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keaalu · 11 days ago

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Kestrel Kestrel, chapter three

“No, Tiger. Still nothing, I’m afraid.”

After a little heated discussion – why do you even want to take it back with us? Just because we’re called TerraHAWKS doesn’t mean any of us know the first thing about looking after an actual bird! – I know that, Mary; I just got a feeling, all right? She needs someone to take care of her for a little while until we figure out who’s lost her, she’s not gonna survive on her own out here – Mary had finally relented. So now Kate sat quietly on a ledge at the back of Battlehawk’s bridge, and watched Mary report back to Doctor Ninestein at Hawknest. She might be back among friends, but until she could get them to recognise her, it didn’t feel like that much of a step up from the desert.

“You’re on your way back already?” the Terrahawks’ gruff commander challenged.

“Yes – we humans are, anyway. We’ve left Sergeant Major Zero in charge of the ground search, but I’m not sure what else we can do, out there? Hawkeye already found her clothing, so it’s clear something bad has happened – but there was nothing else. Not even footprints.” Mary took a stabilising deep breath and a second to compose herself. “I think she’s been abducted, Tiger.”

“Hmm.” Ninestein sounded dubious. “We’ve not seen any sign of Zelda since Spacehawk saw her ZEAF off yesterday.”

“Well the martians aren’t our only enemies,” Mary reminded. “There’s plenty of humans who would be happy if we went away forever. And that’s just our enemies – Kate’s a big enough star that she has fans with the potential to do irrational things like kidnap their favourite artist. But… I think it’s too unlikely for Zelda not to be involved, here.”

“Not disagreeing, but you haven’t sold me on the abduction theory, yet.”

“I’m scared that Zelda’s learned a new trick, and the ZEAF was just a distraction. We know she reclaims her own. What if she’s figured out how to claim those who aren’t, as well? Kate’s clothing was empty – like she was teleported straight out from inside it.”

“Don’t you think that’s a bit of a leap, Mary?” Ninestein cautioned. “Why would she take Kate, and not her clothing? Granted they’re androids, and don’t always get biological behaviour, but I’m pretty sure they understand clothes, seeing as they wear them as well.”

“Well, I agree! But we can’t explain it any other way! She couldn’t have undressed and left her clothing in the state we found it – everything was all tangled up inside everything else…”

Kate listened quietly and wished she could figure out even the smallest clue to give them. No, she hadn’t teleported out of her clothes. She’d just… shrunken, and crawled on out of them, instead. Like that was so much more logical and obvious.

I’m right here, guys!

She wanted to wave (well, flap) and get his attention – look! See? Here I am! – but would that even help? It’d definitely alarm Mary. It had taken several minutes of eloquent persuasion from Hawkeye before the captain had even been willing to consider taking the tiny falcon aboard, and Kate didn’t want to make her any more uneasy than she already obviously was. (To be fair to her colleague, having what they all thought was a potentially-unpredictable semi-wild bird sitting unrestrained at the back of the flight deck? Yeah; she’d have probably been uneasy about it too.)

Out of the front viewscreen, Kate occasionally caught a glimpse of her bright vermillion runabout, expertly piloted by Hawkeye. The irony wasn’t lost on her; even though she suddenly had actual wings of her own, these didn’t even get her off the ground right now, whereas she usually flew the minijet as easily as breathing… and now wasn’t even allowed aboard it.

55 was the only zeroid returning with them. He sat on Zero’s perch, looking strangely despondent – tilted slightly forwards, shutters half-closed, mouth lit in its downturned display. “I’m sorry, Captain Falconer,” he said, quietly, once she’d ended her call. “Maybe I had no way of knowing, but I really should have tried harder to stop her going.”

Mary glanced briefly back over her shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault, Five-five. Short of shooting her, how precisely would you have stopped her?”

“I should still have tried,” he protested, but quickly lapsed into silence again.

Kate wished she could have comforted him. This is way bigger than you coulda saved me from, little guy. Best you could have done is tell them I was a bird, now. And would anyone have believed you, or just decided you were confused and broken?

The rest of the journey home was uneventful, although Mary kept casting anxious glances in Kate’s direction, to reassure herself that the strangely polite, patient little bird was still being polite and patient – and still sitting in the back, and not adventuring off around the ducting.

Hawkeye beat them back by some margin, and arrived to collect Kate from the bridge before Mary had even unbuckled her harness. “Our li’l guest behave herself?”

Kate resisted the urge to try and roll her eyes at him. Even as he reached towards her, she dropped to the deck with an ungainly flutter and hop-skipped it past his feet. If I just show you I know where I’m going…

“Whoa, hey there. I don’t think you should be running around here on your own.” Hawkeye grabbed her awkwardly with both hands and scooped her up off the deck – although her feathers yielded and slipped under his palms and he immediately almost dropped her again. “Oh, yikes! A hand here, Mary? She’s smaller than I thought, under there-!”

With Mary’s help, he managed to get the unwilling kestrel balanced on his forearm again, and the little group retired to the lounge.

Hawkeye first offered Kate the floor, but she clung stubbornly to his uniform and stared hard at the unoccupied zeroid perch next to the piano, instead. After next trying the coffeetable, and then the ordinary table, after a little confused muttering eventually the human figured out her wavelength and let her step across onto the tall electronic column, instead. In spite of all the sockets and connectors on its surface, meaning she had to be very careful where she put her claws, it was a little further from the ground and let her stay closer to her normal eyeline, rather than feel like she was sitting on the floor. Kate decided she’d take any small comforts where she could find them, right now.

Plus, it was next to her piano. Hope swelled in her chest. She couldn’t sing but maybe she could play? Her legs were a lot longer than they looked, and she might just about be able to reach far enough to play something basic. They definitely couldn’t mistake that for anything else! Now, how to get down there…

Her friends had all got back to work, apparently needing something to divert all that anxious energy into. Over at the main table, Mary had pulled over the communications console and opened a conference call with Zero and Spacehawk’s crew. After a little perfunctory squabbling between the two command zeroids, everyone settled remarkably quickly and got back to work. Hawkeye busied himself with doing some sort of research.

Kate managed a short, frustrated sigh. She had to be able to tell them to stop wasting their time searching for her when she was right here, and please focus on helping her get her real body back, instead!

Okay. She ruffled her feathers. Here goes nothing.

She measured her aim, plucked up her courage, and jumped down onto the piano keyboard.

She was rewarded with an unmusical jangle of protest from it, and her feet skidded on the slick keys, almost pitching her straight off the edge. She heard alarmed noises and movement from the table and knew she needed to move fast. After a second or two of frantic flapping for balance, she recovered.

Right, good. Now – music!

She reached one long leg out for the note she wanted-

And-… spacefire and damnation! She was too light to depress the keys! She screeched an involuntary protest and stomped her frustration at it. (That made a noise, infuriatingly.) Her talons skidded over the polished surfaces.

“Hey, hey, careful there little bird.” Hawkeye hastily scooped her up off the keys. “I’m not sure Katie would like you walking around on there, you might scratch it. I’d hate for you to get those little toes caught in something, either.”

He set her back down… on a different perch, closer to the table and away from the piano. “There we go. Bit safer over here, huh?”

She wanted to cry with frustration, but the noise that bubbled up out of her throat instead was the shrill, shuddering screech of a small hawk – sharp and unexpected, it startled everyone, and even made Kate herself jump. In the background, on the video call, she heard Zero asking; “What’s that noise, ma’am? …Ma’am? Are you safe? Is everything back there all right?”

Mary visibly gave herself a little shake. “It’s fine, sergeant major. Just another little mystery we’re trying to solve.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Thank you for all your hard work, everyone. Zero, have your men finish the new search grid, and we’ll come and pick you up tomorrow when it’s light. Hiro, let me know the instant any of your crew turn up anything.” A little collection of ten-ten-s responded before she switched off the monitor and let her arms dangle with a long tired sigh.

Okay. Kate gave herself a shake as well, feathers all fluffing up without conscious control. It took effort to slick them all back down. Okay. Breathe. New tactic. Try again.

She looked round the room and spotted a photograph of her human self on the opposing wall – but she couldn’t get to it. Yet. She tried calling to them and pointing at it, but her wings wouldn’t quite bend the way she wanted them to, and they assumed that her screeches meant she was unhappy. (Well, she was, but not for the reason they thought.) So she was going to have to fly over to it, somehow.

She spent a little time flapping, awkwardly, but couldn’t quite figure out how she was meant to use her new wings to generate lift. (Asking her friends for some videos would have to wait until it was no longer quite so far beyond her capabilities.) Perhaps she just needed stronger muscles? And more exercise. She sent dust whirling with her efforts.

“Do you think she’s in pain?” Hawkeye wondered, propping his head on his hand as he watched her. “She’s pretty fidgety, but I haven’t seen her fly even once.”

Mary looked over as well. “Maybe that’s why she was abandoned out there.”

Kate ignored them and studied the table. Hawkeye had left his tablet unattended.

…his tablet with a keyboard! That might work! She could write something! But how was she meant to get to it? Tabletop and perch were separated by a metre or so; a veritable chasm, for a little bird, but she could jump that. Surely she could jump that-!

Just as she gathered herself to make her leap, the door opened, and admitted Ninestein, with a tray of coffees.

Which he put down on the table right where Kate had been planning on landing.

Then Hawkeye picked the tablet back up anyway. “Hey, boss.”

And everything suddenly felt inordinately heavy.

She really had run out of ideas, now. Kate fluffed herself out and tucked her head down to her shoulders, quietly depressed. Bad enough she was trapped like this, but to be unable to communicate? To be treated as an actual genuine kestrel? How long before she ended up in the ‘care’ of a zoo?

Ninestein quietly took in the scene – his exhausted colleagues still hard at work – before noticing the bigger oddity. “Why do we have a little bird in the lounge?”

Hawkeye looked up from his research and for a second or two just stared blearily at his commander, before wiping his face with one hand. “She decided she wanted to come with us.”

“She decided? The bird?”

“Yup. I couldn’t get her to shoo so I guessed she was a pet? I didn’t want her getting hurt or starving so…” Hawkeye shrugged. “I figured she was hungry. I’m trying to work out what to give her, before I put something up on social, see if I can’t find out who she belongs to. Or who might be able to take her in.” He waved the tablet. “And the biggest irony? Get this: she’s a kestrel. And not even an American one!”

Ninestein gave him a look. “You’re telling me you brought back the wrong kind of kestrel.”

Hawkeye offered another tired shrug and took refuge in his drink. “Thanks for this.”

“Hm.” Ninestein leaned closer to see Mary’s computer. “And what are you doing, precisely?”

“I’d been working with Zero on a new search strategy.” Mary wrapped both hands around her mug and sipped at the hot liquid inside, allowing herself the luxury of a few seconds of enjoyment. “If Kate’s not been abducted, I wondered if she’d gone towards the cliffs, looking for shade or water, and maybe slipped or fell or… I don’t know. Something. But the zeroids have worked over almost everywhere in thirty square miles and we’ve exhausted where we can look. We’re going to have to get imaginative. Or wait on a ransom demand.”

“Still caught on the whole abduction idea, huh. What’s your thoughts on that, Hawkeye?”

“It makes sense but I’m struggling with it. We would have definitely seen some footprints away from the scene.” Hawkeye stretched and rubbed the back of his neck. “But she’s gotta be somewhere, Tiger. We know she was sick. People undress when they get too cold, right? I wondered if maybe the same was true of heatstroke?”

“I’m not sure we can extrapolate like that,” Mary cautioned, with a little wave of a finger.

“Hell, I’m not sure we can do anything, right now!”

Ninestein turned to look over at their kestrel. “And what about the bird?”

“Hawkeye was trying to work out how to feed her. Or more specifically, what.” Mary gave Ninestein a loaded glance. “Seeing as we have a freezer full of lobster claws, not baby chicks.”

Ninestein put his hands up. “I hope I’m not getting the blame here for not buying birdfood for the bird we didn’t have an hour ago.”

Mary made a little sort of apologetic noise and went back to her drink.

“So. This is a kestrel?” Ninestein challenged, walking closer. “You’re sure?”

Hawkeye nodded, just once. “Yup.”

Ninestein stood with his arms folded and stared at the scruffy little bird for a very long time; she looked back at him, fluffed up like an exhausted duster, bright yellow eyelids pulled halfway closed. “You only found Kate’s clothes?” he asked, at last. “And no footprints?”

Hawkeye rested his elbow on the table and propped his cheek against his palm, exhausted. “Uh-huh. Looked like she’d just evaporated clean out of them.” He twirled a hand in the air.

“Maybe she did. Well, maybe not evaporate, precisely, but…”

Hawkeye’s brow furrowed. “…huh?”

Mary also turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”

Ninestein didn’t look back at either of them. “Have any of you tried to speak to her?”

Mary and Hawkeye exchanged glances.

“To… the… bird?” Hawkeye asked, warily. “Well… no? Why would I? I mean, I guess I talked at her a little, but I kinda wasn’t expecting an answer?”

“What are you getting at, Tiger?”

“We all know Zelda can control matter, when it suits her. So what if… I wonder. Now… bear with me here, all right? I might look like I’ve gone crazy, but if this works… well, you’ll see.” Ninestein walked quietly over to the small bird, and crouched in front of it. “Kate?”

…the tiny falcon leapt into the air with a triumphant but useless beat of her wings, and promptly fell off the perch. Ninestein cursed, alarmed, made a scrambling lunge, and somehow managed to catch her before she hit the tiles.

“I guess that’s Zelda’s idea of peak humour; turning Kate Kestrel into an actual kestrel,” he said, plopping clumsily down to sit on the floor with a relieved little bird sprawled out over his palms.

Hawkeye just stared at him, open-mouthed, before working out where his voice had gone. “The hell did you figure that out-… fuck me. That’s Kate?”

“Lucky guess. I wasn’t honestly expecting a reaction but I figured I needed to at least test it?” Ninestein kept his palms cupped beneath her and tried gently to nudge Kate back upright, but she was having none of it, wings spread, legs stretched out behind her. “And… yeah, I guess it is? Good job she convinced you to being her back with you, huh.” He looked up and caught Mary’s eye. “A little help here, maybe?”

Mary had already found a towel, which she now wrapped around her arm. “So she doesn’t need to worry if she grabs on,” she explained, gathering her friend up from Ninestein’s hands. Her own fingers were still trembling very slightly. “This doesn’t feel real, you know.”

“Right.” He remained on the floor for several more seconds, watching as Mary straightened up and let Kate get her balance on her arm. “I imagine Kate probably feels the same way.”

“But how could this be-…” Mary shook her head. “This is-… scientifically impossible. Are we sure we aren’t having some… collective hallucination? Zelda drugged us all with a plant before.”

“That’s as may be, but we can’t just sit around until we wake up.” He took Mary’s free hand and let her pull him back to his feet. “We have to assume it isn’t, and deal with it.”

“What do we do now?”

“Damned if I know. I’m going to at least tell Hiro to stand his crew down, and then…” He threw his hands up. “I don’t know. I guess see if he’s got any genius ideas.” The door whooshed closed behind him.

Mary sat with a bump back at the table, feeling like her knees weren’t all that keen on supporting her right now.

Kate relaxed against her, leaning in against Mary’s upper arm. She still felt tired and sore and sick, but infinitely better now her friends finally knew it was her. Thank the stars for Doctor Ninestein.

“I’m so sorry. You’ve been trying to tell us the entire time.” Mary used a single finger to stroke the back of Kate’s head, gently. “I promise we’ll figure this out, Kate. You just relax, for now. We’ve got you.”

Relax. We’ve got you. The words felt a little bit like a candle, showing her the first steps out of the dark. Kate hadn’t realised quite how much tension she’d been carrying, but now she suddenly felt unfairly heavy. Exhausted. Her treacherous toes automatically snagged closed on Mary’s towel-wrapped arm, but she still wobbled dramatically as she succumbed to a doze.

Mary cupped a hand gently over her back, keeping her from falling. “Did you get much further with finding out about food, Hawkeye?” she wondered, quietly. “She’s got to be hungry, by now.”

“For actual birds, sure.” Hawkeye sighed. “Birds of prey are meant to have whole animals, like they’d eat in the wild. Like… bones and fur and shit. So they can digest it properly.” He rested his head on his hands. “I mean, fucking hell, Mary. I’m not gonna subject Katie to that. Even raw chicken is pushing acceptability further than I’m gonna consider.”

“You didn’t find anything else? What about what we eat?”

“People don’t feed birds of prey with people food. I get the feeling it’s frowned on to feed little birds on cooked hamburger?” Hawkeye manged a terse smile. “Most of what we have in storage is ready prepared.”

“Maybe we’ll just have to try it. She can’t survive on nothing.” Mary glanced down and watched her friend sleep, briefly. “It won’t be for long, anyway. We’ll make sure of that.”

While Mary and Hawkeye had been taking charge of the new situation, Ninestein contacted Spacehawk.

“Hiro? You can stand down the search. We’ve found her.”

“Oh!” On the screen, Hiro sagged against the terminal in relief. “Thank goodness. How is she? Where was she?”

“Right by her ship, when we picked her up-”

“But- How is that possible?” Hiro straightened and glanced back at 101, who had rocked slightly back on his axis in the same sort of alarm as Hiro was feeling. “How on Earth could we have missed her?!”

“…well, that bring me nicely onto my second point. First of all, she’s healthy, so far as we can tell-”

“So far as you can tell?” Hiro echoed, baffled. “How can you not know?”

Ninestein sighed, tightly. “I’m going to just come out and say it, Hiro. It will sound completely absurd and you’ll think I’m playing a practical joke on you, but…” He ran a hand through his hair. “Somehow, Zelda has turned Kate into a kestrel.”

Hiro just stared at him for several seconds. Finally he found his voice again, and said, succinctly: “…what?”

“A little falcon?”

“I-I know what a kestrel is. But- - I’m not certain I heard you correctly.”

“No, no. You heard me just fine, Hiro.”

“And are you sure-”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how?”

“No. Not even the faintest idea. Although to be fair, I haven’t actually tried asking her.” Ninestein matched stares with the shocked expressions at the other end of the connection. “I was hoping that maybe you’d take a look and give me your opinion.”

Hiro shook his head. “I am not a biologist, doctor. I don’t know how much help I will be.”

“Honestly, Hiro? I don’t think there was much biology going on here anyway. There’s no earthly processes that I know of that could turn a human into a bird. It’s gotta be some sort of… magical handwavium at work, courtesy of our friend Zelda. The sooner we can work out what it is, the sooner we can fight back against it.”

“Let me prepare Treehawk and I will be down-”

“Ah – no. I thought it would be better if we met in orbit. Just in case we need to take… certain precautions.”

“You mean, in case it is contagious and we need to quarantine.” Hiro visibly exhaled through a little oh of pursed lips, and took a second or two to centre himself. “I understand. Then we will await your arrival.”

Kate didn’t sleep very long, but woke feeling refreshed, if rather… disoriented. Now where was she?

Oh, yeah.

Bird.

She sagged back against Mary’s arm and wondered if she could just get back to sleep. It all made more sense when it was all just a dream.

The dilemma of eating still hadn’t been resolved, but Hawkeye had fetched a bowl of water for her, so she could at least try to slake her thirst somewhat.

Huh. A bowl of water. Not a glass. She tried to rationalise it as how it made sense, as she no longer had lips, and not that they were unconsciously treating her like a pet cat.

Turned out that even drinking was not very easy. She had to scoop a little up in her beak, then tip her head back so it trickled down her throat. It made her cough. She ended up with more water on her feathers than in her crop, but it got easier with a little practice and eventually she felt vaguely satisfied.

If drinking was this difficult, however hard was it going to be to eat? At least there was very little risk they’d think a mouse was a good food choice, now they weren’t assuming she was an actual kestrel.

Well, okay, fine, she was an actual kestrel, but-… never mind.

Mary explained that Ninestein was going to take her up to Spacehawk, to see if they could work out what was going on. That lifted her spirits a little. If anyone could figure this out? It would probably be Hiro.

Determined to make her own way to the shuttle bay, Kate ignored Mary’s proffered arm and fluttered down to the floor. Still hadn’t quite worked out how to generate lift, but she didn’t just go straight down any more. Another of those small comforts. Her hop-skip along the corridors felt a little lighter than it had previously.

55 was waiting outside Treehawk’s hangar. He looked a little puzzled to see who was approaching, but otherwise sat quietly to watch their approach.

“Ah, Five-five,” Mary greeted. “Doctor Ninestein asked you to accompany Kate, did he?”

“Yes, but I haven’t seen her. Do you know where?” 55 did a full rotation and a half before Mary managed to regain his attention. “But I’m so glad you found her! I wasn’t aware!”

“Oh.” Mary crouched next to him. “In all the fuss, we forgot to tell you. I’m so sorry. Five-five… This is Kate.”

Kate hopped up close and gave a wary little bow, wings slightly spread. She still hadn’t quite got over how strange it was seeing zeroids on this scale. The little robots were bigger than she was, now, and felt… slightly clumsily intimidating? Of course she knew they were (mostly) excellent drivers, but it was hard to convince herself of that now that they could potentially squash her.

55 stared for several seconds, tilted slightly to one side like a dog with a cocked head. “I don’t understand.”

“Zelda has… somehow… transformed her into a bird. So you did actually find her, when you were out in the desert, after all.”

55 continued to stare at her, but his posture had changed, rocked slightly back on his axis. “Oh, Miss Kate!” He sounded horrified. “I hadn’t realised it was you! I’m so sorry-”

She bumped him with her beak, gently, and he went quiet midsentence.

“We didn’t realise either, Five-five,” Mary reassured, resting a hand against his top curve. “You aren’t to blame for somehow not recognising her, when none of us did either.”

He leaned against her leg and made a glum noise.

Space Sergeant 101 was at his perch on the flight deck, waiting to greet them when Treehawk finally arrived. “Welcome aboard!”

Ninestein offered a tight smile and let Kate step off his arm and onto the central control console. “Thanks, 101. Is Hiro in the lab already?”

“Yes, sir; he’s been making preparations since you said you were coming up here.”

“Good. I’m going to see how he’s getting on. Look after Kate, will you?” Ninestein looked down at the zeroid doctor shadowing his feet. “Come on, Kiljoy…”

“Ten-ten, si-ooh, yikes. Miss Kate?” 101 rocked back on his axis, and stayed like it for a handful of heartbeats before coming forwards again, as though leaning closer, conspiratorially. “Did you do something with your hair, ma’am?”

She gave him an affectionately scolding swat with a wing, but was already relaxing. If there was one person she could rely on not to make a big deal, it was the little robot who was used to being on the wrong end of it himself.

“I thought they were joking, to wind Hiro and me up for not finding you. But.” He cocked to one side. “Here you are, huh.” Another heartbeat passed. “Captain Falconer messaged to say you still haven’t eaten. Can I get you something?”

Kate shifted her weight uneasily from one foot to another, and clicked her beak.

“Oh. Oh, right. Er. Hmm.”

101’s optics scrolled as he hastily did some research. Not mice, not mice, she willed him.

“We have some shredded chicken in the cold store. Mary says kestrels aren’t meant to eat cooked meat but Hawkeye couldn’t find anything that says it’s specifically harmful so we guess that would probably be okay just this once?”

She breathed a sigh of relief and nodded.

“You stay here. I’ll go fetch it!”

She watched him tumble off his perch and vanish out the door. Certain other zeroids might joke he was more secretary than soldier, but that felt like it was precisely what she needed, right now; not to mention, someone with just the tiniest trace of social awareness.

55 leaped up to the console, and rolled over, protectively. “I’m so glad we found you, Miss Kate. I was so worried. When I just found your wig, I didn’t know what to think.” He spoke quietly and leaned guiltily closer. “I did a bad job. I’m sorry. I promise I’ll do better.”

She could tell when 55 was particularly stressed because he stopped rhyming. She leaned carefully against him and offered a little crooning noise of comfort. He sat very still to avoid crushing his considerable weight into her, but she sensed he probably wanted to ‘snuggle’, in as much as zeroids could.

They sat quietly together until 101 returned, pushing a little trolley with Kate’s… breakfast? Supper? She’d lost track of what time it even was, any more. She opened her wings and dropped carefully down to the deck. Spacehawk’s artificial gravity felt particularly weird, right now.

Compared to how big she was now, it was an enormous pile of food. The pale shreds of cooked meat didn’t look particularly appetising, but if the alternatives were either go hungry or whole mouse, she decided that boring shredded chicken was absolutely perfect.

Now, how to actually eat it? She studied the plate for a very long time before attempting anything, and quickly discovered she was going to have to hold the shreds somehow, if she didn’t want to have to chase them across the plate with her beak. She balanced on one leg and tried to use her other foot to hold them where she wanted, without a terrible degree of success. Ultimately, she found she had to stand right there on the plate itself.

Lucky she had a coat of feathers, now. So they couldn’t see quite how hot she was burning with humiliation of struggling to feed herself.

The two zeroids watched her for only a second or two before 101 butted into 55 to get his attention.

“Does it not get tiring, making everything rhyme?” he asked. “I can only imagine what it does to your processor load.”

“I don’t rhyme all the time,” 55 demurred. “Some sentences are just too short, and it’s better to keep to a single retort.”

“Right! How would you even say ‘yes’?”

55 gave him a funny look. “Ten-ten?”

“Oh! Duh. Silly me.” 101 bumped against him and the pair fell about giggling.

Kate couldn’t get her beak to smile, and couldn’t quite figure out if her new voice would allow her to laugh, but it was good to see the zeroids interacting as fairly normal individuals, for a change. And while they were chattering with each other, they weren’t studying her quite so intensely while she tried to swallow the lumps of chicken without the benefit of teeth to chew them. (She suspected that was the sole reason 101 had struck up conversation, and 55 had gone along with it. And they actually appeared to be enjoying each other’s company, which was an even better change.)

It might have just been bland unseasoned chicken, and might have required far more emotional labour than eating had ever normally taken, but getting that little bit of food inside her felt like it had stoked the fires of her flagging confidence.

Right. It’s all coming together. You can do this, Kate.

So when Ninestein returned to collect her, she felt a little more able to cope with whatever the world was about to throw at her. Or at least, so she hoped.

Kate perched on the bench in the medical lab, awkwardly, and made a little questioning noise.

Hiro smiled, but there was tension in his eyes. “We would like to take some samples, if that’s all right? And do some diagnostic tests. We hope they might help us work out what exactly Zelda did to you.”

The lieutenant explained everything as they went: skin, blood, saliva samples. A couple of feathers (those were the worst). X-ray. Ultrasounds. Hiro expressed some disappointment about the lack of MRI and PET facilities aboard, after which Kate mostly lost track of what he was doing.

Eventually he and Kiljoy were satisfied, and allowed her to escape. No matter how careful and gentle they’d been, Kate still felt like she was leaving half her body in the lab.

While the humans discussed things with Kiljoy, in low anxious tones, two worried little zeroids decided they needed to get back to looking after her. 55 had finally realised that all the flapping was nothing to do with being in pain, but trying to figure out how to fly. He and 101 hunted out plenty of videos, and she instructed them on which she wanted to watch. (The touchscreen was only responsive to the pads under her toes, not her beak or her feathers, and she wasn’t quite dexterous enough to reach everything she wanted, yet.)

Her first actual flight down the length of the flight deck – actual flight, oh man – was short and ended in a crash, thankfully cushioned by her feathers and Spacehawk’s weird gravity. But it was undeniably flying! Flying! She couldn’t do anything except dance for five whole minutes afterwards, a whirl of bright toes and feathers. Her two self-appointed guardians tried to join in but they were clumsy little idiots and spent more time trying not to crash into each other. Kate couldn’t help laughing, a soft musical little trilling noise – it made her absurdly pleased to discover that she was still capable of that, too.

Finally flying under her own power lit a fire in her. She wanted to go further. Faster. She knew where the cargo bays were – and they were much bigger than the flight deck. Even to a human, they were big. To a small bird, it’d be like flying through an aircraft hangar-

Kate sprinted off into the corridor with the two zeroids in hot pursuit.

Swooping down the full cavernous length of the hold, cheered on by her two excited little friends, it almost, almost let her forget what had been done to her.

This is incredible. It’s incredible. It’s better than incredible.

And to think these were still only her first clumsy attempts! She still wasn’t very elegant – or good at turning, or even stopping, for that matter – but her heart soared. She thought that perhaps she could cope with this part of this whole sorry situation.

Now just imagine doing this on Earth, where there’s no walls, or risk of being sucked out into space…!

It didn’t her take very long to exhaust her new muscles, but she would have happily stayed up there for the rest of the day. She flopped against 55 and panted to catch her breath, throat fluttering.

He chirped softly at her, questioningly.

It took some imaginative charades to finally get across the concept of I’m thirsty, but they finally got onto her wavelength.

“The galley is this way!” 101 sang, leading her towards a small door in the wall, before adding; “It’s a shortcut.” His tone of voice implied he’d have been tapping his nose if he’d had one.

55 followed gamely on behind them.

It was strange, seeing Spacehawk from a zeroid’s point of view. Kate hadn’t realised quite what a maze of maintenance tubes the big vessel actually was – easily navigable by the little robots (and kestrels, now), but perhaps less so by a human, who would probably be forced to wriggle through on their stomach.

“Oh,” said 55, abruptly.

101 stopped dead and turned to face him. “‘Oh’?” he echoed. “What does that mean?”

“It means, oh I think something’s happening.” 55 was watching Kate very intensely. “But not to worry! So long as we get back to the lab. And maybe hurry?!”

Kate felt her breath catch. What the hell did all that mean? She gave a soft little crooning note of question.

“Your heart rate is back up,” 55 explained, bluntly. “Only a tick… but like last time. When you first got sick.”

She stiffened. Whatever process it was had turned her into a bird was reversing? Was that too much to hope?

She brought a wing forwards and noticed a feather had come loose. Then she coughed – a weird little squeaky sneeze noise that felt like it came all the way up from the bottom of her chest.

“Okay, let’s go let’s go!” Alarmed, 101 took the lead, racing off down the maintenance tube. “The lab is this way!”

Clinging to the hope that she was indeed turning human again, and not into something worse, like a slug or a slime mould, Kate chased after him in a sort of hop-skip sprint, wings slightly spread for balance, leaving a trail of loose feathers behind her, 55 following protectively along at the back. Her feet had already started to ache.

Her hope was tempered by the knowledge that she had to get out of the maintenance tubes before she got stuck! It embarrassed her just to think about it; turning human again while still in these narrow passages, getting stuck in the depths of the spaceship, needing the place to be dismantled from around her – buck naked the whole time? She put on a little extra burst of speed, squeaking at 101 to go faster.

The lab was empty when they came crashing out through the zeroidoor, not a moment too soon. Kate’s shrill, screechy kestrel voice had already given way to something a lot more obviously mammalian, horrible deepening groans of pain, and all her large flight feathers had fallen out. She stumbled out into the open space in the centre on all fours, considerably larger than she had been five minutes previously and getting bigger with every second.

She tried to swallow her screams but it felt rather like her skeleton was on fire. She could almost hear the bones of her wingtip creaking, shattering back into individual fingers.

“I’ll get help!” 55 was already speeding for the door.

“Why are you leaving me here?!” 101 squeaked after him, alarmed. “She’s your human! That is, no offence Miss Kestrel-!”

“You’re in charge of the ship, you can keep the doors closed. She’ll appreciate it if she ends up unclothed!”

101 wailed after him: “But I’m not a doctor!”

“Me either!” 55 was already far away down the access tube, and quickly vanished around a corner.

“Oh, help.” 101 leaped for the controls and aggressively plugged into the system; the door thumped closed. “Don’t worry, miss Kate. It’ll all be fine! I’m sure it’ll all be just fine.”

Kate clung to his words, using them as an anchor as she tried desperately not to pass out, propped on knees and elbows and clutching her head as her skull reshaped itself. It was only her empty stomach that was keeping her from vomiting.

It had to almost be over now, surely. She groaned into another shuddering sob.

Please be almost over-

“What’s going on in there?” Ninestein’s voice came very clearly through the door. “What are you little idiots playing at now.”

“Don’t come in!” 101 squeaked, alarmed. “Is Kiljoy with you? Miss Kestrel is um, is not exactly a kestrel any more! And she doesn’t have any clothes, right now! Oh, help. Please get her some clothes!”

Curled up and trembling on the cold deck, it was taking every ounce of Kate’s willpower not to black out again. It was hard to tell over all the noise echoing in her head, but it felt like perhaps the worst of the pain had begun to subside.

She opened her eyes a crack and flinched from the white brilliance of the overhead lights. The world came back into a sort of hazy focus, as though she’d suddenly downgraded her eyes to a bad quality television monitor. 101 was right in the doorway, defensively, plumbed into the system and manually keeping it locked – plus making himself something good for tripping over if anyone managed to overrule him. On the other side, Ninestein was trying to persuade him to open the door; sounded like even Kiljoy wasn’t able to override the sergeant’s control, for once.

“-I’m not letting you in until someone gets some clothes!”

“You’re being ridiculous. We need to check she’s all right-!”

Out of breath and aching all over, she couldn’t quite help the snap – wheezing like she had the worst case of laryngitis in her life. “Will you guys just listen to him and get me some damn clothes? Mercy!” She felt a little like a human pretzel, twisted up into a defensive knot of limbs in an effort to protect her modesty – not to mention, try and keep warm in the chilly room. Sitting naked in the lab on Spacehawk was not how she’d expected her day to pan out.

“Owun?” Hiro’s gentle voice filtered through the hubbub. “We’re still waiting for her clothes to come off the printer. But I have a blanket. Will that suffice for now?”

101 turned just enough that he could catch her in the periphery of his visual field; Kate gave him a brief nod.

“A blanket is fine!” he chirped, and opened the door a tiny crack.

A hand holding a big bolt of soft fabric appeared through it, and dropped it on his head.

The blanket landed with a flump and promptly unfolded, completely covering him and spilling out over the floor; Kate could hear him muttering frustratedly, but after a second or so cross referencing to get his bearings, he rolled it over to her, like a cartoon mole under the fabric.

“I have my eyes closed,” 101 reassured, muffled.

Kate released an arm from the knot of limbs and picked up the tail of the fabric, manoeuvring it around her shoulders.

Oh. The blanket was warm and soft and felt amazing. She wrapped it all the way up over her head, leaving just a tiny window to peek out through. “Okay, hon. I’m decent,” she told 101. “Well. Decent enough. You can let them back in.”

There was a subtle clonk she felt through the deck, and then the door hissed back, almost throwing Ninestein down on the floor from where he’d apparently been leaning on it.

The doctor gestured his annoyance. “Do you think next time you could maybe not lock us out, where we can’t help? I mean… flaming thunderbolts. What if something terrible had happened?”

101 looked defiantly up at him but miraculously remained silent.

55 rolled up very close and pressed against her side. “Miss Kestrel?”

She leaned against him, tired. “Hey, little bodyguard. It’s nice to be able to talk properly to you again.”

“I really hope you’re not in pain, and I’m so glad you’re you again!”

“Me too, buddy. Thank you for looking after me.”

Hiro finally appeared a few minutes later, and crouched in front of her with his arms full of clothing. “Fresh off the printer,” he said, relinquishing the bundle into her hands.

Kate studied it. It was the right colour, but was definitely not her uniform. “This Kiljoy’s way of saying I’m not signed off as fit for duty?”

She meant it mostly as a joke – there was no way she was even thinking about going back on duty just yet – but Hiro ducked his head with a guilty smile anyway. “Forgive me – that was my idea. I did not want you to feel you had to throw yourself straight back into work. Perhaps I should have picked a completely different colour-”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s fine, Hiro. I was teasing. These look perfect. Thank you.”

He covered her fingers with his own. “When you are dressed, Kiljoy would like to assess you. Just to check you are fully you again. Is that all right?”

The idea of being poked and prodded some more, however well intentioned, left her cold. “D’you think he could wait until I’ve taken a nap? I feel like I haven’t slept in a week.” She tried to hide the yawn in the blanket. “Actually, I’m not giving him any choice in the matter. I’m sleeping whether he says I can or not. Would you let him know?”

Hiro nodded. “Of course. We have plenty to be working on.”

Ninestein smiled, tiredly. “Well, since there’s not a lot more I can do just yet, I guess I’ll go check out the ents library. See if 101 actually has anything decent to watch hidden away among all his soaps.”

“Huh!” the zeroid retorted, sniffily.

Not anticipating a crew rotation, and with no time to prepare for the possibility of quarantine, none of the other cabins were ready, so Hiro volunteered his own. It was crisp and neatly organised, bed made, everything tidily in its proper places – with every spare surface (apart from the zeroid perch close to the head of the small bunk) occupied by a potted plant. It felt a little like she imagined is would to take a nap in a forest.

Kate looked down at 55, and patted the pedestal. “Would you stand guard, while I get some sleep?”

Her zeroid looked puzzled but obediently hopped up to the perch’s control surface. “Why, ma’am? I don’t think you’re in danger. We’re aboard Spacehawk, and no-one here’s a stranger.”

“I know. I just think I’d sleep better knowing I had you keeping a sensor or two on me.” She patted his head. “Wake me up if you notice anything strange happening, huh?”

He bumped against her fingers. “Ten-ten, ma’am.”

Kate curled up under the sheets, wondering how long she’d end up laying awake for. That bone-deep ache still permeated her whole body and exhausted though she was, she wasn’t sure if she’d actually manage to doze off.

But 55 was running his fans just enough to be audible, and the lullaby of white noise helped soothe her into sleep.

----

This would have been finished earlier except I got distracted by looking for the Klingon for "open fire!" for a certain little round asshole who is getting WAY too into a particular rescue mission. (Don't ask.)

#terrahawks #zeroids #kate kestrel #space sgt 101 #55 #lieutenant hiro #tiger ninestein #mary falconer #lieutenant hawkeye #fiction

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keaalu · 5 days ago

Text

Meteoric, Chapter 5

Don't think I actually posted any of this fic on this platform directly? Just linked to it, last time. Anyway!

---

Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack.

After being mildly irritated by Ninestein doing it, Hiro was frustrated to now find himself also pacing quietly up and down the flight deck. (He kept making a conscious effort to stop, and felt like that was probably more annoying than just pacing. At least there was no-one around to mind, right now.)

He felt rather at a loose end. 17 and 43 were dutifully reporting to him every time someone found something, but they’d have already analysed it and compiled it into their datasets by that point and all he could usually do was say “thank you, good job, please carry on.”

(“Good job” was rather like catnip to the little robots; they absolutely could not think of anything better and excitedly went straight back to work, leaving Hiro still with no-one to talk to.)

While 17 and 43 were leading, all the other zeroids on board were helping. They’d pooled their intelligences together into something of a gestalt, multiplying up their computing power, constantly talking to each other as they scoured the web, reading through literally everything and anything that seemed to have even the loosest connection to the search – astronomy and robotics forums, social media discussions of meteorites and unusual technology, police reports of suspected criminal activity, council reports of property damage, whatever CCTV they’d persuaded the authorities to give them, cross-referencing it all together. And they were definitely tightening their focus! They’d narrowed their target area down to a few dozen square kilometres – but that was still thousands of streets and buildings, and even zeroid optical software needed time to visually appraise their satellite imagery.

The signal to noise ratio in this search was absurd. Hiro had no idea how the zeroids were finding anything, let alone all the data they’d found so far. One of the advantages of not needing to sleep, he imagined? That, and being able to read hundreds of sources simultaneously. Without computer brains able to read through data, analyse and compile it in seconds, he doubted they’d have got this far in three years, let alone three days.

Hiro had – he hoped not foolishly – begun to think that perhaps they were making some progress, and that maybe they would have actually found 101 soon. He’d discovered that he did rather miss the little robot, sarcasm and all.

Although he’d tried hard to get some rest, while his other crewmates were still aboard, Hiro’s sleep had been punctuated by bad dreams, and he didn’t feel like he’d genuinely rested for more than a few minutes at a time. (It was hard to get some of the images out of his head – imagining his small friend critically damaged in the fall, broken open like a dropped melon, stolen by an unprincipled billionaire, crudely replicated a thousandfold and sold off to the highest bidders… all while the real 101 died quietly and alone in a hundred pieces in a laboratory somewhere-… Hiro pushed up his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, determined not to get lost in those nightmares again.)

“…Lieutenant Hiro? Sir? Lieutenant!”

Belatedly, he realised 43 had been chirping urgently to get his attention. He straightened his glasses and looked over. “Yes, Forty Three. What is it?”

“We found this,” the zeroid said, bluntly, throwing his discovery up onto a screen, and waited for the human to read it.

Hiro felt cold fingers draw up the back of his neck.

It was an advert. Requesting help to locate a valuable asset. Offering a reward of at least a quarter of a million dollars to whoever helped successfully “reunite” the poster with “their” property. And the description of the missing technology, while slightly abstract? Was clearly of a zeroid. The string of responses carried on for over fifty pages already.

Hiro didn’t have time to read through fifty pages – but fortunately knew someone who did. “Has anyone responded positively? To say they have anything?”

“Ten-zero, sir. Not convincingly, at least,” 43 confirmed. “Lots of interest, though. People asking a lot of questions about sensitive data, and not all the responses from the originator are completely incorrect.”

What could that mean? Hiro mulled it over. He doubted it could have been posted by anyone employed by any of the small number of organisations they worked alongside, because even they knew very little about Terrahawks technology (and certainly didn’t know they’d lost any of it). While he was confident that some of the posts the zeroids had found had been from 101 himself, this new one definitely didn’t contain any of his mannerisms.

“Should we take the post down, sir?” 43 prompted, in the silence. “The forum software looks basic enough.”

“No. No, we may be able to use this to our own advantage. Monitor it, and flag to me any time you see something that contains actual data.”

“Ten-ten, sir.”

“Can you identify who posted it?”

“No. 17 has been trying but it looks like it was routed through hundreds of individual nodes and we lose definition the further back it goes.”

“Hmm.”

Hiro had been working on the assumption that the only people that knew 101 was missing were the Terrahawks, and presumably whoever the zeroid had ended up with, but a more worrying new idea was beginning to percolate.

If 101 had ended up with some… malicious Earthly entity that wanted to use him for some nefarious purposes? They wouldn’t have needed to put out a reward for his retrieval, because they’d already have him. (And a ransom note felt slightly more likely.) And no Terrahawks affiliates would be chancing their luck because very few people knew enough about the organisation to know that zeroids even existed, let alone that they’d accidentally dropped one somewhere. Hiro couldn’t think of anyone who might have been talking about it.

But he and his colleagues had spoken to each other about it. And the timing of this post was exceptionally convenient.

Hiro read it again. “I wonder.”

“…sir?”

“I think.” He pressed his fingers to his lips. “That the poster of this…? Is Martian.”

“Zelda-!” 43 rocked backwards. “Oh no! How could she even know?”

“We know her family watch us all the time. They think they will eventually catch us revealing something that will allow them to defeat us.” Hiro sighed. “They must have broken our encryption. We were, ah. Possibly not being as careful as we could have been? They must have overheard.” He flicked a control on the console and sent a voice message to Hawknest. “Not that I want to add to our pressure, doctor, but it looks like we might be racing Zelda to our missing zeroid as well, now...”

------

Saturday morning came along very heavily for most of the flatmates. The previous evening, Laine had retired to her room long before anyone else had come home (and not exclusively to avoid Tark – she was genuinely exhausted), and zonked out very quickly. Sunlight now streamed around the edges of her window blind.

Polly was on the floor next to her bed, busily working away again. She watched sleepily as pages loaded and scrolled in flickers of movement too fast for her to ever follow. And… were those the faintest threads of music, coming up from the laptop?

Yeah – definitely music. Silly sparkly bubbly pop music, at that. Not her thing at all so he must have actively gone looking for it. She couldn’t help the sleepy grin.

“Mornin’,” she drawled, at last.

“Oh, hello! Good, er… morning? Just.”

“Wha’time is it anyway?”

Polly swivelled around to look at her. “It’s almost noon.”

“Oh, fucking hell. I’m sorry. Wasted half the day already-”

“Don’t.” He nudged her fingers. “You were quite drunk. I thought you needed to sleep. None of your flatmates are awake yet either. I heard them get in and it was very late.”

You were quite drunk. A flavour of that same embarrassment made her cheeks get warm. “Yeah I’m sorry about last night. I think I might have been a bit inappropriate.”

His smile looked genuine enough – consistent and bright. “You asked some drunken questions that I was happy to answer. I’d have soon told you if I thought they were too intrusive.” After a beat, he added; “you weren’t the one low-key molesting me, either.”

“…I’ll ask her to apologise.”

Laine lay and watched him, for a little while, until she was finally awake enough to recognise that in her tiddly frame of mind, she’d left the laptop on the floor, not to mention forgotten to plug it in. The chaos of cables and scattered books and pieces of paper suggested Polly had struggled to connect it to power, but hadn’t tried to wake her for help. Obviously he’d succeeded because it was still happily lit up and working for him, but she couldn’t help the sudden pulse of guilt at how long it must have taken him to do so.

“Aw, man. You shoulda woke me up to plug that in.” She extended a hand and brushed her fingers against his top curve.

“Maybe? I think I wanted to prove I could do it myself. I don’t want to annoy you by making you do everything for me.”

“We don’t mind.”

“…at the moment, sure. But I feel like I’m taking you for granted. I should be able to do this stuff!”

“You don’t have hands.”

“Exactly! So how did I do anything before I came here?”

Laine let it lay. He might have had a point. “How’s your search going?” She changed the subject.

“It’s… eenh. Going. I have a couple leads, now. Something about birds, and someone gave me some names. A Doctor Steifel? Stein? I haven’t found out anything else about them, though.”

Laine arched an eyebrow and propped her head on one hand. “You’re a veterinary nurse?”

“Oh I hardly think that.” Beat. “I could be a medicine ball, I guess.”

Laine snickered and gave him a little shove. “What about Tark?”

Polly remained silent for long enough that Laine knew he was trying to be diplomatic, but eventually, he spoke. “I think he’d have come in if you hadn’t locked the door. We spoke briefly through it. We might have discussed more but I didn’t want to wake you – although you were pretty deeply asleep so I doubt I’d have disturbed you.”

Laine swallowed her first thought, to demand to know what Tark had told him – because of her, Polly already didn’t trust the man, and she found that she didn’t actually feel all that satisfied in the knowledge that she’d put them at odds. Instead, she rephrased it; “Did he tell you anything useful?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Maybe? You remember he said there was someone who he thought knew about me? Apparently he’s based in the USA. Tark thinks I should video call him directly.”

“Do you want to?”

“I think I should, but I haven’t decided for definite. Gotta figure out how, without revealing I’m not human? I’ve added it to my database and am trying to interpret it alongside the other limited information I know for definite. Which is. Eh.” A little descending note. “Not a lot.”

“Hey, you’re making progress! That’s not bad for three days!” Laine swung her feet out of bed and crammed them into her slippers. “D’you fancy some company or would you rather work in here where you won’t get disturbed so much?”

“I’m good at multitasking. I’d prefer to have the company, I think.”

Laine left him and the laptop comfortable on the couch before retiring to the kitchen to make something to eat. A bleary-eyed Carrie joined her not long later, drawn out by the smell of bacon, followed eventually by Mina.

Jaxon (somewhat conveniently) appeared when the cooking was almost finished; he shambled across the room, yawning, looking a little the worse for wear. “Hey folks. S’goin on? What’s with the music?”

Laine shushed him and dragged him into the kitchen.

Apparently tiring of searching in silence, and bolstered by not immediately being told to be quiet, Polly was now singing quietly along with Big Big Love in a slightly alarming but pitch-perfect falsetto. (Yesterday evening had apparently had a marked effect on the little machine’s confidence.)

“Is that Polly?” Jaxon immediately fished his phone out of his pocket and opened the camera.

“Hey, no!” Mina put her hand out and pushed the phone down. “Don’t film him.”

“We have the queerest robot in the world in our lounge, belting out Belinda Carlisle at the top of his lungs, and you won’t let me film him. Figures it’d be you spoiling everyone’s fun.” Jaxon rolled his eyes but stuffed his mobile back into his pocket. “If we put that on the internet, we’d know where he belonged in seconds.”

“And we’d have given him a literal planet’s worth of attention when he doesn’t even like us talking about him outside of our little group. He’d never trust anyone again if you went and uploaded video of him singing.” Mina gave him a swat.

Laine took her sandwich into the lounge and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of Polly’s spot on the couch. “Jaxon suggested-”

“I heard. No.”

“You don’t think it’s an opportunity we should be grabbing?” She took a huge bite of her lunch, and sighed deeply in satisfaction. “Mmh.”

“If I can’t find where I belong, I could make it as an international social media star instead, you mean? No thank you.” He made a sort of electronic snort noise. “Yes, you might figure out who I belong to. Might. You’d also attract every chancer in a thousand mile radius, not to mention journalists who want a scoop, and a million people who are just nosey. How would I ever work out who’s telling me the truth? I can’t even ask them for something only I’d know because oopsie! No memory.”

“I guess I prolly shoulda thought it through,” Jaxon agreed, plopping down on a beanbag. “Just used to oversharing online, I guess?” At the expressions directed his way, he hastily put his hands up, placatory. “Which I haven’t! Not about Polly!”

After Sanjay returned from his errands and said it all felt a little like walking in on one of the weirder episodes of Doctor Who, and Polly had responded so predictably – Doctor WHO? – it was like he’d been coached, they collectively decided a lesson was in order. The little robot happily allowed himself to be absorbed into the middle of the gathering, at the centre of the couch – albeit surrounded with cushions so his temporary flatmates could sprawl more comfortably around him.

Even Tark eventually joined the huddle – well, after a fashion, one of the beanbags, out of reach. He endured two episodes before losing patience. “I’m not watching any more kids TV. Hand over the remote.” Then he leaned across and took it anyway.

A little chorus of protests went up.

Polly glanced around them. “Guys? Why are we arguing now?”

“Because Twerpface over there will want to watch some conspiracy bullshit. Like usual,” Carrie sniped.

“Actually I had no intention of watching anything educational today, no matter how much you lot could all do with it.” Brandishing the remote like a futuristic weapon, Tark pointed it at the television and jabbed a button.

The title card flashed up on the big screen: The Iron Giant.

Carrie made a little noise akin to outrage and stabbed a finger at him. “Didn’t I just hear someone say something about not wanting to watch ‘kid’s TV’?! You flaming hypocrite-!”

“Ex-cuse me, it’s a stylish animated film, about a robot who falls to earth and loses his memory, and needs people to help him figure out who he is. It’s not just for kids. I thought it was topical. And, it’s a classic. Do you know how many awards it won? Not some… leftie luvvie pandering garbage. Just ’cause you’re all philistines with no appreciation of actual art-”

“Since when the hell did you ever have-”

“I’ve seen it. It’s a decent flick,” Sanjay interrupted, before the foes could get too entrenched. “What d’you think, Polly? Wanna watch it?”

Polly cast a gaze around the room, shutters tightening uneasily. Everyone was looking at him. “If everyone else is happy, then… I guess? I don’t know what it is. Please don’t blame me if it sucks…”

------

After the movie credits rolled, Laine noticed that Polly was looking a little subdued, in a way he hadn’t after Doctor Who. She stayed with him while her flatmates went off to make a start on dinner. “All a’right?” she wondered, patting the flat of her palm against his cowling.

“I feel a little conflicted,” he admitted, quietly. “It was a good movie, but. I guess I see too much of me in the robot, so I probably didn’t enjoy it as much as you all did. He was lost and scared, like me. He was trying to be good. Then they did… that. It’s left me with a bunch of things to work through.”

“I’m sorry. I guess Tark wasn’t thinking about that-”

“Oh he knew what he was doing.” A little poison slipped into Polly’s voice. “Why do you think he wanted to watch that movie specifically? It wasn’t because he has any grasp of art.” He made a little sad tutting noise. “He’s making a point.”

“…I’m not seeing it…?”

“He thinks it’s what I am. Perhaps not an alien, but a weapon.”

Laine remembered Tark’s words from when he’d first seen Polly; who else has the funds to drop a few million developing something like that? Artificial intelligence, strong enough to punch through concrete? That’s military.

“He’s saying, I know what you are, even if you don’t. Or don’t want to.” Polly’s words softened. “I agree with the giant. It’d suck to be just a gun with a face.”

Laine’s face fell and she let her hand press a little more firmly against him. “Hey. Don’t. Please. That’s not you. You’re too nice for that to be everything about you. And don’t forget; at the end, the giant proves he’s good, by being the hero that saves everyone.”

She was rewarded with a full-body eyeroll. She suspected he was probably thinking the exact same thing that she was, which had crossed her mind the instant she’d finished speaking – yeah, he saves everyone by sacrificing himself, after he himself is the one that puts them in direct danger in the first place.

“The giant was pretty nice, too, until they shot at him,” Polly challenged. “You just think I am. That might just be the bang on the head, shaking some circuits loose. You already know I’m a bossy little tart. I might be some… shrieking bootcamp harridan, normally.”

“Aw, let’s not go over that again. You don’t get to be super-complex and friendly and just plain nice and have it all caused by shaking a circuit loose. Come on, man. You’re a sweetheart. I don’t believe being mean is in your settings – and I absolutely refuse to believe you’re a gun with a face, for crying out loud.”

“Maybe Minnie’s right and that’s what I’m running away from,” he observed, morosely.

They sat quietly together for a little while, until Laine caught a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye.

“Listen.” She lowered her voice. “I’m pretty sure Tark wants to come talk to you, and I know he won’t if I’m in earshot. So, I’m gonna go help out in the kitchen. I know you don’t need a babysitter but yell if you need a bit of moral support. All right?”

Polly bumped her fingers. “Sure. Thanks.”

Tark dithered for a minute or two, until he was sure Laine wasn’t coming back, before finally approaching. He crouched next to Polly’s spot on the couch – made a nice change, usually he just leaned down over him, towering over the small robot in a way that was intentionally more than a little threatening. “So I have a little bit of news. That guy I mentioned last night? I’ve been talking some more with him and I’m fairly sure he knows where you came from,” he said, quietly.

Polly gave him a very guarded look. “I’m listening?”

“He had a picture. Not great, but you could definitely see it was you. You were sitting on this like… I guess a column of some sort? In somewhere that looked a bit like a lab, or a control centre, or something. There were some people in uniform there, too, although I didn’t recognise them and he wouldn’t tell me what organisation it was. Sorry.” Tark sighed and shrugged. “He was pretty familiar with you, though. He knew what your serial number is – 101. He knows what you look like, how you behave. The light-up mouth, sliding eyelids. That… sporty red headband with the sergeant’s stripes on either end.”

Polly straightened, subtly. That was new.

“He says you control a group of other little robots like you. That is, not physically, but you’re their commander. And, uh. Yeah.” The man glanced away. “You can be dangerous. If you choose to be.”

Polly digested the words for a few seconds. “…did he say how?”

“No. Sorry.” Tark shook his head. “Just that he knew people who’d had, ah. Dealings. With other little robot balls like you.”

Polly studied the couch cushions, quietly.

“But he’s confirmed that people are looking for you,” Tark was quick to reassure. “They’re worried about you. And I mean about you, not… worried what you might do. You might not be the only one of your type of robot but I got the feeling you’re pretty one-of-a-kind too, you know? ”

“You think so?”

“Oh he seemed pretty sure.”

“So where do I come from?” Polly leaned subtly forwards, focusing intently.

Tark knelt with his mouth open for several seconds before clearing his throat. “My contact says he’ll only tell you directly. That’s why I wanted you to talk to him.”

“…oh. Right. That’s… huh. Not that big a surprise.” Another disappointment; Polly quietly voiced one of those glum little descending notes. “I’m sorry. Thank you for trying to help, but… I can’t help feeling like there’s something you’re not telling me, here.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Tark bobbed his head, apologetically. “Full disclosure: there’s a reward for finding you. I know, I know.” He put his hands up. “I know you probably won’t believe me but that’s not why I’m telling you about my contact. You’re friends with the guys I live with. We might not get on, and I’m sorry for that. I don’t want to be the source of everyone arguing, all the time. I screwed up, and yeah. I don’t blame you for being wary. I’d like to make it up to you by reuniting you with your friends.” He leaned his elbows onto the couch cushions. “Listen. You represent something I’ve wanted and anticipated my entire life. Intelligent machines. Self-aware machines! Ever since I can remember, I’ve been excited about the prospect of sentient robotics – and here you are, right in my goddamn lounge! And it kills me to think I’ve finally met someone like you, and… I’ve ruined my chances to be friends with you without even trying. So I’d really like to make amends for being such an ass. If you’d let me.”

There was no ambiguity about the way Polly had definitely softened. The tension in his expression had faded, and his shutters were no longer pulled tight in a suspicious squint. “Well. Thank you.” He leaned forwards, just a tiny bit, and nudged the man’s fingers. “For trying.”

Tark offered a faint smile and returned the gesture; a little gentle stroke of Polly’s cheek. “I promise I’ll do better.” His wrist buzzed and he looked down at his watch. “Ugh. Look, I have to go out for a bit. But I’ll update you as soon as I get back. Is that all right?”

“That’s fine. Thank you.”

Polly watched Tark disappear into the hallway – then caught the eyes of the friends pretending they weren’t watching from the kitchen. Laine in particular gave him a very loaded glance.

Polly glared subtly back. “Oh, don’t.”

Laine put her hands up and turned away, but her tightly pursed lips betrayed the smile trying hard to escape.

The second the hall door clonked shut, Carrie leaned out from behind the kitchen wall, wooden spoon in hand. “You don’t actually believe him, do you? None of that is stuff we didn’t already know.”

“Well, there was a little bit of new information….” Polly shifted uneasily on the spot. “Can I afford not to believe him? This might be the first new lead I have.”

“And isn’t it convenient that Tark was the one who found it.”

“To be fair he is the only one with any expertise. Or contacts. Or-… anyway. That bit about sergeant’s stripes-”

“Tark can bullshit for England. The whole ‘military’ concept has come up a gazillion times when we’ve been talking. It’s not a difficult guess.”

“But what if he’s right?” Polly directed his gaze upwards, as though trying to look at his own forehead. “Doesn’t it seem to fit?”

“If you belonged to the army, they’d have come and got you by now.”

“He didn’t say it was the army. He said he didn’t recognise them?” He fidgeted. “…he said I might be dangerous! That can’t be good. I don’t want to put you at risk.”

“Oh, psssh. Dangerous? If you accidentally trip someone up, maybe. And you’re pretty heavy, so maybe if you roll over their toes. What else can you do?”

“Yeah.” Polly hummed quietly and deflated back into the couch. “What can I do.”

Mina perched on the edge of the couch next to him with an unopened pouch of microwave rice. “Anyone would think you can’t wait to leave us. Did we upset you?”

“No? No, I like you all! I like being here. I’d like to think we’re friends.” Polly tried to smile but it was flickery and looked a little forced. “But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hiding in your apartment. I want to know who I am! I’ve gotta have a purpose of some kind. And-…” He dropped his gaze. “I do really want to go home.”

“What if this person knows that?” Carrie contested. “What if they’re lying, because they know how desperate you are to know?”

“What if,” Mina added, quietly, “they want to steal you.”

Polly glanced at her.

“I like to think people are – on the whole – pretty good,” she went on. “But there’s some absolute shitheads out there as well, their whole lives driven by a quick buck. What if Tark sniffing around has made them think you’re worth trying to get their hands on?”

“I don’t think anyone would be able to just steal me. I’m heavy and I think I can be pretty stubborn.”

“Not physically maybe, but they could trick you into going with them. Like, by pretending they know where you belong, maybe? Tark likes to think he’s the cunning king of crypto but he’s gullible as shit also. All he’s focused on is the money he thinks he’s going to get as a reward, not whether they’re lying to both of you.”

Polly gave the laptop a long resentful look, and sighed. “…guess I’ll get back to work, then.”

He sat and listened to the students chattering, finishing the preparation of their afternoon meal – frozen ready meals, by the sound and speed of it – but was soon back in the depths of the dark web, checking out the limited new information Tark had given him. There had to be something, right? It wouldn’t all be garbage. Right?

He’d just made contact with someone who claimed to be an astronaut (although he felt there was a distinct possibility they were actually a bot) when Laine cleared her throat and said ahem loudly enough to catch his attention.

“Hey, Polly. Come on. Join us?”

He looked over to find they’d pulled up a seat near the table, and stacked some books and a cushion up on it, so he wouldn’t be down below the level of the tabletop. Carrie patted it, meaningfully.

“I don’t need to eat?” Polly reminded, hastily messaging the ‘astronaut’ with what he wanted to know.

“No, you don’t have to, but we’d like you to come and sit with us,” Laine said. “We’re not going to exclude you just because you’re not hungry. You’re staying with us for a little while, we like you, we’d like to include you in house matters. That’s all. Is that all right?”

He looked at her for a heartbeat or two before unclicking from the laptop connection and joining them. The book pile teetered for an instant but eventually he got himself stable. “This is nice!”

“So we’d been thinking.” Laine leaned forwards on her elbows. “You’re not having much luck finding out where you’re meant to be, and we thought, if you still couldn’t figure it out and no-one came looking for you, and maybe if you wanted to stay here a bit longer term? That’d be fine with all of us.”

Polly sat very quietly for several seconds. “Do you mean you’d… like… me to stay?”

A little chorus of responses, everyone talking over each other.

“Sure! We’d love you to stay.”

“But only if you want to!”

“As housemates go you’re pretty decent. You don’t use up all the milk, or leave mouldy food in the fridge-”

“-or your skaggy underwear all over the bathroom-”

“-or the heating on when we all go home for Christmas break.”

“Hey, I did that once!”

“We’d have you over Tark in a heartbeat, man.”

“Oh, way to make the guy feel good about himself – compare him to Tarkers.”

Polly smiled – grateful but tired. “I also use your resources and can’t contribute to your bills. I looked it up – electricity isn’t cheap.”

Jaxon shrugged. “We could figure something out.”

“I have no income. Even if I wasn’t a secret, I can’t exactly help Laine fill shelves.”

“Oh come on, there’s a literal million things you could do that don’t require physical labour. We could figure some way around the whole… no-national-insurance-number thing?” He wafted the hand holding the fork, scattering rice across the tabletop. “But that’s beside the point. We’re not asking you to contribute to the bills right now. Just let us look after you, until you find your people. That’s what friends do.”

Polly considered it, quietly. A home. Friends. They’d absorbed him into their loose little adopted tribe like he was himself just a very small person, and he couldn’t quite help feeling enormously flattered at their confidence.

“Listen, thank you. You’ve all been very kind and I appreciate your thoughtfulness more than you can ever possibly know. But I am still broken,” he said, softly. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll remain as functional as I am right now. It could be indefinitely? It could be that something else breaks tomorrow, or next week, or... Plus, as we’ve established, none of you would be able to fix me. I don’t want to put you in the position that you feel you somehow have to.” He hesitated. “But I will get your roof fixed. I won’t be having you financially penalised because of me.”

“Oh yeah?” Mina challenged, playfully. “How?”

“I have literally zero idea.” A ripple of amusement met his words. “But I will. Even if I have to drag a bunch of builders here myself. Somehow.”

“You just want some cute workmen to look at.”

“Haha! Okay, fine, guilty as charged, I guess. Side benefit…”

------

It was already starting to get dark by the time Tark’s contact finally showed his face. He’d insisted on them meeting near a quiet old shopping complex in the suburbs; Tark wasn’t going to complain, it was right by an underground station and one of his favourite fast food joints still operated there. But he’d finished his supper half an hour ago and was still pacing out his annoyance on the car park. Much longer and some paranoid idiot would no doubt complain to security-

At last Tark spotted his contact approaching, from the direction of the rough ground around the back of the complex. The old guy was clean but insanely scruffy, and far from fashionable, wearing shabby, over-laundered thick clothing that looked like it was from at least the previous decade, if not century. Not only that, but he looked like he was about two hundred years old himself. Small suspicious eyes peered out from a face furrowed by wrinkles deep enough to get lost in, and two big brown teeth stuck up from behind his bottom lip even when he had his mouth closed. Ragged ears ruined by too many years of sun exposure poked out from the chaos of grey hair.

It made a weird juxtaposition. Tark knew he was filthy rich, having flown in from somewhere abroad in his private plane, but evidently couldn’t be bothered with either fashion or much more than perfunctory personal care; perhaps he was just too old to care, any more?

If he hadn’t seen the man’s technology already, and had passed him in the street, Tark would have happily dismissed him as the sort of technologically-incompetent grandparent who couldn’t even work a smartphone, let alone some… tech genius. He didn’t sound particularly intelligent, but knew all about Polly – and had promised Tark a cool half a million dollars as a finder’s fee.

So long as he could actually hand Polly over. And right now that dream was receding fast towards the horizon, as the old guy was getting impatient and threatening to cut his promised reward. Tark was hoping a mix of bargaining and threat would buy him an extra day or so.

Following along at the old man’s heels was a little… robot, maybe? Small and self-mobile, it looked a little like a cubed version of Polly – albeit with more faces, none of which looked particularly friendly.

“Hi?” Tark tried.

The cube just hissed at him, so he put his hands up and backed off.

“So. Taaarquin.” The man had a weird gurgling voice, as though he was an alien from some ocean planet somewhere. “We are tired of wasting time. What do you have for us? Have you convinced the sphere to meet with me?”

“I’m… working on it.” Tark opened his phone and hastily flicked through to the photographs. “My flatmates are being obstacles. I think I’m charming it around, though.”

“Your… flat… mates? What are they flat?”

“No, no. I mean the morons I live with.” Tark held out his phone. “They’re more interested in treating it like a pet,” he said, relinquishing the device into the other man’s hand. On the screen, a piece of his secret filming was playing – Polly in the middle of the couch-pile, being educated on the intricacies of what a TARDIS was.

The old man didn’t seem remotely excited or even surprised by the weird intelligence the little robot was demonstrating. Instead he tapped a finger against the human sitting on its right, leaning into the cushions heaped up against it. “Who is the female?”

“That’s Laine. Wouldn’t know the front end of a cybertruck from its ass.” Tark curled his lip. “I don’t know if she adopted the ball or it adopted her, but they look very happy together, if you know what I mean.”

The old man stared through him, for a second. “No, I don’t know what you mean.”

Tark sighed his annoyance at having wasted the crude joke on him. “She’s the reason I’m struggling to get close to it. She suspects my motives and until today wouldn’t leave it alone for me to talk to.” He folded his arms. “I never imagined a robot would be so goddamn needy. What does it actually do?”

“It contains the firing controls for the orbital platform it’s supposed to be based on.” The old man held the phone back out to him.

“Firing controls?” Tark straightened, almost dropping his mobile. “Like… you mean like weapons firing?”

“Yes. We accidentally shot it down. Without it, the platform is crippled. We want it to remain that way-… no longer.”

“So it is military?”

“What did you think it was for?” the man sneered. “A teacher, for nurturing small human offspring? Human resources?”

“The way it speaks? I wouldn’t have been surprised it you said it was a florist.” Tark folded his arms. “Why did you program it to talk like that?”

“We didn’t. That was our enemies, the accursed-” Whatever the man had been about to say, something made him think better of it and he swallowed it. “How long before you can bring it to us?”

“I’m working on it. Unless you come to my flat, I might have to hire a van. That’ll cost me money. And you still haven’t paid me for what I have done, old guy,” Tark reminded, stepping closer. He was naturally tall, and stood easily a head taller than the man and could loom pretty effectively when he chose. “I’m not helping you out of the goodness of my heart.”

The cube hissed from somewhere very very close to his feet. The sound drew icy fingers up the back of his neck and Tark thought better of it.

“You will be paid,” the old man gurgled, smirking. “As soon as we have it.” Pause. “Back. As soon as we have it back.” He pointed an aggressive finger, armed with an ugly thick yellow nail more like a dog’s claw. “I am not offering you money to make excuses, hyoo-… Tarquin. You have already had plenty of time. I am quite sure there will be others who are just as happy to assist us.”

“But I’ve proved to you that I already have it!” Tark threw his hands up. “What more do you want from me?!”

“We want the zeroid!”

The snap made Tark jump and step back in alarm.

“Not your pathetic excuses! There is no point in you having it if it is in your house, not ours!”

For several seconds they just stared at each other.

“But… you do have it. And we are not exclusively cruel. So perhaps we can grant you a little more time. I need to talk to my-… colleagues,” the man said, and turned away.

Tark leaned a fraction closer, but the man’s soft gurgling voice was impossible to make out. And it felt like the cube was watching him. The little square version of Polly creeped him out in a way he couldn’t quite pin down.

The man eventually turned back, with a cold smile. “My… manager… has agreed you can have one more chance, Tarquin. Bring it to me, here, in no more than two days, and you will be paid.”

#terrahawks #space sgt 101 #zeroids #fiction #lieutenant hiro

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