After Grace left, I took in my new domain.
The driver’s workshop was dirtier in person than it had looked on the security camera. Everything was in place, but covered in a layer of particulate matter that wasn’t quite dust. It was whitish and sort of fluffy if I zoomed in on it; like very fine plastic shavings. I’d have to run it through a scanner, but I was pretty sure the mini-facturing equipment was missing a trap somewhere and my predecessor had never gone to the trouble to track it down. I couldn’t imagine what that was doing to the ventilation system and it made my skin crawl. The last guy must have been raised on a planet.
Only grounders took clean air for granted. It took hundreds of years of dedicated effort to wreck the atmosphere of a terraformed planet. Granted, that had happened for real on the homeworld so it wasn’t an unrealistic fear, but colonists seemed to think that could never happen to them. Spacers, on the other hand, did not ever play around with air quality. Cleaning up would have to be my top priority.
I looked at the support pod and thought about Doc’s request. It was easily the cleanest thing in the shop, which I appreciated. Working in pods could be bad enough without having to marinate in someone else’s old sweat and dead skin cells. I still took a minute to track down some cleaning alcohol to wipe down the pod’s interior and control board.
As a Third, I hadn’t really rated the use of Mimir’s pods. I wasn’t supposed to have duties that would impede my ability to steer my own body while working. ‘Supposed to’ was the sticky phrase in that statement. Like a lot of junior techs, I’d often found myself with more than my fair share of tasks so I was used to wedging myself into a chair and making do. It was just as well that my auxiliaries were more independent than most.
Much as my pride wanted it to be otherwise, a chair just wasn’t going to cut it now. If nothing else, I wanted to be able to pump up the heat while I worked without aggravating the environmental engineer. I’d said earlier that the Captain and the XO were the only people on a ship that mattered, but the guy making your air and keeping your power flowing was a close third.
The interior of the pod was lined in soft cushions that rearranged themselves as I settled down so that I was perfectly supported in every direction.
Oh, that was nice. The only thing missing was a blanket. I felt a little exposed.
My eyes fluttered shut of their own volition as the lid shut over me. The ambient temperature in the pod rose until it was not unlike what I imagined the womb must have felt like. For the first time, it was easy to tune out the distractions of my own body as the tension in my limbs eased and I felt like I was floating.
I retreated inside and roused my auxiliaries. They came online one by one like waking kittens as they oriented themselves in our new surroundings and began to clamor for my attention. It had been a long time since I’d turned them all off for more than a minute or two. They were disoriented and cranky about it, but they settled into our new environment without too much issue. They even seemed to like being on a smaller ship.
First things first, I had to know what I was working with. Ships, even at the courier level, often had integral bots. The factory bots didn’t always get used. People liked their custom models and the fabricator plans were cheap enough that you could get away with it. Folks who bought their ships second hand sometimes never even knew they already had bots.
I hadn’t seen any in use on Cassandra, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there asleep in the walls. So I sent out a ship wide ping for any bot in standby mode and got back a deafening roar of pingback.
All right. Yes. There were more bots on Cassandra than just the little guys on standby in my workshop—and not just Grace’s disposable fixers and cryo support units either.
My auxiliaries took the brunt of it, but there was enough data inbound that some overflow ended up in my queue only to rescued after a few milliseconds as my auxiliaries chewed through the data, categorized it, and entered it into a neat little list for me. The results were interesting to say the least.
Grace had hinted that Cassandra had operated under a different name once and the bot presence confirmed it. There were cleaners, sure. I’d expected that and was glad to see them. Some of them thought they were still on a ship called Meteora. I assigned an auxiliary to them and gave it orders to update their programming then get the workshop and my quarters livable. Its presence winked out of my internal conference as it hunkered down to corral its new responsibilities.
Cassandra had the usual complement of emergency hull breech response units, but also two squadrons of unidentified bots, which was not the usual thing. They didn’t match the profiles of any known saboteur models and did not register under any weapons scans. They were also locked down, but had some contingency programming in place that I didn’t recognize. I put an auxiliary on that too, just to audit the hull bots’ directives. It too blinked out of the conference leaving me with about 60% of my remaining force.
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In the time that it had taken me to review the results of that ping, my remaining auxiliaries had keyed the active interior bots to recognize me as their primary driver. Most of them had still been waiting on orders from J. Armsa or KD Fleyt, two of my predecessors. Not anymore. There was a new sheriff in town.
I dove into it. I ran them through drills as my auxiliaries reviewed the standing orders for each crew in turn. Most of the bots had their factory settings still in place, which meant I at least had less to work against.
We were running drills to rest the responsiveness and problem solving capabilities of my new minions when the real world intruded on me in the form of someone knocking on the lid of my support pod.
I handed the drills off to my remaining auxiliary and reluctantly returned my awareness to my body. I went through the slow process of flexing my limbs to wake up my body before I opened my eyes to find Elaine standing off to one side of the pod, looking a little wild about the eyes. I could see industrious little bots working behind her. The cleaning crew was still at it, although they seemed to have moved on to organizing the shelves rather than just cleaning them.
The lid lifted open as I sat up and stretched. “Hey, Elaine. Is there a problem?”
“Nooo…” Elaine looked around the workshop. “I was just checking in. Someone reported unsupervised bots in the corridors and mess area. Do you have everything under control here?”
I queried the team cleaning my quarters and got back an annoyed report from their supervising auxiliary. “Oh, I sent a cleaning crew to my bunk for a scrub down. They found a bunch of trays under the bed and the ship’s SOP is to dispose of them in the mess hall. I’ll amend their orders so they go straight to the recycler. It might be a bit though. The crew in there found some persistent mold and they’re investigating the air vents to make sure the spores haven’t gotten far. It’s nothing dangerous, just gross and all air hazards take priority.”
“Trays?” Elaine looked confused for a second before her expression cleared. “Ohh, that must have been what Amanda was upset about last night. Ew. Well, I’m glad you’ve got things in hand. We’re not used to seeing bots out unless it’s an emergency.”
“Really?” I popped my back and realized that I was hungry again. A check of the clock revealed that I’d been working for three hours. Time for a break. I swung my legs over the edge of the pod’s cradle and dropped down to the ground. My legs tingled with pins and needles, but it faded as soon as I got moving. Huh. I’d been braced for much worse. I could get used to this. The pod was marked as original equipment too. Cassandra’s originating shipyard hadn’t been playing around. “There’s a whole dedicated cleaning bot complement. You weren’t using them?”
“Not that I can recall. Everyone cleans their own areas and we do a big sweep of the corridors and shared facilities every other week or so.” Elaine looked around again with a little less apprehension. “Gosh, remind me to ask you for help next time I have a big job in the ‘ponics room.”
“Sure, that’s what they’re there for.”
We wouldn’t be cleaning the communal zones by hand anymore if I got a say in it, that was for sure. How medieval. I paused as my stomach chose that moment to vocalize its discontent. All right, maybe the pod had been too comfortable. I’d need to start stocking some snacks in the shop if I kept working long spells like that.
“I’m going to grab something to eat. Do you want anything?”
Elaine grinned. “I was breaking for lunch, actually. Let’s go eat together and you can reassure everybody that we’re not facing a hostile takeover.”
“Not hostile, anyway,” I chuckled and Elaine smiled. It was a nice feeling. We both laughed and it was just so easy. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a buddy. Was this what it had felt like in the beginning?
The auxiliaries kept up a constant and comforting murmur of reports and queries in the back of my head as we left the shop. It had been too quiet while they’d been powered down. I felt more like myself now that I was working again.
There were two masculine persons I hadn’t met yet waiting in the mess when I followed Elaine downstairs. Their tags were Brando Oisin, Environmental Tech, He/him and Coro, Systems Technician, he/him, gender-fluid.
Brando was larger than Coro; big, muscular, and sort of compact. I was almost certain he was a former heavy-worlder; one who’d gone through the genetic therapy necessary for him to work in space without hurting his health. Brando’s skin tone was lighter than Elaine’s, but much darker than Coro who looked like his ancestors had never even heard of solar radiation. He had the same grounder confirmation as Elaine, though, so his ancestors must have lived under a dome for several generations.
“Hey, it’s the new girl!” Brando was the one to greet me. He had a big voice; big, big, big. I could hear him across the room and I don’t think he’d put any effort into projecting.
Coro sort of retreated into himself; not from Brando’s voice but at the sight of me, although he did offer me a friendly, albeit hesitant smile and wave. “Hi, new girl.”
“’Sin’ is fine," I told them, feeling a little awkward. Once, a long time ago, I’d had the ability to walk into a room of strangers and make friends. It was harder now that I was older and had failed to maintain the skill. It had been a long time since I’d left the crèche and I’d learned fast that keeping to myself in the outside world was the best way to stay safe. “Excuse me, I’m going to…” I started to lean towards the galley.
“Sit," Elaine patted my shoulder. She wasn’t going to let me weasel out of meeting more people. “I’ll grab you something while I get mine.”
Shoot. There went my chance for a tactical retreat. I turned back to the two men and hoped like hell that they were better at making conversation out of nothing than I was.