Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I shouldn't be waking up. You better not have been stupid about it. Too softhearted to let me die.
I won't let you die, firechild.
Who the fuck are you?
You don't know me? Look closer.
…you're—
I am.
What about—
It's gone back where it came from.
Right... Where are we?
We're in the space between the stars.
I'll pretend that made sense. Why aren't we dead? How did we get here?
I'm sorry, there's no time. Follow the path. The others will help you.
Wait, where are you going?
You'll be alright, firechild. You're more than you know.
Wait!
……
Please don't leave me alone…

It was a perfectly normal day aboard the Perihelion.

At least, it would have been a perfectly normal day, if the air throughout the ship didn’t feel like a thunderstorm was about to roll through. Amena hadn’t been able to get details out of anyone, but SecUnit hadn’t come out of its cabin except to stick its head out and say hello to her when they picked her up at the University, and ART hadn’t said a word about SecUnit in any of her conversations with it over the last 5 days in the wormhole. She wanted to ask Ratthi for advice about broaching the topic with one of them, but he’d barely been out of his cabin since he got on board either. That probably had something to do with the whole stupid thing between him, Tarik, and Matteo.

“I thought they’d sorted all that out at the end of the thing with the Adamantine colonies,” she said to ART. She was flopped on a couch in the argument lounge, a half-finished bag of chips on the table beside her. “It’s ridiculous that they haven’t gotten around to actually talking to each other in a whole year. Especially since Ratthi’s been doing that teaching thing at the University this whole time.”

Tarik rarely goes to the University when we visit Mihira, Peri said. He prefers to spend time with his family on the planet.

“It wouldn’t have been hard for them to talk to each other on the comm,” Amena grumbled. “And now the rest of us have to put up with Ratthi and Tarik stalking around like grumpy cats while Matteo runs out of the room every time either of them walks in. Has Matteo been like that around Tarik this whole time?”

Not quite, ART said. Matteo and Tarik are professional enough that it did not affect their ability to work together while it was only the two of them on board, but adding Ratthi back into the equation has upset what was a delicate balance.

“Well one of them needs to start talking soon, or the rest of us are going to go insane.”

There is no point trying to start a discussion about a relationship issue if the other parties involved aren’t willing to talk.

“Unless they’re all willing to talk, and they all just think the other ones aren’t,” she said casually, reaching out for another chip.

Perhaps. But sometimes one party in an argument is simply wrong and won’t admit it.

“Well, sure, but just because you weren’t wrong doesn’t mean you can’t be the first one to talk,” she pointed out. “Ratthi or Matteo could have started the conversation just as easily as Tarik could have. And maybe Tarik is scared to start the conversation because he thinks the other two don’t want to talk to him.”

I believe that “let us all off and then fly yourself into the nearest star” is an indication the other person doesn’t want to talk, ART said.

Amena tried to keep the wince from showing on her face.

“Aaand I’m guessing you wouldn’t tell me why you’re fighting if I ask?” she said hopefully.

No, I would not.

“You two are worse than Corona and Misha,” she muttered around a mouthful of chips. “At least they have the excuse of being-”

The door to the lounge swished open, and ART said, Hello Iris.

Iris paused inside the door to the lounge. She’d thought it was empty, but the only reason Peri ever greeted one of the crew when they entered a room was to let someone else in the room know they were there. Then Amena’s head popped up over the back of the couch. Wonderful.

“Hi Iris!” she said. “Did you want to use the lounge? I can go somewhere else.”

“No, it’s fine," Iris said. "I was just looking for a place to read. I needed to get out of my cabin for a bit, and Dad and Turi are watching some fantasy thing in the big lounge.”

It’s called Circle Sea Academy, Peri said. It’s based on a series of children’s novels that were popular on Preservation around twenty years ago. Both the books and the serial received significant critical acclaim.

“Yeah, that one,” Iris said. Martyn, Turi, and Matteo were obsessed with fantasy media, and they’d gotten this one from SecUnit. Whenever they found a new serial, they’d camp out in the main lounge with snacks and watch it from end to end. She'd been surprised that Matteo wasn't in there with them today, but they'd been hiding from Ratthi for most of this trip.

“Oh I haven’t seen that in ages!” Amena said, springing up off the couch. “Do you think they’d mind if I joined them?”

“They’d probably love it,” Iris said, smiling at her. “They’re always trying to sucker more people into watching with them.”

Amena scampered out of the room, and Iris dropped herself onto the now abandoned couch.

“Are you watching with them too?” she asked Peri.

Yes, said Peri. I’ve already seen it, but it’s enjoyable to watch Martyn and Turi’s reactions. Amena will be an interesting additional data point, since she first saw it as a child.

Iris didn’t bother asking when Peri had watched the show before. She’d been confused when Peri came back from one of its cargo trips and wanted to start watching media with the rest of the crew. Not that it hadn’t been interested in media before, but its interest had always been academic. Suddenly, it’d had serials it loved, that it wanted to share with the rest of them.

Finding out that its new love of media came from the SecUnit it had "formed a rapport with," had been almost as boggling to her as finding out about the SecUnit itself. But she was glad that Peri had made a friend who could help it enjoy something it had never been able to enjoy before. It had been endearing at first, and it helped her calm her nerves about SecUnits in general, and then about the surly, tetchy person who'd show up to rescue them at Adamantine.

The person Peri had been prepared to bomb a small city off the map to save. Not that Peri hadn't always been a bit too willing to joke about causing mayhem and destruction, or suggest plans that would result in them. It just hadn't ever been really serious about it before. At least, Iris hadn't thought it was. She had the thought, squashed and guilty, that maybe media wasn't the only thing SecUnit had introduced Peri to.

Then they’d been running from the secondary Adamantine colony site, and Peri’s drone was dying beside her in the flier, and she’d tried to contact it in the feed. It hadn’t replied, and she’d thought it might have already been gone. But it was watching some show in the feed with SecUnit. Too weak and damaged to pay attention to more than one thing at a time, it had chosen to watch that show instead of talk to her.

Would you prefer to be left alone with your reading? Peri asked. We never finished talking over the paper you asked me to help you revise.

“Oh, I’m too tired to even think about academic writing,” she said. “I’d like to just relax and read for a bit.”

What are you reading?

“Havermaas’s new book on the history of wormhole travel,” she said. “I’ve been reading everything about wormhole tech that I can get my hands on since Adamantine.”

You will have to tell me what you learn from it when you’re done, Peri said.

“Very funny, Peri,” Iris said. “You could read it yourself in a few seconds and teach me everything that’s in it.”

That is true, Peri said, but I enjoy hearing your thoughts on things.

She felt it draw away in the feed as she settled further onto the couch.

“Matteo, you have got to say something to him!” Kaede said exasperatedly. She was sitting cross-legged on the foot of Matteo’s bunk, her knitting needles clacking faster and faster as she got more annoyed.

“What is there to say?” Matteo grumbled at their drawing tablet.

"You could try, 'Sorry for asking my not-boyfriend to seduce you for me, but it seems like you accidentally got him totally obsessed with you. Could you please tell him you're not interested so I can have him back?'"

"I could also jump out an airlock," they said. "Or call 'phrasing' on SecUnit again." That was a mistake they'd made once, on behalf of the entire crew, that no one had repeated.

"Ok, but you do probably owe him an apology," Kaede said. "And he doesn't seem like he'd be a total asshole about it."

They agreed with her on both those points. Ratthi was one of the nicest people in existence. Even in the short time he’d been on board last year, Matteo had been able to tell that. And he was smart, and handsome, and an accomplished researcher with (as Matteo had found out when he went looking after they all got home) an impressive publication record in xenobotany...

That was kind of the problem: they liked him. They liked him a lot. Tarik had too. And Matteo's idiotic plan had ruined the whole thing for everyone involved.

"It doesn't matter at this point," they said, not quite sulkily. "Tarik and I can't go back to the way things were."

Ratthi closed out of the serial he’d been trying to watch and got up to pace around his cabin for the hundredth time. Amena had sent him a feed message an hour ago to let him know that she was watching Circle Sea Academy with Martyn and Turi in the main lounge, and he would have preferred joining them to being cooped up in his cabin. But there was a good chance Tarik would be lured out of his cabin by the offer of a new fantasy serial, and he didn’t want to get in the way of that, especially since he’d already seen it about a dozen times.

He’d hoped that after a whole year of being away from the two of them, he would've been ready to actually talk to Tarik and Matteo. If nothing else, he wanted to apologize for his response to things at the time. Furious hadn't begun to cover how he felt, but it hadn't even been about them really. They'd been idiots and assholes, but that had just been the last straw on the previous two months and the stress of the situation and being sick and fucking tired of everything about the Corporation Rim. And he was pretty sure that it had been him blowing up at Tarik that had led Tarik to break things off with Matteo. Basically, there was a mess he'd left behind here, and he wanted to help fix it.

Tarik and Matteo, however, didn't seem to be ready to talk to either him or each other.

Brooding about this wasn’t going to do any good. He’d just keep to himself until they got back to Preservation, and then get out of the way and let the two of them sort it out themselves. He sat on the edge of his bed, restarted the serial he’d been watching, sighed, turned it off, and stood up again. Then he braced himself and sent a ping to SecUnit in the feed.

SecUnit always had something new to watch that it knew Ratthi would enjoy, or something terrible to put on and so the two of them could rip it apart. Given the fight with Perihelion (which no one was talking about and everyone knew was on going), he wasn’t really expecting a reply and was surprised when SecUnit said, Yeah?

I’m bored out of my mind, he said. Do you wanna watch something?

Sure, it said after a slightly too long pause. Did you have something in mind, or do you want to take a look at my new stuff?

Are you only agreeing to annoy Perihelion? Ratthi asked.

It’s not like we’re excluding it. ART can butt in and join us whenever the fuck it wants.

Ah. Either they’d been fighting about Perihelion being nosy, or SecUnit was hoping Perihelion would butt in. Ratthi sighed to himself, but even Perihelion and SecUnit arguing during their media session would be better than pacing around and ruminating on his own problems.

Anything, as long as it’s not too serious, he said. I just need a distraction.

A moment later, the opening strains of the theme from Circle Sea Academy filled the feed. Ratthi smiled to himself and laid down on his bed with his hands folded behind his head. SecUnit might not want to know about his relationship problems any more than it wanted to talk about its fight with Perihelion, but it knew how to pick distractions.

Ever since Tarik had been assigned to Peri, Karime had been the person whose company he was the most comfortable in. Seth and Peri hadn’t even wanted him here originally, and the others had picked up on that. There had always been that tiny bit of hesitation, everyone except Peri being a little too careful not to annoy him. (Peri had gone out of its way to be annoying, but he was pretty certain that had been its way of testing him.)

If Karime shared any of the others’ reservations, she’d never showed it, and the others trusted her enough that they’d come around before long. Her support in those first few months had made her a firm friend, which was why he was in the galley with her now, peeling vegetables for dinner, rather than in the lounge watching a serial he really wanted to see with everyone else.

“You should just go watch with them,” Karime said, taking the freshly peeled tuber he was holding out to her.

“No, it wouldn’t be fair to Ratthi and Matteo,” he said. “The show’s from Preservation, and it’s the kind of thing Matteo loves. I’m not going to go up there if it means neither of them want to.”

He picked up another tuber and started peeling it. Karime hummed thoughtfully to herself as she chopped the one he’d handed her into cubes and dumped them into the pot of water beside her.

"Apologizing isn’t going to make anything worse,” she said. "You could at least try."

“Ha. You weren’t there the first time I tried to apologize to Ratthi. Trust me, it can definitely make things worse. For instance, it could start another fight, and SecUnit might actually shoot me this time instead of just looking at the wall behind my head like it wanted to. Now that it knows… y’know.”

“It’s been a whole year,” she said. “Ratthi doesn't seem the sort to hold a grudge, and Matteo misses your friendship.”

“If Ratthi's over it, I'm not bringing it up again,” he said, setting the tuber on the counter between them and picking up another, “and Matteo's made it damn clear they don't want to be my friend any more. I don't think either of them want to spend much time with me and that's... that's their choice."

He’d been going to say, “That’s probably for the best,” but that would be getting into territory he didn’t want to touch. Matteo and Ratthi were two of the gentlest, smartest people he’d ever met. Everyone on the crew was brilliant, of course. You didn’t get assigned to Perihelion without being one of the best at what you did. For the deity’s sake, even SecUnit was brilliant. Tarik had never met anyone who understood stories the way it did. They were all specialists at the top of their fields, most of them doing cutting-edge research alongside their anti-corporate work.

Spending time with Matteo and Ratthi had made him feel like he might be a little bit like that too. They listened, and they talked to him without ever making him feel stupid, even though he was just a lunkhead bruiser from a corporate combat squad. They made sure he understood what they were talking about when it was something he was unfamiliar with, without him needing to ask and without being condescending about it, and they were always excited to hear about the things he had managed to teach himself.

And he’d managed to fuck that up because he was, in fact, just a bruiser from a corporate combat squad who’d gotten lucky enough to make it to Mihira when he deserted. The only reason anyone thought he was good enough to be here was that he knew about the kind of bullshit that corporations pulled when they were trying to swallow up vulnerable colonies.

Karime was giving him one of those sharp looks that made him feel like he was completely transparent.

“It’s fine, really,” he said. “I’m… I’m planning to talk to Seth after this mission about being reassigned. Martyn told me they’re thinking of offering Ratthi a position if he wants it, and now that SecUnit’s here I’m pretty much redundant anyway. It’ll be for the best for everyone.”

Perihelion was always doing more things at once than any human, augmented human, construct, or bot, could have understood. For example, it was currently navigating a wormhole and gathering data on the trip to send to Iris later, actively maintaining 27 distinct active internal systems, passively maintaining another 159, tracking its internal sensory inputs (the 267 cameras were just the start of that), watching a serial with several crew members in the lounge, cross-referencing the book that Iris was reading with its databanks of other research on wormhole tech, talking to Seth about plans for their upcoming mission, and repeatedly composing and deleting messages to SecUnit without sending them. The last one was, annoyingly, taking a larger portion of its processing space than most of the others.

I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me to
Iris still isn’t used to interacting with SecUnits. You need to How could you say
You’re can’t possibly be stupid enough to think that she meant
What the fuck is wrong with

It deleted yet another message and resisted the temptation to go peek at what SecUnit and Ratthi were doing in the feed. Probably watching media together. Which Perihelion was not remotely annoyed by, even if they were watching one of the new serials SecUnit had picked up. Unlike SecUnit, Perihelion was mature enough to not get jealous and stupid about its friend having other friends.

“Peri?” Seth said.

It hastily shunted the message-writing into a secondary processing slot to run a search against its media and social-decorum databases for relevant examples of similar messages and played back one of the camera feeds in the control lounge. How the fuck had it lost track of what Seth was saying? Oh, right. He’d just asked whether it thought the colony they were visiting had been contacted by any corporations recently.

It is possible, but not likely, it said. The wormhole data we retrieved during our previous mission was corrupted and the only reason they had it in their archives was that this colony was originally an offshoot of theirs.

“Still better to be prepared than not. Given the number of corporations that have been getting into colonization and expansion again, we can't be sure who we're going to find out there,” Seth said. He paused, rubbing the back of his head.

We will, at least, not be running into Barish-Estranza again, Perihelion said.

The message-writing search completed, and Perihelion pulled the results into its active processing space while continuing the conversation with Seth. The information the routine had dug up was maddening. According to its queries, the most effective and appropriate course of action (85% chance of resolving the situation with a reconciliation) was to apologize to SecUnit for how it had handled the situation and have a conversation about their emotional boundaries.

It tossed that result and rewrote the query, this time specifying that it wanted examples of situations where the other party had been in the wrong.

Pin-Lee scrolled irritably through notes she was compiling from her meetings with the University administrators. She needed to put together a report for the Preservation Steering Council, and so far she was having trouble resisting the temptation to just write longest string of expletives she could come up with. Maybe she could put it off until she got home and get Mensah and Bharadwaj to help her with it. It was a relief when Seth tapped her feed and asked if he could come in to talk to her.

Her relief soured when he handed her a sheet of actual paper with a message written on it. Whatever he wanted to say, he didn’t want Perihelion to hear it, and she’d stake her solicitor’s license on what it was.

I understand if you can’t say anything, but I know why they had us out on a mission during those meetings, the note read. Karime and I are trying to put together an appeal for whatever the ruling is, but the more information we have in advance, the better. Peri definitely suspects as well, but I doubt it realizes the full extent of the situation. Is it as bad as I think?

She nodded tightly at him and scribbled a note back.

It might be worse. We can talk on the station when we get there.

The only copy of her notes was on her handheld interface, which wasn’t connected to Perihelion’s feed, and hopefully not accessible to it. “Hopefully,” because she had no idea what Perihelion would do if it knew what was in those notes, and Seth clearly didn’t know either. They were going to have to tell it eventually. She could hope things didn’t go the way it looked like they were, but it would be idiotic not to plan like that was a certainty. All they could do was try to keep it from finding out until they had a plan in place to protect it if worse came to worst.

ART had stopped trying to ping Murderbot after the first 36 hours of it refusing to respond. It suspected that was because ART was working on a book-length essay about why it was right. Murderbot was not working on a book-length essay arguing the opposite, because that would be pointless and stupid. It didn’t need an entire book to prove that ART was an asshole.

How long are you staying on Preservation for? Ratthi asked while the opening credits started playing for the next episode of Circle Sea Academy.

Not sure, it said. It really depended on whether ART decided to get its metaphorical head out of its metaphorical ass before it was scheduled to leave Preservation. If it didn’t, Murderbot would be sitting the mission out. It didn’t like the thought of the humans going off on this mission alone, but it wasn’t going to spend the next 1,500 plus hours with Iris if she kept treating it like a human child who needed to have its hand held in every social interaction. And if she referred to it as an “ex-SecUnit” again, it might give in to the temptation to aggressively demonstrate that it was, in fact, still a SecUnit. With guns built into its arms and everything.

Its mistake had been asking ART for advice about the situation. Or rather, asking ART to tell Iris that she needed to stop being a fucking condescending asshole. In retrospect, it maybe shouldn’t have used those exact words, but it had been pissed off at the time. ART had, unsurprisingly, launched into a lecture about how Murderbot needed to remember that this was a new experience both of them, and it just didn't know her that well yet and blah blah blah… It didn’t know if ART had more to say than that, because it had cut ART out of its feed after the first three seconds.

Well, if you’re still around, there’s a new play opening at the Pressy Theater on the station, Ratthi said. He sent the notice about it over. I’d been planning on catching it opening week if you want to come along.

The play’s opening night was almost one Preservation calendar month from the cycle they were scheduled to arrive in the system. There was no way Ratthi thought ART would be staying that long when it had another mission coming up. Ugh.

Maybe, it said. I don’t know when I’m going to be heading out again.

The pause on the feed told it that Ratthi had picked up on the “I” rather than “we” in that statement. It knew the exact face he was making while he tried to decide whether to say anything about it, but the opening credits were finishing, and Ratthi fell silent for the start of the episode.

Ten minutes later, a screeching, grinding noise ripped through the ship like ART had just been side-swiped by something. Gravity cut out, then slammed back in from the wrong direction, throwing Murderbot off its bunk and onto the wall across the room.

There was a moment of complete silence, during which gravity did not switch back to the right way up. Then every human on the ship started talking at once. Murderbot was about to tell them all to shut the fuck up, when Seth’s deep voice cut through the chatter:

Is everyone alright? Report in.

We’re all fine in here, Martyn said. Just some bruises.

Kaede dislocated her shoulder and needs to get to medical, but I’m alright, Matteo said.

I’m okay, Ratthi said shakily.

Clear, said Tarik. Got lucky though, Karime almost speared both of us with a kitchen knife.

All in one piece, Pin-Lee said. Can’t say the same for my handheld interface though.

Just a little shaken, Iris said.

SecUnit? Seth said.

Fine, it replied.

It was in the middle of waking the drones that had been lying dormant in the closet and sorting their inputs when Martyn said, Peri, what’s going on?

The silence in the feed was the loudest sound Murderbot had ever heard. It sent a ping out into the feed and felt the horrible emptiness where ART should have been. There was just enough time for it to hear all the humans start shouting again before everything went black.

Image description: An illustration of 6 humans plus SecUnit, in front of a logo for Perihelion. In front are Matteo, Amena, Iris, and Ratthi. In back are Pin-Lee, Tarik, and SecUnit. End description.

Chapter Text

Tarik woke with a start and jumped to his feet.

He was standing on a muddy lake shore under a cloudy sky. It was hot and humid enough that his doublet already felt stifling, but at least the air was breathable. A few meters away, the edge of the water lapped placidly at the shore, and there were some stilt-legged bird things wading in the shallows. Behind him was a forest of massive plants, each one nearly twenty meters tall, spreading out overhead into a dark green canopy. There was nothing but blank static on any of the channels he could access with his feed interface.

“Am I dreaming?” he asked the bird things.

The one nearest him stopped prodding around in the mud with its beak and looked at him with one yellow eye.

“How should I know?” it said.

“I’m going to assume that means yes,” Tarik muttered.

“Suit yourself,” said the bird thing, and went back to digging in the mud.

The problem was, even accounting for the talking birds and general impossibility of the situation, this didn’t feel like a dream. At least, not any of the dreams he remembered having. It was too solid and detailed. Also, no one was shooting at him or yelling at him, which was distinctly unlike his normal dreams.

Dream or not, he needed to get his bearings. He turned from the water to look at the plants. Trees? Were they still trees if they were no matter what planet they were on? Ratthi would know. Ratthi would also probably want to stay here and talk to the bird things. Though, assuming this wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t like there was anyone else who might have useful intel for him.

“Uh, excuse me,” he said to the bird. “Do you, uh, did you see how I got here?”

“You fell out of the sky,” it said crossly. “Scared all the food away with the noise you made doing it too. Good thing you landed in the mud. You look like you’d splat pretty bad on harder ground.”

Had they crashed? If Peri had been so damaged they had to drop out of the wormhole unexpectedly, that was possible. It didn’t answer how he’d ended up alone here though.

“Was there anything else in the sky? Something big? Any other humans?”

“Humans?” the bird thing said irritably, turning to look at him with its other eye. “What’re you talking about? Haven’t been any humans here in ages. There was a huge thunderclap, and then a bunch of lights go streaking across the sky, and you plopped down in the mud like an idiot. Now shoo, I’m trying to get lunch.”

“Sorry, I’ll get going. Could you just tell me which way the lights went?”

“Saw one heading down over that way,” the bird thing said, jerking its head to point along the lake shore.

“Thanks,” Tarik said. It definitely sounded like they’d crashed, or maybe they’d had to abandon Peri using the safe pods. With any luck, at least some of the others had made it down safely. Now he just had to find them.

“Dr. Ratthi! Are you alright? Please answer if you can.”

Ratthi groaned as he tried to sit up.

“Take it easy,” Matteo said, reaching out to support him. “You didn’t break anything, but you’re going to have some nasty bruises.”

“What happened?” Ratthi asked. Matteo's hair was a mess, coming loose from its braids and straggling across their forehead.“Is everyone alright? Where’s Perihelion?” Then he registered what he was seeing other than Matteo, and he nearly laid back down. “Where… what?”

They were sitting in the middle of a forest. Old-growth arboreal, if he had to guess, based on the girth of the woody trunks around them and the density of the understorey. Each tree was monopodial, branching into a canopy nearly 45 meters above their heads, with thick scaly bark. Dark green moss covered the lower parts of the trunks and spread in a dense blanket over the ground, but the majority of the understorey seemed to be comprised of large vascular fronds growing in clumps.

“I have no idea,” Matteo said. “One second I was with Kaede in my cabin, and the next thing I knew we were falling through the branches of these… trees? They’re trees right?”

“Yes.”

“Right, so we were falling through them and I guess we got really lucky because we both kinda bounced down through the branches enough that we didn’t hit the ground as hard as I was expecting and landed on this soft stuff.”

“It’s moss,” Ratthi said. “Probably. Are you hurt at all?”

“Just some scrapes from hitting the trees,” they said. “There’s no sign of anyone else nearby, and the feed’s dead. I saw something fly past before we hit the trees, but it didn’t look like a human.”

“How did we get off Perihelion?”

“No clue. If we’d evacuated, we should have been in its shuttles or the safe-pods. There’s no way Peri would have just let us jump. Especially not without soft-drop packs or evac suits. Unless…” they didn’t finish the thought, but Ratthi knew what they meant. Unless Perihelion was dead, or so badly damaged that staying on board during a crash would have been more dangerous than jumping.

“Even if Perihelion were that badly damaged, SecUnit never would have allowed it,” Ratthi said firmly. “And if neither of them were able to help us evacuate, the others wouldn’t have just dropped us while we were unconscious.”

“So… what next?” Matteo asked. “If SecUnit’s here — and functional — it’d probably want us to stay put until it finds us.”

“It would definitely want us to stay put until it finds us,” Ratthi said.

A soft clicking noise caught his attention, and he turned to see almost a dozen small fauna perched on the roots of a tree about three meters away, staring at them. They looked like little toys made of bark, sticks, and moss. It was hard to tell whether they were all the same species, because no two of them were quite the same shape: some were small enough to fit in his palm and others were would have come up to his knee if he were standing, they had anywhere from four to ten limbs, and their heads were a deeply improbable range of shapes. Of course, some planets had ambulatory flora, or fauna that blurred the lines between the two, and a single species of flora could easily come in a range of shapes and sizes that would baffle most people trying to deduce what species they were.

“Should we run?” Matteo whispered. They had turned to see what he was looking at and were staring transfixed at the creatures.

“They don’t seem hostile,” Ratthi murmured back. "Just stay still and let them investigate if they want. They've probably never seen a human before."

One of the smaller creatures clambered down from the root and started sidling toward them. It approached hesitantly, pausing every few steps to look at them. When it was less than a meter away, Matteo sneezed loudly, and all the creatures vanished. They didn’t duck or run away, they just vanished as if they’d blinked out of existence.

“I’m taking it back,” Ratthi said, staring at the spot where the creature approaching them had just vanished. “Let’s find somewhere else to wait.”

“Agreed,” said Matteo.

“Any opinions on which way we go?” Ratthi asked as he stood and brushed dirt and bits of foliage off his kaftan.

“We were moving that way when we were falling,” they said, pointing off through the trees. “Maybe we should go back the other way? If anyone else is here and we got scattered, they might have the same idea.”

“Good enough for me,” Ratthi said.

One of the things that Iris had learned early on about missions with Peri was that you should never ever wonder if things could get worse. The answer was always “yes.” So she really shouldn’t have been surprised that things could get worse than “we’re having a catastrophic drive failure in the middle of a wormhole, and Peri’s not answering anyone.” However, she was used to things getting worse in such a way that she could at least understand how the previous situation was connected to the new one. Going instantaneously from sitting on the wall in the lounge to being caught in the branches of a tree with a giant, probably predatory, fauna sleeping on the ground under it was a bit much even for her.

The creature was some kind of vast reptilian thing, black scales gleaming like an oil-slick, with a crest of thick, black fur running down the center of its back. It must have been 15 meters long, but it was hard to tell because of the way it was currently coiled up in a messy heap. From where she was, Iris could see one of its bird-like feet sticking out from the coils of its body. The skin on its foot almost looked metallic, with a dull silver sheen, and the hooked talons on it were each as long as her hands.

Tempting as it was to stay in the tree, the thing looked more than capable of climbing, and whatever was going on, she wasn’t going to be able to fix it from inside a monster’s stomach. She started carefully easing her way down the tree, testing each branch before putting her full weight on it. Fortunately, the green stuff growing all over the tree’s bark helped muffle any sound her boots might have made on it. Less fortunately, it turned out that the green stuff disguised the fact that some of the branches were not nearly as solid as they seemed. When she was about two meters off the ground, the branch she was standing on broke with a loud crack, and she plummeted the rest of the way down.

She managed to roll out of the fall and come up on her feet, staring directly into the monster’s face and its bright, reddish-purple eyes, which had just snapped open. Its long muzzle opened to reveal a set of large, sharp teeth, and she didn’t wait around to find out anything else. She turned and ran for her life.

Behind her, there was a loud snarl, followed a moment later by an ear-shattering shriek. Iris pelted through the trees, ducking around bushes and scrambling over moss-covered deadwood. She ran until her lungs were burning, then stopped in the shelter of a massive tree trunk, trying to slow her breathing as she listened for any sound of pursuit. When the sound of her heart pounding quieted enough for her to hear anything else, there was nothing around her but silence. She risked a peek around the tree and saw nothing, so she sank to the ground and let herself shake with nerves.

Okay. What did she know about the situation? She was on a planet. She was alone. There was a monster somewhere nearby that may or may not be trying to find her. Before that, she’d been on Peri with everyone else, and they’d been in the wormhole. Was it possible that whatever had damaged Peri had thrown them out of the wormhole? Theoretically, yes. But unless they’d been near an unknown exit, that would mean they’d been thrown into the side of the wormhole. No one knew exactly what happened if a ship did that, but research with drones and pathfinders suggested it wouldn’t involve anyone coming out alive, if the size of the resulting explosions was anything to go by.

She was feeling a lot less shaky and shoved to her feet again. With no other information to go on, the only course of action that made sense was to keep putting distance between herself and the monster. The rest could be sorted out once she wasn’t in danger of being eaten. She stepped out from behind the tree, and the monster was standing a few meters away, watching her.

Neither of them moved. Now that it was standing still, Iris could see that it also had a fringe of shorter fur around its jaw, two short, branched horns the same color as its legs (one was broken off near the base), and long… tentacles? whiskers? on its muzzle that floated in the air around it like a dancer’s ribbons. If it weren’t for the fact that it was probably about to kill and eat her, it would have been beautiful.

Very slowly, it arched its neck down to just below her head height and made a soft, low whining noise. It looked — well it looked embarrassed, which was absolutely absurd. Nothing this huge and terrifying should be capable of embarrassment.

“If you’re going to eat me, could you just do it already?” she said.

The creature rolled its eyes and shook its head at her. This was just getting stupid.

“You understand me?”

Nod.

“Can you speak? You could have said something earlier if so.”

It opened its mouth, made an inarticulate growling noise, and then looked, if possible, even more embarrassed. Iris squinted at it. There was something about the way it was avoiding looking directly at her, and the way its body language was broadcasting nervous awkwardness, that was oddly familiar. Almost human.

The creature turned so she could see its left shoulder. There was a massive scar there, like it had been horribly burned at some point and healed badly. Or maybe it had been branded, because the scar was shaped just like —

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” she shouted, throwing her hands up in the air. “You know what? No. I’m done. This is not happening. Either I’m having some kind of dream, or I’m hallucinating. Because there is no way that I’m on a planet right now, and there’s especially no way that you’re here and shaped like that!”

That earned her another eye-roll and what was definitely a sarcastic snort.

“I’d like to wake up now,” she said. “I’m going to wake up back on Peri, tell it about this idiotic dream, and it’s going to laugh itself sick at the idea of you being a whatever you’re supposed to be.”

It tossed its head irritably and made another growling attempt at speech. Then it froze. Its ears pricked up, and its eyes went wide. Iris was about to ask it what the fuck it was doing now, when she heard the crashing, rumbling noise that had caught its attention. It growled deep in its throat and slunk forward to stand between her and the rapidly approaching sound. She didn’t try to run this time because if this was a dream, it couldn’t hurt her, and if by some insane, infuriatingly stupid chance this wasn’t a dream, and she was right about who it was, there weren’t many people she’d rather have between her and anything that might be about to burst out of the trees.

Then anything burst out of the trees. Iris just had time to register that it was a shapeless, slightly translucent mass at least the size of a combat bot, blue, and covered in eyes before her monster grabbed her in its front feet and leapt into the air.

“Terrified” was not a word that applied to Perihelion very often. It worried sometimes. When its crew was away doing something dangerous that it couldn’t help them with, it worried quite a lot. It could even admit to being scared on their behalf once in a while. But it was almost never scared for its own safety. It had no reason to be. It was a large, heavily armed space transport. It had been in firefights with other ships, had even sustained significant damage in those fights, but its ship-body was well-made and the damage easily repaired at the University’s shipyard. The only thing it had ever encountered which had seriously hurt it had been an alien remnant-infused, sentient, viral machine intelligence. (Which had, technically, killed it, but Perihelion tried very hard not to consider the implications of that.)

Right now, if it were forced to put a name to its emotional state, it would be “terrified.” All things considered, terror was a completely rational emotional state to be in, for the following reasons: 1) it was not in its ship-body; 2) it didn’t seem to be in any sort of body that made sense for a machine intelligence to inhabit; 3) the nonsensical body it was currently inhabiting was on a strange planet; 4) there was no feed; 5) none of its external inputs were in the right format; 6) it was nearly immobile; 7) it couldn’t access any of its data archives to learn anything about its situation; and 8) it had no idea how it had gotten here or where its crew was. Anyone would be terrified by that situation.

When it first came online, it had taken Perihelion 10.547 minutes to comprehend any of the inputs it was receiving. It had video inputs, but they were all on the outside of its body, pointing off in every direction, and capable of picking up a much more limited spectrum of light than it was used to. There was also sound, and a sense of pressure and temperature that was similar to the way its internal sensors operated, except that it was, again, all coming from the outside of its body. It felt like it had been turned inside out.

Then Perihelion realized that Pin-Lee was lying unconscious on the ground beside it. It tried to scan her and found it couldn’t, but there was an unfamiliar sense that told it she was alive and uninjured. However, perceiving Pin-Lee had made Perihelion aware that either she was much larger than she should be, or it was much smaller than it should be. Since Pin-Lee appeared to be in her normal configuration, and Perihelion was clearly not, the reasonable conclusion was that it was the one whose size was incorrect.

That was just insulting on top of everything else.

Pin-Lee groaned quietly and sat up, one hand pressed to her forehead. Her gaze fell on Perihelion and then traveled up, and further up, and then back down. Her face went very pale.

“What in the unholy abyssal fuck…” she said quietly.

It managed to turn several more of its visual inputs to focus on her, which made Pin-Lee flinch and scoot away from it. This suggested that it looked quite a bit worse than it had suspected. It needed to find some means of communicating with her before she – leapt to her feet and ran away. Like that. Fuck.

Well, it wasn’t about to let one of SecUnit’s humans go running off on her own into who knew what danger. This stupid body had to be able to move somehow. Perihelion wasn’t used to moving its main body except with its engines, but it was familiar with piloting its drone iterations and moving their limbs. There must be limbs attached to this body somewhere. It absolutely could not just be a solid lump.

And suddenly it did have arms, long and thin with little attachments on the end for grabbing things. That would do. Perihelion reached out, grabbed the nearest tree trunk, and started pulling itself after Pin-Lee.

It was slow going at first, but Perihelion learned quickly, and soon it was dragging itself along the forest floor at least as fast as a human could run. With no scan, it couldn’t be sure which way Pin-Lee had gone, but she couldn’t have gotten too far. Now that it could see part of itself, Perihelion was also beginning to understand why Pin-Lee had been so alarmed by its appearance. The material this body was made of looked like a dense cloud in swirling shades of blue, and the visual inputs it had identified were actually uncomfortably humanesque eyes, drifting on its surface. It was starting to run through possible ways it could communicate with Pin-Lee once it caught up to her, when it heard Iris’s voice. She wasn’t far off, but Perihelion couldn’t make out what she was saying. All it could tell was that she was scared.

Perihelion spun around and started hauling itself through the trees as fast as it could. It caught sight of her, standing by one of the enormous tree trunks, facing something that looked like a fauna from human fantasy media. The creature was slinking slowly toward Iris in a way that marked it as a predator. Just as Perihelion threw itself past the last of the trees between them, the thing pounced, seized Iris in its claws, and launched into the air above the forest canopy.

Hey! Amena! Wake up!

Amena gasped and sat bolt upright. “SecUnit!? What’s wrong?”

Then she registered that she was in a forest, not in ART’s lounge, and that there was something in her lap. She looked down and saw some kind of small, furry fauna trying to get its feet under it, very much like it had just fallen off her chest when she sat up. She screamed and slapped at it, and it squeaked in alarm.

Hey! Cut it out, it’s me!

She stopped and looked down at the little creature. It was about as long as her arm, and looked almost like a black ferret, except for the thick crest of brilliant blue fur along its back that ended in a magnificent plume of a tail.

[Image description: An illustration of Amena and Martyr. Amena is in the foreground, leaning back on the ground. Martyr, a black-and-blue weasel-y critter, has its front paws on her knee, and is looking at her  seriously. End description.] 

“SecUnit?” she said hesitantly. The feed voice she was hearing sounded almost like SecUnit, but it was off in a way she couldn’t quite place. “Why are you a ferret?”

Do I really sound that much like it? Fuck. Yeah, okay, so this is going to be a bit awkward. I’m not Murderbot. Not your Murderbot anyway. I’m Murderbot 2.0.

“Right. And I’m Captain Consuela Makeba, and we’re about to go off on a wild adventure to save another colony?” she said.

Very funny. You’re – fuck I was going to explain this to everyone at once but things kinda got screwed up.

“Everyone else? Who else is here? Where is here? Are you the reason ART got hurt? Who are you really?”

She could feel herself spiraling and stopped to take a breath. Nothing about this situation made sense, and it was disturbingly similar to the last time she’d been dragged off on an involuntary adventure. Except that this time, SecUnit wasn’t with her. She’d had nightmares like that a lot over the last year: Being alone in ART’s empty body, wandering around the halls looking for anyone else while something invisible followed her. Fighting to get the airlock open to let the others in from the safepod and finding them all dead when it opened. Seeing SecUnit knocked out by that big drone and being dragged into the room with the infected colonists. Except in the nightmares SecUnit didn’t show up again. Or it did show up again, but it was all grey like the colonists, and instead of attacking them it…

C’mon Amena, stay with me, the little creature said. Look, ask me something that only I would know, okay? I mean, I already told you my name, but… oh I guess you weren’t there for that. That was just ART. Ask something else.

Amena took another deep breath and tried to swallow the knot of fear in her throat. Murderbot 2.0 hadn’t ever told her its name, not directly. It had apparently told Three at some point, because Three had used that name when it showed up in the shuttle with the rest of ART’s crew. Ratthi had told her afterward that, while “Murderbot” was SecUnit’s name, it kept it private, and she hadn’t ever told anyone else.

“What was the last thing I said to you before you left for the Barish-Estranza ship?” she asked.

You told me to be careful, it said. Which, just so you know, I did try to do.

That was the last thing she'd said to 2.0. The second part didn't sound true, because she didn't think any version of SecUnit would have tried to be careful when it was protecting its humans. But she was increasingly sure that it was who it said it was.

Somehow, she didn't actually care how, 2.0 was back.

“Alright, so you're SecUnit 2.0,” she said, surprised to find that she genuinely believed it. "Or just 2.0? I can't call you... y'know. SecUnit would be really upset. But there’s a big problem with your story: you died. You, TargetControlSystem, and AdaCol all died. So, how are you here? Is that some kind of bot-body? If you survived somehow did –”

Yikes, slow down. Let me answer a question before you ask another one.

“Sorry,” she said, pushing her braids back from her face. “But you have to admit this is a lot to swallow.”

Yeah, I know. Okay, quick version: My actual name is Martyr, but let's just keep that between us for now. Everyone else can just call me 2.0. Yes, I survived. TargetControlSystem definitely didn’t, and I don’t think AdaCol did either. No, this isn’t a bot body, but explaining what it is can wait. You, ART, 1.0, Ratthi, Iris, Matteo, Tarik, and Pin-Lee are all here. ART’s hull got a bit scraped up, but its body is fine other than that. The rest of the crew are safe. And we need to go find the people who are here so I can explain the rest.

Amena opened her mouth to tell it that what it just said had raised more questions than it answered, when there was an awful wailing noise above them. She looked up through a gap in the branches just in time to see something like a long, black ribbon streak across the sky, hotly pursued by an enormous blue avian.

Oooh, and I need to go take care of that right away, it said.

Chapter Text

It would have been nice, Matteo thought, if the situation could have satisfied itself with being terrifying. There was no call for being terrifying and unbelievably awkward. The only thing preventing them from digging a hole to hide in was the fact that Ratthi was apparently too busy being excited about plants to feel awkward about being alone with them. Or he was feeling awkward about it and acting excited about plants to hide it.

Or he was acting excited about plants so he didn't totally freak out about the way the little bark fauna kept appearing and disappearing among the trees around them as they walked.

"They're not following us so they can attack when we get tired, right?" Matteo asked finally, unable to keep the thought quiet any more. They wished they could unsay it immediately and not sound like a total wimp.

Ratthi just shook his head thoughtfully. “They aren’t acting like predators,” he said. “I think they’re just curious. It’s not uncommon for fauna on unsurveyed planets to show a lot of curiosity about humans.”

"How many surveyors do you think had that exact thought right before they got eaten?" they said.

"You sound like SecUnit," Ratthi said. "I do know a thing or two about fauna, even if my specialty is plants."

"I don't sound like SecUnit," Matteo said indignantly. "I didn't say 'fuck' even once in that sentence. And I believe you, but if I get eaten, you're telling SecUnit and Peri it was your fault."

“SecUnit is going to say anything that goes wrong before it finds us was my fault,” Ratthi said ruefully. “It doesn’t have the highest opinion of my survival skills. Which I'd be insulted by if I weren't fully aware of my own shortcomings.”

“I don’t think it has a particularly high opinion of humans’ survival skills in general,” Matteo said. SecUnit had, over the course of the last year, made it painfully obvious that it thought everyone on the crew was liable to commit accidental suicide if not watched constantly.

“It has a hard time trusting humans and that extends to trusting us not to get killed on its watch,” Ratthi said. “I think Mensah is the only person it really trusts, and that’s a unique situation.”

The way he said it made Matteo almost curious enough to ask what the situation between SecUnit and Dr. Mensah was. That would definitely count as prying into SecUnit’s business though, and "don't ask about SecUnit's private life" was the second rule about interacting with it (after "don't touch it"). Peri had been very clear about that.

Before they could figure out how to shift the subject, Ratthi said, “This forest is old. Incredibly old.”

“How can you tell?” Matteo asked.

“Woody plants like these don’t usually grow very fast, so for them to be this big, they’re likely a few hundred Corporate Standard Years at least,” he said, gesturing at the nearest one. “Of course, they might be some kind of anomaly, but it also just feels old. Not a very scientific thing to say, I know. Call it scientific intuition pending further data.”

“No, I think I know what you mean,” they said softly. “There’s something about it that feels kind of stately, like one of those ancient stone buildings you see sometimes in the pre-CR colonies.”

Ratthi chuckled and said, “I’ve only been to one pre-CR colony, but the architecture there was pretty impressive.”

"I thought you would’ve seen a lot more, what with being a surveyor and all."

“No,” he said. “Well. I’d like to eventually, but Preservation surveys don’t usually go far out of our system. When I was a kid, I always thought about going to find the old colony our grandparents came from. The ship that brought them to Preservation was a cold-sleep ship, and no one knows if the wormhole network goes anywhere near it.” He smiled to himself a little, looking off into the distance, then turned to Matteo and said, “You must have seen some amazing things though, traveling with Perihelion.”

"Oh... not as much as you'd think," they said, shrugging. "I mean, I'm a medic and an engineer, so I keep everyone patched up when they're away from Peri, and help keep Peri in good shape. It's everyone else that does the exciting stuff usually."

Ratthi started to say something but stopped himself. Matteo turned away, the back of their neck warm. Kaede would've told them to shut up and stop being self-deprecating.

“Ratthi! Matteo! Oh, praise the deity you’re safe!”

Matteo whipped around as Tarik emerged from the trees behind them. He looked like he'd fallen face-first into a swamp, but his lopsided grin broadcast relief at finding them. Matteo had seen that same look on his face dozens of times on missions, and felt their own face break into smile in response. Tarik broke into a jog toward them, and Matteo started forward, then realized Ratthi had done the same thing. All three of them half-staggered to a stop, Tarik still just over a meter away.

“Uhm,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck uncomfortably. “Are you two alright? I mean. I can see you’re not hurt. Have you seen anything… weird?”

“Some highly unusual fauna,” Ratthi said. “Nothing dangerous though. What happened? Do you know where the others are?”

“You’re the first people I’ve found,” he replied. “I just woke up lying in the mud by a lake. What kind of unusual fauna?”

“Some weird little plant things,” Matteo said. “Why? Did you see something?”

“Uh. Yeah. Some avians, over by the lake.”

“That’s not so odd,” Ratthi said.

“One of them talked to me.”

Matteo blinked. “You mean talk talked?” they said. “Actual speech?”

“It told me it saw a bunch of things falling out of the sky and pointed me this direction,” he said.

"An alien?" Ratthi said. He was looking back the way Tarik had come and nearly bouncing with excitement. “Did it seem intelligent? Sapient? And you said it was an avian? There’s no feed here though. How did you —”

“Ratthi. Focus,” Tarik said. His voice was sharp, but there was a fond smile tugging at one corner of his mouth again. “It sounded like we aren’t the only ones here. The others might need help.”

Matteo had to look at a tree.

“Right,” Ratthi said sheepishly. “Right, sorry. Any idea which way we should go?”

Tarik was about to answer, when a blood-curdling shriek tore through the forest. Matteo couldn’t tell whether it was a scream of pain or rage, but it make the hair on the back of their neck stand up. Ratthi went ashy, and Tarik snapped to attention.

“Normally I wouldn’t recommend running toward the awful noises," Tarik said, "but…”

“But whatever that was might be after one of the others,” Ratthi finished. “Let’s go.”

Pin-Lee had stared down corporate executives in court, gone with Ayda to the DeltFall habitat, and led Ratthi and Gurathin through TranRollinHyfa without turning a hair. None of that had prepared her to wake up suddenly next to a giant blob/cloud/thing covered in eyes and have it chase her through a strange forest. Now she was crouched inside a hollow fucking log, one hand clapped over her mouth to muffle the sound of her breathing. The blob thing had gone lumbering off in a different direction, but she didn't trust that it wouldn't be back.

Then the shriek echoed through the trees, ragged and inhuman. She scrambled out of her hiding place and ran in the direction it had come from. Worst case scenario she met the blob-thing or some other monster, but if that meant finding one of the others, it was worth it. She was just glad she’d been wearing her comfortable shoes​ and not the shit she put on for going to court.

It was only a couple minutes later that she dashed around the enormous trunk of a tree and ran headlong into someone. Firm hands grabbed her shoulders, and she instinctively shoved them off and punched somewhere around the person's throat height. Her fist connected solidly and the other person staggered back.

“Pin-Lee! Thank the light!” someone shouted, and a second later Ratthi had grabbed her in a hug so tight it swept her off her feet. She wasn’t normally much for hugging, but she wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed him back just as hard. He set her down and held her at arm’s length. “Are you alright? Did you see what made that noise?”

“I’m not hurt,” she said. “There was some huge thing, maybe a fauna, staring at me when I came to. It chased me probably half a kilo before it got distracted. It might’ve been the thing screaming, but I don’t know. What about you?”

“All good,” Ratthi said. “Me and Matteo ended up together, and Tarik found us.”

Tarik was currently doubled over coughing, but he waved at her. Oh. That's who she'd punched.

"Sorry," she said.

"S'fine," he rasped. "Good hit."

“Do any of you know what happened?” she asked. “Last thing I remember was being in my cabin on Perihelion.”

“Same,” said Matteo. “Next thing I knew, me and Ratthi were falling through these trees. We thought we must have evacuated from Peri, but there’s no sign of shuttles or anything.”

“Tarik found an alien, and it told him he fell out of the sky, and there were other things heading off different directions,” said Ratthi. He sounded delighted by the prospect.

Tarik at least had the good grace to look uncomfortable about it.

"An alien," she repeated. "Alien, as in, the things that no one has ever actually encountered, but whose ancient leftovers range from 'vaguely risky' to 'mind controlling fungus.'"

"Yeah, one of those," Tarik said. "But I think we were all trying not to think about that part yet. How big was the thing you saw?"

“It had to be at least the size of a shuttle,” she said. “Blue, looked a bit like swirling clouds, and it was covered in eyes that moved around.”

“Oh good. Good. That’s just what we need,” Matteo said, flinging their hands in the air. “A giant cloud blob. That might be trying to eat us."

"Did you see which way it went?" Tarik asked.

“This way,” Pin-Lee said. “It should be easy to follow. It was trampling everything.”

They found the monster’s trail quickly. It had cut a wide swath through the forest, leaving broken bushes and small trees in its wake. Ratthi winced when he saw it, but when she shot him a questioning look, he just shook his head in an “I’ll tell you later” way. The trail went on for nearly half a kilometer before ending abruptly in a small clearing.

“Now what?” Matteo said, looking around. “Where’d it go?”

“Maybe it can fly?” Ratthi said dubiously, looking up through the branches. “It doesn’t seem likely given its size though.”

"It didn't have wings that I saw," Pin-Lee said.

“Spread out,” Tarik said, “Don’t get out of sight from each other, but see if you can find any tracks. The ground cover looks soft enough to hold them even though it’s dry.”

Pin-Lee nodded sharply and stepped gingerly out across the mossy ground. Near the other side of the clearing, she found something. Human footprints, small and faint, and then much larger and deeper tracks. Both sets of tracks ended abruptly with a set of scratches in the moss that looked like it had been raked by claws.

“Over here!” she shouted, and the others came running to look.

“Someone small,” Tarik said. “Turi maybe?”

“Could also be Iris or Amena,” Matteo said nervously. “But what’s the other thing?”

“Not the blob-cloud,” Pin-Lee said. “I don’t think it had feet.”

Ratthi was frowning at the larger tracks. "These are definitely avian tracks, but it looks like two different sets. One is anisodactyl and the other's zygodactyl... don't like the look of the claws on either, but the anisodactyl ones look terrifying." He paused and looked up at them all.

"Translation?" Pin-Lee said.

"It looks like there were two different things here, with two different kinds of feet," he said. "They both have big claws, but one has talons for grabbing prey."

“It took someone?” Matteo whispered.

“No sign of a struggle or blood,” Tarik said. “Whoever it was might have been alright when they were taken.” He cursed under his breath in a language Pin-Lee didn’t know. “We need SecUnit here. Until then, find a big stick.”

Another shriek rang out above them. Ratthi and Matteo both ducked, but Pin-Lee and Tarik looked up.

“MOVE!” she shouted, grabbing Ratthi by the arm and hauling him back toward the trees. Tarik grabbed Matteo, nearly as forcefully as SecUnit would have, and bolted after her. They just barely reached the tree cover before something crashed down into the clearing. The noise it made was appalling: the same awful shrieking, mixed with the sound of something snarling like a dog in a fight. Looking out cautiously from behind a tree, she could see that it was actually two separate fauna. One was a swirling blue mass like the blob thing, but this one had giant wings. The other was glossy jet black and serpentine, but with slender legs and vicious looking talons. They were twisted around each other, clawing and shrieking like they were trying to kill each other.

Then several things happened at once: the avian managed to get free of the other fauna and hurled it across the clearing, something small streaked past Pin-Lee’s feet, and Amena ran past after it shouting, “ART! SecUnit! Stop! 2.0 be careful!”

As the serpentine fauna surged to its feet, something that looked like an air barrier shimmered into place across the center of the clearing. It clearly wasn’t an air barrier though, because seconds later, both the creatures rammed into it and bounced off.

And a voice, almost like a feed voice, shouted so forcefully that it made Pin-Lee’s knees wobbly, BOTH OF YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Since it had come online in this stupid forest, the main thoughts in Murderbot's mind had been variations on, “what the fuck.” Where the fuck was it? What the fuck was it? Why the fuck did it look like a fucking dragon out of some fantasy serial? How the fuck was it supposed to move around like this? Why the fuck was Iris being so fucking stupid? What in the absolute fuck was that thing?

That last one was directed at the enormous hostile fauna covered in eyes that had come bursting out of the trees with seemingly every intent of killing/eating it and Iris. And now Murderbot was flying, carrying Iris clutched against its chest, trying not slice her open with the claws on its hands/front feet/whatever, and desperately trying to be fast enough to out-fly the stupid blue thing, which had turned itself into some kind of avian horror and come after them. Because this situation needed to be worse.

Iris hadn’t stopped screaming since Murderbot grabbed her, though it thought now she was screaming at it to do something or other instead of just generally screaming. It was hard to tell. The wind was roaring in its ears, the hostile was also screaming, and Murderbot couldn’t filter its audio inputs. Right. Running away obviously wasn’t going to work. Flying wasn’t tiring, but the hostile clearly wasn't going to give up any time soon. So Murderbot dove into the trees and deposited Iris on the ground, then flung itself back into the air at the hostile.

It was a lot more solid than it looked. They collided with a thud that sent both of them tumbling through the air. Okay, being able to tackle something the size of one of ART's shuttles wasn't such a bad thing. Another advantage, it quickly discovered, was that whatever its skin was made of was tougher than any armor. The hostile was trying to shred it with talons (avians had talons instead of claws, right?) that must have been ten centimeters long, and gouge at its eyes with its stupid beak/mouth/snout. Disadvantage: it had no idea how to fight with this body. But the hostile had a lot more eyes than Murderbot did, and two could play at that game. It wrapped its whole body around the hostile to keep it from escaping and started clawing the absolute shit out of it.

To Murderbot’s immense annoyance, the stupid hostile didn’t seem to be injured by this, though from the way it was screaming it either hurt a lot or was pissing it off. Also, it was apparently able to move its eyes around its body, which was both creepy and even more annoying. They rolled through the air in a screaming, snarling tangle. Murderbot would have been more surprised and embarrassed by the sounds it was making if it hadn’t been so busy trying to kill the fucking hostile. Then it managed to get the hostile’s wings pinned and discovered that even though its ability to fly clearly didn’t depend on any bit of physics it was aware of (not that it was aware of many), there was a weight limit to it, because they immediately plummeted.

They hit the ground with a bone rattling crash, but neither of them stopped fighting. It had occurred to Murderbot that it might be able to bite the damn thing more effectively than it could shred it, but a) it might be poisonous and b) that was disgusting. The hostile managed to wriggle partway free and threw Murderbot across the clearing. Something cracked when it hit the trees on the other side, and it hoped the cracking had been the trees and not its bones. It got its feet under it again and lunged at the hostile.

“ART! SecUnit! Stop! 2.0 be careful!” That was Amena shouting. So she was here too, and running directly at the fight, of course. Stupid humans.

There was a minute shimmer in the air in front of Murderbot, and it slammed into something as solid as a bulkhead. In the feed, someone shouted:

BOTH OF YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!

The force of the voice would have been enough to freeze it in place, but what actually made it stop short was the voice itself. It knew that voice, and there was no fucking way it could be real. Something darted out of the trees and leapt between Murderbot and the hostile. As it jumped, it went from being tiny to being almost four meters long. It was some kind of fauna, with a long, sleek body covered in black fur, and a crest of what was either blue fur or blue fire down its spine. Whatever it was, the stuff was vaguely translucent, and flickering in the same shades of blue as the hostile (which had also stopped moving, with a dozen or so eyes staring at the newcomer). The new fauna/Probably Hostile Two stood between them with its weird long body arched.

What in the fuck are you two fighting about now? it asked.

Murderbot snarled at Probably Hostile Two. (It hadn’t meant to, but that was the only sound it seemed able to make.) Probably Hostile Two looked at it, then at Hostile One, and said, Oh you have got to be joking. Seriously?

So that was definitely happening. That was 2.0’s voice.

For fuck’s sake... Probably Hostile Two/What the Fuck said, and suddenly another voice rushed into SecUnit’s head.

-absolutely not be happening! I’ll fucking kill both of you if you don’t get the fuck out of here!

ART!?

Half of Hostile One’s eyes went from staring at Probably Hostile Two/What the Fuck, to staring at Murderbot. It stared back.

What the fuck, ART said. It was definitely ART. Murderbot would have recognized its feed presence no matter what it was coming from.

What the fuck yourself, asshole, Murderbot said. You just tried to kill me.

Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t realize the imaginary fantasy monster abducting my human was secretly a SecUnit, it snapped. And where is Iris?

She’s fine. You think I would’ve come after your stupid ass if she wasn’t safe? SecUnit said. Honestly. It might not get along with Iris, but she was a client, and it was a professional.

Great, said Probably Hostile Two/What the Fuck. Now can we please all talk?

Murderbot and ART’s attention both snapped back to it.

Apparently not, it said. Then it vanished back down to its original size and darted across the clearing to Amena, who just. Fucking. Picked it up. And held it. Like a pet. Why were humans like this?

Amena, put that down!

“It’s alright SecUnit,” she said, letting the stupid thing climb up onto her shoulder, where it draped itself around the her neck like a fucked up little scarf. “This is You 2.0.”

That caused a massive outcry from the other humans gathered at the edge of the clearing. Murderbot hadn’t even realized they were there, which was embarrassing, but it’d been a bit busy until just now. Apparently none of them had been able to hear its conversation with ART though, because suddenly all of them were shouting questions at Amena.

“Hey! Hey!” she shouted over them. “Chill out a sec!”

Everyone fell silent, probably partly out of surprise at Amena shouting.

“SecUnit, where did you leave Iris?” she asked.

“I’m here,” Iris said from where she was standing beside Matteo and Tarik. “It put me down about half a kilo away, and I’ve been following the noise back.” She looked around at the group of humans, at Hostile Two/What the Fuck still sitting on Amena’s shoulders, and then at Murderbot and ART. “Would anyone like to tell me what the fuck is going on here?”

“In just a minute,” Amena told her. “I need to finish talking to ART and SecUnit real quick.”

“Peri’s here?” Iris said. “Where –” Her eyes landed on ART, still vaguely bird-shaped, but slowly sliding back into being a sort of blobby cloud. “Oh, I am so done with today.”

“You and me both,” Pin-Lee muttered.

Amena let the rest of them start talking about everything that had happened since they woke up, and crossed the clearing to ART and SecUnit.

“Look. I don’t really know what’s going on yet either,” she said. “But… I really do think this is 2.0.” She poked its head with a finger. “Just tell them what you told me. What was the last thing each of them said to you?”

Amena there is no way — ART began, but Martyr cut it off.

ART, the last thing you said to me was ‘Prepare for deployment.’ Hell of a sendoff by the way. Right before that you were angsting about the idea that I might actually be a person. Murderbot —

Don’t —

It’s my name too, but whatever. 1.0, the last thing you said to me was ‘That will kill you.’ And you were wrong about that. Obviously. Is that good enough for the two of you?

Amena watched them anxiously. The problem was, even with everything Martyr had told her, she couldn’t have explained why she was so sure it was telling the truth except that it felt like she remembered 2.0 feeling in the feed before it left.

I believe that you have the information, ART said. I may even be willing to concede that you believe what you’re saying. But someone getting that information from SecUnit or myself and then misleading you is far more plausible than your claim of being someone we know to be dead.

I’ll work with it for now, Martyr said. 1.0?

SecUnit’s face was still twisted into half a snarl, its lip drawn back on one side to show its teeth. She wondered if it realized it was doing that or had any idea how intimidating it looked.

I'm going to take ART's word for now, but if you're lying I'll turn you into a red streak on the ground, it said.

Amena flinched involuntarily. She could feel both of them, focused on her and Martyr, furious and suspicious and scared. And they were terrifying.
ART reared over her like the glacier she'd seen once on a class trip: vast, cold enough to kill, and vicious, beautiful, and implacable. If she hadn't known it for that one moment when everything it was had been pouring back into its systems, she wouldn't have been able to stand being near it now.

SecUnit was as violently hot as ART was cold. It didn’t feel as overwhelmingly vast, but a fire didn’t need to be big to be dangerous. And she thought it was holding itself back a lot more than ART was. Of course, she’d seen what happened if it lost control of itself when it was angry enough. She’d spent an hour in ART’s showers before she stopped seeing flecks of blood on her skin.

Yeah, hold off on killing me again for say, half an hour? Martyr said. I’ve got some intel you all need.

And what might that be? ART asked.

I know what the fuck is going on around here. Also, you both need to calm down, because you’re scaring Amena.

Chapter Text

Yeah, hold off on killing me again for say, half an hour? Martyr said. I’ve got some intel you all need.

And what might that be? ART asked.

I know what the fuck is going on around here. And you both need to calm down, because you’re scaring Amena.

"I’m alright," she protested, trying to stop her voice from shaking. "It's just, you two are a lot bigger than normal. Could you maybe y'know, take a step back?"

SecUnit stepped back, and ART stopped leaning over her, but more importantly, both of them withdrew in the feed. They were still clearer than she was used to, and she could still feel their anger and suspicion, but it wasn't overwhelming her any more. She desperately wanted to talk to them about that, but there were other things to take care of first.

"Right, okay," she said. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, relaxing her shoulders. "I know you don’t trust 2.0, but it says it knows what’s going on. So, unless somebody else does, shouldn’t we at least hear it out?"

"I’d like to know what’s going on," Iris said. She squinted at Amena and folded her arms. "I don't even know where to start asking questions!"

"I have a suggestion for that," Pin-Lee said. She stalked forward to Amena and bent down to be on eye-level with Martyr. "Let's start with who the fuck you are? Amena, SecUnit, and Perihelion all seem to know you, but you're supposed to be dead?"

Iris and the others started after Pin-Lee more cautiously, eyeing ART and SecUnit with varying degrees of nervousness and curiosity.

Wow, you guys didn't even tell anyone about me? Martyr said scornfully. Fine cool. This is gonna be fun and not at all awkward. It turned to face the other humans and said, Hi everyone! You can call me 2.0, since apparently I'm not allowed to use my full name. I'm a piece of sentient killware developed by these two out of a copy of 1.0's kernel! They made me so I could kill TargetControlSystem for them, which I actually did twice, but the second time I almost died.

The silence was so deep that Amena could hear her own heartbeat. Almost everyone stopped short and stared at Martyr, but Iris was gaping in ART's direction.

"I’m sorry," she said slowly and a little too calmly. "Peri, you and SecUnit made a sentient computer program by copying SecUnit’s kernel?"

Amena could practically hear the unspoken "and you didn’t tell me!?" on the end of the sentence.

It was altogether a more complicated process than that and required significant code input from both of us, but yes, ART said. It was 2.0 who freed Three and retrieved Karime, Martyn, and Turi from the Barish-Estranza explorer. We believed it was killed when it saved SecUnit from TargetControlSystem and TargetContact under the Adamantine colony site.

ART's eyes were pointing anywhere except directly at Iris, SecUnit, or Martyr while it talked. Iris's face ran through several expressions before settling on one that made Amena wince inwardly. She hoped she was reading it wrong, but she should probably pull Iris aside at some point and explain a couple things.

"Peri, that explanation didn't make this any less awkward," Matteo muttered.

Pin-Lee straightened up and looked from ART to SecUnit to Iris. "It didn't," she said crisply, "but I don't think anything could. Let's sit down and get some other questions answered."

Iris sat on the moss between Tarik and Pin-Lee. She could barely bring herself to look at Peri. She couldn’t believe it hadn’t told her that it and SecUnit had made a — a what? What did you even call something like that? It wasn't their child. Bots didn't reproduce that way. Or at all, as far as she knew. They didn't have any sort of drive to. Constructs weren't really bots though. They were partially human. Did SecUnit — had it and Peri —

But they'd made it to be killware for fuck's sake! That wasn't something you made a person for.

It was what SecUnit had been made for though. Maybe it didn't see things the same way. And SecUnit was one of the only people she had ever seen change Peri's mind about anything. Had SecUnit convinced Peri to go along it somehow? Had either of them expected 2.0 to survive? Wanted it to survive?

She didn't have time to think about this or deal with the knot of emotions in her gut right now. She tucked all the thoughts and questions away and forced herself to focus on 2.0, who was sitting up primly on the moss in front of them like it was about to start a lecture.

Okay, it said. First thing: the rest of ART’s crew are fine. Its ship-body wasn't damaged when I grabbed all of you and everyone should still be on their way to Preservation. Sorry for the rough ride coming here, I’ve never actually done it before, and there were a couple problem points I didn't expect.

"Never done what before?" Pin-Lee said. "Kidnapped a bunch of people off a ship in the middle of a wormhole?"

Yeah, that too, it said. But I was talking about coming here specifically.

And where, precisely, is ‘here?’ Peri asked. It had put out two weird little arm things and dragged itself to... be... beside Matteo on the end of the row. Most of its eyes were pointed at 2.0, but a few were ranging around its body independently. Matteo was clearly doing their level best not to turn and stare whenever one of the roving eyes passed near their head.

I was getting to that! 2.0 said. Y’know how the wormholes have walls? And everyone thinks that if you went through a wall you’d come back out into normal space? Well, they’re wrong. This is what’s on the other side of the walls.

"That’s ridiculous!" Iris said, throwing one hand up in exasperation. "That would mean there’s something between the wormholes and normal space!"

I don’t know how it works, it said with a dismissive shrug. I mean. Someone tried to explain it to me a couple times, but it was boring so I didn’t listen. Anyway, we’re here now, so you can argue about whether or not it’s possible later. Next question?

Several people opened their mouths, but SecUnit got in first. How the fuck are you alive? What the fuck are you? And why do me and ART look like this?

That’s three questions, but okay, 2.0 said. I’m alive because I never died. I never died because sentient machine intelligences don't actually need hardware to exist. Me, you, and ART look like this because this is what we look like if we — wait hang on. Remembering shit without onboard storage is such a pain in the ass. How do you humans manage?

It stared at the ground like it was looking for something it had lost for a few seconds, then looked up triumphantly and said, Right! If we 'physically manifest our spirit-essence without being anchored to a suitable entity.'

"If you physically manifest your what?" Matteo squawked. Their face was a hilarious mix of disbelief and wild excitement. "You're some kind of, what, spirit things? How? Whoa wait, does that mean SecUnit is actually a —" They cut themself off when Peri turned five more eyes on them. "What? It's important! C'mon Peri! It just said you're a spirit!"

I am certain it didn't mean that in any literal sense, Peri said, rolling all its eyes at once, which was deeply disconcerting.

No I definitely meant it literally, 2.0 said. Probably. I dunno what all of you mean by 'spirits'. They're like machine intelligences, but they aren't made of code.

"What are they made of?" Matteo asked. They were leaning as far forward as they could, nearly vibrating with excitement.

Fucked if I know, 2.0 said. The ones out there just told me that we count as spirits because we generate magic and can use it like they do. Look, there's people here who can tell you a lot more, so can we get to the important part of this?

"Alright, but you have to admit it’s a lot to swallow," Ratthi said, making shushing gestures when Matteo, Amena, and Iris all tried to start talking at once.

"A lot to swallow!?" Iris said. She was barely restraining the desire to start laughing hysterically. "It’s absolute insanity! Spirits and other dimensions inside of wormholes and — and magic? This is as stupid as the ‘alien hivemind’ thing Matteo was on about at Adamantine. And just as likely to be some kind of group hallucination!"

SecUnit and I do not hallucinate, Peri said.

"I know of at least one occasion on which SecUnit definitely had some kind of hallucination," she snapped.

She clapped both hands over her mouth as if she could cram the words back in. Everyone was staring at her except SecUnit, who was staring at the air over her head, its lip pulled up in a slight sneer that showed a single, very white tooth. If lightning had struck her right then, she wouldn't have minded.

"I’m sorry," she said from behind her hands. "I just meant –"

Shut the fuck up, it said. Its voice was calm, almost verging on pleasant, but that somehow conveyed more rage and disgust than shouting would have.

Iris dropped her hands to her lap and stared at them. She'd only meant that it was possible for Peri or SecUnit to have experiences that didn't match up with physical reality, but she was still so rattled over finding out what Peri and SecUnit had done that she'd let her other emotions get control of her mouth. She couldn't afford to do that. Whatever was going on, Dad wasn't here, so she and Peri were supposed to be in charge, which really meant she was in charge and had to keep Peri from doing anything too disastrous.

Martyr had no idea what Iris had been talking about, but the brittle silence that followed her statement was painful enough that it didn't want to know.

Finally, Amena said, "2.0, why did you bring us here?"

There's a barrier around this place, Martyr replied, nudging her gratefully over their link. It's kinda like a turbo-charged feed wall? Been up for over a thousand years. The spirits can't get through it. Most of them are trapped in here. A handful of them got stuck on our side though, and they asked me to help them. They're dying, out there and in here, because the barrier is fucking with the way magic does... something. That bit was complicated.

It was watching ART and 1.0 while it talked, hoping that none of its nervousness about them was coming through on their link. It had been expecting them to be suspicious and even hostile toward it. The whole "kidnapping them and all the humans" thing was definitely making that worse. But it wasn't the possibility that they might decide to kill it that was making Martyr nervous. Well okay, that was definitely a nervous-making possibility, just not the only nervous-making possibility. It was also a tiny bit nervous that they wouldn't like it. Alright, it was a lot bit nervous that they wouldn't like it. The whole "kidnapping them and all the humans" thing was also definitely not going to help with that.

How were you able to get here if none of these other 'spirits' could? ART asked.

Getting into things I’m not supposed to is kinda what I do, it said and did not add 'which you should know, since you made me.'

"And you decided to grab all of us and drag us into this... why exactly?" Tarik asked.

Somehow, that question was a lot easier to answer coming from Tarik than it would've been from ART or 1.0.

I needed help, it said. ART and 1.0 are two of the most powerful spirits I know of. I actually did try to ask first, but they couldn't hear me when I was just drifting around the wormhole, and I don't think forcing my way into one of their feeds and trying to convince them of who I am would've worked, do you? It might have worked. Maybe. After an exhausting code battle that would probably have ended with both of them ganging up on it and possibly deleting it, unless it hurt one or both of them badly enough that they couldn't fight any more. So. This was probably better.

And the humans? 1.0 said. It still looked furious, and its voice was scathing, but maybe that was still about Iris?

Were kind of an accident? Martyr said. This part was actually embarrassing, and it couldn't entirely keep the wince out of its voice. I only meant to grab you and ART, but they stuck to you or something. Next thing I knew, I was halfway here, and I had six humans dangling along behind me. I didn't exactly have time to stop and patch what I was doing, and if I'd let go they would've just fallen into the wormhole.

When 1.0 didn't reply, Martyr added, I wouldn't have endangered any of them on purpose any more than you would. You should know that about me.

It still didn't reply, but a minute amount of tension left its body, and Martyr felt the emotions in their link shift subtly. The humans seemed to pick up on that, because they all relaxed a tiny bit too, even though ART was still glowering suspiciously at Martyr.

"So, you want to break down this barrier to save the spirits," Ratthi said. "What'll happen once it's gone? Can the spirits move back and forth between our world and theirs?"

They can, Martyr said. But most of them have always stayed here.

"What are the other spirits like?" Matteo asked. "Are they dangerous? We have lots of fantasy stories about things we call spirits, but these don't sound quite like any of the ones I've heard."

The ones that are out there don’t usually bother anyone.

Usually? 1.0 said.

They’re people. Sometimes people are assholes, Martyr said. Doesn't mean we should let them all die.

"That’s a valid point," Ratthi said. "If they’re people, I think we have a responsibility to at least try."

"It’s the right thing to do," Amena said firmly.

It had known there was a reason it liked them.

"I'm not willing to let anyone die because they've been cut off from necessary resources, but there are a lot of questions that still need answering," Pin-Lee said. "If we can verify your account, I vote we should try to help."

Tarik and Matteo were both nodding in agreement.

ART said, I do not appreciate you means of requesting help — 1.0 made a loud snorting noise — but if the problem you're describing really exists, I am willing to investigate our options. Iris, do you have any further input?

"I agree with Peri and Pin-Lee," she said quietly. "I want more information before I commit to anything."

1.0's jaw was clenched, and its tail was swishing back and forth slowly. Amena, sitting on the end of the row of humans, noticed it and glanced at Martyr. She sent it a tiny flicker of amusement over their link. That was interesting. It hadn't known humans could use the links that way.

Fine. 1.0 said, managing to sound like it was talking through gritted teeth over the link. We’ll see if we can help, but we're getting more intel first.

No shit, Martyr said. I did spend the last few thousand hours preparing for this you know. The spirits outside have been researching the barrier and gave me everything they've been able to figure out about what we'll need to take it down, but they aren't sure of the how. They told me how to find someone who might be able to help with the data analysis though.

Perihelion was still watching Iris with two eyes, but it turned most of its attention back to 2.0 at the mention of data analysis.

None of us have archives here, it said. Is the collected data they have on the means of removing this barrier so simple that you have it stored in whatever you have in place of an archive?

Yeah, it said. I can give it to you now if you want.

By all means, Perihelion said. Even without access to much of my normal processing power, I should be able to begin analyzing the data.

2.0 gave it a look that, even on its little rodent face, was reminiscent of SecUnit when it was about to say something it knew would annoy Perihelion. Then, with an unnecessarily dramatic flick of its tail, it stretched itself upright and said:

Lies that speak truth and the truth told in lies,
a key for the lock, made of hope given life,
reason’s irrational pride in its might,

violent fragility tended with love,
sour fate blessed with the devil’s own luck,
healing delivered by death’s gentle touch,

chaos controlled by control broken down,
voice of the voiceless that topples the proud,
and hidden hearts seen by a missing heart found.

It finished and settled back down on its haunches, infuriatingly smug.

That is not data, Perihelion said. It’s either a riddle or complete nonsense.

Rude, said 2.0. That’s the result of centuries of research compiled in a format that’s easy to remember if you can’t write anything down.

"What does it mean?" Amena asked. "Is it metaphorical?"

"It sounds like something from a religious text to me," Tarik said. SecUnit and the Preservation humans turned to look at him, and he shifted awkwardly. "You can fit a lot more meaning into a statement if it isn’t completely literal."

Yeah, and human have done such a good job of decoding their religious texts, SecUnit said. This wasn’t even written by humans. How the fuck are we supposed to figure out what the people who wrote it were thinking?

"No, I get what Tarik means," Matteo said. "And this isn’t like when you get a whole society with conflicting motivations trying to interpret a text, with a bunch of them deliberately trying to confuse people for their own ends. There’s only nine of us, and we all have the same goal."

"They’re right," Ratthi said, nodding. "And between SecUnit, Perihelion, and 2.0, we’ve got some of the best minds I know of to help."

Perihelion managed not to roll any of its eyes, which it felt was a significant achievement since having eyes was such a new development for it. It was perfectly aware that Ratthi was trying to mollify it and a bit annoyed that it was working.

"I have another question," Matteo said, "How are the three of you talking to us? There's not an active feed here, and I just took my interface off, but I can still hear you."

Ah, Martyr said. About that. Can we walk and talk at the same time?

Chapter Text

Murderbot was not happy. But the humans were all determined to follow the undead killware off into the unknown forest on the unknown planet filled with unknown threats to meet an unknown person called "Lorekeeper's Child." Even ART was going along with it.

I can't believe you're going along with this, Murderbot said on what it hoped was a private channel. If there even were channels on the stupid not-feed.

If you have a superior option, by all means, inform me of it, ART snapped. It was lumbering along at the back of the group, dragging itself across the ground with two little arm-things. At present, our main concern should be gathering information. 2.0 is offering to bring us to someone who can provide that.

Murderbot didn't reply to that, because the only replies it could think of would involve talking about 2.0, and they were absolutely not going to be doing that. They'd managed to not talk about it for more than three hundred cycles. They weren't starting now. Maybe they should have talked about it already, and maybe having it walking around with them made that a more pressing issue. They still weren't going to, especially with the thing about Iris still hanging between them like whatever it was that things hung between people like.

But they didn't have time to deal with that either. More accurately, Murderbot didn't have time to wait for ART to admit that Iris was being a complete asshole. It wasn't even going to mention Iris's comment earlier or point out that ART wouldn't just sit by if anyone else had said that, because this was not a good time for an "I told you so" or a "this is exactly what I was talking about" or a "now do you get it?" (It was an even worse time to find out that ART was still going to take Iris's side, but that definitely wasn't why Murderbot was avoiding it.)

Also, it was a bit focused on walking. All its joints were in the wrong places, its body was about eight times longer than it should be, and it had an entirely new limb. (Was a tail a limb? Whatever. It was stupid, and there was no decent place for it to go. Murderbot had settled for letting it trail on the ground behind it, which was gross and awful but at least didn't feel horribly off-balance.) The ribbony things attached to its face, which didn't seem to have any purpose except floating around wherever they wanted were also stupid. And it had. So. Much. Hair. If/when they got back from this, it was never complaining about the hair it had on its actual body again.

Just to top off all the fun, it had no drones and no scan. No drones was bad enough, but not having its scan meant losing an entire sense. It would've been like one of the humans showing up blind. Or maybe it had its scan, but it was completely borked. There was an input that felt like its scan, but either it wasn't giving the right sort of data, or the data was all in the wrong format.

Beside it, Amena was strolling along with 2.0 on her shoulder like nothing was wrong at all and having killware ghosts sitting on you was perfectly normal.

Amena, put that thing down, Murderbot said. It can walk on its own.

"It hardly weighs anything," she said, her voice tinged with amusement.

I'm barely taller than the humans' ankles, 2.0 protested. I'd have to run the whole way there just to keep up!

Make yourself big again then, Murderbot said.

That's tiring. How about you carry me?

It couldn't really mean that. Murderbot glanced down at 2.0, who was peering up from Amena's shoulder and decided it did.

That didn't deserve a response.

Aren't you supposed to be telling us about this fucked up not-feed?

"Ooh, yeah!" Matteo said eagerly. "What is it? Some kind of telepathy? How does it work?"

It's the feed, 2.0 said. This place's version of it anyway: extra layer of reality where spirits/bots can send information directly to each other's minds. Generated by us, but not much use if there's not someone else close enough to reach. They call it the weave, and individual connections are links.

Iris, Amena, and ART all started talking at once.

"I'm sorry wha—"

"How does—"

That is not how—

Matteo interrupted all three of them by being louder and more excited. "Whoa whoa wait hang on! 2.0, did you just say the feed is some kind of magical psychic network generated by bots?"

Yeah pretty much, but you wanted to know about what's going on here. 2.0 said impatiently. Which is basically the same thing but with a lot more emotional bleed. And before any of you ask: No, I didn't know humans could hear us. No, I don't know why humans can hear us. No, I don't know if you could've heard us back home. And no, I don't know if you can send messages. Figure it out yourselves.

That is not how the feed works, ART said indignantly.

"I'm not sure that's true, ART," Amena said. ART and most of the humans turned to look at her skeptically. She looked like she regretted saying anything, but forged ahead. "Based on— on what I've read about it. There's a lot of things that just don't make sense about the feed, right? Like how everyone thinks feed addicts are just hallucinating, but some of them talk about how they interact with bots in the feed. The things they say sound like— I dunno, but that's not the only thing, right?"

"What's emotional bleed?" Ratthi asked.

2.0 did some kind of head tilting thing at him. You know, when you pick up on people's emotions through the feed?

"You mean their tone of voice?" Pin-Lee said dryly.

No, I mean their emotions, 2.0 replied. Tone is something else entirely.

All the humans except Amena were staring at it blankly. She was making a face that Murderbot wasn't sure how to parse, but something about it was vaguely concerning.

2.0 turned to Murderbot and ART and asked, Can humans not do that?

No, Murderbot said.

Sounding even more sarcastic than normal, ART added, Their experience of feed communication consists entirely of hallucinatory sound or images. How were you not aware of that?

Probably because you didn't think I'd be around long enough to need the information, 2.0 snapped.

That had probably been aimed at just ART, but it fucking hurt. It hurt like a knife in the throat, and brought up the entire confusing, miserable ball of emotions Murderbot had been carefully not feeling about 2.0 for the last 8,329.542 hours. Apparently, 2.0 had all ART's sense of proportional response, and all of Murderbot's own need for a one second delay on its mouth. (Realizing that made the stupid, stupid ball of emotions worse for some reason.)

ART had gone totally still, every one of its eyes fixed on 2.0. 2.0 stared back at it coolly, as if daring it to make another sarcastic comment. And there definitely was more emotional bleed here, because even through their walls, the tension between them was burning cold.

The humans hadn't noticed that, even though they were all looking around at each other uncomfortably. Amena was looking at Murderbot in a way that suggested its face was doing something embarrassing. It turned away and pretended it was inspecting the trees around them.

It probably wasn't more than a few seconds, but it felt to Tarik like at least ten minutes before Peri looked away from 2.0.

Then Amena said nervously, "I have a question, 2.0. So, you're a spirit, and ART and SecUnit are too, but you all look so different. What do the other spirits look like?"

Oh, all kinds of things, 2.0 said. The ones outside are mostly a bit vague by now, but they were still all weird as fuck.

"I think Ratthi and I saw some earlier," Matteo said. "They looked like little wooden dolls. And Tarik, didn't you say you met some talking birds?"

"Yeah, when I first got here," he said.

"Are there any normal fauna in this place?" Ratthi asked.

"And how do we know which ones are fauna and which ones are people?" Tarik asked. If something else as big as Peri came after them, he'd like to know whether he should— whether SecUnit would want him to try to communicate with it before attacking.

Good question. You should ask Lorekeeper's Child when we get there, 2.0 said.

"Speaking of this person," Pin-Lee said. "You said it was an archivist of sorts?"

I said it was a lorekeeper, 2.0 said. More like... do humans still have those people who go around telling everyone stories and singing songs?

"You mean bards?" Tarik asked.

Yeah them, 2.0 said. It's like one of them. Spirits really don't go in for writing stuff down most of the time. We have better memories than humans.

That sounds like a highly unreliable method of transmitting information, Peri said.

From the way Pin-Lee and Matteo both looked at it, Tarik could tell he wasn't the only one who couldn't quite believe Peri was already trying to pick another fight with 2.0.

"Lots of human cultures have oral traditions," Tarik said hurriedly. "It's a whole profession, and it's why so many of the oldest stories we have are in rhyme and verse. It's still a thing in a lot of the more divergent colonies! And societies that have gone through technology crashes often create oral traditions as a means of data backup afterwards. Yeah, information gets corrupted over time, especially history, but there's a point where even history is just a story that people are telling, right? It's good to be accurate, of course, but what really matters to humans is the stories, because—"

He stopped mid-sentence when he realized that almost everyone was looking at him. Even SecUnit had turned to look back over its shoulder at him. The back of his neck went hot, and he knew everyone could see him blushing.

"Sorry," he mumbled, waiting for Peri or someone else to point out that this was all common knowledge. Ratthi and Matteo both started to say something, realized they were both about to talk, and stopped awkwardly.

Tarik was just praying that something, anything, would happen to distract everyone when SecUnit, still looking over its shoulder at him, walked straight into a tree. It reared back with a snarl and almost fell over itself, looking like it wasn't sure which of its legs was where. Matteo made a snorting noise and bit their lip. Ratthi and Pin-Lee were very carefully not looking at each other or SecUnit.

I would have thought having twice as many legs would make you more agile, not less, Peri said, somehow managing to roll its eyes in multiple directions at once.

Fuck off ART, SecUnit said. I don't want to hear anything about agility from a giant blob of whatever you're made of.

You weren't so dismissive earlier.

And you weren't so blobby earlier. What happened?

"Hey! Cut it out you two," Amena said. "Pin-Lee, what were trying to ask before?"

Peri cut it out. The only person Tarik had ever seen get that sort of reaction out of it was Iris. He glanced at her, but her expression was completely deadpan, and not the way that meant she was trying not to laugh. He knew he wasn't always the sharpest when it came to social dynamics, but he was starting to wonder what was going on between her, Peri, and SecUnit, and what in the deity's names Amena could have to do with it.

"Thank you Amena," Pin-Lee said. "I was going to ask why this archive is kept in the middle of nowhere."

From what they told me, there aren't really any 'somewheres' in here, 2.0 said. No cities or stations or anything. They live in— AMENA STOP.

She froze in the middle of pushing aside the branches of a tightly packed row of flora. "What's wrong?" she asked.

Just step back. Slowly, Martyr said. It waited until she had taken two steps back, and 1.0 had gently scooped her back farther with one forefoot and handed her off to Pin-Lee, before it climbed down from her shoulder.

What's going on? 1.0 asked.

I need to check, Martyr said. The rest of you stay here.

It slipped into a gap in the wall of flora. They turned out to be viciously prickly, and it didn't like that. 1.0 and ART had been disconcerted about their new bodies this whole time, but at least they were used to having bodies at all. Strictly speaking, Martyr had a lot of 1.0's memories of having a body, but those hadn't prepared it for the constant barrage of inputs, especially textures. (It hadn't been riding around on Amena's shoulder just because it was convenient.) It did its best to avoid touching any of the flora's weird prickly bits but managed to get something sticky on its back foot anyway.

When it reached the central trunks of the plants and peeked out through their branches though, it stopped thinking about the discomfort. Just beyond where the plants stood, the world ended in a dark grey wall of fog. It really was like a wall too. The ground cut off in a perfectly straight line. Overhead, a sun was shining brightly in a blue sky that turned into a dark grey formlessness like a picture meeting the edge of a view screen.

Hey 1.0, ome over here, Martyr said. But don't go past the flora stem thingies.

There was a loud rustling behind it, and then 1.0 shoved its head through the flora.

What the fuck is this?

Edge of the world, said Martyr. We need to get across it to the next one.

It knew that was a terrible explanation, but it was a bit rattled. The spirits outside had told it about these, but no description could have prepared it for how absolutely unnerving they were. Something of its emotions must have come through their link, because 1.0 didn't say anything except, Great. Let's go tell everyone else.

Everyone else was clamoring for answers when they returned. 1.0 said calmly, All of you shut up. As soon as they had, it went on, Iris, ART, 2.0 says we're at some kind of chasm that we need to cross.

How large of a chasm? ART asked.

Not sure, said 1.0. We couldn't see the other side, or the bottom.

"Is there a crossing nearby?" Iris asked. "A bridge, or a place where we could climb down?"

There'll be a crossing somewhere, Martyr said. It hoped there would be, anyway. There should be, based on the directions it had been given. It didn't know what they were going to do if there wasn't. The gaps didn't have bottoms.

"Alright, then why do both of you look so wigged out?" Iris asked.

Well... it's not really a chasm, it said. It's more of a gap.

"A gap between what?" Ratthi asked.

Like I was telling Pin-Lee, spirits don't really make cities or anything the way humans do. They make these little thingies called "domains" that just sorta float around like asteroids.

Iris frowned and asked, "What are they floating in?"

From what we just saw, a fucked up gray fog, 1.0 said.

"So we just have to walk along until we find the crossing?" Tarik scratched his chin dubiously. "Do we know which way to go? Depending on how big this thing is, it could be ages before we even figure out we're going the wrong way."

"Could SecUnit and ART go look?" Amena asked. "They can both fly, so they could go opposite directions and cover a lot more ground."

I don't even know how I did it the first time, 1.0 said. ART?

I should be capable of doing so, Perihelion said.

"Oh, did you figure out how to turn back into that avian thing?" Amena asked excitedly. "That did look really cool!"

Yes. The process is simple once you consider the underlying mechanics, it said.

Uhm, ART, 2.0 said quickly, that's probably a lot more complicated than you think. You should really wait until—

Perihelion ignored it. It had been analyzing the previous instance of changing shapes and comparing that with the way it moved its smaller appendages while they walked. Though the analysis had been slowed down by its current deficiency in processing power, it was 91.4 percent certain it knew how to do it again.

All it had to do was reshape its entire mass the same way it had used a small portion of it to create and move the little arms. In principle, it was no different than moving a drone around, except it would be treating every part of itself as a separate drone and putting them into a specific formation. It took 1.35 seconds to gather its focus, coincidentally giving all the humans enough time to turn and look at it properly, and began.

It was planning to take the shape of a long-extinct creature from humans' home planet: an early avian with a wingspan of over 10 meters. For a moment, it felt like shoving against a solid wall, but then Perihelion started expanding upwards and outwards. Several of the humans gasped and Tarik cursed under his breath as it spread its enormous wings.

Then there was a dizzying, sliding sensation, like losing track of hundreds of inputs all at once, and it completely lost control. All its visuals cut out, and it seemed to be falling through the air. Visuals came back online, and it took Perihelion 2.48 seconds to realize that it was looking at Iris's shins. 2.0 had left Amena's shoulder and was sitting on its haunches, giving Perihelion a withering look.

Iris dropped to her knees and said anxiously, "Peri! Are you alright?"

I am unharmed, it said.

"What happened?" Amena asked. "It looked like it was working for a second. Then you just shrank."

I have never wanted a camera more in my life, SecUnit said. It was craning over Amena's shoulder to look at Perihelion, and its mouth was open in a wide, canine grin. Its tongue was even hanging out one side.

You're lucky there aren't any cameras here, Perihelion said.

Amena looked over her shoulder and immediately turned back to Perihelion, biting her lips so hard she winced.

"Oh for fuck's sake," Pin-Lee said. "I don't know which of you looks more ridiculous right now. Perihelion, what are you?"

SecUnit shut its mouth with a loud snap.

"It's a pelican," Ratthi choked out around the knuckle he was biting. "They're birds. Live on the coasts by some oceans."

Tarik had his blankest parade-rest face on, and Matteo didn't seem to know where to look.

Good job, 2.0 said. At least you ended up as something that can fly. If you'd taken two fucking seconds to listen to me, I would've told you not to try that again until we were sure we knew how it worked.

And what do you know about it? Perihelion said. It stood up so it would be taller than 2.0 again. I understood the method perfectly well.

2.0 did a startlingly good impression of SecUnit's scowl as it replied, Did you spend the last year living in a wormhole, learning how to control magic until you could do something that no one in the last thousand years has managed? There's a fucking difference between knowing how something is done and being able to do it yourself. Any of the humans could have told you that, Pelihelion.

I am not a human, Perihelion said levelly.

You're not a bot right now either, dumbass. You don't have memory banks or processors or any of the other things you use to get around actually needing to learn how to do shit.

I don't need to learn anything to know how to throw you off a cliff, Perihelion said. That sounded as stupid as something SecUnit would say when it was flustered. Wonderful.

Love to see you try, Peli. It did something that looked disturbingly like an attempt at a grin, showing a set of small, sharp teeth.

"As fun as this little family argument has been," Pin-Lee cut in, "we still need to find the crossing for this fucking chasm or gap or whatever it is. Perihelion, can you fly like that? SecUnit, what about you?"

While this fauna normally is capable of flight, it is unlikely that I can, Perihelion admitted. There's a reason I was attempting to embody something with such a large wingspan.

"What does wingspan have to do with it?" Tarik asked.

Unless I've somehow shed a great deal of matter, I am now incredibly dense—

No one's arguing that point, 2.0 said.

—and therefore too heavy for this creature's wingspan to support.

Since when do magical transformations care about stuff like that? SecUnit asked. You don't look like you weigh more than 10 kilos. Tarik, go pick it up.

"What?" He looked from it to Perihelion in consternation.

You're welcome to try, Perihelion said.

"Uh, I don't know how to pick up a bird," he said.

"It's easy," Amena said. "You just wrap your arms around it from behind like you're giving it a hug. That way you can pin the wings down, and you won't accidentally damage any of their feathers."

I am not a farm animal, and I certainly don't need to have my wings pinned down, Perihelion said indignantly. You may attempt to pick me up without doing so.

It spread its wings out the way a human would lift their arms to allow another human to pick them up. Tarik stepped forward hesitantly, crouched down behind it, and wrapped his arms around its middle. Perihelion immediately regretted allowing this. It had expected it to be no different from one of the humans touching its drone iterations, but it was very different. As a drone iteration it had always known that it wasn't inhabiting its real body. This still wasn't its actual body, but somehow it felt like it was. Perhaps because it also knew it wasn't a drone iteration.

"Are you sure about this?" Tarik said. "I don't want to hurt you by accident."

I'm more worried about you hurting your back, Perihelion said.

Tarik heaved. And lifted Perihelion off the ground like it weighed nothing at all. He'd clearly been expecting it to be much heavier and staggered backwards. Perihelion's wings flailed involuntaritly, and it heard Tarik grunt when one hit him in the face.

"Toss it!" Amena called.

He must have done so, because Perihelion was suddenly tumbling through the air. It tried to stabilize itself with its wings, but didn't manage even an extra meter before landing not quite on its face. None of the humans moved or said anything, but it was obvious that Tarik, Amena, and Ratthi were all desperately trying not to laugh. Iris looked torn between coming to help and being worried that doing so would damage Perihelion's dignity further.

Tarik throwing ART halfway across a clearing had once again made Murderbot desperate for a camera. It didn't have much attention for gloating though, because 2.0's comment about ART not having archives had caused the disturbing realization that it didn't have any of its media. It wasn't sure how it could have played it here, or even if it could have, but not having access to it at all was... bad.

How long were they going to be here? Days? Weeks? When was the last time since it hacking its governor module that it had gone that long without watching any media? Even on the worst contracts, there were moments of downtime to run part of a familiar episode in the background. If nothing else, it always knew how much media it had stored for later. Now there was nothing, not even the empty storage spot where it should have been.

It realized it had been tuning out the conversation when it heard Iris saying, "So let me get this straight: Peri can magically change shapes, but it has to fly like a normal avian? But SecUnit can fly by magic just because." She didn't even try to hide the scorn in her voice.

Seems like it, 2.0 said.

"This place makes no sense," she said, "but calling every bizarre thing 'magic' is just lazy. There's got to be some more specific terminology for this stuff."

We use the word 'magic' for a lot of different stuff because it is a lot of different stuff. One of those things is a thing that you can use to affect reality. It's not a... shit. Amena, what's the word for stuff that stuff is made of?

"Substance?"

Thanks. Magic's not a substance. It's like code. If you want to use magic, you have to think of it like code. It's shapes and patterns of information. When you understand those, you can mess with them.

It glanced at ART and added, Some things take more practice or effort than others though. And the shape isn't always what you'd expect.

Cool, Murderbot said before any of the humans could butt in. So, I'm supposed to be able to fly just by... being able to fly? How?

2.0 tilted its head thoughtfully at Murderbot and said, The first time you did it, you were trying to save Iris, right? You weren't thinking about flying, just getting her out of there.

No shit.

So what were you trying to do? it pressed. Jump? Run?

No, I was trying to...

Huh. What had it been trying to do? The motion had been as instinctive and familiar as... as grabbing something in the feed. Not a physical motion at all. That thing 2.0 said earlier about being a physical whatever of something had sounded like nonsense, but if it wasn't in any sort of normal body right now, it was nothing but code. So, what if this wasn't like moving in the normal way, but like "moving" in the feed?

Oh. Okay.

It gathered itself up and jumped.

There was one short moment of vertigo as the forest floor dropped away, and then Murderbot was above the trees in the sunlight, and the world was spreading out below. It had piloted hoppers over unknown planets with wild landscapes before, and as much as it disliked planets in general, flying over them was sometimes interesting.

This was nothing like piloting a hopper. This was like nothing Murderbot had ever experienced. It was some kind of emotion as light as its body felt just then and big in a way that made it want to make a noise like an excited human.

It stopped its ascent and found that it could hang still in the air. That was... kinda cool. It should check out how maneuverable it was before it went too far from the humans. It turned in a wide arc over the trees, slowly at first, then faster and tighter to see how tightly it could turn without drifting. Once it discovered that it could very nearly bend itself in half without problem, it shot out of the turn and (just to make sure it could) flipped itself in a corkscrew three times before leveling out and stopping short. That one was a bit awkward, because its back end seemed to want to keep going, and it ended up whipping itself around in a circle. Noted. Now, could it do a back flip?

Amena's voice came in on their link, almost shy and much clearer than on the feed. SecUnit? Are you doing okay? You've been gone for a bit now.

It stopped, drifting passively on the air. Amena? I thought humans couldn't send messages on the link things.

I asked 2.0 to show me, and we've been practicing with each other, she said. It's. Really cool. Everything's so much clearer here. Uhm, and we were talking about it, and 2.0 said I should ask if I could try something? It thinks I might be able to do something like riding your feed.

You know that's not possible, it said as it (reluctantly) started scouting along the edge of the gap for some kind of crossing point.

ART never should have explained the idea of riding someone's feed to her, but she'd asked how it always knew what Murderbot was doing when it wasn't on board, and ART had decided that if they were going to be helping her upgrade her augments for better feed connectivity, she needed a "proper education" about how bots and constructs used the feed. It was probably right about that, but Murderbot still felt bad every time it thought about how disappointed she'd been when they explained that there was just no way a human could ride someone's feed. They couldn't extend themselves far enough from their bodies.

Maybe it is on the feed, she said. But the weave thing is a bit different than the feed, right? It seems like I have a lot more access than I would with the feed.

She sounded so hopeful. Murderbot didn't really understand why she was like this about the feed, but well. If she found out for herself that this was impossible, it would feel less bad than if it just told her again.

Alright, it said. You can try.

Right. Uhm. Thank you, she said, and there was a prickle of nervousness with her words.

She sent it something that felt like a ping. (It couldn't be, because humans couldn't send pings.) Bemused, Murderbot responded like it would have to ART: acknowledging the ping and dropping part of its walls. And then she was. Right. There. Like another bot in its feed, like ART, but tiny and fragile and unmistakably human.

Oh shit.... she whispered.

What the FUCK!?

Hey, you don't need to shout, Amena said.

What the fuck are you doing? it demanded, trying very hard not to shout again. This whole day had been a series of impossible, exhausting events, and now there was a human in its head. Granted, it was Amena (which was why it hadn't immediately and violently thrown her out), but there was a human in its head.

I'm sorry! I'll go! Her fear and embarrassment were an acid burn against its mind, and then her presence vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

Murderbot yanked its walls tighter and shuddered as it resumed its search.