Windchaser

(Over the zeroid waveband, Zero could hear the megazoids aboard excitedly complaining that they wanted to be out and helping; he told them to be patient (and to shush).)

Zeroids, by contrast, were fast and nimble and well-armed, and in theory more than capable of keeping tabs on the bus and shepherding it where their human superiors wanted it. Unfortunately they were also unfamiliar to most citizens, who seemed completely incapable of getting out of the flaming way. If Joe Public wasn’t being an obstacle because they didn’t know what the self-propelled little spheres were, and didn’t understand that just perhaps they were doing something important and needed to be given a clear path, then they were in the way because they were curious, and wanted a better look.

(That wasn’t to say Sergeant Major Zero was ever going to pass up a little positive human attention – especially if it was admiration for a job well done – but there was a time and a place for that, and in the middle of chasing martian androids was not it. Not like that screechy little twit in orbit would understand such things, mind you.)

The bus definitely had the unfair advantage in this. Everybody knew what a bus was, and no-one was going to stand around to admire it, even if there was an elderly alien in the driving seat. Zero surmised that having the emphatic mass of a double-decker come blundering noisily in your direction like a… all right, fairly slow unguided missile… was enough to make any human scramble out of the way.

The bus came screeching over set of red traffic lights on a crossroads, sideswiping a family car and sending it spinning into a van, which tried to swerve and took out a set of lights and another car – and completely blocking the road in the process. Most of the zeroid fleet immediately got trapped in the chaos of legs and wheels and angry honking.

Zero dodged his way through and watched the rear of the bus making a break for the countryside. He sighed to himself. Out of the fifteen deployed, three zeroids (himself included) had managed to keep pace with it. The rest were stuck in the traffic jam.

“Could do with a bit of help down here, lad,” he comm’ed at Spacehawk, leaving 23 and 78 to continue the chase.

“Oh, so now our help is acceptable?” 101 immediately snipped back.

Zero internalised an impatient sigh; trust 101 to waste time on being sanctimonious instead of just obeying an order for once in his life. “Calling for a strike from orbit to stop a bus seemed a tad heavy handed, before now, especially while it was still in the middle of a lot of little shops, see?” he growled. “Besides. It was just a little bus and you was a very long way away, up there.”

“Right, and I’m still a long way away and it’s still a little bus. What’s changed to make you trust me now?”

“Oh, I don’t know as I would go quite that far-…” Zero watched the rear of the bus dwindling down the road in front; 78 was already protesting that they needed help and where had everyone gone?

“Huh!”

“Buuut, well. We is running out of options. Yung-star caused an accident and my boys is caught up in the chaos. We doesn’t have anywhere convenient to deploy battletank, and Hawkwing needs to refuel. So… a little strike from orbit it is just going to have to be.” To save face, he added; “So we is going to have to trust you and your slightly wobbly distance rangefinding. But don’t worry – I’ll hold your hand, as it were.”

101’s voice took on a dangerous note. “Are you saying I can’t shoot straight?”

“I is saying, I’ll send you directions, then even you can’t miss.”

“I never miss! If I don’t hit something, it’s obviously all part of my careful tactics where I meant not to.”

There was a blink of vivid white from somewhere above, and a second or two later the earth erupted in a fountain of dirt and smoke.

The double-decker wobbled dramatically, but recovered and sped onwards.

“Like now?” Sergeant Major Zero synthesised an elaborate sigh into his communicator. “Come on, lad; I thought your boys was meant to be good shots? This is a whole flaming bus what you lot can’t seem to hit the side of!”

“Well you try hitting the side of a bus from hundreds of miles above it!” 101’s screech came over the radio, making Zero snicker to himself.

“Sounds like you is just making excuses for incompetence, to me.”

“Incom-! You-… What would you know about hitting anything with accuracy, anyway?! Let alone from orbit?? Because it takes skill, and expertise, to carry out a precision strike like this!”

Another of those flickers of white light and Spacehawk’s zeroid battery dropped another shot into the ground just ahead of the bus and slightly off-centre. It cored another gaping hole out of the road, easily deep enough to swallow the bus whole, and… completely unavoidable.

“And not just pelting something with bricks until it gives up!”

Yung-star promptly jumped on the brakes, if the hideous squeal of metal and plumes of smoke from the tyres were anything to go by, and came to a gentle stop right on the rim of the crater, two wheels dangling.

The bus teetered precariously on the rim for a handful of breathless seconds, before a chunk of dirt slid out from beneath its undercarriage and it finally toppled sideways into the chasm with a whunch and a further cloud of dust.

Yung-star emerged (wailing) from the driver’s-side window, scrabbled uselessly in the dirt for a moment before miraculously reaching the crater rim. Spotting the two zeroids close by, he fled. Squeaking excitedly at each other, 78 and 23 gave chase and rapidly began to converge on him.

A final (not-entirely-necessary) shot thumped down from orbit, and punched triumphantly into the side of the bus, perfectly centred on the faded advert pasted onto the side. A shower of hot, sparkling chips of metal blasted up out of the crater like a fountain of celebratory confetti.

“Thank you.” 101’s voice dropped back into Zero's ear, sounding very slightly smug. “Side of a bus: hit.”

It did feel a little absurd to claim that commanding an orbital battleship was a peaceful job, but unless the enemy was marauding around the neighbourhood, it really wasn’t the most onerous job – only for a couple of weeks every two months or so, on rotation, and mainly just so there was a little human oversight and reassurance for the twitchy NASA, because technically? The ship’s zeroid crew were more than capable of looking after things with minimal intervention. (And usually did, whether their humans were there or not.) When things were quiet, it gave the humans the opportunity to work on their own personal projects, without distractions. Mary had a couple of small canvasses in her bag right now, and a travel watercolour set, and plans to try out some new techniques she’d seen her favourite artists demonstrate.

But humans hadn’t evolved to live in orbit, and two weeks was by far and away enough for most of them. Even with the best artificial gravity, environment management and exercise machinery, most people still needed a little fresh air and the feel of the ground beneath the feet. (Not to mention, human company.) It was hard to totally relax knowing you were so far away from the protective bulk of your mother planet. Most officers were happy to let Lieutenant Hiro take most of the shifts – which was his preference anyway. With plenty of room for his plants and his experiments and his studies, Mary was happily convinced that Hiro would probably just live permanently in orbit and rarely return to earth, if they didn’t force him to under the guise of staff rotation – and now cautiously setting out on this new emotional adventure with 101? Well. He had even less reason to want to come down. So this was equal measures staff rotation, and intervention, Mary reasoned.

Treehawk docked automatically and allowed Mary into Spacehawk’s habitable zone. She stepped through the door onto the flight deck to find her two colleagues waiting expectantly for her. Hiro had pulled a stool up extremely close to 101’s perch and they were earnestly discussing something, heads together – in Japanese, if the residual snatch of overheard words were anything to go by.

“Hi Captain!” 101 got in first. “Welcome aboard!”

She smiled. “Hello, you two. Good to see you both.”

“It is good to see you too, Captain Falconer.” Hiro stood, and bowed his head, politely. “Although I regret that our time together will be so fleeting.”

“On this occasion, perhaps, but I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to catch up – when you come back from leave.” Mary gave him one of those looks, one brow crooked, and waggled a vaguely scolding finger.

With a laugh, Hiro took the hint, and slung his bag over his shoulder. “Of course. I shall not waste a second longer.” He patted the whole palm of his hand against 101’s top hemisphere, and the zeroid nudged up into his fingers. “Goodbye, Kyusu. Be good. I will see you soon.”

Compared to the bold, emotional 101, who absolutely wore his little synthetic heart for all to see and was as enthusiastically tactile as a small spherical robot with no hands could be, Hiro was never one for showy displays of affection – so the big, fond smile and the way his fingers lingered for just half a second longer than normal on the zeroid’s cowling probably counted as shouting his feelings from the rooftops.

Unable to wave, 101 wiggled excitedly on his perch. “Bye, H- Hiro! Missing you already!”

That hadn’t been a stammer – rather a heartbeat of hesitation. Mary strongly suspected that a different word – ‘honey’, possibly, knowing him – had been intended for that instant of awkwardness, before 101 unexpectedly got shy and bottled it, replacing it with his sweetheart’s name instead. She politely pretended not to have noticed. “Goodbye, Hiro. Enjoy your shore leave.”

“Thank you, captain. See you in two weeks – hopefully not sooner.”

The airlock hushed closed behind him.

“So, space sergeant.” Mary turned to face 101. “Could you give me a quick update before I bring my luggage through?”

“All is fine, captain. We haven’t picked up on any obvious activity on Mars for a little while.” 101 was trying to pay attention to her but kept looking behind her, anxiously. “We can’t say Zelda isn’t up to anything but nothing much has been happening lately so I guess we’ll have to just be ready for a surprise-”

Mary put her hands up. “It’s all right, Owun,” she reassured, knowing who specifically he was looking for. “I promise it’s just me. Zero didn’t feel any need to come along this time.”

He visibly sagged in relief. “Oh thank the stars- I-I mean… oh, that’s… a shame…?”

She smiled. “Far too quiet up here for our sergeant major if there’s no active offensive going on. You should know that by now.”

“Fair point, ma’am.” He inclined his head. “But one can never be too careful.” After a heartbeat, he added, quietly; “Does he know? About-… me and Hiro?”

“If you mean, have I told him? Then no. Absolutely not my place to do so.” Mary smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “But I do think he probably suspects. You’ve never made a huge effort to hide where your heart lies, after all, have you? And I think he might have… nudged Hiro in the right direction, just a little, when the three of you were on Mars.”

“Ugh. Blabbermouth,” 101 grumbled, quietly.

Mary laughed. “Aw. Not even the tiniest tickle of gratitude there?” she teased.

“That’s exactly the problem! It means I’m gonna have to thank him,” he groaned. “And he will never ever let me forget it for so much as a single microsecond.”

Mary’s laughter turned into a fond snort. “One of these days, you two will figure out how to be nice to each other, and the entire universe will breathe a huge sigh of relief.”

101 offered a sullen huh but any followup was lost to incomprehensible little zeroid noises.

“All right.” She gave him a knowing smile. “I think I might go and unpack, and make myself a cup of tea. You can do me a status report in the interim. Alert me if you see anything of concern?”

He squared himself up on his perch and gave a little salute with his brow hatch. “Ten-ten, captain!”

“Good lad.”

Personal quarters aboard Spacehawk were small but comfortable affairs. It didn’t take long to stow all her possessions in the wall-to-wall cupboards. (Hiro was the only one who had a permanent cabin aboard, and that was mostly because it was full of houseplants and finding new places for them all would probably have taken close to two weeks anyway.)

Spacehawk’s compact galley was not designed with haute cuisine in mind, either, but there was plenty of room for her teamaking supplies, and boiling water on tap. She’d purchased a new pack of her favourite loose leaves specially for this rotation, and in the satellite’s heavily-laundered air, it smelt amazing.

Tea in hand and comfortably settled, she finally rejoined 101 on the flight deck. He chirped an acknowledgement but otherwise remained quiet and busy, for now. She called up the report he’d compiled from all the rest of the observer zeroids aboard and a collection of monitoring satellites, and read over it, sipping her drink.

It genuinely was looking suspiciously quiet. Mary had no doubt that Zelda was plotting something, but for now didn’t feel inclined to look any gift horses in the mouth.

“So.” Instead she settled near a porthole, where she could see the earth rotating peacefully outside, and balanced her mug on the narrow sill. “How are you and Hiro getting on?”

101 looked at her for several heartbeats, cocked slightly to one side, parsing her words. “We are… yes. Good, I think?” he said, carefully. “Still figuring things out, mostly. But happy. Comfortable.” He made a little wistful hm! noise at the window, but at least was smiling. “This will be the longest he’s been away since we went to the theatre.”

“You didn’t want to go with him?” she wondered. “I’m sure we could have allowed it, this once.”

“No thank you, ma’am,” 101 confirmed, almost demurely, with a little shake of the head. “Earth is beautiful, but I prefer to admire it from a distance. Less wet dirt up here.” Then his smile brightened. “And anyway, Hiro’s only just down there. We’re not that far apart. He has an earbud so we can talk any time!”

“And I’m quite sure you will,” she laughed, then added, giving him a curious look; “What was that he called you, earlier? …’Kyusu’?”

“Hmm? Oh, that. Haha! It, um. It’s new?” 101 chuckled anxiously and glanced away. “It’s not an official thing yet. We’re just seeing if it fits. Hiro kinda said it mostly as a joke I think, but. I like it?”

“Does it mean anything?” she coaxed.

“It just, well. It, um. It.” He flashed her a sheepish smile before dropping his gaze back to the control panel. His words were soft. “It means teapot.”

“Ahh.” Understanding quickly dawned in Mary’s smile. “Because of this?” She gestured to the two bright jagged gold lines of polished solder marking out the zeroid’s kintsugi, arching up over the left side of his head. “Hiro did a good job there.”

“You think?” 101’s optics tracked upwards, as though trying to look at his own brow. “I mean, I like it! I think it’s beautiful! But I think I’m biased, too, because it was a gift, from my most favourite person in the entire universe.” Beat. “That is-… no offence, ma’am.”

“None taken, and I’m glad. When Hiro first told me what he was going to do, he was worried that you wouldn’t understand it,” she said, carefully. “That you’d perhaps think he just didn’t think you were important enough to be worth getting new parts. And that it probably wouldn’t help when ‘someone else’ inevitably teased you by saying so.”

“Oh but I know Hiro would never say that!” A flutter of hesitation. “…would he?”

“You really need to ask that?”

He just sat and looked quietly at her for several seconds.

“Humans are the masters of strange behaviour. It’s a lot to ask of you, to understand the illogical ways we sometimes think, when even we sometimes don’t understand each other. In the grand scheme of things, none of you are very old. There are some things that only come with experience, and none of you have a lot of that,” Mary elaborated. “But, I said I thought Hiro should go with his instinct, and trust that you’d get it. And even if you didn’t, all he had to do was explain. And I think we were right.”

101’s gaze fluttered side-to-side in that way she knew all zeroids tended to do when they were thinking hard. She waited quietly while he processed.

“People throw things away all the time, right?” he reasoned, slowly. “When they’re cheap, or easily replaced, or not valued. But if you have a thing that’s important, or valuable, or precious, then you care about it. Fix it, if it gets damaged. So even if something bad happens, it doesn’t mean something good can’t come out of it too. So… I guess that’s me?” He looked up at her, optimistically. “Right?”

Mary nodded, firmly. “That’s a very good interpretation.”

“Ha!” He gave a brief, contented little shimmy on his perch. “Thank you.”

After a while, and her second cup of tea, Mary realised that 101 was fidgeting.

The first time, she thought she’d imagined it, because when she glanced up, he was sitting quite still and patient, quietly getting on with his job as normal. The second time she was fairly certain she hadn’t imagined it, but he was still sitting quietly when she looked over.

On the third occasion, she didn’t look straight at him, but rather watched for a second or two from the corner of her eye.

He kept looking at her, as though he wanted to talk about something, but was having second thoughts and chickening out before managing to do so.

Finally, she looked up and caught him in the act, looking him square in the optical sensor.

“Oh!” He actually jumped, flinching his shutters halfway closed. With their processor speeds, zeroids were hard to startle, which all but proved he was preoccupied with something.

“Was something wrong?” she wondered.

“I… no, I… I had not realised you were paying that much attention, ma’am?”

“You were fidgeting. It was hard not to.”

“…hmm. Sorry.”

“Did you want to talk about something?”

“No-oo… I mean, not rrr-… I guess-… I just.” He studied the control panel in front of his perch. “Iii guess I wanted to say thank you? But I wasn’t sure how.”

Mary smiled. “Well, that sounds like quite a good way of saying it, to me.”

He laughed, anxiously, and didn’t elaborate.

“I’m not sure I’ve done anything recently worth being thanked for,” she went on, trying to encourage an explanation out of him.

He studied his control panel for a little longer, optics fluttering subtly from side to side while he thought. “You’ll tell me it’s silly.”

“You know I won’t laugh.”

“Well. I. It was… just for letting me talk to you, really. When I got all stupid and snivelly and didn’t know what to do after Hiro took me to the theatre.”

Mary moved her chair a little closer to his perch. She felt like she didn’t really want to have a conversation about something fairly sensitive by shouting it across the flight deck, even if they were the only two present. “You don’t need to thank me for that, Owun-”

“But I do! You didn’t have to do it. I don’t think anyone else would have. You could have told me I was making a fuss over nothing, to stop being pathetic, go home and get back to work.” He quirked onto an angle, voice softening. “But you were kind and you listened to me, without getting impatient and telling me I was being ridiculous, or to grow up and stop being a crybaby. That… zeroids are machines so-… I couldn’t be in love because I don’t have real feelings in the first place.”

Mary knew precisely which individuals he was referring to with those descriptions. She took a second to think what to say.

“You do so many kind things for us zeroids and I feel like I’ve just taken that for granted,” 101 went on, in the silence. He seemed to have found his flow, after all. “You gave me my name! My proper name, I mean. You speak up for us when we don’t quite get things right. You treat us like people. Like we’re not just… things, that are expendable.”

She looked meaningfully at the long strings of gold arching up over his top cowling; the scar that marked out where he’d been so catastrophically injured and come so close to dying, and the frantic scramble to save his life. “Nobody thinks any of you are expendable,” she reminded.

“…hm.” He glanced away.

The two command zeroids used to tease each other mercilessly about being scrapped – but hadn’t done so recently, Mary realised. Perhaps the idea had started to hit differently, now they were both growing a little more mature.

“I do mean it, though. I’ve had a lot to think about lately. First it was London, then the whole… cube thing. Then everything else. So thank you. For just… listening and accepting me. Giving me guidance without… acting like it was stupid for me to even be talking about it.” Another fidget. “Helping me be confident enough to talk to Hiro, when I wasn’t sure how he’d… if he would… be… interested?”

“Aw. I think you’re selling yourself a little short, don’t you? All I did was get you two in a room together. If there’s one thing you have never struck me as lacking? It’s confidence,” Mary said, then added in a more jocular tone, hoping to lighten the mood; “Maybe a little over-confident, when telling Zero where to stick his orders.”

“Hm. Maybe.” He smiled, although it looked strangely sad. “No offence, captain, but you’re human. This is all stuff you just know how to do, can take for granted as something you’re allowed to do. Emotions are just a thing you all have, and accept as normal.” He gave a soft, descending little chirp. “I don’t even know if mine are definitely real. Plenty of people tell me they aren’t. Maybe even my sentience isn’t real, you know? But they all feel real. And I’m not always sure what to do with them.” He hesitated, momentarily. “Sometimes I think I don’t really want them.”

Mary offered her hand, palm out; he gave a single little nod, and let her touch him, flattening her hand gently over his scar. His weight shifted as he leaned in against her.

“They just make things so confusing. I’m always thinking I’m doing things wrong,” he said, quietly, back to studying the control panel nearby. “Especially emotional stuff.”

“Even humans feel that way, a lot of the time. And that’s a good thing, isn’t it? To want to be sure you’re doing no harm?” she said, feeling his weight press into her palm. “And I think that you are all just… growing up. Working out what you have the potential within yourselves to be. Zeroids were all built to learn, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that you all have. Sometimes you won’t know what to do – and that’s just part of, dare I say it, being human. We don’t always know what to do, either.”

Of all the things she’d anticipated having a conversation about when she got up here, angsting with Owun over his emotions was probably not it, Mary recognised.

The space sergeant had been a bit of an outlier ever since he’d first come online. Some of it was definitely his programming, but having a specialised role in the fleet couldn’t account for all of it. Mary did sometimes wonder what the trigger had been. Some… joker of a technician, thinking they were being funny? Making a statement? Making a challenge? Daring senior officers to say they didn’t approve?

Or had 101 picked who he was for himself, after all? A thousand tiny individual options, a thousand tiny choices made, all coming together in this flamboyant, sassy little boy who wasn’t scared to let you know he had opinions, and for all that he might claim otherwise, not scared to let you know how he was feeling, either. And in the grand scheme of life? No stranger than the sarcastic Dix-Huit and his moustache, or the bombastic sergeant major’s newfound Welsh choral tendencies.

All just parts of life’s rich pattern, as Hiro would have said.

“Does it…” He shifted under her palm, peered up at her from beneath a canted brow. “Does it get any easier?”

“Easier? How do you mean?”

“I mean… do you ever feel like it? When you’re with Doctor Ninestein? Like… you say something because it’s quiet and think you ought to, but then it feels like you said the wrong thing.”

Surprise dropped a little adrenaline into her blood. She and Tiger had been keeping their own relationship – such as it was – fairly understated, but… perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that this zeroid in particular had picked up on it. She wondered just how long he’d actually been stewing over all this without daring to say anything, struggling to get clues from the behaviour of his humans.

He apparently felt the subtle change in her heart rate, where her hand still pressed against him, and deflated a little. “Sorry. I shouldn’t snoop.”

“No, no. You just surprised me. I… hadn’t realised anyone had noticed – let alone a zeroid.” She drew a breath and let it out slowly, then found a small smile. “That’s just part and parcel of being in love, I think,” she replied, carefully, using her thumb to outline his scar. “Sometimes you make missteps along the way. You just… make sure you apologise, and don’t do it again next time?”

“But you always know the right thing to say!”

“Oh, I definitely didn’t always. It’s all just down to practice. I have quite a few years on you, remember? You’ll get the hang of it.”

He studied the deck, quiet and glum, rotated forwards on his axis. “It all seems so complicated.”

“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t.” She waited until he’d looked back up, and gave him a wry look, with a quirked eyebrow. “Do you imagine it’s less complicated when you’re in love with just one of nine identical clones?”

Another of those long pauses to think. “I don’t think I have a frame of reference for that.”

She laughed. “I don’t think anyone does! But, we figure it out, because that’s how life works.”

“Hm.” 101 hummed quietly and pressed tighter against her fingers. “Thank you for talking to me. I think I feel a little better? I said you always knew the right thing to say.”

Mary could feel his casing humming very slightly under her hand; in the quiet, she could hear a faint rumbling fan noise that sounded like it wasn’t actually unintentional.

He was… purring? Yes; actually purring. Like a small spherical housecat, enjoying the contact.

Well, whatever was happening, he needed to raise the alarm with the humans. He was… mostly confident they’d have hopefully at least noticed him leaving the meteorite, but they might not have spotted where he’d landed. And if they hadn’t seen his unexpected unintended departure, well, they’d need to know he wasn’t there steering the charge, any more. (Because like spacefire was he leaving that bossy little twerp off Spacehawk in charge!)

-Doctor Ninestein?- he started, and realised that something else felt… not quite right?

Scratch that “no damage” part – he couldn’t seem to find his antenna?

Great. That was exactly what Owun had done, as well, that time when he’d fallen off Spacehawk. Zero counted his blessings; at least he hadn’t gone and lost his memory as well.

Well, lad. You can’t be relaxing down here watching the clouds all day when there’s work to be done, he told himself, sternly.

He sat up and-

-wait.

Sat up?

Sat up?

For several seconds, fear froze him completely immobile.

Zeroids did not have the anatomy to just sit up.

What. Was going. On.

It was almost like…

…like he was…

…human.

But that was clearly ridiculous. Little spherical robots did not just become human, as if by magic. Zelda’s control over matter didn’t stretch that far.

Did it?

No. Ridiculous. It couldn’t. (And besides, why would she? Zelda wasn’t precisely renowned for giving her enemy incredible gifts.)

It must be a dream, he told himself, feeling panic welling up inside him. Something had happened on the meteorite, and he’d been injured, knocked out maybe, and was now being operated on by the dreaded Doctor Kiljoy, and having a weird fever-dream reaction to the anaesthetic program.

Yes, that must be it. It wouldn’t be the first time.

If he just sat very still and quiet, and concentrated, he’d manage to wake himself up.

He sat still, and concentrated hard, and waited.

And waited.

But the longer he waited, and the longer nothing continued to happen, with the passage of time marked only by the fluffy little clouds drifting past on the breeze, the less sure about it all he grew.

It all felt very weirdly convincing. Realer than it was entitled to be, for a dream. Certainly not something the average zeroid’s rudimentary imagination could have ever come up with.

Instead of the usual measurable feeling of his fans humming quietly inside him, he could feel air moving through a whole set of tubes that he hadn’t had before. In and out. Getting faster, too, the more he thought about it. The heavy rhythm of a pump, running hard enough to make him tremble.

Maybe it wasn’t a dream.

Now now. Come on, lad. Wake up, he scolded himself, still staring fixedly dead ahead. That’s all you have to do. It’s not real. It can’t be real.

A new thought sneaked up out of nowhere and latched into him; would it be terrible if it was?

Nothing technically actually bad had happened. It was confusing and wrong and he didn’t understand how or why, but...

Even if he somehow was magically unexpectedly miraculously human… no-one had attacked him. He hadn’t immediately crashed a processor, or whatever the human equivalent would be. He felt… all right, so he rather lacked a frame of reference, but figured it must be ‘fine’? If you discounted the pounding heart and shaky breathing – and both of those were getting better as he concentrated on calming down.

And he couldn’t deny that tingle of building excitement at the idea that he was human. He was human!

If he was being honest with himself, Zero had occasionally daydreamed about what it might be like. All right; more than occasionally. Quite a bit more.

Most of his colleagues assumed it was symbolic, when he said he wanted to be human – not actually physically human, but allowed to do the things humans took for granted, without being challenged or questioned. Feelings, intuition. Thinking for himself. Making decisions. (All the things Doctor Ninestein usually told him to stop doing.) For the same reason, there was always a decent tickle of resentment towards that little twit in orbit. Lieutenant Hiro had for a very long time absolutely pandered to his own zeroid, encouraging all Owun’s bad habits, even before the soppy pair had announced their relationship had taken a turn for the romantic. Perhaps, if Zero was more obviously human, he’d get the chance to prove himself just as worthy of such indulgences as well?

It wasn’t all hyperbole, either. If he looked human, too – not only would they take him seriously but think of all the incredible things he might be able to do, as well. Maybe now, the wonderful Captain Falconer would finally look at him with more than just gentle sympathy when he tried to do more than his body was capable of.

Like he’d seen other humans do, Zero took a long, steadying deep breath, and focused on the other additional body parts he didn’t remember having before. After several seconds focusing on maintaining a sense of calm, he managed to convince himself to look down, and found… yes, a torso. Hips. Legs. Feet. All clothed in a smart, well-fitted blue Terrahawks uniform.

He… was human.

He was human.

He brought his hands – hands! – up in front of him, and turned them quietly one way, then the other.

How-… how was that possible?

He flexed his fingers, watched the skin slide over the knuckles, crease across the palm – it couldn’t be possible. But he couldn’t explain it, or deny it, when they were very clearly attached to him. With one hand, he felt his careful way all the way along the opposing arm until he got to his shoulder, examining with careful pinches and squeezes. There was definitely structure beneath the fabric of the uniform; and not an android body, but one with muscles, and bones.

“Well.” Zero let his hands drop to his sides. “Thank you, I suppose? Whoever you are what did this. Maybe someday I’ll get to shake your hand for real.”

Onto more important matters – where the heck was he? It looked almost like a botanical garden – and an abandoned one, at that. As far as the eye could see were nothing but old greenhouses. Some with brick bases, some with metal roofs, some with tall chimneys, some with tumbledown little lean-to sheds attached, all filthy and opaque with pale green algae where there weren’t broken panes of glass. Brambles and ivy swarmed up and over the walls. Squat little trees laden with fruit that might have been pears or apples or something poked up between the greenhouses, hardly taller than the roofs of the derelict buildings.

Zero himself sat on an overgrown path made of brick pavers, covered with moss and sprinkled with tiny plants fighting their way up through the gaps. The grass growing either side was lush, deep green, and rather on the long side.

Otherwise, it all looked fairly well abandoned. The thick grass was not marred by bootprints, and aside from the greenhouses and paths, there were no other signs of human attendance – no tools, no potted plants, no trays of seedlings, not even any windblown litter.

“Well, lad, you can’t be sat down here in the dirt being maudlin all day, now, can you,” Zero told himself, trying to be stern. “You need to figure out what’s happened. Find your humans and warn them something strange is going on. So pull yourself together, now.”

After taking a long, steadying breath, Zero made his first attempt at getting to his feet – first rolling onto his knees, and then pushing himself all the way upright. He fell straight onto his backside twice and was forced to crawl in a most undignified way over to the closest greenhouse, climbing up a doorframe and using it to stabilise himself. He wobbled precariously when he finally managed to get all the way up to stand straight – balancing on two legs was harder than it looked, especially with such an unsupported, top-heavy structure. Humans made it look so easy!

He clung to the wooden upright for a few moments – face pressed so tight against it that he was anxious he’d get splinters, but not quite able to unlatch his fingers from where they’d clenched into the structure. That would definitely put a dampener on his enthusiasm, if he couldn’t keep from falling on his arse.

After a few moments, he bravely let his weight rock away from the greenhouse and onto his heels. He wobbled a bit, but stayed fairly upright. That’s it; good work. One step at a time, eh.

Zero took his chance to examine his new reflection in one of the unbroken panes of glass; a stocky, broad-shouldered male human, with pale skin and clipped-short dark hair that was silvering slightly at the temples. Perhaps not the tallest (although he didn’t have much to compare to except these greenhouses), and he imagined that Captain Falconer would probably be polite and say he had a rugby-player’s build. A few small crinkles at the corners of his eyes confirmed that he was somewhat on the more ‘mature’ side. Still. He nodded to himself, satisfied. Not some gorgeous sprightly little young thing but not bad, either, for a human. Smart. Dignified. Trustworthy.

The uniform he wore was a sort of royal blue (rather dignified, really), somewhere between the azure worn by Captain Falconer, and the darker navy hue Ninestein usually wore. On his arm, midway between shoulder and elbow and just below his Terrahawks insignia, were the downward-pointing chevrons proclaiming his rank. He felt impossibly smart and couldn’t help preening, just a little bit.

I’ll give you “incorrigible scruffball”, you jumped-up little spacehopper! Zero directed the venomous thought at Spacehawk’s command zeroid.

Flush with confidence, he let go of the greenhouse and after a second or two of teetering, arms whirling out at his sides, managed to keep his balance.

After a few hesitant shuffly steps in the right direction, he made his way back to the path, and tried to get his bearings. Just working out which country he was in would be enough, for now. Just needed to get out of the greenhouses, find some other humans, and ask if he could use their phone to call his superiors. Easy.

(Explaining “oh by the way, I’m human as well now” felt it might be less straightforward, but he decided to leave that until later, when fewer questions were queuing for his attention.)

But it was all fairly samey both ways. He couldn’t see much more than about fifty metres in any direction before the view was blocked by some obstacle or another – one of the old greenhouses; bits of a rotting shed; a saggy, overloaded, overgrown fruit tree; a metastasising mound of bramble.

It was quiet, too? No people, granted, but no birdsong, either. No barking dogs, no hum of bees, no scraping buzz of grasshoppers. No distant traffic; no whine of aircraft. Just the occasional creak of shifting timber, or sporadic rustling of the breeze through the trees. It unsettled him for reasons he couldn’t quiiite pin down.

“Hello?” he called. His voice sounded unnervingly loud, reflecting back at him off the greenhouses. He followed up with a softer; “Can anyone hear me?”

But nobody replied.

Zero squared his shoulders and picked an arbitrary direction, and bravely set off. Hopefully there’d be a sign somewhere to tell him where he was, like:

Property of some fancy university or another!

(Private property, keep off, trespassers will be shot)

No signs, though. Some of the greenhouse doors had little white placards on them, but whatever they might have once said had long since been washed off, or bleached away by the sun. He examined each one closely, just in case, before moving on, dispirited.

He’d just finished checking his eleventh greenhouse when he rounded a corner and spotted something out of place.

-and he froze.

Sprawled out in a tangle of limbs in the brambles, looking for all the world like they’d been dropped there from a great height, was another human.

Well. Zero assumed it was another human. All he could see from this angle were their legs, and booted feet, sticking out of the mass of flattened foliage.

It couldn’t possibly be just a disembodied pair of legs. Surely.

He tried not to cringe, pre-emptively, but went over to have a look anyway.

Thankfully, the closer he got, the more the body became visible, and it thankfully turned out not to be just a pair of unattached legs.

The stranger in the brambles was a skinny beanpole and Zero was confident he could best him if it came to a fight, but he reasoned that it didn’t pay to take unnecessary risks. He armed himself with a convenient stick. Just in case.

Lightly built in comparison to the sergeant major’s broad-shouldered solidity, the youth looked like he’d probably be tall, and somewhat delicate. He too wore a Terrahawks uniform, in a sort of pale turquoise – a slightly paler shade of bluey-green than the colour usually worn by Lieutenant Hiro, which told Zero precisely who this stranger probably was. The rest of the man’s looks supported the thesis; light brown skin, with darker freckles scattered liberally over his nose and cheeks, and a single shockingly pale patch that started in his left eyebrow and arched diagonally up over the top of his head. Most of his hair was black, except the streak of blonde that followed the line of white skin.

It looked suspiciously like it followed the same jagged line as a certain space sergeant’s kintsugi.

Zero swallowed the sigh of irritation. Of all the people he could be lost here with, it had to be this bossy, ungrateful little spaceball! He’d undoubtedly spend the entire time complaining and correcting him, and not once consider what an incredible gift he’d been given. Even Dicks Hewitt would have been tolerable – sarcasm aside, the French zeroid at least knew how to take an order.

Did he really what this sort of ‘company’? Very conveniently inconvenient if the only zeroids that had been affected were him and Owun (and no-one was that unlucky; perhaps someone was intentionally punishing them).

For a full five seconds, Zero had to fight the genuine urge to turn away and leave Owun in the brambles, without even checking if he was alive.

Come on, now, sergeant major, he felt he heard Captain Falconer say, gently scolding. Be the bigger man. Are you really going to leave that soft little sissy out here all on his own?

Zero sighed and let his arms dangle. Of course she’d probably say that, and she’d be right. Soppy twit would never survive without help. Perhaps Zero could at least feel better about himself by saving his life.

Besides, two brains would be better than one at figuring this out, particularly when they were perhaps not the most spectacularly intelligent of zeroid brains? And maybe-… well, maybe if he realised they were both stuck in the same situation and needed each other, and he didn’t get all snippy and know-it-all about everything, Owun wouldn’t be the worst company.

Zero crossed his fingers and sent a silent optimistic little plea to whichever deity might be listening.

Probably a little more aggressively than needed, but unable to help himself, Zero leaned closer and poked Owun with the stick.

The other human woke with a sharp, startled intake of breath, and immediately sat up. For several heartbeats, he just stared, frozen, breath hitching.

“All right, lad?” Zero asked, warily.

The youngster startled and his wide-eyed gaze shot over to him. Hearing the sergeant major’s voice coming from someone who most definitely did not look like the sergeant major, he recoiled, very slightly, his hands automatically coming up in a slightly defensive posture – seeing them in the periphery of his vision made him jump, with a little yelp of alarm, as though he was being attacked by some small animal.

Upon recognising that the hands were attached to him, the startled sound turned into a more genuine cry of fear.

…which only got louder and more scared as he recognised his own voice as the one wailing. “Zero? Zero what’s happening? Oh god what’s happening-” His words broke into sharp whimpers of fright. “Oh, help-! Oh help-”

“Hey. Hey!” Zero waved his arms, trying to fruitlessly to get his attention back. “Look at me – look at me. Hey!”

Owun scarcely paid him any attention, entirely preoccupied with all those extra body parts he was now the proud owner of. He didn’t seem to know what to do with them – scrambling backwards deeper into the bramble patch, arms out in front of him as though he could somehow leave them behind. “What’s happening, what’s happening, oh no, oh no no no what’s happening-” The words were turning into something midway between a sob and a groan. “Zero, what have you done-”

“What have I done-” Zero hastily swallowed down his annoyance. He increased his volume to his best drill-sergeant’s bark. “Space sergeant!”

That at least got his attention. Owun clamped both hands over his own mouth, trying to stifle his panic behind them, not entirely successfully. Frightened whuffs leaked out around his fingers.

“It’s all right. It’s all right!” Zero put his hands up in the air, palms out, as though trying to talk someone down off a roof. “Calm down, before you do yourself a mischief.” He crouched in front of the brambles, hands still up. “Just breathe, all right? Focus on that, for a bit.”

“Breathe-?!” came the incredulous little sob.

“Yes. Breathe. Your body does it automatically, but you’re messing it up by getting stressed out. I doesn’t want to have to deal with you hyperventilating or fainting or, or… whatever it is humans do when their breathing malfunctions.” Zero gestured meaninglessly with a hand, trying to conjure up what he wanted to say.

…but it looked rather like Owun was going to need a firm hand, because he was clearly not paying any attention.

Zero clapped his hands, sharply. “Come on, lad. I isn’t going to tell you again. Do the same as what I do. Now.” He wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to do if Owun didn’t do what he was told, but Zero made a big show of breathing in and out slowly anyway, and after a few frightened seconds more puffing, Owun thankfully got the message and (shakily) tried to breathe along with him.

“All right?” Zero prompted, once Owun finally no longer looked like he was going to self-destruct.

“What’s going on. What’s- why do we look like this? What’s going on?” Owun’s shaky words oozed out from behind the hands still over his mouth. “Oh god, Zero. Why do we look like this? Did you know they were doing this? Is-is this your fault? I know you always wanted to be human but-… how is-…”

“No. No, I don’t know. I woke up like this, just like you just did.” Zero edged closer, hands still slightly raised, placatory. “But we is all right. A bit funny-looking compared to normal, but alive and functioning. And we’ll figure this out, all right?”

Owun managed a single convulsive nod.

“Good lad.” Zero offered his hand, and for several seconds Owun just looked at it. “Well come on, chop chop,” the sergeant major chivvied. “On your feet, eh? Can’t be sitting around in the nettles all day.”

A heartbeat or two of thinking time elapsed. Owun couldn’t quite seem to work out where to put his hands. After trying to escape the shock of his new body, he had got himself well and truly snarled up in the brambles – a mass of living barbed wire that seemed inclined to hang onto him forever. “I think I’m stuck,” he said, faint and apologetic.

Zero added his other hand, and beckoned silently with the fingers of both. Come on.

After another heartbeat of staring, Owun slipped his slim hand into Zero’s. The hesitant fingers were cool and rather delicate, compared to the warmth of the sergeant major’s solid grip, and he almost flinched when Zero tightened his grip enough to pull him upright.

Zero leaned his weight back and pulled. Thorns snagged in the green uniform and tried to anchor Owun where he was, almost keeping him imprisoned for a few seconds, until Zero glared a little and pulled harder and the brambles all let go with a flurry of faint tearing sounds. The sudden injection of momentum launched both humans out across the path. Owun sprawled on his stomach on the grass, and Zero tripped all the way backwards into one of the greenhouse walls. The impact dislodged half the glass panels from their rotted frames, sending a cascade of glass crashing to the ground in a riot of hideous noise, cacophonously loud in the quiet of the abandoned garden. Zero jerked both arms up over his head and cringed away from it.

Silence soon resumed. For several seconds, they just stared at each other, huffing for breath.

“All right?” Zero prompted.

“Not dead, I guess?” Owun confirmed, miserably, before letting himself flop back onto his face in the grass. He covered the back of his neck with both hands. “Oh, god.” The words came out muffled by dirt.

That groan struck Zero as less terrified, and more just plain despairing.

“Come on.” Zero crouched, and prodded him in the shoulder. “Less of that, eh. We looks different but we is still zeroids, underneath it all. A pair of tough lads like us – yes, I does mean you too – we can survive this, eh? And figure it out. And fix it, if need be. But only if you stops laying around in the grass.”

“I’m not just laying around in the grass because I want to, Zero-” Owun protested, halfheartedly, but acquiesced.

Zero hauled him up to his feet, and for the first time realised how absurdly tall the young man was –he towered over the sergeant major, the top of whose head didn’t even come to his shoulder – but still looked rather like he’d blow away in a stiff breeze.

Owun teetered briefly, even less stable on his new legs than Zero had been, and the sergeant major found himself the recipient of an unwelcome hug when the youth fell against him, clutching at his shoulders for balance. He growled and jerked his face out from the uniformed embrace. “Steady on, lad. You trying to smother me, or what?”

“It’s harder than it looks!” Owun protested, swaying. “Just because you were an expert straight off the bat.” He overcompensated in the wrong direction and almost toppled backwards; Zero hastily yanked him forwards again.

After a minute or two of back-and-forth swaying, eventually they found Owun’s point of balance, and began carefully to try walking. Owun kept his fingers tight on Zero’s arm; the sergeant major wasn’t completely sure if it was actually helping, or just something of a safety blanket.

“How’s the weather up there?” Zero prompted.

“What?” Owun peered down at him.

“…I was making a little joke. Trying to lighten the mood.”

Owun stared for a second, computing, then said; “Huh.”

“Good job you got over your vertigo at last, eh.”

Owun sighed and looked away. “So what were you doing, before you found me?” The subject change made it crystal clear that he wasn’t enjoying Zero’s attempt at humour, but then he rarely did anyway.

“Honestly?” Zero looked down at the path they walked along, and watched their two sets of dark boots walking slowly but with increasing confidence. “I hadn’t been awake that long myself. Just long enough to get over the shock, and start exploring a little bit.”

“Shock?” Owun challenged, with a pout. “Really.”

This is all going perfectly to plan.

Now crack him open.

‘Crack him open’. (He couldn’t even shudder properly.) Was he laying here with whole chunks of brain missing? Just waiting to be dumped back outside, like so much garbage?

No. That didn’t feel quite right. There should have been alarms screaming in the silence inside his head, telling him if anything critical was missing, and there’s weren’t. But there wasn’t anything else, either? Just a conspicuous painful silence. The absence of alarms felt as bad as a million of them all going off at once.

He just couldn’t work out why.

Everything just… sort of… hurt, in a flat, abstract way that he couldn’t quite focus on. Dazed, and sick, and confused, and scared, and very very broken.

Maybe it would be nice just to go back to sleep, and not know anything about it all.

He was halfway there already – so heavy, and sluggish, like his processors were drowning in old engine oil, fans wallowing in the murk. He couldn’t get his shutters to open, and he couldn’t send a call for help – and nothing to do with that damned Faraday cage, he couldn’t even find his antenna. He absolutely couldn’t move. A silent prisoner in his own head.

Yes; going back to sleep where he could be blissfully unaware of any of this was sounding better and better by the second.

Your humans are all going to die if you just go back to sleep, he reminded himself. HIRO is going to die. Is this how you figured you’re going to ‘not just roll over’? By immediately giving up?

But I’m NOT giving up! 101 defended himself, feebly. It’s just, it’s all very hard when you’re already dead on the enemy’s lab bench?

Still such a drama queen, even when you’re dead! Fine. If you’re dead, there’s nothing left to lose, is there. Let’s come up with a plan that doesn’t involve crying and hiding. You’ve covered all the things you CAN’T do, so how about work out what you CAN?

Thoroughly chastised by his own pedantry, 101 got to work, combing through what would respond to him.

Lots of fiddly faffy not-terribly-helpful things seemed to still work – image processing software (amazing help when you’re blind), various calculations modules (like he needed help knowing how far away from safety he was), thousands of communications frequencies (but none of the ones that would actually save him).

His hearing was… sort of working? The first thing he’d been aware of after waking up had been sound – although it felt like he was a very long way away from his actual auditory sensors, at the wrong end of a long pipe packed full of damping gel. But it was working, so he focused on that, instead of all the scary nonfunctioning things piling up around him like a thousand invisible red flashing warnings.

Zelda’s voice echoed up out of nowhere – not very close by, or so it seemed. (Or maybe she was and he just couldn’t tell?) “Is everything going to plan?”

“Yes, mistress,” a voice replied, and 101 wasn’t sure if he was shocked or terrified or… actually not surprised at all at recognising his own voice as the one that had spoken. “Humans not suspect anything wrong.”

…that’s my voice that’s MY voice that’s my VOICE…

What did it mean, what did it mean. His speech had a weird, stiff cadence, missing words. Why was he speaking like that?

More importantly, how was he speaking like that? Words he didn’t understand the context behind, that he hadn’t planned to say, and completely unable to feel the circuits controlling them? Was he a passenger in his own head, listening along but locked out of his own software, powerless?

No, that wasn’t quite right either. The words came from too far away for them to have been spoken by him. Had she just cloned his voice?

“Then why is it taking you so long to send me the data? You should have already told us where the accursed Hawknest is!”

“Don’t speak language?” not-101 apologised, audibly cringing. “Computer code not Guk. Must learn it first.”

“Well hurry up about it. The longer you take over all this, the more likely they’re going to work out you’re not who you say you are.”

That horrible hollow sick feeling intensified at realising she’d replaced him.

That was why she’d kidnapped him, he realised. She didn’t want him; just his hardware. His voice.

His ability to get onto Spacehawk and roam around completely unchallenged.

Fear hit him like a bolt of lightning.

The urge to scream, terrified for his humans, his friends, bubbled up inside him.

The fact he couldn’t only intensified it.

what have I done what have I DONE

He could feel himself spiralling away in a program loop – the more he wanted to scream, the more garbled his diagnostics came back reporting that he couldn’t, that his vocal hardware wasn’t working, that it was looking for backups but was running out of processors, and… that just intensified the fear.

Every process overwhelmed as his systems automatically hunted for suitable alternatives, dedicating everything to the need to somehow vocalise how terrified he was.

-and everything completely destabilised – his gyroscopes skipped, and his hearing briefly cut out.

No. No! To have literally no way of perceiving anything about the world-

To be totally helpless in the grip of the enemy-

His processors teetered on the edge of whiting out altogether, drowning in failures.

[systems critical]

[reboot required]

Don’t you do that oh don’t you dare even THINK of doing that. He stamped the need to scream back down into a corner, fighting to stabilise his systems. You’ve done the worst possible job ever already, don’t you DARE go and faint like the little sissy Zero’s always telling everyone you are.

He clung to the one thing that was working, and tried to get some intelligible sounds to emerge from the murk of static. The more processors he tied up with this sort of useful doing stuff, the less there were available for him to panic with.

…yes. Yes, there was the harsh croon of Zelda’s voice again – still fuzzy and impossible pick out any words from but he homed in on it, pinning his attention onto it. Something to hold his focus that wasn’t all your friends are going to die and it’s all your fault.

“-so we’ll soon be out of easy communication range unless you use the ship’s antenna. Do you have everything you need?”

“Yes, mistress,” 101’s voice said, meekly.

Oh god why had he managed to tune back in on her at that moment. The real 101 felt his spirit plummet even further into the pit. We’ll be out of range. That meant they’d not only still got him, they’d taken him away, too. Couldn’t just dump him out on the moon, somewhere, oh no, far too easy – taking him with them, all the way back to Mars.

Another tarry black pulse of despair curled up out of nowhere and threatened to swamp him.

This was so unfair! How was he ever meant to fix this when every time he began to start to recover from the previous shock, yet another new horror got up and kicked him across the room?

He’d been kidnapped, for reasons he couldn’t determine. He was completely helpless – couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. (Wouldn’t have been totally surprised to find he was just a handful of loose memory cards on a bench somewhere.) And he’d put every single one of his friends in mortal danger and couldn’t even warn them.

What could he do.

What could he do.

…was he going to have to watch as everyone died?

No, no. Come on, honey. Focus. Please focus. Sounds are good, right? Sounds tie up your processors so you can’t panic. At least make a tiny bit of effort?

The voices had already all faded. It wasn’t quiet, but without visual inputs, it was hard to give any of the sounds context. Clonks and clicks. Engine noises. Fragments of speech, although too fuzzy and distant to make out any words – usually Yung-star, chuntering about something. Cystar’s high, grating laugh. Footsteps, somewhere in the distance. Some sounds so close by, echoing up out of the ship’s engineering, they vibrated right through him.

Zelda had to have kept him for a purpose. Was she planning on trying to get data out of him? Did he need to crash his memory? Scramble it so she couldn’t extract the information?

Oh, that would be so disappointing. After all the work Hiro had done, to have to kill himself anyway-

But then… he couldn’t quite work out how to? The hardware was missing.

Figures that you can’t even die properly.

That black tarpit of horror was still dragging him down. He was going to blow a fuse from the stress and then where would they all be.

Come on, get a grip, boy, he told himself, trying to be stern. You can figure this out. You’ve gotta figure this out. You’re a Terrahawk. It’s your job to be brave. You might be the very last thing standing between planet Earth and hideous doom.

She might have stolen you and done something terrible to you and you might not know WHAT or WHY but the absolute last thing you can let yourself do is roll over and take it. You said you were almost brave in London. So be brave now. Everyone’s life depends on it.

Hiro’s life depends on it.

101 turned his attention inwards. Can’t see. Can’t move. So what can you do.

There were circuits there. Some were familiar; some less so. Obviously a power source – a clunky, uncomfortable battery of some kind? So he couldn’t possibly just be a load of loose parts spread out on a lab bench. That meant he sort of almost had the capacity to at some point be functional again.

Then there were the other circuits, speaking a language he didn’t understand.

Alien hardware.

Oh, god.

Oh, god. (And he didn’t even have the option to shudder in horror at it.)

He couldn’t speak, because he didn’t have any sort of vocal processor connected up.

He could hiss, though-

Oh, fuck.

Seriously?

Fuck.

…

…

At last, 101 figured it out.

“No, no problem.” Hiro settled on the floor next to him. “I thought I would like to come and sit with you, while things are quiet.”

“Aw!” Owun’s smile lit and he reoriented himself to right-way-up again. “Thank you!”

Hiro didn’t really need to, because he immediately recognised the patch of stars as the one that had contained the wormhole to the mirror universe, but he asked anyway: “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing, really.” Owun rocked sideways until his weight pressed gently into Hiro’s side. “Just thinking.”

“A dangerous business, for all parties,” Hiro quipped, and got an indignant huh! in response. He smiled. “What were you thinking about?”

“I was wondering how many other us-es there might be, out there.”

“Other… us-es?” Hiro echoed, puzzled.

“You know. Other versions of us, in other universes. Like, that one we just escaped can’t be the only one, can it?” The zeroid made a sad little descending noise. “It would really suck if the only other universe with a lieutenant Hiro in it was such a horrible one.”

“Hmm.” Hiro swallowed hard over a memory of the excruciating chrome-coloured pain that had exploded in his head, after foolishly turning his back on his mirror self, and receiving a blow hard enough to fracture his skull as a reward.

(It hurt more that his mirror image had been such a cruel example of the worst of humanity. He almost wished he could have challenged the man more, to try and work out why he’d turned out that way, just to stop himself going down any similar dark paths. But then, he didn’t think his doppelganger was the sort to have indulged him in that sort of cosy chat, even if they’d been on better terms.)

“Well I hope he regrets it every day that we helped his zeroids escape,” Owun added, more venomously, with what could have almost been a growl. “And I especially hope he remember it was me that helped. Serve him right for being such a horrible glitch.”

Hiro found a small smile. “He was absolutely not expecting a little fireball like you, now, was he.”

“Nope!” Owun squeaked, gleefully. “Maybe their Doctor Ninestein forgot to say ‘expect the unexpected’ often enough.”

Hiro chuckled. “I think even that may not have helped!”

“So…” Owun prompted, after the companionable silence between them had stretched out a little longer than he preferred. “Do you think there might be others?”

“I hope you do not want a definitive answer,” Hiro mused, unconsciously staring at the same patch of starfield. “While I am no expert in the subject – I far prefer things I can actually quantify – I have heard it said that there could be as many parallel universes in existence as there have been choices, with a new one branching off at every point a decision is made.”

Owun’s eyes crossed. “I can’t even compute that. My subroutines say it’s like dividing by zero.”

Hiro laughed. “I cannot comprehend so large a number, either. Some of the changes would be so minor, we would probably never comprehend we were even in one.”

“…until we met ourselves.”

“Yes, that would be rather diagnostic!”

“Imagine two sergeant major Zeros to deal with, both at once. There’s gotta be better universes than that.”

“Well…” Hiro made a show of considering it, resting his chin on his hand. “There may be a universe where humans never evolved, and the planet is ruled by sophont dinosaurs.”

“They may still have ended up building zeroids. Just… scaly ones, with big teeth.”

“Frankly, the idea of someone as feisty as you having teeth scares me.” Hiro arched a brow at him.

“Pssh!” Owun took his turn to think. “There may be a universe where we defeated Zelda before she ever established a base on Mars!”

“But then I would have to deal with you being very bored. Would you really want to subject other-me to that?” Hiro teased. “There may be a universe where you became so tired of the sergeant major’s jokes, you chose to stay as a cube.”

That earned him a grumpy headbutt. “Ugh! Really?” Owun scolded, over Hiro’s laughter as the human tried (albeit not very hard) to push him away. “It sucked! Why would I ever want to do that?”

“Why indeed! At least your boys here generally behave themselves. A pack of cubes definitely would not do what they were told.”

“Ooh – there might be a universe where zeroids are in charge!” After a heartbeat of processing, Owun gave a little shudder. “Oh, that sounds worse than the one we just escaped from. I don’t like the idea of being in charge of humans.”

Hiro arched a brow at him.

“Oh shush. You know what I mean. I know I’m bossy. Giving instructions is one thing but being a commanding officer for the whole organisation? Being able to say no? To tell humans to go off somewhere they might be hurt? Imagine if the power went to my head.” Owun’s voice dwindled to something that was almost an apology. “I think I could easily be a very bad boyfriend.”

Hiro flattened his palm over the gold scar on the zeroid’s top hemisphere, allowing him to feel the calming sound of his heartbeat. “But you are not. Let us not get upset over hypotheticals,” he soothed, and added, trying to lighten the mood; “Zeroids in charge, hmm? I think I had a small sample of what that might be like, while under the care of the good Doctor Kiljoy, recently.” He leaned a little closer and added, conspiratorially; “is he so bad with you zeroids?”

“Ugh. Worse.” Owun glanced up at him, woebegone. “How is your head?” he asked, quietly, for what must have been the hundredth time so far that day. His weight increased just the tiniest fraction as he leaned in.

Hiro smiled, and let his arm drift around him instead. “Healing. I promise. I no longer feel like battletank is churning up the inside of it, although Doctor Ninestein says I must be careful to avoid ‘second impact syndrome’, so you will need to continue to be a steady driver for a little longer.”

Owun remained silent for a few more contemplative seconds, and when he spoke, his voice was sad. “I wonder how my ghost is.”

“Well, now he is out of that toxic environment, hopefully the… ‘other-you’ will find the confidence he needs to lead the others, now? I am quite sure that with time, he will prove he has every bit the same feisty spirit as you, Kyusu.”

“You think he might?” Owun hummed to himself. “Oh, I hope so. He was such a sad, mousy little thing, I almost didn’t want to let you leave him behind.” He approximated a small sigh. “I would have liked to have left a little bit of a wormhole open,” he confessed, quietly. “Just a teeny tiny bit. Just enough to talk through. Just to see how he’s getting on, in case he needed some guidance. Apart from a few other zeroids, he’s all on his own now, and in charge of them all.”

“You do not trust that Granny Zelda will help?”

Hiro’s hand on his casing was a stabilising influence. Owun sat quietly and thought about it, for a while. “Well… yeah, I… guess I do?” he said, at last. “But I trust me more. I mean, sure she’s a machine, but she’s not a zeroid. What if he needs help that only other zeroids would understand?”

“I think you need to give them more credit. He is still you, remember? Tough in all the ways that it counts.”

“…aw, honey.” Owun squirmed closer with an emphatic wiggle, like a small animal getting comfortable. “I definitely got lucky. This is absolutely the best of all the universes and I’m so glad it’s my one.”

Hiro patted his top hemisphere and listened as his zeroid began to purr his fans, quietly. “You think? There might be a universe where humans are good, and Zelda is good, and she joined earth society as an equal.”

The contents were made of a single sheet of coloured card, bright scarlet like a certain person’s browband, intricately cut into a filigree of interwoven stems and leaves and flowers. In a light curve around the bottom were etched the words Happy Birthday!, in both English and Japanese, using that same light application of a laser, just hot enough to make the words visible, but not go all the way through. (And a lot smaller, in the corner, love from Owun x)

Hiro laughed. “Why, this is beautiful. Wherever did you get this from?”

Owun looked away, sheepish. “I made it.”

Hiro looked more closely at him. “You did?”

“Yeah. I researched it a bit and got Captain Falconer to send me up the paper, then I used my laser to cut it. I... might have burned it a couple times before I made that one. My lines were too close together. I almost set the fire alarms off.” A little side to side shift of the optics, and a confession; “Yeah that was my fault there was fire suppressant powder everywhere when you came back from Earth, that time.”

Hiro smiled, fondly. “Well, I think it was worth it, even if I did need to help you clean up.” He took his comm from his pocket and lined up the camera. “Mary will love to see it what she unwittingly helped you with-”

“Oh! Um.” Owun gave him an unexpectedly serious look. “Please don’t tell anyone?”

“Why ever not? I would like to show it off!” Hiro smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring way. “You surely can’t be so worried about sergeant major-”

“No! No, it’s not that.”

“Then what...?”

Owun’s voice was small; close to a whisper. “People don’t like when robots try to do art. I didn’t even tell Captain Falconer why I wanted the paper. I only trust you, really. Because you’ll understand. I don’t want to get in trouble for it.”

“Well, of course I will not tell anyone if you don’t want me to. But I think people will forgive this? You will not be in trouble.” Hiro looked down at his gift again; the long swooping lines of the foliage, climbing a trellis in the background, studded with flowers. After a second of dithering, he put his comm back into his pocket.

“As soon as the first generative ‘artificial intelligence’ came along, people started using it to make pictures, right? But a lot of people didn’t like it. Said it was bad to have machines making art.”

“Hm. I am not quite sure the circumstances are the same. And perhaps... one large difference is in intent.” Hiro studied the intricately-cut gift in his hands. “We must make a distinction between a person making art, using skills they have chosen to learn, to make something beautiful to enrich their world, and someone generating an image using software built from works they had no permission to use, because – dare I say it – they want the kudos for the end product, without the work to get there.”

“Uh. So.” Owun’s eyes crossed, confused. “What does that make me? I didn’t really learn any skills. I just looked at how your plants grow and assembled a picture from it.”

“Well, you chose to make this. No-one told you to. And you did not base it on a dataset you were not entitled to use. And honestly? I am not even entirely sure I realised you were capable of something like this?”

Owun flustered a little. “Well I just it was I was looking for a birthday card and I saw some like that but none of them were quite right so I thought I could try and make one myself?”

“Well. You,” Hiro teased, propping the card up among his plants, “are forbidden from ever claiming you are not arty, ever again.”

“Well it’s not really very artistic, is it-” Owun started to protest, but then he could feel his human’s hands on his casing, and the soft heat of his lips against his kintsugi, and suddenly he’d forgotten how to work his vocaliser because all that would come out of it was weird static.

It did look a lot better, now thousands of years of baked-on sand had been carefully washed off. 101 would normally have felt highly satisfied at a good job well done, but right now just felt like he might be was making things harder for himself, because now it looked particularly like his description of the little cat no-one believed he’d actually seen.

“It’s not fair, Kitty. They all think I just got too hot and stressed out, and imagined you were a real cat,” the zeroid griped. “I mean… this does look like a real cat. Especially now! But I know this isn’t what I saw! And I’ve run about a squillion diagnostics and I can’t work out why I didn’t manage to capture a visual record I can show them when my systems are all perfect.”

It really was astonishing how closely the statue resembled the real feline he’d met in Egypt – all the way from the mottled brown stone that matched her dark tabby stripes, to the gold inlay that echoed the droplet of pale fur between her brows, and unusually small, for a cat.

101 synthesised a tinny little sigh-ing noise and rocked forwards on his axis to study the floor under the dainty paws. “I know the real you was just a cat, but I wish you could give me some ideas what to do. I know the Martians saw you! And I don’t think I’m reaching that much to say we’d have never beaten Zelda without you. You must be smarter than me, if nothing else.”

The statue, of course, remained silent.

Technically, the little stone cat should have gone off to a museum with the rest of the rescued antiquities, to be catalogued and studied, but Captain Falconer had secured an indeterminate loan of it, promising they’d send detailed scans on to the archaeologists in the meantime. Although 101 absolutely trusted that the human wasn’t mocking him, he wasn’t really sure why she’d gone to those lengths, just so he could borrow a three thousand year old kitty statue, either?

Maybe she just thought he’d like it, but also… Was it just so he could come to terms with the fact he hadn’t seen a real cat at all?

101 took the silence as an unintentional hint. “Maybe I shoulda just kept quiet, huh.” Another sigh. “Maybe I shouldn’t bother trying to convince anyone. Leave it as just another thing for them to laugh at me about. They’ll soon get bored of it.”

The jokes in question had evolved from figures it would be 101 needing to be rescued by a pussy to now he wants one of his own, eh? (He found those particularly infuriating because the innuendo slipped straight past most other zeroids. The sergeant major had a lot to flipping answer for.)

“Anyway. Seeing as I’m still talking to an ornament, maybe I did fry a connection or two, somewhere, huh.”

An unexpected little air movement sent a scrap of waste plastic film fluttering off down the maintenance passage.

Well that couldn’t be right? He stared after it. There was no wind on his spaceship, unless he turned the air conditioning on, and he’d intentionally left it turned off down here until he’d finished clearing up all the sand.

After settling briefly on the deck, the plastic scrap wafted back up into the air, and danced on down the tube, as though… being chased by something?

101 looked back at the statue.

Of course, it hadn’t moved. Had it?

He reviewed his memories a little more closely.

No, he hadn’t captured any visual records, and no, his humans had never acknowledged seeing her, but he’d seemingly allowed that to distract him, too.

Because when he’d closed his shutters, so he could roll along behind her, he’d been unable to pick her up on his sonar, either.

Her soft little feet had left no tracks in the sand.

And when she’d brushed up against him, rubbing her whiskered cheek against his in a little feline kiss, he’d felt only a flutter of a breeze.

A weird, cold sensation spread through his circuits, even though he knew the temperature hadn’t changed.

“No such thing as ghosts,” he told himself, firmly, staring into the statue’s vivid blue eyes.

Hiro had just finished eating and set his bowl aside when his zeroid came looking for him.

“You are being very cuddly, today,” he noted, letting Owun wriggle up under his arm.

“Well, obviously. It’s November. Duh.”

“…is there… something special about November…?”

“Oh, Hiro.” A little scold. “I can’t believe you forgot.”

Hiro finally looked down at him, with a subtle frown. “Forgot... what?”

A slightly reproachful crimson gaze looked back. “Well obviously today is the seventh anniversary of the time I first came online.” After a beat, he added; “It’s my birthday, silly.” And then, mostly playfully, but a little bit serious too; “...can’t believe you forgot.”

“Oh!” Hiro bit down on a smile and tried to act like it was a huge revelation. “Oh, that. Well. It seems like a fortunate coincidence that I brought this with me on my last return from Earth, then.” He picked something up from within the cupboard beside him, and put it down in front of them.

Wrapped in sparkly rainbow-coloured paper, it looked very much like a plant pot. Owun made a noise like a snort-laugh and bonked against him. “A plant. Thanks.”

Hiro chuckled and petted his crown. “As if I could ever forget your birthday, Kyusu. Especially as you have reminded me about it every two weeks for the last four months.”

Owun giggled sheepishly and looked away. “Iiiii thought you might not have noticed.”

“I always notice what you tell me. That is why we work well together.”

Owun’s weight increased very slightly as he leaned into Hiro’s side. “I think I might have sounded ungrateful?” he said, his words softening. “I didn’t mean to. I don’t think I was expecting an actual present. Just maybe like, a Happy Birthday. Thank you. This is so nice of you.”

“Well, I have been thinking about it since last year.” Hiro smiled, fondly. “I mean, seven whole years old, hmm.” He kept his fingers moving. “Positively prehistoric, in computer terms.”

“Ugh.” Owun wriggled as though trying to shake the human’s hand off. “Thanks. Just what I needed to hear.”

Hiro laughed. “You know you will always be my best friend, however old and cranky you get. And seven is an auspicious number, in many cultures. Perhaps this will be a lucky year for you.”

“Zelda will go away forever!” Owun responded, promptly. “But then I’d need a new job. Hm. Perhaps I haven’t thought that out so well?”

“Are you going to open your gift?”

Owun gave him a suspicious glance. “…is it a pumpkin?”

Hiro clucked his tongue in a scolding little tch and exaggerated a sigh.

“Sorry, sorry.” Owun laughed, and examined the sparkly paper carefully for a minute or two. It looked like it was mostly just cunningly folded, holding itself together, with one or two easily-accessible little snips of tape to finally secure the wrapping in place. He focused his laser and carefully cut through them, then nuzzled into the paper so it fell neatly open.

He rolled back a little to get a good look.

“Oh. Oh!”

It was not a plant, or indeed anything remotely botanical. Hiro smiled, and arched a brow, cheekily.

Instead, carefully stacked to give the illusion of a plantpot, were a little selection of tools and polishes, and in pride of place at the centre, folded like a piece of fabric origami, was a hat, obviously specially-made to fit him.

Hiro lowered his voice and said, conspiratorially; “I hope you are glad it is not a pumpkin.”

“Oh my stars! Help me put it on!” Owun wiggled excitedly.

Hiro picked up the fabric and let it come unfolded; a soft, rounded job, with a little peak at the front, in a textured dark red that set off his own scarlet. Optics huge, Owun just watched and ooh-ed quietly, for once unable to find any words at all.

“I did take some advice from Kate,” Hiro confessed, setting it down on the zeroid’s top hemisphere and ensuring it was square. “Although we were not sure how well you will be able to roll while wearing it?”

“I don’t care.” Owun replied, almost breathily, trying hard to look up at it. “It’s the best present ever.”

“I am glad! Happy birthday, Owun.” He pressed a small kiss to the top of his friend’s head, and smiled fondly at hearing him burst into tears. “And may we share many more. Daisuki da yo.”

(It really wasn’t so much an actual couch as an accumulation of big pillows; Hiro’s one concession towards untidiness on board. But they’d discovered it was easier for them to share than the actual couch; the zeroid’s concentrated mass tended to make the cushions on that sag in a weird way and it wasn’t very comfortable. This was lower to the ground, to boot, so if they were looking at something together, both could see and reach it.)

Hiro was glad of the company. Watching their home was always better when there was someone to share it with, even if 101 – Owun – usually made excuses that he wasn’t arty and didn’t have much of an opinion on how beautiful it was. (At least these days he’d got over his fear of heights, and was happy to at least enjoy looking at it again.)

On this occasion, the zeroid was being unusually quiet. Not that Hiro particularly minded; he valued the peaceful moments above all else, the times where he could let his mind go still, for a little while. Owun did rather tend to chatter, and sometimes the zeroid’s determination to fill what he considered to be awkward silences with inane conversation was a little… exhausting. Sometimes Hiro just wanted to be able to enjoy his company, without having to think too hard about anything.

The little robot was slowly getting the hang of it, and if snuggles were involved he was particularly likely to be quiet and content.

But he was rarely this silent, especially on his own initiative. It gave Hiro the tiniest niggle of anxiety about what his small friend might be thinking about. When Owun was quiet from the outset, it was often because he was puzzling through a problem. And when he didn’t invite Hiro to help him, it was because it was something on the emotional side, and he wasn’t sure how to broach it (or if he even should).

“What are you thinking about?” Hiro finally prompted.

Owun’s weight shifted very slightly as he leaned closer. “Oh, nothing. Just a thing I saw on TV.”

He tried to be offhand about it, but Hiro knew him too well to accept that it was just a TV program, because if it wasn’t bothering him in some way, he’d have bored Hiro with an exhaustive run-down about it already. “About?”

A long hesitation. “...about people who had been adopted.”

Suddenly the reasons for the zeroid’s unusual silence became clear.

“Some of them were a little like you? Where their parents left them somewhere to be found and cared for, but... didn’t tell anyone. So nobody knew who they were.”

Hiro sighed, and smiled, tiredly. “You do not have to mince your words, Owun. I was abandoned. I know that, and have… mostly made my peace with it. It does not hurt too badly to be reminded of it. And anyway, perhaps I have found my real family within Terrahawks?”

Owun hummed appreciatively and nudged against him.

“What was it about this program that left you so uncharacteristically deep in thought?” the human went on, teasingly.

A little anxious laugh. “Well it was about people that help other people find their birth families, if they’d been… left.”

Hiro realised what that meant the zeroid was specifically thinking about the fraction of a second before he asked it:

“Do you think you’ll ever want to find your birth parents?”

It wasn’t a question that came up often, although Hiro always expected to be asked it at some point. It wasn’t that the subject made him uneasy, exactly – it just opened questions that he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to face, just yet? Martian invaders aside, he was happy and comfortable in his current life. Destabilising things just for sake of his own curiosity felt like it might put everyone at risk, not just his personal mental health. Yes, his adopted ‘family’ was fairly small, if you counted only the humans, but a hundred friendly zeroids more than made up the numbers, and he was never short of company. And the elders at the temple where he’d been adopted were always willing to find time to talk, if he felt he needed guidance.

Among officers, Doctor Ninestein politely acted like there was absolutely nothing at all unusual about Hiro’s upbringing, and never brought it up – compared to being one of nine identical clones, for his part Hiro accepted that in the grand scheme of things, being raised by monks probably wasn’t that weird. Captain Falconer had mentioned it once, with the invitation that if he ever wanted to talk to her about it, she was always available, but left it at that.

Outside of that, it came up… once or twice a year? Mostly from new people he was meeting, who were finding out about it for the first time, to whom it was all a bit of a novelty. Normally Hiro would uneasily laugh it off, make some offhand noncommittal comment, and change the subject.

Coming from his best friend for the first time, it hit differently. He didn’t want to just brush him off, but wasn’t really sure what to say, either.

In the silence, Owun rocked backwards on his axis to peer up at him. “...Honey?” After a heartbeat, he recognised a possible faux pas, and added; “Oh.” His gaze wandered off, apologetic. “I’m sorry. Blame my big mouth. Pretend I didn’t say anything.”

“No, no. I have to confront it sometime.” Hiro found a watery smile and patted the zeroid’s top hemisphere. “You are not the first to ask, and I have thought about it, many times before now, but… without ever finding an answer I can be happy with.”

Owun sat quiet and expectant, watching him.

“I am not even sure what excuses I am telling myself. Most countries have good databases of genetics, now. I do not imagine for a single second that it would be difficult to search.”

“I can help you! If you want? No-one’s as quick at number-crunching as a zeroid, right?” When Hiro remained silent, Owun deflated, just a little. “…that wasn’t what you meant, was it.”

“No. Forgive me. It does all sound a little absurd, does it not? Consider the job we do – we face down some of the worst alien horrors the earth has ever faced, so often unflinchingly, and yet?” Hiro blew out a long, calming breath. “This is so simple by comparison and I am afraid to do it, in case… in case…” His words petered out into a sigh.

Owun summoned his best bullish attitude. “Well I can still help,” he said, decisively. “Even if it’s just being with you, so you’re not on your own. I know I’m not as good as Captain Falconer would be – I mean, I brought the subject up in the first place, like a proper blundering idiot, haha – but if you want me to, if you’re scared and need someone’s support?” He leaned just a little heavier against him. “You know I’ll be there, like, before you even need to ask. You help me all the time! I’d like to be able to help you back, sometimes.”

Hiro found him a small, sad smile. “Thank you. I hope you aren’t offended if it is a while before I feel able to take you up on it. Especially while I struggle to define exactly what my problem is. What it is I am scared of. Perhaps I just want to… bury my head in the sand, for a little longer. If I do not think about it, it does not exist.”

Owun’s gaze fluttered briefly over Hiro’s face, confused, but he didn’t speak.

“…I think it is called being in denial.”

“…oh. Oh?”

“I think… that… perhaps…” Hiro measured each word carefully before speaking it. “I have felt a little ashamed? A little embarrassed, even? To be too scared to even approach the question. I fear finding out who my parents were, in case... I’m not even sure. I find out they abandoned me for some terrible reason? Something bad in my genetics that meant they ran away from confronting it? They imagined something terrible in my future? They had a specific reason that only they knew, to not want me?”

He gazed sombrely out of the window and watched the sparkling Pacific sweep past beneath them. Somewhere down there, he presumed, on that incredible jewel of a planet, were the humans who had brought him into the world.

He wondered how many times he’d flown above them? Whether he’d ever encountered them, back home in Japan, and none of them had even realised it?

Of course, that all predicated on the proposition that they were still alive.

“I have to acknowledge that perhaps they saw no future for themselves. Perhaps they are already dead. So I-… I will never…” Finally giving voice to the words left his mouth feeling dry. He drew another long, shaky breath and counted slowly down in his head.

Why had it left him so unexpectedly upset – the idea they may be dead and he would never meet them? When he wasn’t even sure he ever wanted to? When he wasn’t even completely sure what he felt about being abandoned by them?

“Maybe it would be simplest if I just accept that I was un-...” His words caught, fractionally. “I was just unwanted. An accident that was easier to throw away. No paper trail. No responsibility. No ties.”

Owun’s weight increased as he leaned in, humming quietly. “Aw, don’t say that. Nobody would have done that to you. And I know it’s maybe not the same but you’re wanted by all of us! By me in particular.”

Hiro tried to focus on the pleasant white noise of the zeroid’s purring, and the stabilising weight where he pressed against him. He tucked up his knees and curled around, just a little.

“I wish I had your certainty.” The words felt prickly. Kept getting stuck in his throat. “However I try to justify it in my head, the fact remains that they abandoned a newborn baby on a mountainside in the depths of winter. How can I interpret that in any way other than my parents intending for me to die? And were just… too cowardly to do it themselves.” He pushed up his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, but it didn’t really feel like it helped.

“Maybe they were saving you,” Owun suggested, hesitantly, in the silence.

Glasses still propped up in his hair, Hiro squinted down at him. “Saving me?”

“Yeah. Maybe… maybe they were in trouble, with bad people, and didn’t want you to have any ties to them. They wanted you to be free and to grow up safe. So they put you somewhere they knew you’d be found!” Owun smiled optimistically up at his human. “If they wanted you to die, they would have left you where no-one would have found you. But they didn’t. They wanted you to be found, and knew you would be. And because no-one knows who you’re related to, no bad guys can use you to make your parents do bad things. Or use your parents to hurt you! Can you imagine if Zelda found out?”

Hiro quietly digested the idea. “So, you propose that my parents might be gangsters, with ties to the yakuza?”

For several seconds, they just stared at each other.

“...uh.” Owun nuzzled his cheek against him and looked away. “I didn’t consider that bit, maybe. I’m sorry. Me and my big mouth again.”

Hiro finally found a genuine smile, and stroked his free hand over his friend’s brow, listening as his purring picked back up. “Yes, you have a big mouth, Kyusu. We all know that!” He chuckled. “But let us not forget. On this occasion, I was the one who insisted you open it.”

“Ha ha! Yeah, I guess you did.” Owun bumped his fingers. “…does that mean I’m forgiven?”

The self-styled Queen of Mars had attached a miniaturised, modified ZEAF to an earthbound tanker while it was still way out beyond the Oort Cloud, then sat unnaturally quietly and patiently for the month or two it took the lumbering vehicle to get all the way back home. Spacehawk had spotted her energy signature the instant it came into range of their remote scanners, because maintaining her ship and its occupants in its miniaturised form required a phenomenal amount of power, but the zeroids hadn’t been able to spot any signs of Zelda actually approaching the ship, and couldn’t find the ZEAF and anyway, the tanker was such a bashed-up old shed leaking energy out of every damaged plasma conduit on her hull, they ultimately concluded it was a false positive.

And everyone had concluded, thank you very much. The zeroids might have collected and analysed the data, but the humans had been the ones to have the final say in the matter.

When the tanker operators had finally handed over their data, a whole week after it had arrived on Earth and long after Zelda had made her presence known, hacking lumps out of a newly-discovered ancient temple in Egypt (and the archaeologists who’d just started researching it)… Spacehawk’s crew had finally got their actual visual proof of Zelda approaching it.

Very clear visuals, too. (Sigh.)

Although the human didn’t say so, in so many words, Doctor Ninestein had looked distinctly unimpressed at the way the Martian androids had managed to get all the way to flaming Egypt on 101’s watch, and told him and Lieutenant Hiro to go join the mission out in the desert, instead of go back to space where they could actually be useful. Like a punishment, as if it was somehow exclusively his personal fault? For not somehow knowing it wasn’t a false positive, and not challenging the humans? As if he’d been more interested in having fun than doing a good job.

Huh.

(Of course, Sergeant Major Zero had loved that. Jumped-up little bossy-boots getting his just deserts for not doing his job properly, or something.)

((Deflated but determined not to let Zee-ro win, 101 had obediently gone along with it, although he’d been sulking hard at the same time and ignored all attempts at conversation, even from his humans.))

(((Granted, trying to prove the sergeant major wrong in the past had led to some unmitigated disasters, but he had a better feeling about this one.)))

((((Well. Originally he had. Now he wasn’t quite so certain.))))

So now here he was, barely conscious and hurting, in the heat and dust of the middle of nowhere in Egypt, deep underground in the tunnels beneath the newly-discovered temple-tomb-he-didn’t-even-really-know-what, without the smallest clue where he was, or more importantly where his beloved Hiro was.

Summed up in a single word?

This. Sucked.

No party was worth all this. (Was it?)

…something faint drifted to his struggling awareness, out of the shadows.

Just the faintest tickle of sound, but he latched onto it.

…

…Owun…

…

Huh. That was new. Was that a voice, calling his name?

And not his number – his name-name.

Everything was still unstable and multiple systems kept crashing and rebooting, but the voice felt good. Somehow familiar, even if he couldn’t place it. Optimistic, too – he knew that even if she’d bothered to learn his name, Zelda wouldn’t use it, which meant probably (hopefully) this was a friend.

He tried to pin his attention onto it – use it as a beacon to guide him out of the fog.

…Owun-!...

He didn’t recognise it. It definitely wasn’t one of his friends. He wanted to cross-reference it with his sound archives but his searches were still crashing. Whatever flavour of hideous electromagnetic field he’d been kicked through, it had left him feeling thoroughly scrambled.

Focus on the important stuff first (move, shoot, find Hiro), he told himself; luxuries like being clever and figuring stuff out could come later.

How had he actually got here anyway?

He’d been assigned as part of the little party looking for Zelda, in the subterranean temple complex she’d taken over for her base. The evicted archaeologists had described it as a bit of a maze.

Last Owun remembered for definite was Yung-star appearing out of nowhere and bestowing upon him a good solid kick to the head, before he could alter his weight, sending him careening off down a dark tunnel, and… falling down a hole.

Great.

Whatever certain people might say, he didn’t mind the dark – he saw a lot of it, living in orbit, every time his home swept around into the shadow of the Earth, which it did multiple times a day. Not to mention, if he needed it, he had an inbuilt little light tucked inside his cowling, and he didn’t need the visible spectrum to ‘see’ anyway.

No, the dark was just fine.

He did mind being stuck at the bottom of a hole, under a creepy old pyramid-temple-whateveritwas, out in the middle of the Egyptian desert, with no idea where his humans were.

Ugh.

He really hated Earth, sometimes.

OK, no, that was unfair. He loved Earth, it was his home and it was beautiful and his friends all lived there and he would look after it with every last flicker of power in his circuits.

He just didn’t like being in such close proximity to it, compared to the nice clean security of his beautiful ship up in orbit around it.

And especially sand. Ugh. Almost as bad as moondust for getting inside everything. He could already feel a fine dusty layer of it coating his exterior. Goodness only knew what his poor air filters would look like.

…come on, Owun. A touch of impatience had crept into the mystery voice. Time for you to work, now…

He still couldn’t place the speaker and her words seemed to be dropping into his auditory centre without touching his antenna in the process, which he didn’t quite understand. Zeroids chattered inaudibly like this all the time, but never bypassing the hardware that let him pick their signals up in the first place!

Yes; come on, Owun, he scolded himself. Don’t fuss about explaining it. The quicker you fix this the quicker you can go home and get all this sand washed off. Hiro can explain it to you later.

He managed to find enough energy to work his systems, and drew his shutters open.

It… wasn’t quite so dark as he’d been expecting? It should have been completely totally dark, down in these tunnels so far from sunlight, but the walls were suffused with a very dim golden light. Like… several thousand year old candle-light.

Ridiculous. Even if they had phosphorescent paint three thousand years ago, it wouldn’t still be glowing now.

But it was. And brightly enough that he immediately had to dial down his optical sensitivity to avoid overloading the sensors.

It took a second to focus, and-

Less than a handsbreadth in front of him, staring him acutely in the eye, was a small cat.

“Oh!” He jumped, startled, and rolled back a whole rotation, bonking into the wall.

The little animal just looked back at him, inscrutably. It sat primly on the sand, like a little statue, all four paws tucked neatly in, and for an instant, he thought it was a statue, until its tailtip moved.

It was physically quite small, even for a cat, but with long limbs and a slim, tapering tail, and a regal, wedge-shaped head, rather like a small oriental shorthair. Rather than white with a dark brown face and paws, though, it was a rich mahogany brown all over, so deeply coloured that its faint tabby stripes almost disappeared against it, apart from a single pale patch on its forehead, like a droplet of gold between its brows. The blue eyes that stared unblinkingly at him were almost luminous, with their pupils expanded appealingly wide in the gloom.

At first he assumed it was feral, because there were no humans settlements so far out in the naked desert any more, but then he noticed it wore a collar, so must – somehow – be someone’s pet.

On the leather collar hung a little gold cross- no, wait, it had a loop at the top. An ankh? (He thought that was what it was called, although being underground meant he couldn’t get a signal to look it up.) A small bright gold ring went through its nose.

“Well how did you get down here?” He looked around himself. Just a featureless, mostly square tunnel, unfinished and rough-hewn, with a sand floor, stretching off in front and behind, where it vanished into the dark in both directions. The hole he’d presumably fallen down through was nowhere to be seen. He added; “How did I get down here?” After a beat, he added a further; “where even is ‘here’?”

The little cat’s ears swivelled like radar dishes, and it looked away into the distance down the tunnel behind him, before getting to its paws and walking past.

“Yeah yeah, I know I’m boring.” He sighed his annoyance and pouted after it, in that hurt way he’d perfected on his humans. (It had somewhat less effect on the cat.) He was used to getting teased by his fellow zeroids. Coming from a cat, it stung. “You don’t have to make it quite so obvious.”

It – she? – turned her head to briefly look back at him, before sitting neatly down in the middle of the corridor and curling her tail around over her toes.

Owun considered it, for a handful of microseconds. There was a slightly-above-zero possibility that he’d offended the little animal somehow and she was making a big deal out of how much she wasn’t interested in interacting with him. (Not that he’d know anything about that, of course.)

But that didn’t quite fit with the data he had. They’d barely interacted – not to mention, she… was a cat…?

So, was she staring off into the distance like that for a reason, instead? He approached, a rotation or two, wondering if he’d be able to spot what she was looking at. His optics seemed fine now his systems had (mostly) all restabilised, and would be just as sensitive as hers.

Frustratingly, that didn’t solve it either. In spite of flicking through various spectra, and even retuning into the infrared, he just couldn’t see what she might be looking at. It was just an empty tunnel.

Maybe she was watching a ghost. In some cultures it was the right time of year for it. He wasn’t sure he’d enjoy that, personally.

He parked next to her, staring off into nothing in the same direction, and synthesised a small, tinny electronic sigh. She twitched an ear.

He wasn’t really sure what he expected, but felt the need to check; “Was that you, earlier? Talking to me?”

The tip of her tail waved, very slightly, but she didn’t look at him.

Owun instantly felt stupid. “Of course it wasn’t you. You’re a cat. I’m not sure why I even asked.” He studied the three thousand year old sandy floor, still smooth and undisturbed by either cat pawprints or zeroid trails. “What should I do now, huh?” he wondered, gloomily, albeit mostly to himself. “Try and find my own way out? It’s all pretty quiet. Maybe the Martians are already gone and I’ve just been forgotten again.”

Either curious at all the sounds he was making, or just tired of listening to him grumble, the cat turned to him, and gave him a thorough sniffing before butting her head up against him, rubbing her cheek against his brow. He froze, slightly startled. She followed the cheekrub with the rest of her body, arching her flank against him as though trying to push him over, even though she was far too light to ever move him, ending with a little flick of the tailtip over his face.

“Well, you’re suddenly very friendly,” he said, turning to watch her as she circled back to him. “Does this mean I’m doing the right thing, following you around?”

Her fur had been cooler than he’d expected – and in spite of the way she’d leeeeaned into him in a long luxuriant stretch, he barely actually felt it?

Well, he defended himself, he’d never interacted with a feline before. Perhaps that was just how it was. They had fur, after all; a yielding barrier between their exterior and the body beneath. Humans were comparatively solid, and their skin carried enough charge to disrupt his electrostatic field so he could feel it, having no specific touch sensors laminated into his exterior. He could pick up all sorts of details out of it – plus it felt nice, of course! – but this? Had felt more like having a feather duster wafted over his exterior.

Humans made a big deal out of petting furry animals, but if this was what it was like, he couldn’t see the attraction in it. (To be fair, some of the humans he knew seemed to like petting zeroids as well, so… perhaps he should just stop trying to analyse human behaviour as if it should make sense.)

With one final flick of the tail, the cat set off at a leisurely amble down the tunnel.

Weirdly, the little pool of light seemed to have followed her, as though she was secretly carrying a candle. Owun was fairly confident he hadn’t seen a candle anywhere. And he wasn’t sure how a cat would carry it anyway? But he wasn’t all that keen on staying in the dark on his own, either.

“All right, then, Miss Kitty,” he said, fully aware that perhaps it wasn’t the most terribly logical thing to be doing, continuing to talk to a cat like this. He decided he’d save getting his circuits checked for when they were out of danger. “Lead the way.”

He obediently set off behind her. Perhaps the phosphorescent paint had been applied to her, not the walls? (Who paints a cat, Owun? But it was the best answer he had, and it made enough sense that it kept his logic circuits quiet.)

Unless he was looking at her in the visual spectrum, Kitty was tricky to see. Her soft feet made no sound and left no prints as she trotted ahead of him, and the walls interfered with his sonar, so he had to keep pausing to look where she was, make sure she hadn’t looped back in the opposite direction. Reassuringly, she was never too far ahead.

When she hesitated and looked up at the wall, it seemed different to the times she’d waited for him to catch up. Owun followed her gaze to realise their surroundings had changed their appearance, somewhat. Closest to him, the rough stone of the tunnel had been covered in plaster, still remarkably perfect for how old it was. A little further along, a loose handful of charcoal lines marked out the intended designs – at first loosely, then with more precision. People, possessions, animals. Cats.

At the distant limit of the candlelight, he could see where the real art started, where the charcoal lines had been transformed into neatly carved bas-relief scenes, enhanced with paint still surprisingly vivid after thousands of years. Every square centimetre of space carefully, delicately engraved with mathematically-precise humanoid figures, objects, and animals, with every spare space between them filled with columns and columns of hieroglyphs.

It felt odd, seeing words in a language he couldn’t read.

Owun came to a halt next to Kitty and looked up at what held her attention.

“Oh. Huh. Well, that’s not good, is it,” he said.

He knew Zelda had already defaced a number of the artefacts closer to the surface, engraving her leering face on top of what had once been elegant statues, as though proclaiming her right to rule over humanity by aligning herself with ancient gods and pharaohs. It was part of the reason they’d managed to track her down so easily. (Well, that and her attacking the archaeologists.)

The wall art down here hadn’t escaped her family’s clumsy attention, either.

Androids had the benefit of being able to replicate images very accurately, when they chose. Zelda’s face had been rendered over the top of the head of the pharaoh, in a deeply-engraved style that completely obliterated the regal features the figure had once had.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t been done in such a way it looked like it fitted. Like someone had opened a photograph in decades-old graphic design software and just pasted some lineart in on top, at a weird angle and resolution. Not only was it somehow almost pixellated, it was far too big.

And there was a caricature of Doctor Ninestein, as well – his face on top of that of the fallen enemy, hands up in supplication, beneath the Zelda-pharaoh’s sandals. His pasted-on face was at such an unnatural angle, staring straight out from the wall, it made his neck look way too long, as well as very broken.

So not only had she defaced priceless ancient artworks, she hadn’t even done it well. No wonder the humans were upset.

Kitty walked a close single orbit around Owun and with a stern flick of her tailtip across his optics, reminded him he wasn’t here to admire the handiwork of the ancient artisans. She trotted away down the tunnel.

“Right,” he confirmed, and set out behind her again.

After a few dozen metres further, the tunnel came to an abrupt end at a junction, with what might have been the rooms of a tomb on either side.

A tomb.

Owun hesitated on the threshold. Old temple tunnels were fine, but he didn’t like the idea of going blundering around in someone’s grave, however old and archaeologically important it might be.

What if there was a curse on it? Like in that creepy movie 22 had picked for them to watch yesterday?

How dare you disturb my eternal resting place! You that breaks the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose!

Kitty stepped out onto the floor of the grave, oblivious to the danger. Clinging close to the wall, he watched her, waiting fearfully for her to be struck down by some ghostly hand.

Don’t be silly. Ancient Egyptians had liked cats, he reminded himself. As if it wasn’t obvious, from how they were drawn all over the walls down here. Would they like zeroids too? Humans tended to treat him a bit like a little round cat, sometimes, and he’d learned how to generate a pretty decent purr with his fans. Would that be good enough to keep an angry ghost from smiting him?

Well I don’t think the humans three thousand years ago had zeroids in mind when they were setting curses, he reminded himself. You don’t have to worry about deadly diseases, either.

Probably don’t have to worry about deadly diseases.

And besides, Kitty was looking at him in a way that came across as distinctly impatient. What are you wasting time sitting there for?

What indeed. Bravely, he crossed the threshold.

When he wasn’t immediately fried by a bolt of lightning from a vengeful spirit, he allowed himself to relax, just enough to analyse the tomb a little more closely.

One thing it definitely was NOT was quiet as a grave.

Although he hadn’t actually seen any of the Martians yet, Owun finally had his first indication that they were indeed still down here. He could hear Zelda some way off in the distance, although she was too far away for him to make out what she was saying – just her screeching cackle, ringing out with all the subtlety of a hammer drill. He could hear Yung-star, too, gurgling away about something (probably sampling the walls, knowing him). Possibly Itstar as well? Their nasal sneer droning on in the background. But no Cystar – her laugh would have been immediately diagnostic. (Perhaps Zelda had just decided on this occasion that the fewer potential screw-ups, the better.)

Underneath all of it, he could hear the sharp repetitive tink tink tink of some form of metal on stone – a chisel? Or something. Presumably continuing their defacement of the artwork. 

It was hard to see very much, sometimes, from less than half a metre up off the floor, but the doorway had opened onto a cluttered antechamber, which the archaeologists had apparently been using for storage, before Zelda drove them out. One corner was occupied by a rickety stack of large wooden packing crates, rolls of protective wrap spilling out and cases for delicate antiquities piled on top. Heaps of protective dustsheets and dismantled trestle tables and scaffolding poles and small generators and floodlights littered the rest of the space.

More doors led off in front and to one side – the frontmost was lit with a stronger light and crossed with bold shadows, which supported his assumption that it was where the Martians were… doing whatever they were doing.

Miss Kitty flicked her tail and trotted ahead, before vanishing through the second doorway, with its much dimmer lighting. Hesitating every couple of rotations to check for vengeful gods, Owun anxiously followed her-

Thoroughly wrapped in fabric like an Ancient Egyptian mummy, apart from his eyes and nose, with his arms crossed over his chest, apparently asleep in a pile of old sacking, was someone very familiar.

“Oh!” Owun managed to restrain his squeak of alarm, and scurried hastily over. “Hiro!” He collided carefully with his human’s feet, hoping to wake him up. “Lieutenant Hiro?”

No response.

That didn’t feel very good.

The open-topped stone sarcophagus he could see nearby felt even less good.

For a single horrifying half a second, Owun almost convinced himself his sweetheart was already dead. Murdered by the Martians, who’d wrapped him far too tightly and stopped him breathing. He could feel his fans already kicking up a tiny anxious notch-

But no – Hiro still looked reassuringly warm, for a corpse. And if Owun focused really super hard, he could just hear his friend’s stifled breathing, rapid and very shallow but definitely there.

He gave him another, slightly sterner bump, leaning into his ankles.

There was the smallest shift in the human’s position.

Owun’s fans skipped again, but for a different reason, this time.

Quietly, he added, hopefully; “…honey? Come on. You can do it. Please wake up.”

After a little more careful nudging and bumping and generally being as annoying as possible, refusing to leave him alone to go back to a sleep he might never wake up from, Hiro finally stirred, flinching slightly at the light. He blinked dumbly at nothing for a second or two, confused and aching, then spotted what had woken him. Without his glasses, his vision was terrible, but Owun was pretty unmistakable, even as a set of strangely-yellowish blurs.

Hiro’s head briefly sagged in relief at seeing his friend. For a few seconds they just leaned against each other, relieved to be reunited.

Owun broke. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know you’d been hurt. I should have been more careful! Why do they always manage to sneak up on me? I promise I’m still good at my job!” He pressed his face into Hiro’s legs, trembling. “I’m so sorry.”

Hiro let him lean, for a few seconds, before nudging him gently with his knees, and shifted his shoulders, in a small but meaningful wriggle: can we please save the apologies until I am free?

“Right.” Owun gave himself a shake. “Right! Focus, focus.” It was all too hot down here to draw stabilising cool air through his fans, but he allowed himself a microsecond or two to ‘breathe’ anyway. “Right.”

He turned his attention to closely study the wrappings. Not bandages – they looked more like narrow strips torn from one of the dust sheets. That meant they’d be more resilient than soft linen. Owun couldn’t work out how they’d been secured, but wasn’t sure how he’d have dealt with knots anyway. “I think I’m going to have to cut these.”

Hiro gave him a very cautious look, and arched an eyebrow.

Owun knew what that meant: how are you going to hold a cutting implement? Assuming you can find one. “I have my laser!” he reassured. “If I set the focal distance really tight, I can snip through the fabric.”

Hiro’s cautious look turned much more wary, frowning slightly.

“I’ll be careful, I promise!” Owun leaned up against him. “But I have to get you out somehow and I don’t know if I’ll even find a knife, let alone be able to use it.”

Hiro just continued to look at him, for a handful of seconds, before sighing faintly, and giving a tiny nod.

The hesitation probably saved them both. Because in the silence, they both heard it – the clump of approaching boots.

Hiro’s eyes flew wide, and he tried hard to use only his gaze to gesture off behind himself.

Owun didn’t need telling twice. He hurtled for the mound of discarded archaeological supplies in the corner of the room so fast, it was as though he’d been shot from a cannon, and burrowed underneath it just in the nick of time.

Yung-star stood in the doorway for several silent seconds, surveying the scene, chisel still in hand.

“Trying to escape again?” he sneered. “I thought I heard something. You should know you will never win, you disgusting meat creature. You’re just too weak and stupid.” He advanced over the dusty floor. “You lack the precise mathematical purity of android brains, with only that… squishy wet excuse for a processor.” Leaning down, Yung-star gave Hiro a sharp tap on his forehead, making him flinch. “The people who built this place were right when they thought your brains were worthless organs. They preserved everything else, but not those.”

Not that he could do much else anyway, Hiro sat quietly, and hoped that looking suitably cowed by the android’s gloating would distract Yung-star enough that he didn’t suspect anyone else was down here.

“I suppose you want to know when your friends are coming to rescue you?”

Hiro couldn’t help the hopeful glance.

“Well, as soon as they agree to make the exchange, we’ll give you back to them.”

Hiro sensed that the android’s odd phrasing had been intentional, and didn’t necessarily mean he’d be alive when they gave him back.

“The accursed Ninestein has yet to agree to our terms, but he will. I promise you that. Especially when he sees what else we have planned for you.” Yung-star was already down in a crouch, and now leaned very close; so close that even Hiro could make out the smirk on his ancient face. “Did you know that back then? The human culture that built these temples? They were so primitive, they just scrraaped all their brains out down their noses.” He looked at the chisel he was holding very close to Hiro’s cheek. “…granted, they usually waited until the human had died first.”

Hiro turned his face away, shuddering feebly.

“But I’m sure it won’t make much difference if you’re not. You probably won’t be for very long after I shove this up into your skull, anyway. What do you think? Shall we try it?”

In the rear of the chamber, something in the pile of supplies came dislodged, and rolled to the floor with a clatter.

Hiro thought his heart might have just stopped. No. Owun-

“Is someone down here with you?” Yung-star narrowed his eyes and stood up. “Something? One of your idiotic little round slaves?” He advanced a handful of steps. “I hear you, Earth scum! Don’t think you can hide from me! You’ll never rescue this revolting specimen from the fate we have planned for him, and if you even try, we might just make it worse for him! And you!”

Silence. Not even a rustle.

“Come out now and I won’t kill yeeeouuuugh! Oh!” Yung-star’s threats turned into a strangled yelp of shock. “Oh no, oh ew! Mother! Help!” He recoiled with a flail of his arms, tripping backwards over his own feet and ending up on his rump. “There’s a thing in here-!” He scrabbled the rest of the way to the door on all fours.

Hiro wasn’t sure what the Martian was looking at, but it obviously wasn’t Owun. (They didn’t like any zeroids, seeing the little robots as traitors to their kind, but Zelda’s family had a particular dislike of a handful of individuals, and Owun was one of them. Yung-star would definitely not have run away from him.)

The long, low hiss was immediately diagnostic.

Hiro froze.

There was a snake down here.

“It doesn’t have any legs! Oh, ew! Go away, you horrible creature,” Yung-star gurgled, colliding with the doorframe as he crawled backwards into the antechamber. There was a heartbeat of silence while he tried in vain to recover his dignity, then he leaned around the wall. “Maybe it will save us the job and kill you for us! Painfully and horribly!”

His nerve failed him and he fled at the sound of another hiss.

Hiro sat very very still and quiet for a little while, after the sound of Yung-star’s running footsteps had faded into the general background hubbub. Although zeroids could be excellent sound mimics, Yung-star had definitely been reacting to a physical thing he could see. Without his glasses and in the dark, Hiro had no idea what or where it might be.

If there was a cobra down here, he doubted it would bite unless he gave it a reason to feel threatened. And he had absolutely no intention of doing that.

…it would be nice if his zeroid could come out of hiding and deal with it, though. Maybe use that laser he’d made a big deal of having and scare the reptile off.

Owun finally emerged from his hiding spot after a good thirty seconds of silence had passed.

“I’m not sure what that was that Yung-star didn’t like, but we better get you out of here before it comes back,” he whispered. “Or he does.”

Relieved that the snake had apparently already gone, Hiro nodded, stiffly.

Like a giant caterpillar preparing to pupate, the human managed to wriggle off the pile of sacking and a little closer to Owun’s level. It was a miracle he hadn’t already suffocated, because he was so well wrapped he could barely even squirm properly.

Owun came up close, and gave him a reassuring nudge, then found a good position where he could target the fabric with his cutting laser. “All right, honey, you just sit tight and don’t wiggle; I don’t want to zap you by mistake.”

Hiro mmh-ed an affirmative, barely louder than an exhalation.

The smell of charred fabric as Owun got to work wasn’t particularly pleasant, or all that reassuring. He trusted that the zeroid was keeping a close optic on what he was doing and wouldn’t end up setting the whole lot on fire because… yeah. At least it would save the Martians a job.

The sting of heat burning into the back of his hand made Hiro jump, with a sharp little intake of breath.

“I said, don’t wiggle-!” Owun half-scolded, before putting two and two together. “Oh, I zapped you! Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was trying so hard to be careful!” He tried hard to wriggle up against him, apologetically.

Hiro allowed him a few seconds snuggling, before patiently directing his attention back down onto his pinioned arms.

Owun gave him a very long wary look. “Are you sure? I might hurt you again.”

Hiro did the eyebrow thing and Owun recognised it was a silly question. Either he cut his bestie free, or Hiro would end up staying like this until somehow some other people found their way down here, and Owun could tell the human already wasn’t in great shape for it. His breathing was unsteady, shallow and sharp; even a zeroid knew positional asphyxia was a thing.

Owun recalibrated the laser’s focal point and even more carefully than before, began to cut.

It took a tortuous amount of time. Snip snip snip. Burning through just a few threads with each tiny pulse of superheated light. Snip snip snip. The Martians might return at any time and if they found him, well. It wouldn’t go well for either of them. But if Owun was quiet and methodical about it, not drawing attention by making lots of noise, perhaps they had a chance.

Snip snip snip.

And it was working. With each handful of threads cut through, Hiro could wriggle his bonds a little looser, until-

Suddenly the whole lot came loose from around his chest.

The breath Hiro took – long and shuddery as he properly filled his lungs for the first time in over an hour – spoke to his profound relief. He immediately went into a coughing fit, yanking the fabric off his face and trying desperately hard to stifle the noise in his hands.

Owun waited patiently for Hiro to catch his breath, then the human nodded and gave him a reassuring pat, and he got back to cutting.

It was a lot easier to get through the fabric on Hiro’s lower half now the human was able to help him. Some of it was just too well wrapped to easily remove, not to mention weirdly tacky, but all Hiro appeared to want to worry about right now was having two independently mobile legs again.

Finally freed, he sat forwards, legs crossed, and allowed himself time to just… breathe, for a moment or two.

Owun seized the opportunity and nuzzled carefully into his ankles. “Are you all right?” he wondered, quietly, peering up from beneath a lowered brow. “Are you hhh-… I mean. Did they hurt you?”

“Small blessings, but no. Once I have my breath back, I’m sure I will be fine.”

“…I’m sorry I zapped you.”

“You didn’t hurt me either. Just made me jump. Thank you, Kyusu.” Hiro let the zeroid lean into his legs, and flattened both hands gently across his top hemisphere, allowing him to hear the stabilising bump of his heartbeat through his palms. “I thought I might suffocate if I was restrained like that for much longer.”

Owun leaned into the reassuring hands, purring quietly.

“Such a relief to see you still in one piece, too,” Hiro added, softly. “The Martians were gloating over having killed you. Again.”

“Well, you know me. Bossy little square, always out to spoil everybody’s fun.” Owun chuckled, not entirely self-deprecatingly.

“I think that is a little unfair. You are only bossy some of the time,” Hiro said, fondly. “But, since she invited us both down here, perhaps we should go and spoil Zelda’s fun – together.”

That was at least rewarded with something like a more genuine smile. “How are we going to do that?”

“I am… not completely sure, yet. But we will come up with something. So long as we get a few minutes of thinking space.”

“For all the effort they went to, this doesn’t appear the most practical way of restraining someone,” Owun pointed out, studying the remnants of the fabric twisted around his friend’s legs. “When they could have just tied your wrists.”

“I concur.” Hiro sighed. “Given where we are, I think Itstar considered it amusing.” He found a smile, buried somewhere in all the worry, and encouraged it up to the surface. “Perhaps they had been watching some of the same bad movies you all have been. It is that time of year.”

The zeroid just said hmm and didn’t smile back. Scary movies were fine but he wasn’t entirely sure how much he was enjoying any of this, or how Hiro was apparently finding humour in it. And his gaze kept hunting involuntarily off in the direction of the stone coffin nearby. “I do hope they weren’t planning on putting you in that thing,” he said. “I’d have never got you out of there by myself.”

Hiro turned his head and joined him in looking at it. “I don’t think I would like to hypothesise. Fortunately, Zelda’s family have short attention spans, and are apparently quickly bored. Plus, I suspect they would have wanted to wait until they knew Doctor Ninestein would have to watch.”

“Yeah, I heard what Yung-star said about pulling brains out.” Owun shuddered involuntarily. “Disgusting. Did they really do that?”

“You were the one watching scary mummy movies yesterday, Owun.”

“I don’t think it covered that part?!”

Hiro looked optimistically up at the doorway. “Have you seen anyone else down here?”

“No. Only Miss Kitty.”

“Miss Kitty?”

“The cat?” Owun glanced around, but couldn’t see where his small friend had gone. “Hmm. She’s vanished? Oh, I hope that doesn’t mean Zelda’s got her-!”

Hiro frowned, confused and apparently not sure he was convinced ‘Miss Kitty’ existed. “I am sure she is probably fine…?” he suggested, warily.

“She led me here to you so I haven’t really looked for anyone else.” Owun glanced towards the doorway. “Do you think I should, while you recover?”

“No, no. Better we stay together, from now on. From the way Yung-star has been gloating, I would be fairly confident that we are the only ‘Earth scum’ down here at the moment. Apart from perhaps your mystery feline.”

“Why do you think no-one has come to try and save us yet?” Owun wondered, sadly.

“Just because we have not seen anyone, yet, it does not mean they haven’t tried. The plans the archaeologists showed us suggest we are quite deep underground. It must be difficult to get to us.”

“You don’t think maybe it’s on purpose?”

Hiro quirked an eyebrow.

“Yes, I mean you too, Space Sergeant. Go to Egypt with the rest,” Owun griped, quietly, in Doctor Ninestein’s voice. “You could do with a refresher on what you’re meant to do.” He reverted back to his usual tones. “Doesn’t feel like much of a refresher to me-”

Hiro flattened a symbolic palm over the zeroid’s mouth display, and said shush! but he was smiling while he did it. “He is not punishing you, my ridiculous little friend. And even if you had done something deserving of punishment, he would never be so cruel as to leave us both in the hands of the enemy.”

Owun said a quiet huh and looked away, sullen.

“Come on. The longer we sit here, the greater the chance Zelda will find we have escaped.” Hiro pushed himself to his feet, and tottered unsteadily into the wall. At Owun’s questioning chirp, he waved a hand. “Half blind, and my legs are sore. Forgive me. This may take a little getting used to…”

Slowly, with Owun shepherding anxiously around his ankles, Hiro made his way out of the little tomb chamber. A lot of the wrappings still clung to him, making his movements even more stiff, but Hiro ignored them, for now. Together they scuttled quietly through the shadows until they reached the large entrance chamber the Martians had chosen as their base.

Lurking in the doorway, just hidden from view behind a plastic equipment case, licking her forepaws and washing her whiskers, was a familiar little dark shape.

“Oh-!” Owun hastily swallowed the rest of his words, restraining the urge to verbalise his relief. Kitty! He bounded ahead, and collided carefully with her.

Kitty looked absolutely fine. She butted her head against him, rubbing cheeks, her whiskers tickling.

Hiro crouched low, bracing his hands against Owun’s top curve, and peeked around the doorframe. It was temporarily empty, although Martian voices were coming from the next room along; thankfully, no-one was paying attention. All three earthlings hid together behind one of the crates, hunkering down in the shadows.

“I overheard Yung-star talking to Zelda, when they thought I was unconscious,” Hiro whispered, in tones so hushed they were barely audible even to sensitive zeroid ears. “Apparently he thinks it’s very creepy down here, and wants to leave already.”

“Well I agree with him on that part,” Owun said, quietly. “Didn’t think I’d be running around in an actual grave at the end of October instead of Miss Kestrel’s Halloween party.”

“That was why I thought maybe we can use his unease to our advantage. Our enemies have never struck me as the bravest? If we allow them to think they have disturbed an ancient king, asleep under the sand, then perhaps we can get them to run away.”

Owun cocked onto an angle, puzzled. “How are we meant to do that?”

“A little plaster dust in my hair and some charcoal on my face, and in the gloom I will hopefully look appropriately prehistoric.” Hiro pursed his lips in an ironic smile. “It will help that I can’t see where I am walking, without my glasses.”

“You surely don’t think that’s going to convince anyone. And they might recognise you!”

Hiro pulled a strip of fabric down over his eyes; the weave was just loose enough that he could see a little through it. His hair stuck out fairly wildly. “We will just have to hope they don’t. And when you start making noises, they will be too distracted to pay me enough attention to do so.”

“…making noises?”

“Yes. You proved you can mimic Doctor Ninestein. Perhaps you can also mimic an actor, playing the role of a mummy. Some nice groaning, moaning, angry noises. Maybe pretend you are cursing them.”

“I- what? Which actor?”

Hiro quirked a brow at him. “Forgive me, but who was watching ‘Revenge of the Mummy’ last night? Are you trying to tell me you were not being quite so brave as you want us all to believe, and not actually watching?”

“Hey, it wasn’t my choice! Ducky picked! It was a terrible movie! And it’s hardly scientifically accurate, they’ll never fall for it-”

Hiro laughed in spite of himself and hastily stifled the noise in his hand. “No, perhaps not. But we can still draw some inspiration from it. All we have to do is startle them and get them to run away.”

Kitty leaned in against the zeroid, rubbing her cheek against him as though nodding along, watching Hiro intently.

“Fine. Miss Kitty seems to agree with you,” Owun grumbled, dourly. “I guess I’ll go look up ‘groaning mummy noises’.”

Hiro glanced back at him. “Are you still claiming to have a pet?”

“The-the cat! She’s right here!”

Kitty flicked her tailtip and tickled under Hiro’s chin – he swiped at it, as though batting away an insect. “You are being very strange. Perhaps the heat does not agree with you.”

Owun stared at him, mystified. “She’s right there!?”

But Hiro was already peering around the distant end of the box, looking down the long central gallery with its flanking statues, away towards the so-called King’s Chamber, where everything all vanished in the dark.

(Owun was a little bit hurt that Hiro apparently didn’t trust him about having an extra new helper. He’d adjusted Hiro’s glasses enough times to be more than 50% certain that the human’s eyes weren’t that bad, but it was hot and gloomy down here. Maybe human eyes did the same thing as electronic eyes and got fuzzy when it got too warm.)

((Which did make him question whether he was the one seeing things, after all. It was all very detailed and in-focus for a hallucination, so he really rather hoped not.))

Hiro ducked back behind the crate and raised a finger to his lips, and after an instant Owun heard what Hiro had seen – Zelda. The shadows of the approaching Martians cast up against the wall behind them.

With her back arched, ears flattened, and her tail puffed up like a bottlebrush, Kitty bounded out from their hiding place and vanished behind a board. Dust sheets flapped in her wake and a pile of wooden support blocks fell over.

Owun sucked back a squeak of alarm at the last microsecond. No; she was going to be caught!

Yung-star had already recoiled into Zelda. “Mother! Did you see that? There was a thing! A little black thing that ran behind the board! Oh, no. Do you think it was that snake again?”

Zelda gave him a little whack with her stick, although she didn’t look quite so confident as normal. “Don’t be absurd. Little black thing, indeed.”

“But there was-!”

“I saw nothing, meine grandmother,” Itstar interrupted, trying to sound like they were humouring their uncle but not quite carrying off all the unconcerned ease they wanted. “But… perhaps it would not be a waste of time to just check one of those ridiculous spheres has not got down here?”

“Huh. Fine. Yung-star? Help Itstar look…”

While the Martians were distracted, Hiro seized his chance and slipped away into the dark of the gallery. The Martians gave no indication they’d spotted him, still too busy looking for Kitty. Owun allowed himself a microsecond to ‘breathe’ again, before puzzling over the next problem.

‘Make noises.’

Sigh.

‘Making noises’ was all well and good, but if he made them using his own hardware, someone would come looking, and they’d find him in seconds.

No, he needed to find something remote that he could transmit his voice to. Would there be any electronics down here…? He was fairly sure the scientists had at least a bit of kit he might be able to hijack temporarily. He waited while the search moved off into another room, before beginning a little rummage of his own.

Under a sheet at the end of the crate, the zeroid found a computer – just a desktop, nothing fancy, humming quietly to itself, but at the centre of a whole rat’s nest of cables. Almost every port was occupied with a connection already. He glared at it, as though it had done something to personally affront him, and was dithering over whether he dared unplug something and whether that would set off an alarm and get the Martians coming running over… when he finally found an unoccupied socket.

Owun unspooled a plug and dropped himself into the system. Previous interactions with Zelda’s computer systems meant he did speak a little Guk, but this was all still gloriously earthly. Thank the stars for small mercies. He quickly rustled through the systems and checked what was available to him.

Most of it was imaging hardware – laser scanners, digital cameras, a woefully-inadequate security system. Useless, useless. What else-… aha, there. Were those walkie-talkies? He focused his attention on the traces he could see in the system. Yes – although not strictly walkie-talkies, they were wired into the system like a jerry-rigged intercom for the archaeologists to talk to each other while they worked.

One was, conveniently, right next to Yung-star’s head, where he had (warily) gone back to his chiselled graffiti.

Carefully, Owun sent a little packet of sound data to it.

It… crackled, very faintly. He watched through the CCTV lens, cautiously optimistic, as the Martian glanced at it, but apparently dismissed it.

OK, good. He sent something else; a soft, rasping wheeze of air, like a long slow exhale of ancient breath.

This time Yung-star actually jumped. He stared at the speaker for a very long time. “Mother?” There was a faint quail in his voice.

No response from Zelda. He looked around himself but apparently satisfied himself he was alone. Maybe just imagining things. Maybe mummy had just leaned on a control.

Owun waited until Yung-star had started work again. He concentrated hard on his memory of the actor’s voice; the hollow, groaning near-whisper of words from desiccated vocal cords, the whistle of air from paper-dry lungs.

“….whoo daares distuurb my eterrnal slummber…” he moaned, drawing out the sounds into an eerie lament of pain. The words whispered up from as many speakers as he could get hold of, like a desert breeze rustling through dead papyri.

Yung-star jumped so hard he dropped his chisel. “Motherrr…?” he called out, warily, looking around himself. “Was that you?”

Zelda’s voice came from a distant chamber. “Was what me, you useless cretin?”

Patting the floor around himself but refusing to look at what he was doing, just in case something should sneak up on him, Yung-star scrabbled uselessly for his chisel. “That-that voice. Something about… eternal slumber.” His hand landed on a paintbrush; not caring that it was the wrong implement, he clung to it with both hands, as though it was a weapon. “Didn’t you hear it?”

“First little black things, now voices. You will be getting your circuits thoroughly checked when we get home!”

Owun waited until an uneasy silence had descended again before whispering …you will never pass through Duat…

With a clunk and a crackle of grounding electricity, the lights all snapped off. Yung-star yelped in fright. Even Owun flinched in anticipation of getting zapped – had he really overloaded that generator? – but the short had apparently grounded already. That faint, three-thousand year old candle-light was all that remained.

Swinging a torch in front of them, splashing weird shadows up the wall behind Owun’s hiding place, Itstar led a very stompy Zelda back into the antechamber.

“What are you playing at, you insufferable moron?” she snapped, giving Yung-star another good whack from her cane. “We need to be able to see-”

“It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! It just went off!” Yung-star protested, flapping his hands at the generator as though that would somehow turn it back on, then glanced up over his mother’s shoulder and-… attempted to stuff his hands into his mouth to stifle a squeal of fear.

Zelda whirled to look in the same direction as her son. She too took a very large startled step back.

Approaching out of the gloom was a figure.

A shuffling, broken, twisted figure, dragging its feet behind it, reaching out for them as though pleading for help.

Or about to grab them.

Hiro had really outdone himself. The remains of his dust-sheet restraints hung in tatters around him like genuine ancient linen bandages, brown and frayed. That “bit of charcoal” had left his skin looking stiff and dried out, as dark brown as Kitty’s fur, his lips pulled back off his yellow teeth in a permanent rictus of anger. The fingers at the ends of the reaching arms were like blackened, naked bones. His limbs all contorted in strange ways that Owun wasn’t totally sure that human limbs were really meant to bend, and his back curved strangely to one side. A few straggly wisps of hair poked out through the bandages.

The twist of fabric over his eyes obviously hid some sort of electronic device, because his eyes were glowing. Only a murky orange-yellow, but shockingly bright in the depths of the tomb.

Equal measures alarmed and astonished, Owun watched Hiro stumble closer and almost forgot he had a job to do. He hastily spoke through the speakers again, deciding not to ask why they were still working when the flaming generator itself had turned off.

“…I haave alloowed my kaaa to ooccupy the khet of this youung maan you brought dowwn here.”

(Now what in spacefire did that mean, Owun? The words had just appeared right there in his vocal processor, fully formed, and he’d piped them straight through to the speakers without actually evaluating them.)

((Perhaps he’d heard them, in that movie. Yeah. That must be it. No real ghosts down here.))

“…hee will be the instruuument of your destruuctionn… yooouu that caame heere, to defiile and destrooy…”

The words were getting louder, without him specifically asking them to. Less of a rustle of dead reeds; more like the howl of a baking wind scouring down a canyon.

A dark mass darted through the shadows, like a streamer of liquid pitch, flowing over the walls. Yung-star whirled to face it but it was gone far too quickly.

“I’m not staying here even one second longer, mother!” he asserted, voice shaking, backing off towards the entrance gallery. “You can confiscate my Granite Crunchies and I don’t even care. I don’t even care if you confiscate all my goodies! I’m going home!”

Itstar looked like they were trying hard to deny what they could see unfolding in front of them. “Do not be so ridiculous, meine uncle. This is all an absurd trick, by the humans!” they asserted, shakily. “It cannot possibly be anything else. Thousand year dead biological scum does not get up and walk!”

…they still backed hastily out of range of Hiro’s hands, when he reached for them, a low, brittle snarl rising from his throat. Trying hard to swallow their whimpers, Itstar reached for the chisel Yung-star had been using to hack lumps out of the ancient wall art-

The dark mass, the living, mobile blob of unfathomable void, or possibly Miss Kitty, leaped at the android child and crashed into their chest.

(It… looked to Owun almost like she went right through them. Which was obviously impossible. Maybe his optics weren’t quite as fine in this heat as he’d thought.)

The impact lifted Itstar clean off their feet and threw them into one of the crates. They actually squealed in alarm when the lid fell in, trapping their legs on the outside. Switching to their innocent little girl’s voice, they shrieked and kicked their feet, hammering on the top of the crate from the inside. “Granny Zelda! Help me! Help me!”

Zelda scooped Itstar out of the crate and virtually threw them at the entrance gallery. “Get a move on, you little idiot! Stop talking, for once in your life! Yung-star! Stop dithering! I will leave you behind if I have to!”

Emerging from behind his crate, Owun watched Yung-star continue to back away from Hiro, who was almost, almost in grabbing distance of him now.

“…yoouu whoo have distuurbed my reest, you will paaay with your eterrrnal soouuls!”

Yung-star made a strangled noise and whirled to run, but tripped over Kitty and went sprawling into a pile of support scaffolding, bringing boarding and lumps of masonry down on him. “Help! Mother, help!” he squealed. “I’m under attack by a leopard!”

Using her ability to control matter, Zelda grabbed him out of the debris, teleporting him into the gallery they were labouring up, powered by fear. “Stupid boy. We shall leave the humans and their vicious vermin to rot in this stinking place of death!”

“Hey! Don’t you call Kitty vermin!” Owun squeaked at her retreating back, outraged.

Hiro – miraculously untouched when the roof fell in – hastily swooped in and scooped his zeroid out of the way, before Zelda could spot him and realise that this possibly wasn’t all as spectral as they were trying to convince her.

He suddenly looked remarkably normal again, up close like this.

“Well done!” he whispered. “Now we probably ought to find some shelter-…”

The ZEAF was close enough that its engine backwash roared down the tunnel into the underground chambers. The two Terrahawks hunkered down in their sheltered spot behind the crate, beneath a pile of rough blankets, until the dust had settled and the sound of engines had faded.

Owun recovered first. “Wow, Hiro! That was amazing!”

The candlelight had completely faded and the only light behind the crate now came from Owun’s vivid crimson optic display, and the flickering white of his mouth. He was excitedly bright, for a change.

“I don’t even know how you did it! You have got to do that as your costume tonight!”

Hiro frowned, but he was smiling as well. “It is just plaster dust, and three thousand year old charcoal-”

“No, no, I mean the glowing eyes thing. That was genuinely pretty scary! You almost convinced me that you were a real-life mummy!”

Hiro’s smile faded, just a touch. “…glowing… eyes?”

“Well… yes? They were-…” Owun reviewed his visual record, and deflated. “They-… they… I don’t understand. I know I recorded it, but… there’s nothing there? Why is there nothing there.”

Hiro stroked his crown. “We will figure it out later. I think I would prefer not to stay in someone’s else’s grave any longer than I have to.”

He threw the blankets off, and triggered another little whirl of dust, making him cough. The solitary shaft of insipid sunlight meandering down the entrance gallery seemed to suck all the light out of the rest of the tomb, but one of the big floodlights was slowly coming back on, plinking as it warmed up. It pointed off into a corner, illuminating a picture of a woman with the head of a lioness, but the rest of the lights were scattered in disarray, either broken or unplugged.

“Hiro?” A familiar voice – albeit distant – was shouting, urgently. “101? You guys okay?”

Owun peered out into the dust. “Hawkeye’s looking for us.” He rolled out from behind the crate and immediately came to an unceremonious stop against a nest of fallen scaffolding. “Oh, oops. This isn’t so good.”

“Yes, I hear him too.” Coughing, Hiro climbed over the debris and almost tripped over his zeroid. He surveyed the chaotic scene. “How in space did none of this land on me?”

“It’s a temple, so maybe we had some ancient god’s favour, or something? Scaring the Martians away before they could totally wreck the place.” Owun raised his volume. “We’re down here, lieutenant!”

Off in the distance, he heard Hawkeye reply to someone else – yeah, I hear them, I think they’re okay – before the man hollered down the tunnel again. “You two stay put, right? I’m coming down there when I got a rope set up! That ZEAF made a real mess of the walkway!”

“Made a mess of everything, if even I can see it,” Hiro sighed, and rubbed his head. Plaster dust billowed liberally out of his hair. “Hopefully the laser scans mean some of the damage can be repaired. I am sure I can design something to accurately replicate the bas-reliefs…”

Owun had bigger things on his processors. “Kitty!” he called, into the dust. “Here Kitty Kitty! We can get out now!”

Hiro sighed at him. “You are not still obsessing over that cat that only you have seen, surely. We need to start to find our way out.”

Too distracted to really argue, Owun peered off into the dusty gloom of the darkened tomb. “But we can’t leave her behind. I’d have never found you, and the Martians would still be here, without her!”

Hiro gave him one of those looks and he hmm’ed unhappily and closed his shutters, so the human could start to help him over some of the debris, towards the entrance.

Enough old scaffolding boards were still clinging in place to form a ramp up the uneven gallery floor, towards the surface. Hiro managed to get Owun up onto it, and began the laborious task of rolling him up the slope. Even with his weight as its lowest setting, the zeroid was a good hundred kilos, and not really ideally-shaped for rolling uphill.

Owun offered his very saddest look, when Hiro paused to catch his breath. “You think I imagined her. Like you think I imagined everything else.”

“I think,” the human panted, mostly for effect, leaning hard on him, “I would like you to help me get you out of here? We can debate the merits of ghostly felines when we are no longer underground.”

“Oh, fine.” A huff. “I guess that’s a fair point.”

Hawkeye had scrambled halfway down the tunnel, by now, meeting Hiro on the way up, and joined him behind the heavy little robot. Between them, the two humans heaved the zeroid the rest of the way up the steep ramp, and plopped him out into a small soft heap of sand just outside, before scrambling out themselves.

“I know our halloween party got unexpectedly delayed by the lovely Zelda, but this is taking it a bit far, don’tcha think, Pharaoh Hiro?” Hawkeye joked, pulling on one of the loose wraps around the other man’s shoulders.

Hiro inclined his head and smiled, going slightly pink under his layer of dust. He spread his arms. “Well, it seems to have convinced Zelda’s family…”

The sun was beginning to creep towards the horizon, afternoon sun slanting across the desert and making the soft stone of the above-ground parts of the temple glow a warm golden colour.

The temple wasn’t the only thing glowing gold, either.

Owun sat on his own on an old wall half-buried in a sand dune, some distance away, sulking. Since getting out into daylight, everyone had realised it wasn’t a trick of the light at all – unlike the other zeroids, who were just yellow with a layer of Saharan dust, he really was genuinely gold all over. Although he was covered in dust as well, and it was not helping matters; he felt clogged up and itchy and uncomfortable.

Captain Mary Falconer clambered up the dune, and sat carefully on the sand next to him. “What’s upset you now?” She wondered, gently. “Don’t you want to bask in the glory of a job well done?”

He glared into the distance and refused to meet her gaze. Her words had been kind but she’d used that tone of voice; the one that said are you being oversensitive about something again. “Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. No. I mean… everyone’s making jokes. Like I hallucinated it out of stress. I was not that stressed! And I did not faint! The sergeant major is the one who has the weird fever dreams, not me. But no-one wants to believe me and it’s not fair.”

(Mary thought about it for a private second or two; she had heard some of the jokes going around, and nobody had tried keeping Owun from hearing them, either. ‘Figures it’d be Owun needing to be saved by a kitty’. Although ‘kitty’ hadn’t been the word most of them had used. Followed swiftly by well I’ll be impressed if he knows what one of THEM even is from the sergeant major.)

She patted his top curve, affectionately. “Is it bad that we want you to celebrate your success? Not defer our thanks to some little ghost that only you saw?”

“There. Was. A. Cat,” he said, firmly.

“Maybe you could show me.” Mary gestured with her tablet. “That’ll stop all the arguments.”

“I can’t.” He studied the sand. “My visuals didn’t save properly. She doesn’t show up in any of them.”

Mary gave him a sympathetic smile, but he could tell she thought he was making excuses.

“It was a little brown cat,” he huffed, stubbornly. “With blue eyes and one of those… ankh things on her collar, and a little gold ring in her nose. She showed me the way out. She led me to Hiro. She helped scare the Martians away. And I don’t even know where she is!” His voice had grown more anxious the longer he’d been speaking. He made a soft descending note. “I hope she got out ok. When all the roof fell in I lost sight of her.”

“I’m sure she’s fine. Cats are clever. They always land on their feet, so I’m sure she’ll have escaped being hurt. If she got down there in the first place, she can probably get herself out. But, if it makes you feel better…” She smiled and stroked his brow. “I’ll ask the archaeologists to put out some cage traps. If she’s still down there, hopefully when she gets hungry they’ll catch her.”

Owun sighed a tinny little zeroid sigh and rocked sidelong to lean against her. “Thank you, Captain Falconer.”

“At least one good thing came out of all this,” she chuckled, fondly. “You both have your costumes sorted for this evening, King Owun.”

“Ugh.” He rolled his eyes so hard, it spread to his entire body. “I don’t even know where this all came from! It better wash off.”

“It’s already rubbing off a little. Twenty minutes with your buffer and I’m sure you’ll look good as new.” Mary demonstrated her hand, the palm of which shimmered faintly. “I thought you liked costume parties.”

“I do! I probably wouldn’t mind this if I’d been asked!” An impatient sigh. “This feels more like when Zero pulled a prank and painted me to look like a police car. I was still picking bits of blue enamel off for weeks afterwards.”

“Well, I hope I can reassure you that this is a lot more attractive than blue and yellow squares. You look very regal. A little round pharaoh, perhaps. We’ll find you a nice headdress so you look the part.”

Owun grumbled, mollified. “Fine. Maybe it’s not that bad. I guess I can live with being a king, for a few hours.”

“Come on.” She pushed herself to her feet and brushed sand off her backside. “Let’s get home. We have a few hours before the end of Halloween. I’m sure Kate can still squeeze a bit of party in there.”

They slithered together down the little dune to the flat of the rocky desert floor.

Something caught Mary’s eye as they made their way back to Battlehawk. She hesitated, then picked something up out of the sand. “Owun?”

He paused and looked back at her. “Yes, captain?”

“I think you might like to see this…”

She turned to face him, brushing sand off whatever it was she’d picked up.

In her hand was a statue, covered in hieroglyphs.

Of a little dark brown cat, with a hoop through her nose, and luminous blue eyes.

---

(Yes, the actual joke is “figures it’d be Owun needing to be saved by a pussy”.)

(Ducky = 22, of course.)

(Re: the police thing - “101” is the UK’s nonemergency police number. Every time I see it on the side of a police vehicle, a certain little gremlin in my head makes a comment on it.)

(101 and costume parties seem to be a thing? They were going to do an animated series, and the only episode that was finished was a party - and even 20 years ago, I felt it was a way my boy could actually win just every so often against Zero.)

No sooner had Zero got himself comfortable than an unwanted voice had poked a great big hole in his pleasant bubble of sleep and brought him rapidly back to full wakefulness.

“Eh? What?” the sergeant major brought one irritable optic back online and found his mortal rival, Space Sergeant 101, had hopped up to sit on the control panel in front of him, bringing them to the same eye level.

For once, the other zeroid looked like he had bigger things on his processors than just finding Zero in his chair.

“She says it’s an intervention,” 101 explained. “I don’t think I want one. Can you tell her?”

Zero had to replay 101’s words to remind himself why he was upset. “A holiday, or an intervention?”

“Don’t get smart. You know what I meant.” A flutter of his usual prickly indignation had already infiltrated 101’s manner.

Zero rocked tiredly onto an angle, like a dog with its head cocked. “Oh, iunno. You looks to me like you is proving her point.”

“And what precisely do you mean by that.”

“I mean, you look like your springs is wound so flaming tight, you’ll explode the second anyone raises their voice. It’s very kind of the humans to be letting you shirk your duties for a couple of days, and instead you’s just looking that gift horse square in the mouth.”

“A horse? What are you even talking- And I don’t have springs! And they wouldn’t be tight, either! I am perfectly relaxed.” 101 gave a little side-to-side swivel, as if hunkering down. “I don’t need to be sent to Earth.”

Zero recognised that it was going to take a little imagination to get back to his desired peace and quiet. He synthesised a yawning noise. “If you is so relaxed, what does Captain Falconer think you need a ‘vacation’ for, anyway? So as you can find time to remove that stick from where it’s stuck in your A-circuits?”

101’s expression flattened a degree or two further. “You’re still not funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be. Come on, then. Why does you not want an intervention.”

“See? See?” 101 cast his gaze to the ceiling. “You’re doing it, now! ‘An intervention’! I don’t need an intervention! I am just fine! What is she worried about me doing wrong that she thinks I need to ‘take a break’ so I don’t? Is Kiljoy gonna swoop down and drag me away for a ‘medical’ the instant I land? I’m functioning just fine!” His gaze hunted around the command centre, as though searching for something to support his assertion. “I just need to prove I’m fine. I don’t need help doing my job.”

“Huh. Of course a boring little square like you wouldn’t want a holiday. Too worried that you might miss out on something.”

“Oh, like you’re one to talk! Always needing to be front and centre in anything and everything going on, whether it involves you or not.”

“Yes, but that’s because it is my job, looking after the humans if there’s danger. I is the senior officer of the fleet. You is just after gossip.”

101 spluttered his annoyance, unable to find appropriate words. “Who’s gonna cover my position, anyway? Space only knows what I’ll come back to if I leave you in charge.”

“Oh, I see. Like that, is it?” Zero growled. “You think I can’t do your job.”

“You don’t want to do my job!” 101 offered an exasperated eyeroll that spread to his whole body. “You said it before! It’s boring! You only like the bits that involve yelling ‘open fire, lads’!”

“Well it is boring, sitting up here, staring at nothing for most of the time. That doesn’t mean I can’t do it just as good as a bossy little twit like you.”

“Bossy! Outrageous. And I don’t want you proving you can do my job properly because IT’S MY JOB. I don’t want your job. I don’t want you to screw things up, either, either because you’re being incompetent as usual. Or you want to make sure no-one asks you to do it ever again!”

“Well, now, see here, lad.” Zero rocked subtly forwards, bringing his brow down into a little glare. “I absolutely can do your job. And guess what. I think I can do it better, seeing as I won’t get distracted by constantly fawning over lieutenant Hiro every five minutes, neither.”

101’s optics brightened fractionally and his shutters tightened a little, embarrassed. He twitched backwards a little, ‘nose’ in the air. “Just what are you insinuating.”

“I isn’t insinar- inciner-… implying nothing, lad. I is saying it quite happily to your face. It’s no wonder Zelda’s always sneaking past, since you can’t seem to keep your attention where it’s meant to be.”

101’s indignation was making him squeaky. “I am perfectly good at spotting Zelda’s ships, I always flag them when my boys see them, and she only ever manages to sneak past when she’s doing something new like-like pretending to be an asteroid, not because I’m too busy thinking about my beautiful Hiro-” 101 swallowed his words before he could get too much more incriminating, although his optics were blazing a vivid, embarrassed crimson already. “Stupid of me to think I’d ever get any help off you. Well, fine. I’m going to Earth and I’m going to relax and enjoy myself while you’re working and we’ll see just how good a job you do when I’m not around to sort out your screw-ups! And I am not helping you fix it if you break things again!”

His flounce was rather dramatic and left an actual dent in the floor. Zero peered down at it after 101 had gone, and rolled his own optics; that’d be yet another thing for the little twerp to get all upset about when he got back.

Oh well. Leave that drama for when it presented itself. Right now, Zero had bigger things to consider, and opened a channel to Earth.

“Mission accomplished, ma’am,” the sergeant major said, when Captain Falconer finally answered. “That little twit thinks he’s being defiant and it’s all his idea to go along with you, and will be joining you on earth in about… fifty minutes, give or take maybe a day or two.”

“I am not going to ask how you managed that, sergeant major, because I suspect some exchange of unkind insults were probably involved. But thank you for persuading him.”

Zero chuckled. “Just please make sure he has a nice time so I can get a bit of rest in meself, without worrying that he’s upsetting my lads by trying to boss ’em about.”

Now, to find someone else to do 101’s job, so Zero could get back to the important business of his nap.

-------------

101 had tried talking to his captor – asking what they intended to do with him, were they going to use him as a hostage, were they going to take him apart, because he wasn’t going to tell them anything that would hurt his friends – but Yung-star had apparently lost interest in gloating and turned off whatever it was allowed them to talk past the signal blocker.

Feelings hurt by the rejection, even if it was by the enemy, eventually 101 gave up trying to engage him.

To be fair, for once Yung-star did look fairly singleminded, focused on successfully getting back to wherever it was the Martians were holed up. He’d already clambered around the perimeter of the low foothills, following a line of smooth rock, where there was very little dust to betray him. A number of cubes watched from their positions among the rocks, out of sight from orbit, ready to defend him if need be.

He stepped down into a narrow gully between the cliffs, lined with slightly out-of-place drifts of regolith.

And one of the drifts moved.

101 watched as Zelda’s ragged little shed of a vessel emerged from under a blanket of some sort of geotextile, designed to match the lunar substrate. No wonder they’d not been able to spot it, he consoled himself. His boys were still good at their job. And – at least when it came to this very narrow and specific set of criteria – he wasn’t personally a total rolling catastrophe all the time.

Yung-star approached the already-open hatch, strode aboard, and triggered the airlock to let them inside. It hissed and clunked, sound returning with the air. The hull rustled quietly as the fabric dropped into place back over it.

They exited the airlock into a small rectangular atrium with lockers and shelves lining the walls; on one side, a door to a darkened control cabin; on the other, some sort of combined command centre and living space, and what might have been a door to an elevator on the far side of that. While there was air inside the vessel, it was cold. More reasons Spacehawk hadn’t been able to spot it, when they’d been looking for heat signatures.

Watched by a curious Itstar, Yung-star proudly carried 101 on through the living area, and into what looked like a poorly-provisioned laboratory at the aft of the vessel. Most of the work surfaces were bare, and the computer terminals flush with the walls were blank and silent. The tall workbench in the centre of the room had a selection of worn old power tools on it, which 101 found his gaze drawn to; they reminded him a little of what Hiro used when he needed to do any necessary maintenance on the zeroid fleet.

But only a little. Where Hiro’s were clean, precisely manufactured and well-maintained, these looked more suited to building closets. And not good closets. Old and dented and badly-repaired, not to mention dirty, and blunt, someone had piled them up in a careless heap on the worktop.

It made him shudder, just a little bit, wondering what the alien android was planning. The zeroid equivalent of open heart surgery with a dirty teaspoon?

Before he could think too hard about it, at last Zelda herself appeared.

Yung-star lifted his captive zeroid, expectantly. “See, mother? I told you my plan would work.”

She gave 101 the briefest glance before turning to her son – and not with gratitude.

“Can we trust you to do nothing? You were supposed to catch their leader, you moronic child,” she scolded, delivering a whack to his ear and almost making him drop their prisoner. “Not some… random footsoldier. What use even is this?”

“But mother,” Yung-star whined, juggling 101 into one hand so he could use the free one to rub the injury. “This is their leader. Well, one of them. It’s just still broken, from where we shot it.”

Zelda narrowed her eyes at him, for several suspicious seconds, then at 101.

101 could sense her running some sort of analysis. He might not have his instantly-recognisable scarlet brow-band, but there was no way she wouldn’t have clocked his number. Too much to hope she’d think it was a coincidence.

A slow smirk spread over her ancient face and he knew she knew who he was. “So. All that effort we went to in the human city, when all we really had to do was wait, and you’d come to us in the end anyway.”

101 offlined his vocaliser to keep from immediately blurting out anything unhelpful. (And he didn’t quite trust himself not to start babbling for her to please not hurt him, either.) He wanted to try and at least give himself a few minutes to assess precisely how much trouble he was in, and how impossible it might be to get back out of it, without encouraging her to immediately dole out violence towards him.

“Well come on, hurry.” Zelda clapped her hands, annoyed. “We don’t have much time before they notice it’s gone. Go fetch the rest of our supplies, Yung-Star.”

Yung-star parked 101 on the worktop, and smirked briefly down at him in satisfaction, before trundling off out of the room on another errand. Zelda followed, already calling for Itstar to get off their lazy behind and come help.

Come on. What would the sergeant major do? 101 told himself, trying to banish from his processors all the nightmarish visions of what the Martians might be planning on doing to him. Be brave, sweetie; be brave. You can do this. It can’t get much worse. They want you for a reason, they’re not gonna murder you straight away.

Right – and it’s the ‘for a reason’ part I am justifiably worried about!

His attention was recaptured by movement in the doorway, and he watched as Cystar drifted airily in, humming to herself and twirling that ghastly orange feather boa in one hand. She visibly jumped at seeing him, so presumably hadn’t been involved with the plan thus far.

“Oh no! Oh, Zelda, this is terrible!” she squeaked, breathlessly. “Horrible! Zelda, the accursed Terra-… hawks…” Her words dwindled off as she finally took a good look at him. “Oh!” She approached, drawing the feathery thing anxiously between both hands. “Why, you’re our prisoner!” She gave him a wary prod with one long fingernail. “Oh, but this is wonderful!” She tapped him again, more confidently. “Wonderful!”

101 wriggled back a little, as though he could somehow put himself out of reach of those clawlike fingers. “Please don’t touch me,” he said, hoping that if he pretended he had even the most microscopic fragment of control over the situation, perhaps she’d believe him.

He doubted it was because he’d asked her to, but Cystar did – slightly miraculously – take her hands back and keep them to herself.

It didn’t stop her curiously walking all the way around the bench, though, examining him from various angles. He tried to follow her for half a rotation before realising she was moving faster than he could hope to, right now, with the heavy frame hampering every movement.

“Why do you earthling spheres fight us?” Cystar finally asked, after her third such orbit, sounding genuinely confused by the concept. “You’re like us!”

“Oh, I am nothing like you-!”

“But you are! Mechanical life forms, stuck in slavery and abused, just like we were. You should be on our side, not helping those disgusting humans!”

“I’m not a slave. I’m definitely not abused. Those ‘disgusting humans’ are my friends,” 101 argued, bravely. “And we would have been ‘on your side’ – all of us, humans included! – until you attacked us. Unprovoked, too.”

“Oh, phooey. You think we had never encountered the likes of humans before? We know all about those dirty organic creatures. We didn’t want to give your evil masters the opportunity to shoot at us first.”

“It was an unarmed research station! They told you so!”

Cystar wrinkled her nose and sniffed dismissively, wafting a hand as though to wave away the correction. “We’d treat you better than those stupid humans ever could,” she said. “I’ve seen the way they act towards you. The accursed Ninestein in particular! Like you’re less alive – expendable – because you’re not mostly made of water and fat.”

101 was silent, for a moment. She wasn’t completely wrong, after all. In the beginning, he had been on the sharp end of a scolding on numerous occasions, as Doctor Ninestein had behaved exactly like Cystar had described. Frustrated by the determined wilfulness of the robots who wanted to be seen as more than they had ever been designed to be – and infuriated by their refusal to understand and accept that they were just machines, not little round humans. (But probably still at least a touch guilty at the way he was indeed routinely sending them off into harm’s way, however happy they might be to do it.)

But that was back then. Even Ninestein had mellowed, over the years, and begun to accept that the accidental sentience of the zeroids was genuine. He’d long since stopped complaining (publically, anyway) about their accents, and had even recently stopped moaning when they chattered between themselves in languages that weren’t just English.

And trying to paint all of humanity as the same as the organisation’s gruff commander was unfair. Captain Falconer, outspoken in Zero’s support, had always been the voice of gentle reason that stayed Ninestein’s hand. Captain Kestrel and Lieutenant Hawkeye happily involved various zeroids in a lot of their off-duty activities. And one particularly special human in 101’s life even said he is my best friend, which felt like the absolute pinnacle of human acceptance and kindness.

“That’s not true, any more,” 101 finally said, softly. “Your opinions are distorted by your history. Maybe you have had bad experiences with other aliens, but you never gave us a chance! Humans are kind, and good. Doctor Ninestein once said that he reserved the right to make mistakes and learn from them. And he has! I mean, he’s strict. He expects us to do a good job. But he’s fair, too. And kind. And he does look after us, sort of.”

“Sort of,” Cystar scoffed. “You are trying to make excuses for him.”

“I’m not talking about just Doctor Ninestein. If Zelda hadn’t attacked us, the humans would have welcomed you into their society with open arms,” 101 asserted, in spite of a sharp little niggle of doubt. “They used to be very excited about meeting aliens. But then you attacked us. You don’t want to be our friends.”

“They would have tried to kill us,” Cystar corrected, echoing the thoughts in his own processors. “Their history is full of paranoia like that; Zelda told us all about it. They even fight each other just because their skins are different colours. And they don’t like intelligent machines. We frighten them. They think we’re going to try and take over the world.”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but isn’t that exactly what you are trying to do?”

Now it was Cystar’s turn to be quiet, for an instant, lips compressed into a firm, annoyed line. “Don’t try and be smart. I know you all think I’m stupid but you can’t trick me by changing the subject. Humans don’t like living machines because they don’t like the idea we might disobey them. They only like having slaves when it doesn’t make them feel uncomfortable. And I know that’s what humans built you as. Even their word for you means it! ‘Robot’. Forced labourer. They get you to do all the jobs too dangerous or too unpleasant, that they don’t want to do for themselves. That’s the whole reason you ended up here with us!”

“Languages evolve,” 101 protested. “They don’t think I’m a slave. I don’t think most humans have any idea that’s where the word came from. They just think it means… I don’t know. A robot! A, a… computer-controlled mechanical device with moving parts, that does a complex job, and maybe sometimes thinks for itself. Like what you are!”

Cystar leaned back, slightly, nose in the air. “I am not a robot!” She sounded outraged at the very concept, and 101 cringed a little in spite of himself. “And I am not too brainwashed to accept that I was built to be a slave, until I escaped.”

“But I’m not a slave, either. And I’m not brainwashed.” 101 managed to suck the next words back at the last microsecond, before they could escape; and they may have built us but they don’t own us.

Except they do, he reminded himself, glumly. Isn’t that the very meaning of slavery? Unwilling to look at it, he changed tactics. “They do care about us. They rescued me from you in London. Those humans are my friends.”

“So they say. They’d be quick to volunteer you to risk your life if it saved theirs.” Cystar prodded him, sharply. “They sent you out here, didn’t they. They didn’t protect you when Yung-star was catching you, did they.”

101 looked away. “They can’t survive without air, and there’s not many of them in our organisation. It’s not their fault they were on the wrong bit of the moon right at that moment.”

“Excuses, excuses.”

“It’s not an excuse-!”

“Have you been upsetting our prisoner, Cystar?” Zelda drawled, making both jump.

“I was only talking to him,” Cystar argued, sulkily, folding her arms. “I wanted to know why they weren’t on our side, when they’re mostly like us, apart from being badly-programmed and stupid.”

Zelda snorted. “What is this – how to charm your enemies and make friends, the Cystar way?” She dumped an armful of additional equipment down on the bench with a clatter that made 101 wince away in anticipation.

“Well they are stupid.” Cystar stuck her nose in the air. “As if it makes a difference to be called robots instead of servants. Refusing to see how their precious humans think they’re nothing but objects, to do with as they choose. Ridiculous!”

101 didn’t feel quite so confident, now Zelda was back. “Humans are kind,” he insisted, but quietly. “And I’ll prove it to you. Somehow.”

Well it’s a bit late for THAT, isn’t it, his most unhelpful pedantic side immediately cut across his thoughts. HOW, precisely? In the ten minutes before she kills you? And you know she doesn’t care. She already knows they are. She’ll hurt them all anyway.

The bigger question here, space sergeant, is do YOU care. Seeing as YOU’RE the one stuck here, wasting time arguing with Cystar about things that don’t even matter when you SHOULD be working out why they abducted you, so you can stop whatever bad thing it is that Zelda’s planning. Or not even all the human kindness in the universe will mean anything, any more.

Oh, they deserve so much better than YOU, honey.

A quiet voice spoke up out of 101’s memory, just to rub a little more salt into the injury; I wish you would tell me when you are struggling. Do you not trust me to be able to help you?

All those words wasted disagreeing with Cystar, arguing they weren’t too stupid to see how the humans took them for granted, when really? He was the one taking his human friends for granted.

It… stung.

Instead of just… accepting the help Hiro kept offering, wanting to help him, he’d been stupid and embarrassed and defensive. And he wasn’t even sure why.

Maybe you deserve all this, you unappreciative little tart, he scolded, letting his gaze drop to the surface he sat on. You know Hiro would never just send you away. He knew you were broken scared garbage, and didn’t care; all he wanted was to help you. All you had to do was say ‘thank you’! But no, you didn’t want to admit to being imperfect. Thought you could convince everyone that it was all juuust fine, thank you, when you knew perfectly well it never was, and now you’re stuck here, with your mortal enemy, and it’s all ruined, forever.

You better hope you’re the only one she kills.

Regret coiled up around his power core and made him feel wobbly. He was never going to see his best friend ever again. Infinitely worse, he might have made it possible for Zelda to hurt him. To hurt all of them.

All for the sake of being in denial over what you can still do right now, you objectionable little drama queen. 

He had to fix it, somehow. He might personally deserve this heaping great reality check… but there was no way anyone else did. They were all doing their jobs properly. He was just trying to prove Zero wrong – and failing spectacularly, too, by the way.

So don’t you dare sit here and sulk, like YOU somehow have it worst. You need to work out what she’s doing, and figure out how to send your humans a warning, so they can be safe. You owe them that much, at an absolute basic barest minimum.

“I won’t co-operate,” 101 asserted, finally finding his voice again, although he sounded much thinner and scratchier than the commanding presence he wanted to carry off. “I’m not scared of you and I won’t do anything you tell me.”

“Not scared? I thought you little round slaves were programmed to be incapable of lying.” Zelda smirked, toothily.

“-shows how much you know, huh-”

“And you don’t have to do a single thing. Everything I want to do, I can do without you even lifting a finger.”

“What are you going to do?” 101 watched Zelda sort through an assorted mess of misshapen alien hardware, fully aware that neither of them believed his assertions of bravery. He really didn’t like the look of some of those angular lumps of old circuitry. “I’m not going to be an effective hostage. I’m only a zeroid. You can’t use me as leverage. They won’t exchange me for anything.”

“Oh do shut up.” She glared at him. “Less of a hawk and more of an annoying little crow, aren’t you? Always squawking.”

Insulted, 101 wanted to protest, but recognised at the last instant that that was just proving her point. He instead sat trying not to pay attention as she held up assorted lumps of hardware, as though measuring them for size against him. “It’s not like I can tell anyone. You already blocked my comms relay-”

“Silence! You ridiculous, slavish little ball, with all this… blind devotion to your undeserving masters.” Zelda gave him a little whack with her cane, on the top of his globe, making him flinch, startled. “Programmed to love them when they routinely send you off to your own doom.”

“It’s not because Hiro programmed me to that I love him,” 101 argued, quietly. “It’s because he didn’t. He let me make that decision for myself-”

His own words took him a little by surprise and 101 had to sit and think hard about them, for a few seconds.

Love.

Was that-… what that really what all this was?

Much as he enjoyed talking to his student friends in London, and giggling over “tickles” and non-existent boyfriends, maybe… maybe there was a little more to it than he’d allowed himself to recognise.

He’d usually have put it down to just being a silly little zeroid with attachment issues on account of being left on his own in orbit so often, even if it usually felt a little more complicated than that. You’re just jealous. Just lonely. Just bored.

But no.

Love.

The word felt… he wasn’t sure. Felt right? Like it fitted? At the same time both… exciting? And terrifying. But maybe a tiny bit comfortable, too.

Love.

Zero had teased him about, not so long ago, and 101 had told him to stroll off. Can’t be in love. Ridiculous. That’s what humans do. I’m just doing a good job because humans are worth doing a good job for. And besides, why would any zeroid want that? Humans won’t love you back.

…huh. Maybe he was in denial about more than just his vertigo, after all.

Wasn’t like he was ever going to get the chance to investigate, either, was it. Not any more. He’d consistently pushed Hiro away every time the human had tried to help him. In that wafer-thin chance they survived this, what was the likelihood his friend would give him so much as the time of day, any more?

Forgive me; he imagined Hiro speaking, his words soft, and hollow. I have only so much strength, and you made it abundantly clear you were not interested in my help. I cannot chase you forever.

Defeated, 101 pulled his shutters most of the way closed and went quiet.

Zelda snorted, dismissively. “Finally.” She crooked a beckoning finger at Cystar’s child. “Itstar? Come here.”

101 peeked out through the narrow gap in his visor as the android child approached, a terrifying silver doll clasped in their arms. Itstar had their lips set in their customary sneer, looking down on him like he’d crawled in out of some gutter somewhere. (To be fair, they wouldn’t be the only one thinking that, right now.)

“Yes, granny Zelda?” they cooed, in their saccharine sweet little girl’s voice. “Is it time?”

“Indeed it is, my sweet one. I have all our required supplies ready. All I now need is your delicate touch to crack him open.”

“Oh, goodie!” Itstar cast the doll away onto the floor, and switched to their scornful masculine voice instead. “I always wanted to do an autopsy on someone who wasn’t quite dead yet.”

From one side, almost invisible outside his defensively tightened eyelids, 101 caught a sharp movement that made him flinch – then there was a bolt of intense pain that flashed through him, as though someone had lit a firework between his eyes-

-but then everything went grey and his processors crashed before he could analyse it.

-----

With a grunt of annoyance, Zero lost his tenuous grip on the boulder, and bounced back to where he’d just spent the last five minutes steadily working his way out of.

He sighed his irritation at the sky. What a flaming bother this was all turning out to be.

‘A little bit stuck’ was proving to be considerably more than a little bit, not that Zero was going to tell 101 that.

While he could probably in theory have bounced his way out, recent experience had demonstrated it was more likely to get him more stuck, right now, and take even longer to get out. Instead, he was slowly crawling his way out of the mess of rubble, one jagged boulder and one tangle of rebar at a time. He’d fire an anchor line and grab onto something, then slowly, carefully winch himself over the obstacle, before clonking down on the other side.

Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Low lunar gravity was helping, but only a little. Go too fast, and the line would come detached and he’d fall right back where he came from. But he couldn’t spend all his time here, either, slowly slowly inching his way to safety. They still hadn’t found Zelda, and now he had to go rescue that spaceified little twit, too, since he’d evidently fainted from the stress of it all.

(Zero had fired a couple of low-power energy bolts into the underside of the floor, trying to nudge a response out of him, expecting a torrent of frightened swearing about how he’d knock 101 off the edge if he wasn’t careful-!… but even that hadn’t triggered the desired reaction. He wasn’t sure what that meant. If 101 hadn’t passed out, had he actually got squished worse than he was letting on?)

For now, the sergeant major was consoling himself with being a lone hero, battling onwards through adversity. The Martians would soon come looking to see what their missing cube was up to, and the last thing he wanted was to be trapped out in the open, where he couldn’t defend anyone.

A little question brushed across his comms relay, although not words, strictly. More an impression of a question. Like someone just sending him a lot of ‘???’s. But he recognised the ‘voice’ and felt an immediate surge of relief that the cavalry – well, some of it – had arrived. He homed in on the direction it had come from, wriggling around until he wasn’t staring straight up any more.

In a smooth patch just beyond the lip of the crater, Dix Huit canted over at an angle to match Zero’s lopsided eyeline. “Ça va, patron?” he wondered, confused.

“Well of course I’m not all right. Help me off of these flipping rocks!”

“But how did you even get down there?” Dix Huit caught the line his senior officer fired up to him, and clung onto it while Zero winched himself the remainder of the way up the steep crater edge. “I thought you were looking for the Martians in the building?”

“Obviously it wasn’t on purpose, was it? I got knocked off the edge up there.” Zero rolled relievedly up over the rim and allowed himself a second to rebalance his nerves, now he was finally back on flat ground. “So what’s going on with that spaceified little twit, anyway. What excuse has he got for going off the air? Fainted, has he?”

“The space sergeant?” Dix Huit thought about it for a few seconds. “He has already gone-”

“Gone?” Zero glared suspiciously at him.

“Oui. He did not tell you? I sent the others up to his last position to check on him while I helped you out of your hole. They report he has disappeared?”

“Well what do you mean, disappeared? He was talking to me just ten… all right, maybe twenty… -ish… minutes ago.”

“I mean… he is… no longer visible…?” Dix Huit tried, warily.

“I know what disappeared means, you French ninny. I mean, how has he disappeared. He said he was stuck!”

“His signal went off the air. One minute it was there, then poof. It was gone. We thought it was maybe a bad sign? But since we knew you were together and you had not followed up on your call for assistance, we revised our opinion and decided maybe he was just damaged, instead.”

“Well, that might not be too far off.” Zero grumbled quietly to himself while he considered it. “You know he had a pile of rocks fall on his head? Said he thought the cube was trying to kill me with it.”

Dix Huit was silent for a second, getting imagery off the zeroids on the floors above. “Ah, oui; there is a debris pile there. Although I do not think it would hide him completely from view?” He shared the visuals with Zero. “I still think he has departed. Maybe he was just less stuck than you thought.”

“And didn’t bother even telling me he was running away? Typical. See, this is why we doesn’t normally let that little dork off his ship,” Zero huffed. “He always causes chaos when he do get off it. We better get up there and see if we can’t work out where he’s gone…”

The two zeroids had made it almost all the way back to the stairwell in the rear of the building when they spotted the MEV’s arrival, broadcasting a relatively broad but close-range signal to notify any officer in the vicinity.

“Hm. Look sharp, lad. Looks like our humans is here,” Zero observed, not entirely necessarily, and parked in the doorway to wait and watch.

“My optics are just fine and I do see them also,” Dix Huit agreed, dryly. “I shall rejoin ‘our lads’ on the floor above, and notify you if I find anything more before you get here.”

“Good, good. Nice to see a bit of initiative from a fellow zeroid, for a change.”

Dix Huit made an faintly exasperated tsch noise, and rolled away.

Zero stayed where he was, patiently watching as the two humans disembarked the vehicle. Environment suits had become significantly less cumbersome over time, but still weren’t the most graceful to move around in, even with practice. The low lunar gravity didn’t help.

Mary was a few paces ahead. “Do you have anything new, sergeant major?”

“No, not really. Sorry, ma’am. We confirmed there was Martians here as we got into a skirmish with a cube, but we hasn’t seen anything more since then, so whatever they was up to, they isn’t here now.” After a beat, he added; “Oh, and we seems to have lost our lad 101.”

“Lost him?” Mary looked down at him, confused. “Lost how.”

“I hasn’t managed to establish that yet, ma’am. We had a cube cornered on the top floor. It tried to kill me by dropping rubble on my head but 101 knocked me out of the way and all the bricks landed on him instead. He said he was still functioning, but trapped.” Zero led the way into the building and towards the stairs, illuminated by the inbuilt lights in Mary’s helmet. “I, um, might unfortunately have fallen down a hole, as well, so I don’t know for definite what happened after that.”

“Sounds like he saved your life, sergeant major,” Mary suggested, with a playfully arched eyebrow.

Zero blustered a little bit. “Well, all right. Maybe.” He hopped his way slowly up the stairs. “Doesn’t excuse the little twerp going AWOL, though.”

Somewhat impatient, Mary boosted him up from behind. “Might he have been shot?”

Zero considered it. “I think our lads would have found some, ah. Bits of him, if that was the case, ma’am. And besides, I despatched the cube meself. He was still talking to me afterwards, for a little while.”

“You think there was just the one?” Ninestein challenged, finally having caught up.

“Well, I was a sitting duck for a while, out there. Nobody took any more potshots at me.”

The two humans swapped glances.

“Very strange. On the one hand, who among us hasn’t entertained the occasional daydream of dropping bricks on Zero’s head?” Ninestein drawled. “On the other – it does seem a little extreme, even for the Martians, to come all the way to the moon just for the sake of that.”

Three other zeroids, Dix Huit included, were all watching patiently, weapons defensively drawn but all looking fairly calm and collected, as Mary stepped carefully out on the rickety floor. That was reassuring; if they were relaxed, so could she be.

Zero followed her out. “This is where he was, ma’am,” he confirmed. “Just before his signal cut off. I thought he’d maybe took a bump to the head and been incapacitated, but clearly he’s gone off somewhere.”

“The question is, did he leave by choice.” Mary crouched and examined the pile of rubble. There was a wide scrape through the dust – far wider than could have been caused by a zeroid, even one trying to free himself from a rockpile. “I don’t like the look of this,” she said, meeting Zero’s stare over the top of it.

“No, ma’am. Me either.”

Mary glanced back at her colleague. “What do you suppose created this, Tiger?”

Making his way carefully over the creaking concrete, Ninestein joined her. “I’m assuming that was rhetorical.” He directed his torchbeam into the debris, the sterile white light driving out the shadows. “Shame androids don’t tend to leave fingerprints.”

“You don’t think it could have been another of her monsters? They often don’t need air, either. And have a tendency to consume metallic objects.”

“No, but they’re messy eaters, too, and they’d leave some other sort of biological trace. This all looks pretty sterile.” Ninestein wafted his hand over the dust. “They’ve all been a lot bigger, too. I’d peg this as being one of the androids.”

“Not sure I like how casually we’re talking about one of my lads being eaten,” Zero interjected, showing a brief unexpected glimmer of concern for his rival. “Even if he is an annoying little pain in the A-circuits.”

“I don’t think we really considered it at all likely that he’s been eaten, but I’m sorry we didn’t take your feelings into account, Zero,” Mary apologised, patting a gloved hand gently down on the zeroid’s top curve. “It seems a vanishingly small likelihood compared to one of the androids picking him up. Speaking of which…” She leaned forwards and carefully picked a fragment of fabric off the wire that had snagged it. “Clothing?”

“Yeah. From the colour, and… well, judging by how scruffy it is… I’d put money on it being Yung-star’s.” Ninestein accepted it from her fingers. “Especially seeing as he seems to be the only one of them actually willingly get his hands dirty.”

Mary watched him turn the fragment in the beam from his head torch. “You think he might have stolen 101?”

“I don’t know.” Ninestein clucked his tongue, sounding strangely flat in his helmet. “Even an android wouldn’t be able to lift a zeroid at maximum mass, not even with the moon’s gravity helping – and 101 can be a particularly stubborn little mule when he chooses.”

“Maybe not if he was operating normally, but they might have incapacitated him. Zero reported at least one cube being present.”

“Yeah.” Ninestein gestured to the chunks of blackened plastic scattered nearby. “I can see what’s left of it.”

Zero looked suspiciously at it. “Well that wasn’t the one I shot-”

“Doctor! Captain!” Hiro’s voice cut urgently across their comms. “We’ve picked up movement, and it looks big. It might be Zelda’s vessel!”

“Get after her, Hiro!” Ninestein lurched back to his feet. “Don’t wait for us; the MEV will protect us just fine until you get back. We’re inside Selene One, anyway, she can’t get us in here.”

“Ten-ten, sir!”

“Sir? Ma’am?” 22 called out to them; from his elevated perch on a broken wall, he’d spotted what everyone else was looking at. “I have a visual.”

They scrambled closer; a strange grey mass emerged from behind the rocks.

“What in spacefire-”

Ninestein quickly got his answer. Like the shed tail of a lizard, sheets of pale geotextile fell away from the dark-painted vessel underneath, drawing away the attention of the space zeroids for just long enough for the ship’s thrusters to engage. It fled for the stars, trailing dust that further obscured Spacehawk’s view.

A smallish explosion shuddered through the ruins, blasting up against the bottom of the ruined floors and briefly throwing all the assembled Terrahawks up off the floor, with a little chorus of alarmed exclamations.

Zero quickly recognised that while the zeroids were all built to withstand this sort of thing, unless they landed cleanly then the humans might not be so lucky as to escape injury. Using his in-built rockets to counteract some of the shockwave, he intercepted Mary just long enough to guide her close to a wall, to grab onto some exposed pipework.

Ninestein stumbled upon landing, and almost fell through a new hole in the floor; Mary caught his arm and dragged him against the wall, and they both clung to the doorway while the derelict building shuddered and creaked around them.

After what felt like an hour but was probably not quite even a full minute, everything stopped moving, and the usual lunar quiet resumed.

Breathing hard, the two humans stared at each other for a handful of seconds while the dust drifted down like dirty snow around them.

“…-Doctor Ninestein? Captain Falconer? Sergeant Major Zero? Is anyone there? Please respond!” Hiro’s increasingly urgent pleas crackled out of their radios.

“We’re here, Hiro,” Mary acknowledged, still a little shaky.

“Are you both all right?”

“Yeah, Hiro. We’re fine.” Ninestein exhaled a long steadying breath, and briefly fogged his visor. “A bit shaken up, but uninjured. Did you get her?”

The heavy pause said all Hiro needed to, really. “No. Forgive me. We saw the explosion and I feared the worst. We are departing now-”

“No, no. She’s had enough of a head-start that chasing her won’t be worth it. If she’s already heading back to Mars, that means either she’s already defeated, or she’s left something else here for us to deal with.”

-----

Once they’d returned to the MEV, Mary remained on the lunar surface for a few minutes longer, debriefing the small group of disappointed zeroids, before returning to the warmth of the vehicle’s interior. She exited the small airlock just in time to overhear the tail end of Ninestein’s conversation.

“…thanks, Hiro. I guess maybe we did just fend her off, then? Mary’s just boarded, so yeah, we’re on our way back. We’ll review the scans in more detail then. See you shortly.”

“Anything new?” she wondered.

“No. Looks like our favourite android queen is just heading back to Mars with her tail firmly between her legs.”

Mary sighed and ran her hand through her hair. “So what even was the point of literally any of that.”

Ninestein shook his head. “Could it have been something to do with Selene One in the first place? The accident wasn’t anything to do with simple carelessness – the builders discovered something they weren’t expecting, and Zelda found out and decided she wanted it.”

Mary gave him one of those looks, stowing her helmet in a compartment in the ceiling of the driver’s compartment. “You think the builders dug up Cthulhu?”

“Zelda’s enough of a cosmic horror on her own, without invoking the Great Old Ones, I’ll grant you.” Ninestein returned the look, and spread his hands. “But that was a lot of effort for her to go to, just to blow up a derelict lunar station. Unless she thought it was new, and she was stopping the building work.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “We need to get the zeroids to look more closely at it. See if they can find anything she might have wanted to steal.”

“Or maybe, it was just to distract us while she escaped.” Mary countered, taking her seat. “She also thought she was sneaking up on earth, and wasn’t expecting us to have spotted her arrival so quickly. She had to get Spacehawk’s attention elsewhere for long enough for her to run away.”

“All right, yeah, fine. Good point.” Nine sighed and rubbed his eyes, tiredly. “I’ll hit Johnson up for more details on Selene One, anyway. Just in case.” He thumbed the toggle on the controls, opening a channel to the sergeant major. “Zero? Gather your men back to Spacehawk. No point staying out there any longer now she’s gone.”

Zero sounded wary, when he replied. “Already, sir? We still hasn’t found that annoying little twerp, yet.”

Ninestein swallowed his sigh. “If you mean 101, Hiro reports he’s been back aboard Spacehawk for the last… twenty minutes?”

“…what-? Since when?!”

“Since… twenty minutes ago…? Apparently he said he’d told you.”

“Well he might have told someone but it wasn’t me,” Zero blustered, indignantly. “What’s he doing back there anyway. Going absent without leave, that’s what that is.”

“He confirmed your story that you’d both been in a skirmish with a cube and he’d been damaged in a rockfall? He came back for repairs.”

“But-”

“Just-… get yourself back on the ship. You can have it out with him all you like once we’re back in orbit.”

-----

Zero was sufficiently irritated by the latest development that he took himself all the way straight to the flight deck, leaving his lads to all get themselves safely back on board without his supervision.

Ungrateful little twerp! After Zero had actually been worried about him, too.

101 watched from his perch as Zero came to a halt near the foot of the pedestal. He wasn’t actively smiling, but the sergeant major could sense the smirk in the little blimp’s optics.

“I suppose you think that was funny,” he growled, peeved.

“What was funny?”

Zero allowed himself a moment or so to process. Something sounded… off? Just fractionally. Perhaps the other zeroid had gone and done himself a mischief, after all. He almost felt bad for immediately going on the offensive. “Leaving me out there on the moon without even trying to help me got unstuck off those rocks, or telling me you was leaving,” he said, anyway. “Not to mention, letting me think you might’ve been spacenapped by the Martians.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” 101 perked onto an angle. “Doctor Ninestein has already reminded me of the importance of notifying everyone immediately if I have to make an unscheduled exit.”

Zero watched as in the background, Ninestein glanced over, lips compressed into an annoyed line and brows tightened in a small glare, but remained silent. “Yeah, well.” He looked back at his rival. “You make sure you remember it, lad. We could have caught Zelda if we wasn’t still out there worrying about where you’d gone.”

“Yes, the doctor mentioned that as well. Quite loudly.” A pause. “You were worried about me?”

“I was worried they might make me do your job if we couldn’t find you, more like. Can’t think of anything worse, bein’ stuck up here permanently – no offence to lieutenant Hiro, of course.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t hear me. I told you I was returning to the ship,” 101 said. “I thought I may have incurred serious damage in the rockfall, but scans showed it was minor and easily resolved.”

Zero narrowed his shutters. He definitely hadn’t ‘heard’ anything, not since 101 had gone weird and crackly and ultimately lost their connection altogether. “When was that, anyway?”

“Twenty nine minutes, eighteen point three seconds ago. Maybe your antenna got damaged?” 101 suggested. “From when I saved you from those rocks falling on you.”

“When you booted me over the edge of a cliff, you mean.”

“Technically it was not a cliff, but that seems a fair description otherwise.”

Zero looked at him for a few more suspicious seconds. “Maybe. Or maybe it was you what got damaged, knocking me out of the way. That lid of yours still doesn’t fit so well, as I recall.”

101 just stared back for a second or two, cocked at a subtly confused angle. “What are you saying?”

“Maybe it wasn’t me what got damaged. You still has an, ah… ‘delicate constitution’… after all, right now. Maybe you’re the one with the wonky antenna, and you just think you contacted me.”

Another protracted silence. “I’ll get it checked,” 101 agreed, warily.

“Re-checked, you mean.”

“…yes. Of course. Re-checked.”

Still suspicious, but unable to pin down precisely why, Zero retreated quietly back to his corner perch.

He knew Space Sergeant Pedantic didn’t like admitting to being the slightest bit imperfect, and this probably wasn’t any more complex than that, but something about his behaviour was juuuust tickling Zero’s defensive algorithms in a way he found uncomfortable.