You Can Have It All, If ...

Nekkau said, “… can I have it now?”

“No, first I’ll make the arrangements.” The director swiped a flake of blue glass glowing and rimey plastic off the folding table and began drag-and-dropping little squares into circles. “You’ll have your own team. Would you like newcomers or veterans?”

A tiny camping stove stood between them with a transparent convection box perched atop. Within that box sat two mugs—the director’s blue enamel, and the brown guest mug—each wafting an earthy vanilla at Nekkau. She stared.

“I don’t want a team. Look, can I just have the tea already?”

“You can have it all, but there are … rituals to observe.”

✧✧✧

“We need to talk.”

Noooo. Nekkau looked at the two of them, the serious light in Taru’s eye and the kitten-curiousity of Jack’s smile, and just knew they were going to have their conversation right here in front of her. Shoo. Go away. Let me recharge.

“Team Diamond Firetail, you have an informal asset recovery mission,” the intercom on the wall said smoothly. “Report to drop pod 013 for immediate departure.”

“Informal means it’s optional, right?” Jack asked.

“No.” Taru folded her arms and looked to the ceiling for patience. “It means success is optional. Refusing to go tanks your combat rating.”

So they went, threading through crowded halls and squishing in elevators and sardining into the drop pod, while interrupted words gathered rust in their heads. No privacy till the pod was burning retrograde for the descent, and even then they weren’t really alone, not with Nekkau sandwiched between them. Jack and Taru tried to glance over or around Nekkau, but they never managed to catch the other’s eye.

Wait, I think I remember this pattern. Nekkau brightened even as her main capacitor went dark. 20 minutes of normal operation left. When two humans need to discuss something important, they don’t want to talk, and any interruption will cause them to avoid the subject even more. Good, at least they’re being quiet. Entering power-saving mode.

“So …” Jack saw the uncomfortable ice, and punched through it like a sledgehammer. “We need to talk?”

“Yeah. There’s this person I know from way back ….”

But the director told me it didn’t work like this. Nekkau’s head thumped back against the headrest. She kept trying to power down non-essential systems, only for each subroutine to wake and tune into Taru’s laying out of the situation.

“Sure, I could do that.” Jack turned away to hide the fact that he was grinning like an idiot. A smoother, xeric cultivar of idiot, but still.

“You sure? I mean, we won’t actually be … dating.” Taru’s cheeks glowed like hot steel. “It’s all a show. For sham. All a … you know.”

“But we do need to make a good show of it.”

Please, make these two shut up.

Jack and Taru yammered on through atmospheric entry, around the drogue chute’s deployment, and over the pod punching through an ancient skyscraper. By the time they landed, the two of them had sorted out none of the finer details of their plan. They pulled themselves free of the crash webbing, still talking.

“Regarding … the holding of hands ….”

“Oh, yeah, we’ll definitely have to do that.”

“But—”

“Ms. Nieuport would hold your hand if she dated you, right?”

On three occasions that Taru could recall, Selene Nieuport had taken a flying wildcat leap at her hand. “Well, yes.”

Jack clicked his pistol and dagger into their thigh holsters and popped the small arms locker shut with one finger. “She has her idea of romance, and what someone thinks they have to offer, they expect their rival to provide in spades.”

Taru turned away and released the first lock on the pod’s door. Finally, Nekkau got her reprieve in a prerecorded message of the director’s sunset voice.

“You and several other teams have been tasked with finding a black box, which we believe may have survived the drop pod’s destruction. No penalty if another team locates it first, but whichever team finds it gets a nice bonus and a bump up the rankings. Search the surrounding grid zones, and bring the box back. Insurance won’t shell out for a replacement pod without it. Good luck.”

When the recording ended, the second lock released automatically. Nekkau walked on stiff legs into the late afternoon while her so-called teammates bickered about who should be in charge of the mission. Her capacitor giving up its last few sparks, she let tired feet lead her towards sleep, which happened to be down a maze of mossy lanes, and when she encountered a rotting wall, Nekkau leaned on the millennial fiber-laminate siding till it gave up. Within the dark, an ancient console connected to a long rotted computer could still glow to welcome Nekkau home. This, one of her many boltholes, contained a few necessities and niceties—one geothermal microturbine hooked up to a single purring accumulator, which had a lone uni-directional power port dangling above the fractal pavillon bench she had pilfered from the wreck of a previous interloper ship. Thin bleaching lines in the wood suggested this seat once had many cushions, of which only a deflated, defeated remnant gray remained. A bladeless fan stirred air that smelled like a limited time offer of dust, even on days when she entered without destroying a wall.

Nekkau sat on the bench and let her tail snake its way up to the hanging port. The two connectors bumped fruitlessly a time or five before she remembered to remove the G13 adapter from the tail’s end. Much good it had done her, she raised her arm to hurl it at the stairs leading down into gloom, but her reserve capacitor was giving its last sparks. She let it clunk onto the bench—waste the energy on a gesture later, perhaps.

She didn’t dream, not in the way that Jack or Taru understood. Silent drifting images adhered to the past and carbon copied shreds of bygone moment. Nekkau found herself again in the reeds with the clay shifting under her fingers as she watched an interloper—no, a human—scan a tree with one hand while holding an enamel mug that was the brilliant prototype that the color blue had spent its career trying to replicate. As before, Nekkau stalked through the undergrowth, closer, curious, caught. Backwards a century or two, to an evening on a rooftop under a sky dyed murex purple by a far off volcano, and no one to share it with. Then she was forward, under a chilling wind in that hasty tent sitting across from the director over a pot of patient tea. The director said she could have it, but kept stalling. First this team business, then handed Nekkau the tablet and asked her to sign one document, then another, then ten more. When the tent flap drew back, the director turned, and Nekkau didn’t hesitate. She had reached into the convection box and withdrew the brown mug and drank deeply and felt the smooth tannins of rooibos caress her tongue and cheeks and for the first time she could remember the weather readouts, lidar, stability and orientation gyros, they all shut up.

It wasn’t water-plus-flavor like the humans had first explained it. There was also an astringent quality—even with her mouth full of the last red swig, the roof of Nekkau’s mouth felt dry and submitted a polite request for more. Tilt it back as far as she could, the mug had nothing left to give.

“You little sneak,” the director had said with an accusing smile.

Nekkau reached for the other mug, but the director snapped it up.

“No, that’s mine. If you want more, you’ll have to get it yourself.”

“… how?”

“As I said: you can have tea and so much more, but ….” The director had wagged a finger. “There are rituals.”

Nekkau woke. Capacitors averaged 35% full. Why rise early? Interlopers came and went, centuries elapsed between, and she always slept till fully charged. She disconnected from the accumulator and scooped up her G13 adapter without really thinking about it. All her diagnostic sensors read green, and yet … her mouth wished to be dry and not-dry at the same time again.

None of this makes sense.

But she knew someone who might explain, and the director didn’t come down to the surface these days.

The bolthole found itself empty once more, but it didn’t mind. It stood, confident that she could figure things out.