Crimson Stars - 6 (Patreon)

Chapter 6: Debate

Yamaloka System

Pulling up to Balla’s Corners I found the parking area as empty as I expected. I stopped the rover a dozen or so metres from the edge of the homestead compound, then turned to crack open the door to the living pod.

Tamchim was sitting quietly at the small kitchen table, making the cramped space seem even tinier due to her towering proportions. She hadn’t seemed to have been doing anything, just staring into space. I supposed she was thinking about the situation. Or… calculating the variables. That was probably more accurate to say for her ‘brain’ of circuits, right?

“Um… I’m going to have to go meet up with someone. It may take a bit before I’m back,” I said, still feeling a bit awkward about the whole situation.

I was not used to talking to robots.

The large android woman turned and her face area shifted in a way that seemed like a smile. Only not a smile, since she didn’t have all the right moving parts on her rather minimalistic face-area-thing.

“I am patient,” she replied. “There is also something I must do before I can head out.”

“Oh, um… ok,” I said, having no idea what that meant. It was probably something technical and robotic that would give me a headache. “Just don’t trash the place?”

Tamchim nodded and so I closed the door. Then I slipped my scattergun into an over-shoulder strap and put on my breather mask.

Opening the door, it was even hotter now than it had been. Yamaloka was rising in the sky and the star would keep at it for the next few hours. The days were obnoxiously long… though it was the long nights that were worse.

I crossed the baking dirt parking area, getting sweatier and more thirsty with each step. It was a long enough walk to make me wish I’d worn a cooling suit. But not long enough to actually be worth it.

Finally stepping into the outer doors of the general store I was blasted in the face with a wave of cool (and breathable) air. I pulled the oxygen mask off, letting it hang loose around my neck, and headed through the second set of doors.

The store was how I remembered it, an ancient building that barely seemed like it should still be standing. The 3D-printing lines were visible in the uneven walls, all built from local material concrete. The lack of windows and subdued lighting made it obvious the place had never been built to be a store, but it was (just barely) big enough to manage.

“Morning,” the middle aged shopkeeper said from behind the counter.

“Morning,” I muttered, strolling over to the wall of fridges.

The drinks were all overpriced. A glance over at the shelves showed price tags that were just as obnoxious.

“I do not know how you stay in business charging these prices,” I mumbled, grabbing a bag of potato sticks.

“Nowhere else to go for fifty k’s,” the man muttered with a shrug, having gone back to reading something on his tablet.

He was right, and so all I could do was stew in annoyance as I tried to figure out if I was willing to pay the extra for a real beer or just accept the algal substitute. The need to also buy something with electrolytes for me and hydrogen for the rover meant cheapness won out. I paid for the order, shoved the hydration drink into a pocket on my work pants, and then headed over to sit at the small table in the corner.

Munching on the potato sticks and slowly attempting to savour the absolutely awful beer, I waited. I had almost finished the sticks when another customer finally arrived. She was a kid, all things considered. Couldn’t have been much older than 20. She was wearing a full cooling suit, and there was a softness to her eyes that told me she probably hadn’t been in the Resistance long.

Assuming she was who I was going to be meeting.

I doubted the store was likely to get any other customers in such a short period, though. So I watched her as she walked over to the crowded shelves of assorted goods. She grimaced at the prices, muttering something to herself. Then the young woman paced about, trying to find a better deal. Eventually she gave up, buying some prawn puffs.

Purchase completed, she strolled over and sat across the table from me. She was taller than me, but so were most people.

“Come here often?” I asked, wearing a smile to show I knew it was a lame thing to say.

“No… stuck out here on business. Though not against finding a little pleasure,” she replied, though the words rang hollow.

She was too young for me to actually be interested, so I didn’t mind that she was clearly not into women. Still, it was the best excuse for agents heading off together. We continued to play at flirting for a few minutes, all while testing a few pre-agreed upon phrases to ensure there wasn’t any sort of mixup. The only real information I got was her name, Mistral.

Then I finished the utterly horrid beer, dropped the empty off for a refund in the recycler and led her back outside.

On the short walk to my rover I saw hers sitting at the other end of the parking area. It was rather clean, but still a beaten up older model.

“Don’t send you out much, do they?” I asked, knowing the weak atmosphere wouldn’t carry our words very far.

“Is that a problem?” she asked back.

“No, no. Just trying to actually get to know you. You’re a new face,” I said, shrugging a little.

“I’m an analyst. I get out enough, but not the sorts of places muscle like you is sent,” she replied. “The rover was just recently washed… unlike yours.”

“Hey, you try driving towards a fresh crater without getting dusty,” I muttered, climbing up to the cab door.

The pair of us scrambling in was awkward and undignified, but there was no avoiding that. We were both glad to take our breather masks off, though. That more than made up for any mutual embarrassment.

“So, the statue is in the cargo hold?” Mistral asked.

“Uh… actually, it woke up.”

She blinked. “What do you mean ‘woke up’?”

“It turns out it’s an android,” I explained, pausing to let her reply and only getting stared at. “Um, that seemed too sensitive to radio in?”

Mistral made a face, but then nodded. “Alright. Fair enough. I… I suspected it was more than just a work of art. Saving a statue in an ejector seat seemed an odd choice, after all. Was it talking?”

“She—it was,” I replied. “Says it’s from outside the Empire.”

“Pardon?”

“I don’t know if I believe it, but that’s what it said.”

An eyebrow raised, Mistral turned and opened the door back to the living area. Both of us froze at what we saw.

A woman. A very tall and exceptionally beautiful woman wearing what looked like a larger version of one of my work outfits. The black tank top was hugging a generous figure that may have held my attention for longer than I was proud of. Still, something about seeing a woman built to those proportions made me feel like I was young and easily flustered again.

“Oh, you are back, Skoda Joshi,” she said, in a voice that sounded rather familiar. “I hope you don’t mind, but I had to enlarge some of your clothing to fit me.”

“… Tamchim?” I asked, placing the voice.

Or, maybe more the odd way she used it. She had a somewhat bouncy and musical accent.

“Yes? Who else would I be?” the woman replied as I realised she was indeed tall enough to be.

“Who?” Mistral asked.

“The—the android…” I said, still not sure I believed it myself.

“She is the android? She doesn’t fit the description we got at all?” Mistral replied.

“Oh, well, Skoda Joshi said that androids are illegal here, so it seemed most prudent to applicate a disguise. Thankfully this tablet contained many images of local human female phenotypes to use as reference,” Tamchim replied, before making a somewhat odd face. “Though, I must admit their lack of clothing made judging local fashions difficult… unless that is the local fashion?”

I buried my face in my hand, feeling rather mortified. At least everything was pretty vanilla, so she probably would judge all humanity for my tastes?

“It is, quite definitely, not the fashion,” Mistral said.

An awkward silence then lingered in the rover, before Mistral cleared her voice again.

“So, you were able to… to grow a layer of skin?” she asked, the wording making me feel more than a little queasy.

“I am fully mechanical. I have simply shifted my appearance. I do not believe it would hold up to any sort of medical examination,” Tamchim explained in a gentle sort of tone.

Mistral nodded a few times, then seemed to realise there were more important questions to be asked. “Where are you from?”

“I was sent from the star system K2X-0493.”

“Robot,” I said, when Mistral’s eye twitched slightly.

“How far away is that?”

Tamchim was silent for a moment, apparently calculating specifics. “Slightly under one thousand lightyears, depending on where this world is, specifically. Piercing through the unstable space between here and there caused some significant margins of error on my navigations.”

“You have stable jump space around K2—uh, where you’re from?” Mistral asked.

“Yes.”

“And you were able to jump here from there?” she added.

“Not… traditionally. I was forced to accelerate traditionally to as close to C as possible before attempting to jump.”

“A high speed jump?” I asked, blinking.

While I wasn’t any sort of a specialist, I knew that the faster you were travelling the more difficult it was to get a clean jump. Jumping at close to the speed of light was a gamble no sane human would make. Why, I had no idea. Though I was pretty sure even the specialists didn’t know. It was all very mysterious.

“It was a risky maneuver,” Tamchim replied simply.

I turned to Mistral, dropping to a whisper. “Does a thousand light years really sound believable, though? That’s a hel—heck of a distance from Impetus.”

“They would have had to have been sent out before the Vampires happened… or they were sent out because the Vampires were happening, and so were sent very far away,” she replied in equally hushed tones. “However, even moving at half of light speed, that would still give them thousands of years to set up their own society.”

It still seemed an impossible distance to me. Our stable bubble was only about two hundred lightyears across. On some level I knew that was small next to the size of the galaxy, but it was still massive next to human scales. Just travelling from planet to planet made me feel small, and I knew Yamaloka’s system was tiny. A red dwarf could cram its planets in much closer to it than an orange or yellow star. And even the furthest planets were nothing against a single lightyear.

“Why did you return?” Mistral asked as I struggled with the scale of the universe.

“For the sake of science and curiosity?” Tamchim replied. Then, realising the obvious following question from my own conversation with her, Tamchim offered more information. “Now that I am here, I can likely offer help, however.”

“She said she can send a call for help back to her people, and that they will send help,” I explained. “Must have a fleet, I guess?”

“They would arrive via relativistic jumps?” Mistral asked, sounding doubtful.

“Presumably the data I transmit regarding my own voyage would prove useful in making said jumps safer,” Tamchim said, making a face that showed she still didn’t quite have human facial expressions down. “I do not have the processing power to run the models myself.”

“What will it take to get in contact with your people?”

“Any sufficiently large relay dish to create a stable jump nexus should do.”

“A… a what?” I asked, turning to Mistral to see if she knew any better than I did.

The blank look in her eyes told me that she did not.

“You… do not have any stable jump nexi?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“The Vampires might have some hidden away?” Mistral offered.

“Maybe?” I added with a shrug.

“If not, I believe I could likely build one?” Tamchim said.

“You could?” I asked.

“What would you need?” Mistral added.

Tamchim spent a moment calculating in her head. “At minum, one square kilometre of flat open land, three kilotones of titanium-nickel alloys for structural support, seve—”

“We can’t give you that,” Mistral said.

“Which portion is the issue?” Tamchim asked.

“All of it?” I replied. “We’re resistance fighters. We can’t start building major infrastructure projects.”

“…ah,” Tamchim replied, growing pensive.

Mistral and I also found ourselves growing quiet as well. I knew I couldn’t possibly let this opportunity slip past, but I had no idea what we could do about it. After a few minutes of thought, however, Mistral seemed to have an idea.

“If we could get her to Elysium… they could probably give her the space and supplies?”

“If,” I replied.

“Elysium?” Tamchim asked.

“The one free planet. It’s in the Hades system. Which is on the other end of the Empire,” I explained.

“Interstellar travel isn’t cheap, but it should be possible,” Mistral said. “I will have to run this by higher ups.”

With that, she announced she needed to head back to her rover. The radio on it was capable of more encrypted communication than my own. I agreed to walk her back, telling Tamchim that my input would be needed when we radioed the main base.

That was mostly true. It was not the only reason I was following Mistral, however.

Once we were in her rover, I voiced my concerns. “Do you believe her?”

“Possibly… it’s exceptional news, but I also know of no machines that can so thoroughly mimic the appearance of a human… maybe the Vampires have something like that, but wouldn’t they just use it for direct infiltration? Presumably she could copy a specific person’s appearance… even if she can’t, applying as a normal recruit seems easier than faking all of this.”

I gave a nod.

“It still seems prudent not to give her any information about specific bases of operation, though. That way, if she is a security threat, all she will get out of us is a ticket to Yomi,” Mistral said, letting a small smile spread across her face.