#sergeant major 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.

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

(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.”

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.”

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.