Serengeti (28 page)

“You’re not
looking,
” he scolded in a sing-song voice. He pointed again, more insistently this time. “There. Near the middle of
Cryo’s
backside wall. And over there,” a twitch of his leg, moving it left then right, pointing at the ragged edges where her body wrapped around the lifeboat. “What’s missing?”

“I don’t—oh!” Now it was
Serengeti’s
turn to be embarrassed. Eight docking clamps held
Cryo
in place—three here on the backside, three more on the front, one on either side—all of them identical, ringing the lifeboat around.
Serengeti
looked outside and saw one of the rear-mounted clamps dangling loosely below the lifeboat’s bulging
sphere, but the other two were missing.
Missing,
not hidden. Not broken away. Gone entirely, except for the end piece that connected to
Cryo—
that was still there. The rest of it—the docking strut, the swing arm, the hydraulic motors that ran the whole complicated mechanism—seemed to disappear. Vanished into thin air.

“Explosion tore them loose,” Tig said.

“Tore them loose, tore them loose!” Tilli giggled and flailed, prancing in a circle.

High explosives,
Henricksen’s voice said.
Best way to solve a tricky problem.

“Droll, Henricksen. Very droll.”

Tilli kept dancing around but Tig stood there, looking from Tilli to
Cryo
outside like he was waiting for something.

Do the math,
Serengeti.

Henricksen’s voice again. She’d be lost without him.
Serengeti
tallied the numbers and found the total came to seven.

Told ya.

“Shut up, Henricksen.”

Tilli stopped dancing and flashed her face lights at Tig, wondering who
Serengeti
was talking to.

Tig shrugged and raised a leg, twirling its end beside his head.

She thinks you’re crazy,
Henricksen offered helpfully.

“Who knows. Maybe I am,”
Serengeti
murmured.

She didn’t
feel
crazy, but she supposed it was possible. After all, her last maintenance visit had been a long time ago—years upon years upon years—and who knew what glitches her damaged systems had developed in that time. AI were machine minds but built on human brain specifications, so it was possible, if improbable, that she’d lost a few of her marbles along the way.

The design specs say I shouldn’t dream, but I picked that up along the way. Maybe that’s the first step—the first indication of an unstable mind.

She waited, expecting Henricksen’s voice to pipe up and offer some snarky comment, but Henricksen was strangely silent. She wondered if that was significant. If that voice’s sudden desertion was her subconscious indicating its agreement.

Didn’t matter. Crazy or not,
Cryo
is almost free. And after that…

“What happens after that doesn’t matter either,” she said softly, studying
Cryo
through Tig’s eyes. “We’ve got one docking clamp left now. Just one.” And two faulty fuel cells throwing up alarms, reminding
Serengeti
it was time she made herself scarce. “I must go now, little ones.”

“No!” Tilli’s cobalt eyes blazed brightly, shining with sudden fear. “No, please. Last time—”

“Shh. I won’t be far. Not this time. This time I go to sleep of my own choosing. This time I won’t let the darkness drag me down.”

And she wouldn’t be alone. Not this time.

Serengeti
leaned Tig close, touching his cheek to Tilli’s, and then
Serengeti
flitted away, racing along her broken network to the bridge. And there she slipped to sleep—peacefully this time, dreaming her dreams of days gone by. No fire this time, no destruction. Just Henricksen swapping pithy bits of wisdom, keeping
Serengeti
company in the dark.

“Whelp. I’m out.” Sikuuku tossed his cards down and polished off the last of his drink. “You’ve got all my money, boss. Think I’ll head back to the ranch and get some shut-eye before you take that as well.” The gunner smiled and shoved his chair back, tapped two fingers to his temple in a half-assed salute before weaving his way toward the door.

Henricksen stared after him, sipping at his glass as Sikuuku stepped out into the hallway and pulled the door to Henricksen’s quarters shut.

“You’ve known him for a while.”
Serengeti
normally didn’t intrude on Henricksen’s off-duty time—even a captain needed time away from an unsleeping AI—but she was curious about this new captain of hers.

Henricksen turned his head toward the camera in the corner. “Served on three different ships together. Sikuuku…” Henricksen dropped his eyes, staring into the depths of his glass. “He might’ve stayed Black Ops if I hadn’t left.”

“He’s a good soldier. A good
friend
.”

Henricksen nodded and tossed off his drink. “The best.”

More to that story—so many things
Serengeti
wanted to know about Henricksen and Sikuuku—this grizzled, battle-scarred pair that ran her bridge.
Patience,
she told herself.
He came to you looking for assignment but you still need to earn his trust. You can’t just go barging in like a bull in a china shop demanding his entire life’s history.

Serengeti
thought for a minute, considering the dozens of questions she wanted answered and settled on the simplest of them all. One that, oddly, bothered her the most.

“The scar on your face. Why?” she asked quietly. “The cell replicators can easily get rid of it. You’d never even know it was ever there.”

“Wonders of modern medicine,” Henricksen murmured, lips twisting in a lopsided smile. “Cover up anything you want. Make all the bad memories go away.”

Bitterness in his voice.
Serengeti
heard it—you bet she did. “So why then? Why did you keep it?”

Henricksen grunted and touched at the jagged line of scar tissue running down the side of his face. “Let’s just say, there are some things you shouldn’t forget.”

He lifted his eyes to the camera, grey eyes staring into the lens. And then Henricksen’s face faded into the darkness, shadows and smudged grey outlines rising up to take Henricksen’s place.

Bridge, Serengeti’s
muzzy mind registered.

She almost went back, wanting to finish that conversation and ask Henricksen the questions she’d never had time to ask.

Can’t go back, Serengeti.
Henricksen’s voice, filled with regret.
You can only move forward and hope for the best.

I’m trying, Henricksen. I’ve
been
trying all these years.

Then
keep
trying, Serengeti. Eventually you’ll get us there.
Henricksen retreated to the recesses of her mind.

Serengeti
drew a bit of power, focusing the camera, searching the bridge below for cobalt eyes and chromed faces. “Tig. Tilli. Where are you?”

“Here. I’m here,
Serengeti,
” Tig called, voice drifting from a shadowed corner.

She turned the camera toward him, smiling to herself as Tig’s chromed face appeared, cobalt eyes blazing brightly, Tilli fidgeting nervously at his side.

“Welcome back,” Tilli said, shy as always. She shuffled her legs, eyes flicking to one side.

Curious,
Serengeti
turned the camera a bit more, and…

“What’s this?” she breathed as a third robot face appeared.

Three
chromed faces,
three
sets of brightly glowing eyes when last time there’d been but two.

Great. Now I’m seeing things.

She
powered the camera off and brought it back on-line again, thinking it a malfunction—a problem with the feed, a glitch with the camera’s optical resolution mechanism, something like that.

No such luck. The camera turned back on and that third face was still there, gazing up at her with the others.

“What’s going on?”
Serengeti
whispered, AI mind processing, trying to make sense of the camera’s images.

Three. It shouldn’t be three,
she kept thinking.
Should it?

For the briefest of moments,
Serengeti
honestly wasn’t sure. That scared her. Scared her badly. So much that she counted the robots again, working her way from left to right, tallying up eyes and faces, before starting over again. Three times in total she counted, and each time the tally was exactly the same: three sets of eyes—six cobalt orbs in total—and three shining, chromed faces.

“Maybe I’m imagining it,” she murmured. “Just like Henricksen.”

Maybe she was still dreaming and just
thought
she was awake. Maybe she really
had
gone off the deep end and just didn’t know it.

That’s crap,
Serengeti, Henricksen’s voice snorted.
You’re a lotta things, but you ain’t a loony. So drop this maudlin BS and figure out what’s going on.

Serengeti
laughed—she couldn’t help it. Henricksen might not be eloquent, but he always knew just the right thing to say.

I miss him.
More than she could say. More than
Serengeti
could have ever imagined.
Someday, Henricksen. Someday,
she promised, and then shook herself, focusing in on this unexpected visitor on her bridge.

Serengeti
drew a bit of power to her, bringing the light above the robots to life. “Well now. Who do we have here?”

The newcomer squeaked in surprise, startled as much by the sudden brilliance as being the focus of attention.
Serengeti
zoomed in, trying to get a better look at it, but the robot up and ran before she got more than a glimpse, scurrying behind Tig to hide in his shadow.

“It’s alright,”
Serengeti
called after it. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

A rounded head peeked from behind Tig’s carapace, cobalt eyes wide and wary-looking, filled with equal parts curiosity and fear.

“Hi,”
Serengeti
said in her softest, friendliest voice. “Come on out where I can see you.”

No dice. The robot took one look at the camera, squeaked and ducked out of sight again.

“Hey now. That’s not very polite,” Tig admonished. He flashed an apologetic look at the camera and then twisted around, addressing the robot sheltering under his nether regions. “She’ll think you don’t like her.”

A muffled
peep
came back.

Tig waved Tilli over, calling in reinforcements.

“
Serengeti’s
a nice…warship.” Tilli offered a sickly smile to the camera. “There’s no need to hide.”

“
Peep?
” A bit of curiosity in the hiding robot’s voice now, but it clung to the shadows under Tig’s body just the same, doggedly refusing to show itself.

It took a bit of cajoling and encouragement from Tig and Tilli, and a lot of patience—more patience, frankly, than
Serengeti
had herself—but they eventually got the little creature to come out. The robot crept from its hiding place—head down, legs wrapped close about its body—and grabbed at Tilli’s leg end, holding tightly to that anchor as it inched its way to Tig’s side.

Serengeti
zoomed in close, taking a long, hard look. “Well now. Isn’t this interesting?”

Not one of her robots—that was for sure. She’d never even
seen
a robot like this one before. In some ways it resembled Tig and Tilli—a miniaturized version anyway—but there were some obvious…deviations from the TIG blueprint. For one thing, it had fewer legs than Tig and Tilli—just six, when your average TIG came equipped with eight. The body was different too—more rounded, not the elongated oval of a true TIG, and its head rounder still. Rivets and weld lines betraying the fact that the model wasn’t quite stock, the body stitched together from salvaged pieces and parts. But more important than all that was something the robot was missing. It squiggled and shifted, holding tightly to Tig’s leg on one side, and Tilli’s on the other, and as it did,
Serengeti
got a good look at the strange robot’s flanks.

Bare metal there—well, metal composite, like every other robot and just about every other
thing
inside
Serengeti’s
body—no numbers or letters on the tiny robot’s sides. No sign of them either—no smudges and smears, no shadowy remains like Tig and Tilli wore—and when she reached inside the robot, touching gently at its AI brain,
Serengeti
found none of the identification tags the other robots carried. None of the data to mark it as one of hers.

“Curiouser and curiouser,”
Serengeti
murmured, intrigued by this tiny little mystery Tig and Tilli had brought her
. Tiny and somewhat adorable.
She smiled to herself and looked from Tig to Tilli. “You two have got a new friend I see.”

Tig tittered nervously, throwing worried glances Tilli’s way.

Tilli fidgeted and fiddled, hovering close to the little robot beside her, looking like she might grab it up and run herself at any minute.

Odd.

The TIGs were flighty by nature—a fault in their programming
Serengeti
found endearing most days—but Tig and Tilli seemed
especially
flighty today. That was worrisome. And a tad annoying. Time to get some answers.

“This is the second time you’ve surprised me by showing up with a new companion, Tig. So tell me: where have you been hiding
this
little robot?”

Tig shrugged and
burbled
something nonsensical as his face lights flashed in blotchy, discordant patterns.

Interesting, that. Bit of guilt in that blush, a touch of worry in the way Tig looked at Tilli, and Tilli refused to look back. But she reached for Tig and shuffled closer to his side, hovering protectively over the miniature robot sandwiched between them.

“Who is she, Tig?”
Serengeti
asked.
She
. Instinctively, though there was nothing about the robot to indicate she or he. Not like Tilli’s bright pink bow. ‘She’ felt right, somehow, though
Serengeti
was at a loss to explain why. “What’s her name?”

Tig looked up at the camera, blue swirls of discomfort crawling across his cheeks. He glanced at Tilli and to the little robot standing between them. “Go on,” he said, nodding encouragingly.

The little robot blinked and
peeped
, ducked her head and stared fixedly at the floor.

“It’s alright.”
Serengeti
waited, watching the little robot, until she finally looked up. “Hi there. What’s your name, little one?” Soft voice again, gentle as can be. “You
do
have
a name, don’t you?”

Small shrug in response—the barest lifting of the little robots legs.

“Oh, come now. Surely you do! Everyone has a
name
.”

A
peep
and whistle—that’s all
Serengeti
got in response. Just those two nervous sounds and nothing more.

Tig cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Sorry, she’s a bit shy.” He shrugged an apology and ducked down, whispering softly to the little robot beside him. “Go ahead. She won’t hurt you,” he said, nudging the robot in the side.

“
Peep?
”

“Promise,” Tig smiled.

A shy glance at the camera, face lights flashing wildly, stuttering out a rapid-fire communication punctuated by
beeps
and
borps
and an ululating
trill
. A last low whistle and the little robot curled up tight, hunkering close to the floor.

This was starting to get irksome.

“She can’t speak?”
Serengeti
turned her eye to Tig.

“Language processors still need a bit of work, but she
can
speak. Sort of. When she wants to.” Another nudge at the little robot, Tig’s face swirling with soothing patterns as she uncurled and raised her head, looking to Tig first and then the camera. “There now. See? Nothing to—”

The robot quivered and ducked back down, legs splayed wide, belly flat against the floor.

Bit of drama in that. Bit of
playing
at being scared rather than true fear.