Alright, so I’d been certain that Sin would fit into my crew’s existing dynamics, but even I hadn’t been prepared for how right I was.
The first sign that I’d made the best choice was when Sin just took over cleaning common areas. I hadn’t even known that we had cleaning bots and when I brought it up to her, she just blinked slowly at me, and sent me a manifest through the feed from the shipyard’s final report before they sent Cassandra out with the relevant line item highlighted and, yup, there it was; 10x AstraCo Janitorial Servos and Semi-independent Facilities Droids Model 333.21.
To be clear, I bought Cassandra second hand once she’d already been decommissioned. I came on board with the assumption that anything that still had value had been stripped off her, and I was right in most other aspects. They took any electronics that hadn’t been nailed down and all the soft fittings. The Navy hadn’t even left behind the padded cushions on the built-in benches, but then Sin showed me that the facilities bots had never been activated while the Navy had her, either.
In retrospect, that made sense. The Navy does like to have warm bodies doing their menial tasks while those bodies learn the non-menial work. They do most of their recruitment on planets, so the new sailors don’t always know how to live aboard a ship and letting them spend a few months adjusting while they mop floors just makes sense. Not every grounder can handle space life and it’s better to let them find that out when the stakes are low. So, there was a real possibility that Cassandra’s former Captain hadn’t even remembered he had cleaning bots when he released her to the ship broker.
Well, I wasn’t about to insist on sweeping the corridors by hand anymore. I was just annoyed that I hadn’t found out about that before Amanda and I spent half a duty shift cleaning up all the crap that Jace left behind and I found out that his room was the source of the persistent mold problem we’d been having in the atmosphere regulator. Brando had been hunting that for months. I wouldn’t want to be Jace if Brando ever spots him on a station. I’ll be paying another security fine, for sure, and this time it wouldn’t be an investment.
The cryogen bots, meanwhile, had been running at ideal capacity. Sin set her two of her auxiliaries to alternate supervision of the chambers and prevented at least one cryo-failure related death while everyone was asleep one night. I only found out about it the next morning when the auxiliary paged Doc and I directly to confirm that the affected turkey’s biomonitor was still in the green. It had commandeered a cleaning bot to make the repairs it couldn’t do through software fixes, so when Sin asked if she could have a budget for some dedicated bodies for her auxiliaries I had to sit on the urge to just hand over my entire credit chit.
It was everything I’d been hoping for from my Driver, but hadn’t dared to expect.
Talking to auxiliaries was a little weird, although Sin assured me they were all well-socialized. They were intelligent enough for complex tasks, but if you talked to one for too long then you could see where it fell short of true sentience. A lot of their decision-making power was piggybacking off of Sin’s own brain. They used her a bit like a predictive modeling tool to determine what was the correct decision in any given situation, which was why she spent most of her duty shift in a light trance-like state; she was literally sharing her hardware with them and training them to make correct, conditional choices. So, I could also see how some of them suddenly make the leap from an auxiliary to a true synthetic intelligence.
Taking the communal maintenance off everyone’s plate did a lot for crew morale too, especially when the others gradually relaxed around the bots and realized they could make requests to the auxiliaries through them. Sometimes the answer was ‘no’ if Sin had them all busy, but just as often a few bots would peel off the rest of the group or crawl out of the wall to help Brando find a wire and carry a heavy filter for Elaine.
“I can’t believe we had these guys in the walls the entire time,” Taj commented one night when we were having a couple’s meal in our quarters. He had made channa masala with coconut rice for us as a date night meal. We were running low on fresh ingredients and it was one of his favorite dishes to make when we were getting down to nothing but meal kits, root veg, and dry goods.
“I’m just stunned Jace never noticed them,” I replied as I took in the beautiful aroma of the food. The meal kits were perfectly edible and I ate them for most meals, just like everyone else, but nothing quite hit like freshly cooked food. “If he hated cleaning, then looking for bots to do it for him just makes sense.”
“It’s because he’s a lazy sack of shit,” Taj countered, but he also hooked his ankle around mine under the table. “I’m not complaining, though. I’m glad he’s off the ship. If he didn’t ditch then you wouldn’t have gotten a chance to pick up an old crechemate. Your mood’s been a lot better lately.”
“Was it bad before?” I wanted to know.
“Nah,” Taj waved that off. “Your mood is usually pretty good, but it’s been better lately. Not so good that I have ever had cause to wonder if you snuck an old flame on board, plus she clearly didn’t recognize you, but…”
My mood actually did dip then as I was back aboard the creche station for a second, cornered in the boys room, as Wasp and his shithead friends forced me into one of the stalls and my head into—I cut the memory off with a jerk of my chin.
“She saved my ass, once,” I said quietly. “The creche was mostly alright, but it was understaffed and sometimes could be dangerous if the older boys decided they didn’t like you. She wasn’t supposed to be in that part of the ship, but she showed up and beat the absolute shit out of a bunch of bullies who had me cornered and were going to hurt me. Then she got me to a medic and testified before the headmaster about what had been going on. Luckily, there was a bot recording of what happened and the bullies got an ‘early graduation.’”
Taj frowned. “What’s ‘early graduation’? It sounds like a euphemism.”
“It is. It was where they dropped you off on a planet with an earlier-than-usual age of independence and left you there,” I explained. “It’s the most extreme punishment they had and they didn’t do it often, only when someone really could have died.”
“So, you…” Taj trailed off, uncomfortably. He rubbed the back of his neck and dodged my eye contact as he tried not to ask the question hanging in the air between us.
“That’s right,” I admitted. “They didn’t plan on me being able to walk away afterwards. Thanks to Sin, I lived another day. I was finally able to repay that debt when we pulled her out of Fjord Orbital.” I quirked a half-smile and Taj reached over to brush his thumb over my cheek, looking soft.
“Yeah, you got something to be proud of,” he said huskily and leaned over the table to kiss me. “I’m happy for you, babe.”
I smiled and leaned into his hand before changing the subject. I didn’t want Taj asking about exactly what happened. It was enough for him to know that it had ended when Sin curbstomped Wasp’s ugly face. That story was gonna die with me, if I got my way.
“Yeah, now I just need to figure out why Evander is so anxious for her,” I said. “He’s been doing everything short of asking me for daily status updates. Yesterday, he wanted to know if she’d put on any weight and I had to tell him that I couldn’t ask, but that her face looked fuller to me. He wasn’t impressed by my metrics. I don’t love him having this level of interest in one of my employees.”
Taj barked a laugh. “Maybe she saved him from bullies too?” he offered. “Although, I’d be surprised if Evander had ever even set foot on a creche station. He’s always seemed like a former rich kid or a core worlder to me.”
“Maybe,” I allowed.
Personally, I thought Evander worked too hard to have ever been on a Universal Income Benefit. He was always hunting credits, even if he wasn’t afraid of spending them once he got some. I would never have found Cassandra if it weren’t for him ringing my comm in the dead of night and hustling me onto a passenger liner before I even finished waking up. He was behind a lot of Cassandra's ongoing upgrades, too, and he was the reason her atmospheric regulator would be overengineered even for a ship of twice her size and crew complement.
“I think Elaine is into her, by the way,” Taj added, waggling his eyebrows.
I put my spoon down and leaned in. “No,” I breathed. “You’re kidding. Elaine?”
For context, neither of us had even seen Elaine have a relationship or even a hook up during a portstay and she was one of my original crew members. Even Brando would step out for a little club fun when we had a long port stay, although he hadn’t indulged while we were on Fjord Orbital. No one had, that was a good way to end up in the clinic with a VD while Doc made sure that it’d be months before you would be able to live down the mortification.
Elaine had admirers in every port of call, but she never messaged any of them back and left their invitations to the holos or dancing on read until Cassandra was ready to get underway. Taj had been forced to politely let them know that she had chosen not to reply more than once before Cassandra uncoupled from the lock. No one asked him to be Elaine’s let-down service, but he had a recurring horror of being met by security at the lock one day if one of those lonely hearts decided that Elaine wasn’t just ignoring them and was being confined aboard. Sometimes she attracted real weirdos who weren’t put off by her indifference.
“She brought Sin new clothes out of her own fabber budget on that first night and she made me pay full retail plus a 30% markup the last time I asked to use some of her leftover feedstock,” Taj explained. “Brando says she has been showing up to meals and even gets Sin’s tray for her every time. I thought she’d stop once Sin was settled, but it’s been almost a month and Elaine is still picking her up.”
In my experience, Elaine only remembered to go to the Galley for one out of every three or four mealtimes. Otherwise, she’d eat ration bars or powder drinks in her workshop when she realized that she was hungry. I could understand why she would bring a few new jumpsuits to a new crewmate with nothing to her name, but the shared meals thing was new. Maybe Taj was onto something.
“They’re planning a shopping trip once we get to Elladan Orbital and Elaine was looking up holoshow times, salons, and fabber designs for dresses when she was taking her watch with me on the deck yesterday,” Taj continued, clearly into the gossip.
“Well,” I said after thinking it over. “It’s not like the rest of us aren’t paired off. It must be Elaine’s time.”
I’d have been more worried if this had been a month ago, when Sin had only just come aboard; scared, thin, and wary. Now, it felt like she’d always had ownership of the botshop and that Jace was a transient nightmare I’d long since woken up from. My only worry now was whether or not Sin knew she was being wooed.
“Elaine’s got her work cut out for her,” I said. “Unless she’s changed a lot, the Sin I knew was blind to attraction. Nearly all my classmates who liked girls had a crush on her and it was the same for the upperclassmen, but she never dated anyone or even seemed to notice that they felt anything for her. I know she had a few relationships, so she’s interested in people, but I think her exes were all really upfront and obvious about what they wanted from her.”
Taj winced. “Oof,” he hissed. “That’s gonna be rough, if so.” He thought about it for a second. “Is it wrong to think that Elaine could stand to be the broken heart, for once?”
I pursed my lips and had to admit, “No, I think it’s high time she had a challenge.”