Chapter Text
It’s the last day of class, and Mariss is exhausted but pleased despite the compressed course structure of five days straight of eight-hour sessions. Seminars are not like the big lecture halls that terrify her and scramble her thoughts, leaving her reading too quickly from prepared notes in her feed and not looking at the students, not engaging them.
This is a graduate seminar with a couple of the advanced undergraduates sitting in. You have to fucking love geochem to be here. Everyone knows their shit, has read at least a few of her articles, and wants to talk about aliens. This is her happy place.
There are three hours left before she can call it a complete success when a message from Dr. K. comes through in the feed marked Urgent, High Priority with every possible flag and alert attached.
Mariss stops midsentence and opens it. Her stomach drops and waves of hot and cold wash over her as she tries to understand what she’s reading. The words don’t make sense. She starts shaking.
Mariss,
Ti has been injured. Please return to the system immediately. I will get them home, but they are worried about the MedSystem. I think we need you. I will send updates when I can.
-K
Mariss catches herself on the desk and rereads it again hoping it will make sense this time, only vaguely aware of the noises around her. Someone almost touches her, and she jerks back in alarm and fear.
Oh fuck, it’s just one of the students, Dejen.
“Sorry,” she gasps as Dejen pulls back in response.
“Dr. Bernez, are you ok?”
They’re all looking at her, and she knows they can see how upset she is. Weak, weak, weak. Mariss shakes her head, unable to form words. This is everything she feared.
Dr. K knows.
How the fuck does a SecUnit get injured? It was a safe fucking academic conference.
Deity, her brain gives her plenty of ideas. Push them away, push everything away. Get moving.
“I’m so sorry,” Mariss gasps, “I’ve just gotten a terrible message. I have to go. I’m sorry.”
Half the students are out of their seats trying to help her, reassuring her. They help her gather her things while her hands are shaking too badly to pick anything up without dropping it, and she’s sending a message back to let Dr. K know she’s on her way.
“You all were great,” Mariss manages as one of the students helps her get her bag on her shoulder. “You were a great class, thank you.”
She’s shaking and can’t think straight as she makes her way to her temporary office. Is this shock? Maybe it’s shock. Mariss puts things in her bag without seeing them. She tries to check the transport schedules but they don’t make any sense. The numbers are a jumble. She collapses into her chair and starts crying.
Dr. K’s message is from four days ago. It will take her three days to get home.
Twenty-two will have gone a fucking week without her, whatever help she might be, and she knows how terrified it is of being caught. And now Dr. K knows. If it’s injured, everyone must know. It shakes off taking bullets like they’re fucking bug bites.
There’s a sound, and Mariss manages to look up at one of the other professors, Dr. Bennett. He’s leaning in through her open doorway, looking concerned.
“Bernez, your class said you had to leave early. Are you—oh what’s wrong?”
“I have to go,” she gasps out. “My partner—something happened to my partner.”
“Fuck.” He’s in her office immediately, helping her dump everything from the desk into her display bag and an old food bag lying around. Then he’s helping her up and outside into a transport cart. They go to her visitor apartment, which is a comfortable but small studio, and he helps her carry all her crap inside.
“Why don’t you sit down for a minute?”
“I—could you help me figure out the transports? It’s giving me a headache. I need to get home.”
“Of course,” he says, disappearing into the feed.
Mariss pulls herself together enough to actually pack, with Bennett’s help once he’s figured out the next transport to Lagrange and booked her a seat. Bennett’s seen her underwear, so it isn’t weird that he’s stuffing it all into her travel bag while she crawls around on the floor trying to locate all of her socks.
They’d been having a really fun, casual thing that was making her think about coming back for a visit during the next semester break, but she puts all that aside now. Once her stuff is all accounted for, she realizes she has four hours until the transport leaves. And there’s nothing she can do about it. She can’t make it go faster. She can’t make it leave now. But she can’t do anything else.
“I think you should try to eat something,” Bennett tells her. All she can do is shake her head and try not to be sick.
He gets her and all her shit into a transport cart and to the port.
“Thank you,” Mariss says through tears as the bot driver steers them effortlessly through the city streets. “Thank you for everything and for helping me now.”
He gives her a fond, worried smile and squeezes her shoulder. “Of course, Bernez.”
They reach the port with hours to go before her transport and Mariss doesn’t know how she’s not going to go crazy. Bennett gets out of the cart to walk her into the departures check-in. Mariss is so overwhelmed and grateful and desperate for reassurance that she short-circuits. She pulls him down to her mouth, sinking into the feeling of his lips on hers, his arms tightening around her, the pressure of his chest against hers, the warm smell of him, the reassurance of gentle physical contact that she had ached for for so long.
“Thank you,” she says, pulling back.
Bennett lets out a breath and makes a face. “I’m going to miss you, Bernez. I hope your partner is ok. Let me know when you can, alright?”
He waits as she shuffles through the embarkation zone and turns to wave back.
Mariss drops to a seat in the waiting area, checking her feed over and over again, but there are no other messages. Nothing from anyone else. She sends frantic messages to Martine, and Patel, and Georgie, and Dr. Juma, and Yliman asking them if they’re ok, if Dr. K is ok…if Ti is ok.
She needs Twenty-two to be ok. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if it isn’t, but her mind fills her with dark thoughts, and she can’t do anything but sit in them for two hours, foot tapping, stomach churning, skin burning.
When it’s finally time to go to the platform, Mariss is first in line, first at the hatch, pressing up against the port bot that’s directing everyone to wait until disembarkation is complete. She almost breaks down again there in line as she waits for boarding.
She’s first aboard, first in her cabin. And then she has to wait. There are two more hours until departure.
Then there are three days of pacing and crying and being unable to do anything or focus or think about anything but the possibility the one person she would literally kill for is—hurt and afraid and there’s nothing she can do. All she can think about is every single thing Twenty-two has done to help and protect her for six straight years and how she wasn’t there when it needed her.
It’s finally calling her its friend. That’s the word they both use around people who know them both, but it isn’t what Mariss feels.
Twenty-two is the person she wants to spend her life with, if it wants that, in whatever form it might want that. Maybe one day it will tell her.
It has been less than a year and a half since they reached Lagrange, so she figures in another year or two it might come to some decision, and then it will probably take another year for it to get to the point of telling her. If they get that time.
She wishes she’d told it she loved it again before it left for the port. It hates that. It makes the grumpy face, sometimes it tells her to shut up, sometimes it just walks away. Mariss would have stopped after the first time, if not for the fact that Twenty-two isn’t great about walling itself off from her. So she feels the flood of emotions it has every time. Its desperate relief and uncertainty always makes her think it needs to be told it’s loved.
There are a million things she should have done and a million what-ifs and she has to beat her mind into focusing, because for all her terror that Twenty-two might be dead, she has to be prepared to address every other potential situation.
Mariss makes a chart, chugging coffee in the middle of the night cycle and pulling files from years of research and planning that she hasn’t needed since Twenty-two accepted the job on Lagrange. Some of her information is out of date, but she has an automated search always scraping the newsfeeds for relevant information about constructs, so she can make updates and think about her options.
The biggest variables are the university’s reaction and the amount of support she can expect. The fact that Dr. K (1) messaged her before they’d even left the conference, (2) did not state Twenty-two was a construct, (3) let Mariss know the secret was out, and (4) made clear she was bringing Twenty-two home, leads Mariss to put Dr. K in the support category. That means she can expect at least half the tenured geochem faculty to back her.
Geochem has decent pull in the College of Sciences; they work well with others, they pull in lucrative grants, and they add a lot of value to the planetary viability studies, which bring in a lot of money. They won’t be steamrolled by the administration, so Mariss can expect the other departments to hear them out, to hear Dr. K out. She needs Dr. K (the current chair will do what she says)—and Dr. Juma, who’s next in line for chair and has sway over the younger faculty.
The other departments are a mixed bag. Mariss doesn’t trust MI. People who design sapient intelligences to obey humans unsettle her, even though it’s necessary. No one would get on a transport run by a bot pilot that didn’t particularly value human life. But that doesn’t make her trust a person whose mind works that way, so she puts them in the against category along with a few others.
The administration is the real enigma. It’s sprawling, complex, and full of such deep political systems she has barely mapped out the factions and thinks it will take years to understand the depths and subtleties of the divisions. What she needs is a suggestion that sounds good to everyone, which is impossible.
So what she has to do is craft something that placates or flatters a majority of the power players, something that looks generally beneficial but that different groups can claim was their idea, or be pitched as it really being most useful to them.
She makes another chart.
Once she hits the port, Mariss estimates she’ll have less than an hour to judge where things stand before she has to decide what to do, and she’ll only have that much time because the university is spread across three planets and a Dyson ring and has such a labyrinthine bureaucracy she can expect notice of her arrival to pass through five levels of assistants before reaching someone who can order her detained. So she has to use every second after they exit the wormhole and before they land, and she has to be ready to abandon everything. She’s done that before, but Twenty-two will be sad about its shoes.
Mariss forces herself to get a few hours of sleep on the last night, taking something from the emergency MedSystem for insomnia. When she wakes up, she feels physically better and that’s about all she hoped for. Then she has to wait and be ready.
When the transport comes out of the wormhole, Mariss’ feed floods with days’ worth of messages. The torrent overwhelms her, and she has to close everything for a moment and shake herself before she dives in again, prioritizing everything from Dr. K.
Twenty-two is alive. They think. It’s breathing. It won’t wake up.
They’re on the station, not the College of Sciences.
Mariss runs to the control deck. There’s an argument. A long one. Mariss is proud of herself for actually getting words out.
The good thing about a human pilot, versus a bot pilot, is that a lot of people will cave in order to stop having to witness emotional distress. And Mariss doesn’t even have to fake the distress, not that she’s above that. She doesn’t consider herself above much.
“Fine, Dr. Bernez, fine,” Pilot Rao says at last, holding up her hands. “We can divert to the station. Please fucking leave the cockpit now. Thank you.”
Several of the other passengers grumble a bit about the two hour delay she’s causing them, but Mariss is too distraught for any of them to actually say anything to her.
That done, she can try to read the rest of the messages.
They’re in a secured lab space on the station. Dr. K needs her help with the MedSystem because she thinks Mariss has additional insight into the complexity of Ti’s augments. There isn’t a single use of the word construct or SecUnit in any of the messages. Something unclenches in Mariss’ heart. For now at least, the information is contained.
On station, Mariss owns Twenty-two. This knowledge usually makes her want to crawl out of her skin and vomit, but at the moment, it’s a relief. The university can’t seize it like it could on planet.
She revises her charts and lists, skimming the other messages for information she can use. She can deal with the rest later. Dr. Juma’s message leads Mariss to add him to the guaranteed support category. That means she has geochem. Now she needs the administration.
All of the messages from the other grad students are four days old. Which means they sent them to her once they arrived back in the system, but then stopped sending her updates that same day.
So they’re in a blackout and only faculty have full feed access? Whatever is going on there does not make her feel good.
It’s likely no one from any other department knows. There’s a good argument none of them need to know. Mariss’ best bet for an argument is that nothing needs to change, Ti Guerrero happening to be a SecUnit is really not that important. It’s an ancient university—no change is usually the preferred approach to new situations, at least until they can conclude a decade-long, multi-stakeholder study.
Mariss reorders her documents and lists and charts and makes sure her bag is packed. She pockets Twenty-two’s drone. It had insisted she bring one, so she had kept it tucked into her workbag, sometimes spinning it around her little apartment while thinking through her lessons. She’s spent the last three days holding it.
Mariss isn’t the only passenger to disembark at the station, apparently everyone who was expecting to have to catch a shuttle up from the port is taking the opportunity to skip the trip as well. She’s still first in line at the hatch and everyone else gives her room. It’s weird being the crazy one here (as opposed to the mine where she used it to her advantage), but she doesn’t mind having some breathing room.
As soon as the hatch finishes cycling, Mariss is through and running. She bolts down the dock, straight to the security screening.
I’m here, Mariss sends Dr. K in the feed. And she starts a timer. She shoves through the lines, getting looks and shoves back and some indignant exclamations, but she’s tear-streaked and a little nutty looking so no one tries to stop her as she pushes through the junior faculty lane and every scan as fast as humanly possible.
Dr. K taps an acknowledgement and sends a location.
Mariss runs through the station mall, panting and gasping as the straps of her bags cut into her shoulders and try to pull her over backwards. Next time she leaves the system, she’s packing lighter. She reaches the lift tubes to the station labs and offices and wriggles through the crowd, ignoring every negative reaction in order to force her way into the next capsule before it closes.
“Sorry,” she says to the person she’s pressed up against. “My friend got hurt and is in a lab upstairs. I’m trying to get to them.”
“Oh shit, sorry,” te says, tir expression going from annoyed to embarrassed.
Anxious energy thrums through Mariss as the lift rises, she feels her hands shaking and her legs tremble with the effort of not moving. She’s out and running again, as soon as the lift doors open, following a station map to the location Dr. K sent. She reaches it at last and checks her timer—ten minutes down, fifty until she has to make the call.
The hatch slides open and Mariss darts through—running straight into Dr. K’s soft bulk. The older woman wraps her arms around Mariss, and the timer and the charts and everything goes out the window as she breaks down crying.
“I think—I think we can fix them,” Dr. K says, her own voice thick with emotion. “But we need your help.”
Dr. K gets Mariss’ bag off her shoulders and leads her through to a lab space that’s under a top-level contaminant lockdown with only certain IDs permitted access. Fuck. She can’t see who has permissions and it will take her half an hour to get into the system, time she doesn’t have, so she has to hope she’s on the list.
There’s a new person in the room as well. Feed ID Dr. Stewart. Holy fucking shit. Dr. Stewart—head of the School of Medicine, member of the University Steering Committee. FUCK.
Mariss hadn’t taken the College of Medicine into account, and they are probably the people Twenty-two is most afraid of.
“She’s here! Hello Dr. Bernez, nice to meet you,” Dr. Stewart says pleasantly. “Now we can get back to work.”
“To work?” Mariss manages.
She looks around and spots Twenty-two, prone and unmoving on a MedSystem platform at the far end of the room, chairs clustered around the control panels and operator display, evidence of people having spent extended time in the room scattered around. The MedSystem isn’t currently active and Twenty-two is definitely not conscious. She’s never seen it look like that. The last time—oh Void, she sees Sixty-four again, limp in a pool of its own ichor.
Mariss wobbles, and Dr. K steadies her.
“Barbican sold me cubicle repair modules,” Dr. K says, drawing Mariss across the room. She needs to and absolutely does not want to look at Twenty-two to see how bad it is. “We’re trying to install them in the MedSystem but there are aspects that are unfamiliar.”
Of course they’d be unfamiliar, machine repair and medical care rolled into one efficient and uncaring package isn’t exactly geochem. They have a medical robe draped over Twenty-two, and Dr. Stewart goes and grabs the edge and lifts it back.
“I’ve never seen a construct before. From the reading we’ve been doing, this seems to be some kind of stasis? It takes a single breath every four minutes.”
Mariss looks away quickly. “Probably,” she says while tapping Dr. K’s feed. “They go into stasis for travel or in reaction to severe injuries.”
She’s never seen Twenty-two naked. She knows how it feels about ‘gross stuff’ and that it’s seen a lot more of her than it ever wanted. It’s important to give it this privacy. Mariss saw enough to see the bullet holes, the stump where an arm should be, and her head is spinning.
Dr. K pulls the robe back up over Twenty-two, then says, “Sit down.”
Mariss drops into one of the chairs, throws out the timer, and deletes half her flow charts and potential exits. They haven’t killed Twenty-two, Dr. Stewart isn’t asking to dissect it or take it off for experimentation—which is against the University’s code of ethics anyway, and she isn’t taking it anywhere while it’s in stasis with an arm missing. She will go with the staying route and make it work.