The Seeker SK4209 is a galatic-class
military destroyer. The kind that has no business at the
civilian-sanctioned McLan Docking Station. Not that they could be
bothered to care, or even to explain how their spacecraft had become
damaged enough to barely limp into our Station. The Seeker takes up
half the docking bays, leaving McLan scramble for space to fix it and
to also service the regular civlian craft who would be paying us for
fixing their vehicles, loading and unloading supplies and doing
everything else a Docking Station does. Not that the Seeker wouldn’t
reimburse the station, but it would take time and during that time
we’d be running at a crippling power loss if we weren’t careful.
So everyone was scrambling like mad, and that included the mechanics.
Transfers aren’t allowed to work on
military craft. A human whose mind is inside a body that isn’t
human is not to be trusted. Its not law, but it is custom and
tradition so old it might as well be law.
When you’re a cylinder (with arms
inside it) on treads with a viewscreen ‘face’ on the top, you’re
not human. It made the crew of the Seeker twitchy, so I’ve had my
projection up over my body for weeks now: a human-me, the Dar I would
have been if I’d lived into my twenties. There had been an accident
when I was eight; I was one of the first transfers into a non-human
body, and now one of the oldest. Most don’t last that long, all
told. I have.
I’m left trying to do the regular
work on civilian craft with a third of our normal crew and anyone
that any craft or other Station can spare. Not that we have the time
to train anyone we get properly, but a body is a body and hands are
hands. We’ve given out so many access codes to various apps and
linkages – along with major systems of McLan – that we’ll need
to redo every passcode once things return to normal. This is barely
an issue on anyone’s radar right now. Thinking on that and a dozen
other things is half why I missed the first two pings from Orien
through the infoweb insisting I come to his quarters.
He’s
a medic, my best friend on the station and has his own charging
station in his quarters since all his limbs are synthetic after an
incident with a bomb. He’s also one of the only people I let get
through no matter what I’m doing. He pings
me three more times while I finish making sure two apps are
properly linked with a system; I
manage it without too much trouble on the second try, distantly
worried it took me the second try, and he pings me again.
I make farewells to the other mechanics on duty and take the
restricted access tunnels to his quarters. I have access, thanks to
Orien, but I rarely use them. But
I’m in a hurry today, like
every other day of late.
He is standing just
inside the door when I enter and points to the left, where the door
is open to a small side-room with a half-dozen charging stations. It
is excessive, but they’re also a backup system in case of damage to
one of the main systems. I hurry over, flexing limbs out of my
chassis and hook myself into the station, shutting off my projection
with a deep sigh of relief: the constant drain on my systems was
starting to take a toll and it feels good to charge for more than ten
minutes at a stretch. So good I slip into the rhythm of the energy
flowing into my body and drift for almost three entire hours before
pulling myself out.
I disengage,
shutting the station off and am halfway to the door when Orien’s
voice catches me.
“Dar.” He’s
sitting at his kitchen unit, eating a meal of fried greens and meat.
“You didn’t even register that I was here.”
“I need to –.”
“Over
here. Now.” He says it in his medic-tone, not his friend one at
all. I go over, stop in front of the table. He puts down his knife
and fork and walks over, then bends down and presses one hand into my
side. “You have a dent
here.”
“Coupling
mechanism last week, I –.”
“You didn’t fix
it. Or come by and ask me to.” He runs fingers gently over my
chassis, undoes linkages and removes a few apps, part of my body, and
takes them to an examination table, repairing the dent, checking a
couple of subsystems and snaps everything back into place a good five
minute later. I’m unable to avoid a sigh of relief from my vocal
interface: being naked still terrifies, no matter how much I trust
Orien.
“That took five
minutes,” he says softly, and I go still at the edge to his voice.
He walks back to the kitchen table, gestures me to follow. I do,
stopping in front of it again. “How many days has it been since you
had a rest day, Dar?”
“I don’t need
to rest like humans do.”
“Like people do?”
I say nothing. He
eats, waits. “Like people do. A month, but –.”
“Almost two
months. You were running on empty for almost a week, Dar. How many
mechanics on sleep breaks were you covering for?”
“I don’t –.”
“Three. And your
own work,” he says, and doesn’t raise his voice at all; somehow
that hurts me more. “You’ve been a mechanic on the McLan for
almost five cycles. Dar. You don’t need to prove yourself to
anyone.”
“I’m not. I can
do more than other people, last longer than they can: it’s
something I can do, so I do it.”
“And you need to
rest, the same as other people do.”
“Orien, I need to
–.”
“Get back to
work, because you have too much work to do.”
“Yes!”
“And you don’t
think that is why you need to rest?”
I am moving toward
the exit, almost without thinking. I pause. He’s looking at me with
no expression at all. I move back to the table, stop again. “You’ll
seal the doors if I try and go, won’t you?”
“I don’t want
to. I have that authority, but I do hope you’ll see sense first.”
He begins eating again. “I have a half-hour for lunch. Relax. Talk.
Anything you want, all off-record.”
“I can’t work
on the Seeker because they won’t let me.”
Orien just nods,
and listens. I talk for at least half an hour. If I’m honest, I’m
ranting for most of the time: about the Seeker, about the mechanics
we can barely train, the overcrowding, the workload and Orien for
taking too long to eat his lunch by the end of it.
He finishes and
smiles after. “Better?”
“We’re all
under pressure. It’s –.”
“We all need to
let off steam, Dar.” He reaches out a hand and pokes my viewscreen
with a finger. “Even you, especially with having to keep a
projection up for fear of ticking off people working on the Seeker.”
“I just –.”
“You’re not the
only one who is ticked.” He pulls his finger away, snagging a cloth
and makes me wait while he wipes down my entire chassis, even my
treads. I’d protest but I haven’t felt clean in weeks and I can
tell it is relaxing him as well.
“Better?” we
both say at the same time, and share a laugh.
“I want your
schedule,” I say. “Because I bet I’m not the only one in need
of more breaks.”
Orien blushes at
that and reluctantly sends me his entire schedule over the infoweb.
I check it,
double-check it and say I’ll be back in fourteen hours to make sure
he’s having at least one more meal today. I am halfway to the door
before I add that he should see about charging up his own systems.
He throws the rag
at me viewscreen and the door closes on his laugh sooner than I’d
like it to.
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