in my direction, which meant he was asking me a question. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“What?” I asked.

He gestured at me. “On your face.”

Oh.

Nobody was staring at me, because they’d all somehow figured out that I didn’t like that. But I could tell they were all paying attention, and curious. Some of them were looking at Ratthi, some of them had stopped messing with the flora in their hands.

I didn’t really know how to explain. There was no explanation. I said, “Um…” And then trailed off and wished I hadn’t said anything.

“I mean, is it a decoration, or a pet, or does it serve some kind of cool ecosystem purpose or something? Does it protect you from bugs, or sun, or—?”

He was giving me way too much credit.

I said, “It just stuck onto my face at some point.”

Ratthi made a quizzical look at the flora leaves he was straightening out with his hands. “But you kept it? And you named it?”

Arada piped up, “It’s like a little friend!”

“Client,” I shot back, because I didn’t have friends, that was just stupid. SecUnits don’t have friends. It wasn’t possible. And rogue SecUnits especially don’t have friends, because nobody would even want to be friends with a rogue SecUnit and anyways a rogue SecUnit couldn’t trust anyone who did want to be friends, because anyone who wanted to be friends with a rogue SecUnit was either a fucking nutcase, or a liar who would get the rogue SecUnit dismantled.

Except, I guess…

And then I realized my mistake. I watched in horror as surprised little smiles crossed everybody’s faces. Even Pin-Lee and Gurathin looked weirdly pleased. I think I needed to stand up and walk into the grassy plains and get torn apart by those weird combinatorial worm things right now. Right now. Right. Now. Damnit, Murderbot, you know talking to humans is a bad idea. Even these weird humans. Maybe especially these weird humans.

“Not—” I said, trying to backpedal, only it was too late. The damage was done. “Shut up. It’s nothing. It’s just some random weird flaurna that got stuck to my face at some point and it didn’t eat my skin or anything so I just left it there. That’s all.”

“What’s a ‘flaurna’?” Arada asked.

But now I was wary of responding to anything she said lest it was a trap, so I kept my mouth shut.

Possibly my face was expressing some kind of confused anguish and/or horrified anguish, because that’s when Mensah changed the subject by holding up the lumpy sandal she was working on and asking me if it was possible to salvage the part that she’d irreparably bungled.

Later though I did hear Ratthi whisper to Arada (everyone knew that I had good hearing but they still underestimated just how good), “I really am curious about whether it’s created its own species catalogue. Like has it been secretly doing field work all this time?”

Arada did finish a hat and gave it to me. It itched on my head, and I wasn't sure if I liked it, but I wore it for the rest of the day. And when it rained in the evening the hat she’d made and the weird big mat thing that Ratthi wove actually kept me completely dry. The falling drops made an interesting sound on the flora fibers. I saved a recording.

Chapter Text

We ended up faffing around for two whole days at the head of the valley. On the second day we split the group; Ratthi, Gurathin, and Arada stayed down in the valley floor doing the flora-weaving stuff, while Mensah, Pin-Lee, and I went up scouting. (I hated to split us up like this but keeping everyone together wasn’t really practical.)

As we explored around the rocky valley head, I did some travel pacing math. My humans were much slower than me and couldn’t handle the same kinds of terrain that I could. Uneven footing, extreme slopes, ice sheets, and gaps/cracks/boulder-fields were either too dangerous or just completely impossible for them to traverse. And what they could traverse, they did much slower than me. Scratch that, they weren’t actually that much slower than me walking, now that my legs were damaged. But they needed to rest and eat and sleep and stuff, which slowed them down significantly.

In my solo trekking days, this mountain pass wouldn’t have been worth mentioning in my logs. The ice might’ve been a bit annoying but it wouldn’t have slowed me down all that much. But at the speed we’d been walking as a group, if we had to abandon this valley and backtrack to find another route, we could easily lose ten or twelve days, only to find that the second route we tried was equally difficult as this one, or worse. If the topography map was to be believed, this pass looked like a relatively good one for the area we were in. Also, time mattered. The longer my humans were stuck out here, the more likely something could go wrong and kill them. The recycler could fail. Some weather event could squash them flat. Not to mention Pin-Lee's limited supply of medications. She was already taking less than she was supposed to.

Mensah tried out the route that Pin-Lee and I had gone up a couple days ago. She was significantly slower than Pin-Lee was, stopping frequently to catch her breath. By the time the morning was half gone we’d only gotten a third of the way up the pass, and Mensah had to stop and sit down, breathing hard. She wasn’t even carrying all the pack weight that she normally did. I wasn’t sure why the incline seemed to challenge the humans this much compared to walking on the flats, but the effect was pretty dramatic.

“This isn’t going to work,” Pin-Lee said to me in a low voice.

“I can… hear you,” Mensah grimaced. She tilted her hat back. Sweat drops were glittering all over her face, and wetness stained her shirt around the collar and underarms. She took a few more deep breaths, and then sighed heavily, staring down at the valley and where the temporary shelter was set up. “It’s beautiful though.”

I pointed my eyes at the view she gestured at. I’d seen a lot of views like this now. Admittedly it was a good vantage point, with a lot of expansive sightline. The belly of the valley was full of the grass, sparkling as it moved with rainbow arcs of wind. The curve of planetary rings in the sky were like a pale inversion of the curve of the valley as it wound around the mountains and sloped out of sight.

“Do you suppose we could camp partway up the slope?” Pin-Lee mused. “Break up the uphill distance?”

“It’s too exposed up here,” I said. It was already windy where we were, and I knew it would get a lot worse when night fell. “And there’s nowhere to sleep, unless you’re all willing to lie down on the scree at a 40-degree incline. Plus we’d have to double our water carry. We don’t have the container capacity for that, not to mention the weight.”

“Fuckdamnit,” Pin-Lee muttered. Her expression was hidden from me by the brim of her hat, but her tone was dark. “I think we really are going to have to try your batshit idea.”

“It does not seem safe,” Mensah said. She was still staring out at the valley. “You’re sure you can do it, SecUnit?”

“It’ll be trivial for me, physically speaking,” I said. I was more worried about whether my clients could sit through it without panicking and getting us all killed. Or one of them losing focus and slipping and dying.

Mensah sighed again. “I think we should do at least one test run. Let’s head back down.”

By the time we got back down, it was noon, and Mensah was wincing about her knees.

We stopped by camp so that Mensah could grab some gear straps, and then the three of us picked our way along the valley head, moving over to a spot with a gentler initial slope, but which ended abruptly at a near-vertical cliff face. After a break for the humans to process food, water, and other bodily functions, we hiked up the little slope and reached the cliff.

Pin-Lee removed her hat and leaned her torso back, craning her neck to look straight up at the stone shooting right up to the sky, near-vertical. Mensah used a hand to keep her hat on her head as she looked up.

I also looked up with my eyes (I was conserving my drone, because getting it recharged was a whole production involving semi-dismantling its outer casing using the electronics toolkit). We’d stopped at a spot with a fissure along the rock, but the fissure only extended partway up.

“That ain’t right,” Pin-Lee muttered, tilting her head back down to normal and putting her hat back on. “I mean, I’m not scared of heights, but… are you sure?”

“I’ve done this a bunch of times,” I said. “The problem will be making sure you don’t fall off my back.”

“Even if you can, it seems like it’s going to take forever, is the thing,” Pin-Lee said. “How fast can you—”

I assume she was going to ask me how quickly I could climb the cliff. The answer to that was I didn’t know exactly, it depends on the cliff, so I went for a practical demonstration, starting off by using the fissure as a hold and then winging it from there.

It took me about fifteen minutes and twelve seconds from the bottom to the top. This used to be easier back when I had two good feet. Plus a new wrinkle in the process was that I no longer had human skin on one of my hands, which made gripping more difficult. But it was actually a bit easier than walking was with my bad hip. I took extra care getting up over the ice sheet at the top (luckily the ice didn’t overhang the cliff. I guess gravity broke it off, but it was still slippery up there), then came back down the same way. It was faster coming down because I had ironed out the route—twelve minutes exactly.

I hopped down the last twenty centimeters to the ground where Pin-Lee and Mensah were waiting for me.

Pin-Lee said something that was probably a new cuss word. I saved it to memory. Then she said, “You are not going to go that fast with me on your back.”

“Sure I can,” I said. Why did the humans keep thinking that I worked the same way they did?

“Sure you can, but I’ll barf my guts up,” she said.

“If you barf on me I’ll drop you on purpose,” I told her. (I didn’t mean that, but judging by her smirk she understood it was a joke.)

“I’ll go,” Mensah said. “SecUnit, can you try carrying me up?”

I stared at her shoulder.

Well.

Okay, so I know this was my stupid idea in the first place, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

“Do you think we should try hiking the pass and just keep going at night if we don’t make it over during daylight?” I asked, after a deeply awkward pause. (I know, I know. Still. I hated choosing to do stuff that felt this risky, even if everyone agreed it was the least worst option.)

“That’s not going to work and you know it,” Pin-Lee said. “In all likelihood we’re going to get stuck in the snowy bit when it gets dark, and that’s assuming everyone even makes it to the top before nightfall.”

My face was doing a thing. Okay. Okay, fine.

Pin-Lee used the big strap that was usually for keeping the shelter wrapped up together, to attach Mensah to my back, looping the strap around Mensah's torso under her arms, then around my arms and around the back of my neck. This was not at all an ideally secure structure, but Gurathin was still working on his rope, and anyway I privately didn’t trust that flora-strand rope of his more than a nice synthetic gear strap. This was my stupid idea. Fuck.

Either we were actually going to do this, or we were going to give up on this pass altogether and try a different one.

Mensah put her arms locked over my shoulders and around my neck.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said, my knees bent, with one hand bracing on the cliff wall for balance. She hopped up onto my back, wrapping her legs around my waist. She was a lot heavier than my backpack had been, or the recycler was. I could feel her heat and sweat on my body, and she was so close that I could even smell her. It was a specific kind of human-sweat-smell, kind of warm, kind of sharp. And she could probably smell me too. Oh, great. I’d forgotten about that. I definitely didn’t smell good right now. Neither of us had properly bathed in a while. I tried not to think about it.

This scenario was… weird, because I don’t really like it when humans touch me most of the time. But I don’t really mind it if it’s an emergency scenario. But this wasn’t an emergency scenario, it was a practice scenario, but it was a survival scenario, but it wasn’t strictly necessary for survival because there were alternatives but the alternatives were bad…

Okay, whatever, stop thinking about it. As long as she could hold position for… twenty-five minutes max, the straps wouldn’t matter. And then we could take a break. And then another twenty-five back down.

I wedged my good foot into the fissure and started climbing.

The rhythm of it was familiar, but the added weight changed the balance dynamic. It made me nervous and more cautious. What had been an automatic and straightforward sprint to the top now felt completely different, loaded with gravity. My threat assessment was yelling at me like crazy. (Risk assessment didn’t seem even slightly perturbed, the idiot.) I had Mensah on my back and her life was in my hands. Every time I shifted my weight, every time I felt her adjust her grip slightly, felt her body tense and relax against mine, felt her breathing and her heart rate rising and falling, I was calculating what could happen if either of us slipped even slightly.

All told, it took twenty-two minutes and fifty-nine seconds to reach the top.

I pulled the both of us over the steep lip where rock became ice, and crawled carefully away from the edge, then collapsed flat on my front on the freezing ice. Mensah’s weight pressed down on my back, sticky from sweat and hot with human body temperature. Her heart was drumming so hard and close I could hear it with total clarity, and even feel her pulse through her skin. The ice felt kind of nice in contrast to that.

It was a bit claustrophobic lying there trapped under her body, but at the same time the sheer relief that she hadn’t fallen off my back to her death was so intense that I couldn’t bring myself to mind the close contact.

We lay there, silent for almost ten seconds, and then Mensah started laughing. The motion of her body shook through my torso, and her voice was so loud right in my ear it felt like my head was ringing with it.

It was so unexpected that I tried to roll over and scramble out from under her, only she was still strapped to me so I just jerked her with me.

“Wait, wait, stop,” she exclaimed, still gasping with laughter.

I stopped, freezing in place, the backup strap digging into my armpits. It had to be digging uncomfortably into her body, too. “Why are you laughing?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was higher than it usually was. “We’re alive. And we have to do it all again. It’s just…” Apparently she didn’t know what it was ‘just,’ because instead of finishing that thought, she said, “SecUnit, you’re incredible, do you know that? Just absolutely unbelievable.”

“Dr. Mensah…” I said. (I wanted to say, ‘Please, don’t say things like this to me when we’re tied together at the top of an icy cliff.’ But I didn’t say that.) I said, “Are you ready to go back down?”

I felt her steadying herself. Several slow breaths later, she said, “Yes.”

We got back down the cliff. When our feet touched the ground Pin-Lee practically screamed in excitement and relief (she’d clearly been holding back a lot of noise and commentary while I was climbing, which I appreciated). We got ourselves separated from each other, and Mensah and Pin-Lee embraced for what felt like a weirdly long time.

“Shit-the-bed almighty,” Pin-Lee whispered into the side of Mensah’s head. (Pin-Lee's hat had been knocked to the ground from the hug.) “Just watching that was terrifying.”

Mensah laughed a little, shaky, not nearly as loud as she’d been when we made it to the top.

They finally let go of each other, and Pin-Lee glanced at me for a moment like she was thinking about hugging me too, but then glanced away. She leaned down and picked up her hat.

“Let’s return to camp and discuss our plans tomorrow with everyone else,” Mensah said.

Chapter Text

The humans were up bright and early on cliff day. Judging by the restless noise inside the shelter during the night hours, they mostly hadn’t slept very well. Their chatter while packing up camp also had a bit of a nervous bent to it.

We made our way over to the foot of the cliffs, and then everybody craned their necks looking up.

“Last chance to wuss out,” Pin-Lee announced, loudly. Ratthi and Arada chuckled nervously. Gurathin just glared at her. His resting dour look was 10-20% more pronounced than usual.

“Let’s decide on the order,” Mensah said. “I’ll go up first.”

She looked expectantly at the group.

“Me next,” said Arada. Which, I hadn’t expected her to be so emphatic about it.

The remaining three looked at each other. There was a lot of facial and eyeball signaling going on that I didn’t understand, but then Gurathin let out a huge sigh and claimed third, followed by Pin-Lee and then finally Ratthi.

We also had a bunch of gear and crap for me to haul of the cliff face, so I started with those while the humans finished figuring out how they wanted to arrange their bodies and clothes and take snacks and bodily function breaks etc. It took me a couple trips to haul all the shit up there, and picking the route without any fragile humans aboard gave me some more practice at ironing out the climbing process.

And then we got Mensah hooked up to my back, and I started up.

We’d done this before already.

Sidenote but Mensah is a really great commander. I don’t think I’d really appreciated it when we first met. But the more time I spend with these humans the more I appreciate her. I’ve had so many contracts where the manager is just a real shitheel. There’s all sorts of ways for leadership to suck: abuse of power, general incompetence, lack of ethics, [doesnt care], poor maturity, spineless, cruel and greedy, etc. But Mensah somehow didn’t suck.

She wasn’t perfect, or anything. She was only human. I could tell that all the stress has been weighing on her. She’s had periods of moodiness and reticence, holding back her own opinions. She hid it pretty well from the group. I think everyone else was mostly interpreting it as stoicism and quiet thoughtfulness. But more than once I’d noticed her walk off in the midst of a conversation about logistics, or survival odds, or their home planet. She was pretending to have a bathroom break, but actually she would just stand out of sight of everyone and breathe heavily or mutter irritably to herself. (I could hear her. The others couldn’t.) I didn’t know her that well so my guess was she was trying to appear collected in front of her subordinates, but that there were some negative emotions and stress going on.

But anyway, she has a lot of little moments that I can’t help but respect. And big ones like this. Going first up the cliff. Twice.

I brought her up there just like yesterday, and then we detached ourselves from each other, and I went down to get Arada.

Arada’s weight settled differently on my back compared to Mensah. She was a bit lighter and bonier, and did a good job of balancing with me and not getting in the way of anything. She mostly kept totally still the whole way up, though she did this thing where she would take deep breaths and then hold it in a way that was kind of distracting.

Next was Gurathin.

Gurathin usually wore a full body environmental suit, but he’d swapped it out for just the respirator today. That was a good move as far as strapping him to my back went (the cheap flimsy suit could’ve been damaged from the safety strap digging into it), but bad news as far as the Me Never Touching Stinky Gurathin Agenda.

As Ratthi buckled him in, I could tell that Gurathin was desperately trying not to make this weird. He was not saying anything, and making only minimal physical movements. Great. I was also not going to say anything.

The thing was, I think Gurathin knew that I didn’t particularly like him. And now I was going to haul his ass up a cliff.

I’ve overseen company “trust building exercises” between reluctant colleagues with mild interpersonal beef before. This felt a lot like that, except if either of us fucked up, one or both of us might actually die, followed by probably the rest of the team. So the stakes were a lot higher.

“There we go!” Ratthi said, tightening the strap. Gurathin put his arms over my shoulders, crossing them in front of me, and hopped on.

This is the most awkward fucking day of my life. And that’s saying something.

We reached the top in total silence and record speed. Gurathin’s balance wasn’t as good as Arada’s, his weight kind of just went dead, like he was inanimate supplies getting slung around. I suspected he had his eyes closed but I wasn’t going to check or say anything about it.

When Pin-Lee hopped onto my back, her arms around my shoulders and neck were uncomfortably tight. I could hear her gritting her teeth the whole way up, and making sharp little hisses of breath at every jolt and quick movement. She was noticeably stress-sweating, I could smell it. I didn’t ask her if she was afraid of heights. This whole time she’d been fronting a sort of bravado in front of the others about the cliff. I didn’t think she’d take kindly to being questioned.

Mensah helped detach Pin-Lee from my back, and then I went down for Ratthi.

This last one was a little tricky, because there wasn’t anyone else to get the emergency strap in place. It took a little longer to do, and then I used my drone to triple-check that the latch was secure.

And then we were ready to go up.

Fuck. Final client. If I could just pull this off without making any catastrophic errors, I’d have all my humans up the cliff. And from there it would be… a short little jaunt across a stretch of treacherous ice, and then down a long and steep mountain slope, and then a few hundred kilometers of assorted planetary terrain. Easy peasy.

We got to the top. Great. Excellent. I hadn’t dropped even a single human to their death. If we could just finish this day off by getting everyone’s asses off the top of this icy rock without incident, I would be… well, “happy” was maybe too strong a word to use, but I would be marginally less disgruntled with the overall state of affairs.

Of course, while Gurathin was helping decouple Ratthi from my back, I noticed that Mensah was leaning over next to Pin-Lee, who was squatting on the ice, hugging her pack tightly, and breathing weird. Arada was digging through one of the bags—they’d mostly re-arranged all the Stuff to be carried again after I’d hauled it up here, but now Arada had almost completely unpacked a bag.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Pin-Lee doesn’t feel well,” Mensah said, calmly, like that wasn’t already self-evident.

“What’s wrong with her?”

Pin-Lee didn’t even snap something sarcastic or mean, which was how I knew something was really wrong. She was swallowing repeatedly, in the way humans do when they’re trying not to vomit.

“I think she doesn’t like heights,” Arada said. And Pin-Lee still didn’t say anything to contradict that, which was really starting to wig me out.

“It’s probably a panic attack,” Gurathin said.

“It’s not a panic attack,” I said. I was very familiar with what panic attacks looked like in humans, and while puking wasn’t out of the question, this didn't track with panic attacks I'd seen in the past.

“Got it!” Arada said, withdrawing the little container of emergency meds from the medkit. (Okay, so we were going to start packing that more accessibly starting immediately.) Arada pulled out a little bag and squinted at it.

“Crud, it’s a feed-label,” she said. “Let me find my interface—”

I stepped over (Ratthi was finally detached from me), and checked the feed label. “Anti-nausea, take one with water,” I translated.

Pin-Lee chose that moment to slump down and lie on the ice, covering her face with her hands.

“Pin-Lee, we have the meds,” Mensah said, gently, rubbing Pin-Lee’s upper back. “Can you get up?”

Pin-Lee swallowed, throat bobbing.

“Something is wrong,” I said. (I know, it was obvious, but the humans didn’t seem to be taking this very seriously.) “Does anyone have a first aid module?”

“No. We assumed you would,” Gurathin said. "You don't?"

That was annoying. I’d deleted any human medical knowledge to make room for my media, but there was no way I could admit that. But also, I’m pretty sure any company first aid module would be shit anyway. They were the humans, surely they should be the ones to keep this data on file for themselves.

"No, I don't."

“I wish Overse were here,” Arada whispered. Oh no. Arada was looking suddenly teary. “She would know what to do.”

Mensah managed to talk Pin-Lee into taking the anti-nausea meds. Then we sat around for a while waiting for the meds to kick in. It was already high noon. There was only so much daylight to get out of this icy dump and back down to marginally less treacherous terrain.

Finally, Pin-Lee’s nausea subsided enough for her to stand up and pick up her pack. She was grumpy and curt and kept snapping short monosyllabic words at everyone, but at least she didn’t look like she was about to hurl her guts up any second. And then we started walking. I took the lead, to pick out a safe route. The ice and snowy shit was kind of melty and I didn’t trust that it wouldn’t collapse under somebody. I poked at the ice in front of me with my staff at every step.

We’d barely been walking for twenty minutes when Arada gasped for a break, and just sat down on the ice right there.

Fuck, what was wrong now?

Pin-Lee also sat down, and put her head in her knees. She was gulping again. Fantastic. I wasn't freaking out in the slightest, and I really hoped that it wasn't showing on my face either.

What the hell was going on with my humans?

Mensah, Ratthi, and Gurathin were all looking bewilderedly at each other. (Apparently, they had no idea what was going on either.)

“Are you cold?” I asked Arada. Because it was significantly chillier and windier up here than it was down in the valley. Everyone was wearing more clothes. Maybe this was some kind of human reaction to cold? I'd never seen that happen before, either.

“No… I just… need a second to… catch my breath,” Arada gasped.

My face was doing something. There was something deeply wrong with two of my humans, and maybe it was going to start happening to the others, too. But why was it only Pin-Lee and Arada? I glanced between each of my clients, trying to evaluate what could possibly be causing symptoms in some of them but not others.

Then it hit me.

“Arada, Pin-Lee,” I said, urgently, “Where are your respirators?” Pin-Lee wasn’t wearing hers, because she just hated wearing it. Arada wasn’t either, because of the skin infection thing on her face that was still healing. The other three were wearing theirs.

“Oh, shit,” Ratthi said. He immediately scrambled over to Arada’s bag and started unpacking it again.

“Fucking air quality?” Pin-Lee snarled. She still had her head between her legs. “Are you telling me I feel like scumshit because I’m breathing high-altitude poison?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“It might not be poison,” Mensah said. She was unpacking Pin-Lee’s pack, now. “It could be that there’s insufficient air. I didn’t realize that we might be at high enough altitude for this to happen…”

I’m sorry, what?

“How can there not be air?” I asked.

“It has to do with gravity,” Mensah explained. “A planet only has so much atmosphere, and it’s densest closer to the surface. The further up you go, the less concentrated the air is. And then when you reach space, there’s nothing.”

Huh. That might have been kind of interesting, except for the fact that my clients were apparently dying about it.

“Is that why it’s colder up here?” I asked. Gurathin was giving me a funny look. I didn’t know what that meant. So I was ignoring him.

“I suppose so,” Mensah said. “I dearly hope these respirators work, because if they can’t give us sufficiently concentrated oxygen, we’re going to have to go back down the cliff.”

“They must work,” Gurathin said, “The rest of us are fine.”

“You would think so,” Mensah muttered, “But I’m not wholly confident.”

Yeah. If going too high was as physiologically hazardous to human health as trying to cross an ocean, we were going to be shit out of luck. We’d have to backtrack all the way around this stupid fucking mountain range and try to figure out how to cross the waterless desert region. Which was also hazardous to human health, because no water = dying, and hot = dying. For fuck's sake, everything on this planet = dying.

Maybe this was an impossible task.

You know, this planet felt like enough of a death trap when I was wandering my ignorant ass around it all alone. Now that I had five terrifyingly fragile humans in tow, I was really starting to despair our chances of getting out of this alive.

We got the respirators onto Arada and Pin-Lee, and then sat around for a while waiting to see if they felt any better. We were losing a lot of time and it was making me nervous, not least because we only had so many hours to get our asses off this mountain before dark, but because I didn’t like the look of the clouds gathering on the horizon.

Arada caught her breath pretty fast with the respirator, but it took Pin-Lee a while to stop gagging.

“Fuck,” Pin-Lee announced, an hour later. She stomped up to her feet. “Fuck my whole ass. I’m human again.”

What a weird thing to say.

Mensah hugged her.

I watched the clouds.

Chapter Text

There was a forgiving slope on the other side of the pass that would take us down to a more human-friendly altitude. The problem was, in order to reach the slope, we had to traverse what turned out to be some very human-unfriendly terrain.

It was basically all ice, and rock, and ice on rock. There was also a freezing cold wind blasting us directly in the face, because of fucking course there was.

I took the lead so that I could scout out a route, and my humans had strict instructions to only follow exactly in my footsteps. This type of ice-and-rock terrain has this annoying tendency to be full of hidden cracks specifically designed for humans to fall in and die. So I went ahead, using my scans, my walking-pole, and my physical weight to test the ice.

Turns out, my shitty ass stub foot was not great for walking on ice. But whatever. My humans were also not great at walking on ice. It was extremely slow going. It was not made any easier by the slight uphills and downhills that made balancing even more difficult for the humans. There was some scooting-on-butts and cussing involved.

We were most of the way across the freezing windy ice ridge to the tantalizing gentle downslope, when Ratthi (fourth in line after me, Pin-Lee, and Arada), made a little “eek” noise about 0.4 seconds after the ice under his feet opened up and he dropped into an ice crevice.

So that was just fantastic. I don’t know why the ice crevice decided that Ratthi was the prey it wanted to eat, and not me, Pin-Lee, or Arada. I don’t know the minds or appetites of ice crevices.

Before Arada could turn around and scream, I’d vaulted over her head and into the crack after Ratthi.

He’d instinctually thrown his arms out, falling forward and flailing a lot against the ice crumbling around him, which marginally slowed the plummet/slide to his death, and which gave me the precious half-second I needed to catch up on his fall and grab him under the shoulder.

So, there we were. Partway down an ice crack. Darkness below our feet, because fucking hell it was a deep ice crack. I’d jammed my walking staff into the ice, pinning us against the wall of the crack. The staff was making a sad creaking noise. It wasn’t very strong—it was just cot poles strapped together, and they were not designed to hold up weight like this. I gingerly hoisted Ratthi up, and the staff creaked sharply. We probably had anywhere between two seconds and ten seconds before it gave way. Chunks of ice where still tumbling around us and onto us.

“Ratthi,” I said, using my calm soothing voice. I needed his attention for this next bit. Unfortunately he was wasting it by being all stiff-bodied and clutching at my torso while making a hissing noise, like air escaping from a punctured hatch.

He looked at me, wild-eyed.

I said, still using my calm soothing voice, “Let go of me. I’m going to throw you out of here.”

To Ratthi’s endless credit, he only wasted about 2 seconds processing that, and then he did let go of me.

I tightened my grip on my walking staff, and threw him.

Ratthi pitched upwards, the staff snapped, and I tumbled ass over head further into the crack.

Mensah and Gurathin, who’d been walking behind Ratthi, had sensibly scrambled away from the crack when it had opened up. Arada had just gotten around to turning and screaming. Pin-Lee was very stupidly backtracking towards the crack, which was when Ratthi emerged, catching more air than was really optimal, and then he came crashing back down on his front, nearly taking Arada out at the knees.

“Ratthi!” Arada exclaimed, crouching down and grabbing him. Then, “SecUnit!”

The others all followed her lead and started yelling and asking me if I was okay. Huh. That was weirdly nice of them. By now I was pretty far down the crack, spanning it with my arms, so at least I’d stopped falling even further.

I let my drone out from under my clothes (the air was calm enough in the crack to use it), to relay a message to Gurathin’s augments: “Tell everyone to stay put. Stay away from the crack. It’s going to take me a minute to get back up.”

“Stay put!” Gurathin yelled, and he even pointed at Pin-Lee, who was still stupidly heading towards the crack. “It says it’s coming up!”

You know, for all of their terrifying human frailties, it’s really nice working with clients who actually listen to me.

It took me longer than a minute to get back up. More like three minutes. (Look, it’s not very easy to climb out of an ice crack when your limbs don’t all work properly, okay?)

When I finally got back out, Arada and Pin-Lee grabbed at my arms (they had stayed put, but the moment I came within reach they both suddenly got all grabby, which was bewildering) and then Arada hugged me around the torso (which was completely alarming).

I said, “Dr. Arada, please let go of me.”

She was shaking a bit, but she listened, snatching her arms away. Pin-Lee also let go of my arm. Arada started fluttering her hands at me like she desperately wanted to touch me but was confusedly trying not to, and then she abruptly turned and hugged Ratthi instead. He was still sitting on the ice and holding one arm tucked against his chest. Shit. I’d broken his limb throwing him up here and landing him on his face. His face was also scraped up and bloody, and his respirator was broken and hanging around his neck. Fuck.

So there was a whole diversion where the humans got the medkit out to try and treat Ratthi’s arm and face, and I went around the crack to help Mensah and Gurathin navigate back around it.

I didn’t know how much time we had before the altitude sickness started affecting Ratthi, but we had no choice but to just keep going. Mensah said she would share her respirator with him. I was limping very badly and I didn’t have my walking staff anymore, so I leaned a hand on Pin-Lee’s shoulder and we walked that way.

And then a few hours later, the heavy clouds made good on their promise and started to dump freezing water on us.

It was still daylight, and we were still up on the windy cold icy rocky ridge, but there was no way we were going to make it all the way down to the valley under these conditions. Threat assessment figured that the odds of somebody slipping and dying had just tripled, and it didn’t know how to account for hypothermia.

We were almost out of the ice, though. If we could make it to the purely rocky stretch…

I pointed down at where the ice ended. It was exposed, and not totally flat. It was not an ideal spot. I could tell it was going to be windy as fuck. “We’re setting up the shelter there.”

Nobody argued.

It took us a whole hour of limping through the blasting wind and ice-rain to get to the rocky area. The humans fumbled a lot as they tried to set up the shelter—their hands were cold and the wind wasn’t helping. By the time they finally planted the shelter, everything was soaked and cold and I figured nothing would ever be warm and dry ever again. The shelter pitched against the wind, but it held thanks to the anchors in the rock. And then all the humans climbed inside.

Pin-Lee was the last one in, but she didn’t close the door behind her. It flapped loudly. I was about to tell her to close the fucking door already, but then she yelled at me.

“Get the FUCK in here, SecUnit!”

I stood there, icy water running down my body, having a staring match with Pin-Lee. She was scowling like crazy, and probably fighting not to use stronger language. She screwed up her face like she was going to yell at me again, but then Mensah put a hand across Pin-Lee’s chest, and leaned forward, poking her head out of the shelter.

“SecUnit,” Mensah said. Her voice was raised, but not a yell. I could still hear it over the cacophony of wind and water on the shelter. “Please come in.”

She was looking at me. I wasn’t looking at her face. It was too windy for my drone to be out, so I was looking at her shoulder.

Then she withdrew, leaving the door open.

After a second, I crouched down and went in, sealing the door behind me.

We spent the rest of the few hours of daylight and the whole night inside that shelter together. The storm raged. I don’t think the humans slept much. The wind kept flapping the whole shelter all over the place, and the noise of the storm battering the shelter was loud as fuck. I tuned down and filtered my auditory inputs, but the humans didn’t have that feature. Gurathin kept trading off his respirator with Ratthi every hour or so, though neither of them showed signs of sickness. I think everyone was wondering if we were going to be blown off the mountain and die bouncing down a cliff inside this shitty wet sack of a portable emergency shelter.

Everyone was lying huddled together, including me. It was not my favorite arrangement (all the touching. Eurgh.), but I guess I couldn’t let everyone die of hypothermia, so I upped my body temperature. I didn’t run the recycler that night, because I couldn’t spare the charge. Everyone was going to be hungry tomorrow.

Mensah was lying on one side of me, Gurathin was lying on my other side, Pin-Lee was kind of flopped across us at an angle with her head on my chest and her feet on Mensah’s legs, Ratthi was lying halfway on Gurathin, and Arada was on Ratthi’s other side. I think she was the only one who was actually fully asleep, faint snoring and everything, somehow. There were blankets and wet objects and shit all over the place. It was a big gross mess.

It was an hour before daybreak that the storm also started to break. The wind calmed way down and the precipitation on the shelter started sounded less like suppressing gunfire and more like quiet innocent pattering.

It was around that point that Mensah spoke, her voice soft. “May I ask why you always stay outside the shelter, SecUnit?”

I stared up at the shelter’s flexible ceiling. The fabric-stuff that the shelter was made of was rippling with the wind, though not nearly as heavily as it had been for most of the night. It was cold enough that water was freezing to the interior of the shelter surface, and the wind-ripples knocked it down as tiny showers of powder-ice.

“I’m keeping watch,” I said, also quietly. Apparently she needed me to state the obvious out loud.

Arada was still asleep. Ratthi might have also been asleep, it was hard to tell. Either way I don’t think he could hear me from the other side of Gurathin.

I was very aware of how keenly Gurathin and Pin-Lee were listening to us, though.

Mensah said, “Be as that may…” she trailed off for a bit. Then she started talking again. “It doesn’t seem fair for you to be working the whole night through, every night. Especially when the weather is bad. We could take turns keeping watch, if keeping watch is indeed important. What kinds of threats are you watching for?”

“Having the rest of you take watch in shifts is stupid. It would just interrupt your sleep, and humans are bad at security. I’m a SecUnit,” I said. Slowly. Spelling it out. I didn’t really understand why we were having this conversation. “It’s my job to make sure you are safe.”

Gurathin and Pin-Lee’s silence felt agonizing, now. I didn’t have my drone out, and it was dark but they might somehow notice if I did deploy it under such close quarters. So I couldn’t see their faces.

Mensah said, “Yes, but you are also our teammate. I worry about you being out in the cold and rain all by yourself.”

I felt my face do something weird.

Why would she say that? Why would she worry about me? I was the SecUnit. But it made me feel strange, like my insides were warm and melting. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t my heating system failing.

Gurathin made a “hm,” kind of agreeing noise.

We stayed like that, in a gross wet warm human pile on the floor of the frosty cold ass shitty emergency shelter, until the planetary sun started to rise, and the light began to glow through the thin walls.