by Cindy Zhang
"We were supposed to wait for the captain," the shorter one says, looking Sabine in the eyes but clearly explaining this to their partner. The one who has Eirlys pinned doesn't react.
"Let me down," Eirlys demands, gasping for breath. The arm on her neck eases up slightly.
"Captain? This is Tel," the other one says into her wrist-mounted communications device. "We found Eirlys and Ms. Lin outside their room. 38 has… apprehended one of them." Tel says this with a dry, amused tone.
"I'll be right there. Control the situation, please," comes the answer.
Sabine searches for some tactical advantage that two hurt girls can use against three trained mercenaries. 38 is muscled, and actually shorter than Naomi, now that Sabine sees her standing still. There's just something about her navy uniform and tidy black boots that makes her seem bigger than she is. Her black hair is tied back in a low ponytail. She looks like she might be from the Philippines. The set of her shoulders speaks of complete control over her hold on Eirlys.
Tel is smaller, and dressed in tight black clothing. She looks Japanese, and her black hair goes down to her back. There's a charcoal smudge on her right cheekbone. She's watching everyone with a look on her face like she knows exactly what's going to happen next.
It only takes about five minutes for Naomi to show up, but it feels like an eternity with the tense energy in the corridor. She doesn't look impressed. "38, put her down."
"She might run," 38 argues, tone flat. "We don't want to hurt you," she informs Eirlys.
"Funny way of showing it," Eirlys snaps.
"She won't run," Sabine insists, and watches as all eyes turn to her. "We won't run. We want answers."
38 finally leans back all the way, dropping her arm to her side and letting Eirlys drop to the ground.
"Answers," Tel repeats, grinning in a strained sort of way. "That all depends on what kind of questions you want to ask."
Sabine flicks her gaze to Eirlys, but she's not paying attention. That's fine. Sabine has plenty of her own questions saved up. "I just want to know why—well, why any of this is happening. We're just two workers who happened to survive our ship going down. Who hired you? And why us?"
"Just happened to." Tel sighs. "If only it was that simple."
"Just answer the damn question," 38 growls. "We can't stand here all day."
Tel shoots her a warning look before turning back to Sabine. "Okay, here's the gist: you were attacked by a set. You're clever kids, I'm sure you pieced that together yourselves. The human governments wanted to avoid precisely that, which is why they hired us to keep you from talking to anyone who shouldn't know about what happened." Tel holds up a hand and starts counting off points on her fingers. "One, even rumours of an unprompted attack by a very powerful set on a ship full of humans would cause widespread panic, much less the presence of survivors who can verify those rumours. The situation with interspecies negotiations is delicate enough right now. Two, no one knows what exactly happened, and if you're a politician that's the last thing you want to admit. Three, to buy time, they wanted to make sure you didn't go running off to somewhere too difficult to retrieve you from."
"Okay. So the government is awful and paid you guys to lock us up. One last question." Sabine looks Naomi in the eye. "If that's your job, what are you doing right now?"
Naomi looks away. She's not smiling anymore, and she doesn't answer Sabine. The tense feeling in Sabine's gut solidifies to dread. Why would they answer all her questions, give them this much information, unless they were sure she and Eirlys weren't going to be leaving with it? Sabine breathes in sharply, and her spike of fear makes Eirlys tense up beside her.
"There was a change of plans," Naomi admits, still not looking at them. She reaches into her jacket pocket and produces a gun. She levels it at Eirlys before anyone else can react. "38, please secure Ms. Lin."
The mental picture of Eirlys tearing forward—getting shot—knocking the gun out of Naomi's hand and snapping her teeth closed in Naomi's face is projected so clearly that Sabine has to blink the blood out of her vision. Naomi's hand wavers. Eirlys hasn't moved.
"If you were sure about shooting us, you would have done it by now." Eirlys tilts her chin up in challenge. The deliberate taunts in the form of mental images repeat, so much clearer when she's projecting than when she'd been leaking.
"They told you to kill us?" Sabine whispers, her thoughts still lingering a few beats behind. The gun hasn't moved. 38 hasn't moved.
"The original assignment was secure and interrogate," Tel says, as a reminder to Naomi or as an explanation to Sabine.
"That's not even a set gun," Eirlys points out. "You didn't come out here prepared to kill us, so stop pretending like you're going to." Despite her brave words, Sabine sees Eirlys's fingers twitch, and her stance is tense and ready to dodge.
"I don't have access to set guns," Naomi admits. Slowly, she lowers her hand, and Sabine lets out a breath she didn't notice she was holding. "This isn't for you. I'm not keeping any more secrets for them."
Sabine doesn't care why. The gun is down and she can breathe again. "They told you to kill us."
"They sent me the message when I was in the room with you." Naomi passes the gun to Tel, as if she doesn't want to hold it anymore. "Congratulations, kids. Some very important people want you dead."
"They're going to want us dead, too," Tel adds cheerfully. "When they find out you didn't do what they told you to, they're not going to hand you a better gun and a second chance."
"I know." Naomi glances back at Sabine and Eirlys. "We should get going. I assume you two don't have a way off of this ship?"
Sabine can see where this is going. She shakes her head.
"You could come with us," Naomi suggests, hesitant. "As an apology for almost letting my fear win over my good sense."
"Good sense doesn't lead here, either," 38 mutters.
Sabine sidesteps and grabs Eirlys's fingers. Is this a good idea? What if it's a trick?
No, she's telling the truth. Eirlys looks over at her, almost surprised, like she forgot Sabine can't tell just like that whether someone's lying or not. She's a lot better at it than most humans, but the upper limit would be hiding that gun and her intentions for those few minutes.
Sabine thinks about it. What other choice do we have?
Eirlys seems to reach the same conclusion, because she huffs a quick breath through her nose after a few seconds. "Fine. Okay. What now?"
Naomi smiles, and Tel grins. "Now? Things get a lot more interesting!"
Sabine tries not to be worried.
*~*~*
The docking area is a large rectangle of wide open space for incoming ships to park after sliding in through the gate that takes up an entire wall. A U-shaped passage lines the outside, blocked off from the centre space by a wall with a strip of window through the middle and five solid doors. Most of the controls for the docking procedure are in that passage, including the one that opens and closes the gate. The passage also indirectly functions as a lock for the five doors, because for safety reasons those are always unlocked when there's atmosphere in the centre space and locked when the gate is open.
No alarms sound, yet. The assignment is too recently abandoned and too far under the public radar for the ship's guards to be pulled into it. No one gives their little group a second glance the whole way to the docking area. Sabine still holds on to Eirlys's hand, though, because she's letting her, and it provides them with a bit more cover from any snooping sets.
They run into trouble at the check-in.
"Papers?" The woman sitting behind a desk by the door barely glances at them. Sabine's fingers tighten around Eirlys's hand. They don't have any papers; any identification they had would have gone down with their ship.
Naomi smiles, easy and apologetic. "I think I left them on the ship, last time I came through to pick something up. Can we have a few minutes to look for them?"
"Only a couple." The security guard goes back to he
r book.
There's only one ship docked right now, Naomi's own. The four of them hang back and let Naomi approach first. The arrow-shaped ship is sleek but slightly battered and mismatched from repairs. It's painted bronze with orange highlights and purple lights, and sized to fit a small crew. Naomi walks up and lays a hand on one wing.
"Could you get Ast?" she mutters, and Sabine wonders how anyone inside can hear her. Who is she talking to?
They all wait a tense two minutes, Eirlys glancing at the doors they came in through every three seconds, until a ramp folds down near the nose of the ship and a figure appears at the top.
A robot rolls halfway down the ramp. They're four and a half feet tall and made of dark grey metal, with armoured shoulders and a metal skirt-shaped dome. Gold accents, painted on, outline some of the plates on their shoulders and torso. They have two rabbit-ear-shaped antennae and glowing white eyes in unimpressed slits. They seem to be travelling on two wheels embedded into their feet, and when they stop, three toes and a heel extend to lift the wheels off the ground.
The small, flat head swivels to take in everyone gathered by the ship. "Ast." Their voice reverberates, low and steady Rue leaves unaccompanied by flowers, the crumble of dry earth and the sinking press of damp soil, and the autumn layer of leaf cover six feet above shielding a coffin from the rain.
"It's nice to meet you," Sabine says quietly, after a few seconds in which Eirlys says nothing. She's staring at Ast, but no emotion flutters across through their joined hands, and Sabine has no chance of guessing based on the expression on Eirlys's face. "I'm Sabine."
A few more beats pass before finally Eirlys nods. "Eirlys," she says, and Sabine gets the open sky and plunge and rocks again, in the same level of detail as before.
"You can call me Ship," another voice adds brightly. Sabine jumps a little. Squinting against a ruthless sun, rays sprawled against an empty blue sky, the colour orange, and torn scraps of laughter drifting in the breeze. It takes a second for Sabine to process what that means, and when she does, all she can do is gape.
"Come on, you can't tell me you've never seen non-humanoid sets before," Tel teases.
"I've never seen—I've heard of ships, or, sets who are in ships—sorry, I, but," Sabine stammers. "Sorry. It's nice to meet you."
Laughter rings out in that same light tone, sounding almost like it's echoing all around, but if Sabine concentrates she can follow its source back to inside the ship, through the opening at the top of the ramp behind Ast. This is so weird.
"We have to go." 38 has been so quiet that Sabine would have forgotten her presence, if not for the memory of how easily she pinned Eirlys to the wall. "We have a small window between when we enter the ship and when the guard raises the alarm."
Sabine frowns. "I thought we needed a ground crew to open the gate? Who's operating the switch?"
"I rigged it to activate three minutes from now," 38 answers.
That's an awfully calm way to say we have three minutes to get in the ship or die of falling out an airlock, Sabine thinks. "Oh," is all she says out loud. She glances back at the security guard at her desk, who hasn't looked up yet.
"Ast?" Naomi asks. "This is important to me. I swear on the contract." She sounds more serious than when she was promising Sabine and Eirlys that she would help them run from the government. Sabine hadn't realized until now that Ast is standing directly in the way of anyone wanting to board the ship.
Ast's eye lights blink, off and on, slowly. They turn and wheel away without a word. Naomi turns back to their little group and smiles.
"Welcome to the crew," she tells them.
CHAPTER FOUR
"The combination of sets' love for identifiers and wariness of imitation has led to interesting patterns in which human customs they adopt and which they avoid. The most prominent example is gender: sets have no concept of this, since it's completely unnecessary to their reproductive process, but they're fascinated by it and most sets have made a decision about what gender they are and which pronouns they prefer.
However, they stay far away from adopting race and other categories. Part of this might be their reluctance to look too much like humans when designing bodies that humans will interact with. It may be that their empathy allows them to identify precisely which conversations humans have been having about appropriation and experimentation: which identities are fluid and which are familial or bound to a person's birth and upbringing. This is likely why sets don't identify as "Canadian" but they do identify as "cat person/dog person"."
- Excerpts from The Unofficial Guide to Sets, Piper Patel, Chapter IX. Gender and Human Categories.
"The Network has a conflated definition of familial and romantic relationships. In fact, even platonic relationships fall under the same concept for them, and although some can seem analogous to human relationships, the social implications and prioritizing tend to be very different.
The following are the terms I've picked up so far:
Match: This is, if not the most important one, at least the relationship that has shaped set society the most. It involves two very similar sets who, it could be said, share an integrity. This is extremely dangerous for them and anyone who might happen to be in their path; if they are too close, emotionally and/or physically, the bonds holding them together become insufficient to contest the bonds drawing them to each other and they often end up colliding and shredding themselves and any unlucky sets in their path.
Sets are known to hunt each other down once they know their Match exists and destroy them just to be safe. This is because it's easy to develop very strong bonds with your Match if you're not careful, which makes proximity even more dangerous. In the latter case, they are forced to find permanent bodies and are locked into the finite lifespan of those bodies, lest they are free-floating at the same time and have an accident.
As you may have gathered, this is why a unique identity and personal integrity are so important to sets. The fewer individuals you are similar to, the less likely you'll Match with someone.
(Human comparison: soulmates, twins)"
- Excerpts from The Unofficial Guide to Sets, Piper Patel, Chapter III. Relationships and Romance.
This is a terrible development.
Eirlys is sure that Ast can sense her trepidation, but she can't bring herself to grab Sabine's hand again to tamp down the emotional leaking, no matter how much it might bother their host. Once was enough. Twice was too much. There's no excuse now except her own weakness and the looming sensation that she's going to get eaten. Sets don't even work that way, but Eirlys once spent too much time in a rodent-analogous creature and she's never been inside another set before. She tells herself that Ship isn't actually bigger than her, Ship just happens to be in something bigger than her.
It doesn't help.
There's not too much time to freak out. Eirlys follows Naomi as she leads them all down a narrow hallway along the side of the ship. At the end of the hall, there's a door-sized gap in the wall that leads to a small dining space, which leads to a kitchen.
"Sorry," Naomi says as she sits down, "there's not really another room on Ship that has space for six people. At least we have some extra chairs around."
Ast had gone ahead of them and taken a turn off to somewhere else, but they roll back in and position themselves at one end of the rectangular table. Everyone else grabs a seat, except Ship, who signifies a presence by brightening the lights in the room and dimming them in the hallway.
"So here we are," Naomi begins. "Next steps."
There's a pause as everyone waits for someone else to speak first. Ship laughs, landing closer to mind-echo than real sound, and jokes, "I'll bet five sticky-notes on two more awkward silences before the end of this conversation."
"I'll take you up on that, for three more." One corner of Tel's mouth lifts. "So are these two part of the crew now?" she continues, nodding at Sabine and Eirlys. Eirlys gets the sense that she's not asking for the sake of her own curiosity. So
meone else at this table wants the answer, but they're not willing to ask. She wonders what kind of history these people have with each other.
"That's up to them. I think we can leave that issue until this is all over, in fact. It's not an urgent thing." Naomi smiles at them, but Sabine doesn't notice and Eirlys isn't particularly inclined to smile back.
"What is this?" Ast says, in their flat voice. "What are we doing?"
"We're stopping the thing that attacked us before it hurts anyone else," Sabine puts in, almost puzzled. She must have thought it was obvious, but then she presses her lips together and sits back further in her chair. There's something bothering her, either about the attention she'd accidentally attracted or some social faux-pas that Eirlys didn't notice.
"Why do we have to?" Ship asks, and the lights shift colour from yellow to blue. "Why us?"
"No one else is going to." 38 stares past Eirlys at Ast. "Someone has to."
There's a tense moment of stiff silence, everyone looking at someone, but somehow none of their gazes meet. It's hard to tell where Ast is looking, and Tel's eyes flick from place to place and never settle in one spot. 38 is looking at Tel. Naomi is looking at Ast. Eirlys feels Sabine's eyes on her, so she's carefully watching Naomi instead. Ship is still, terrifyingly, all around them.
"We should decide where Sabine and Eirlys are going to stay," Naomi says. "We don't have very many rooms, and mine isn't large enough to accommodate more than one person."
"I'm already sharing the engine room with Ast! We might be able to squeeze in one more, though." Ship doesn't seem discomfited at all, being the only person trying to lighten the mood. It could be just that Ship has no interest in lightening the mood for anyone else.
Naomi's looking between 38 and Tel. "I'm sorry to have to ask this of you," she starts.
"Fine." The table creaks under the fingers of 38's left hand, and Eirlys makes a note to investigate. From their brief scuffle and the little dents in the metal surface of the table now, it seems like 38 is equipping more than the standard human apparatus. "I'll move in with her."
