Eight

[keaalu]

     To Slipstream, it felt like someone had grabbed his entire world and inverted it, dumping him square into the Pit itself.

     Impacts showered down across him – short-circuiting across his plating, sending motors into spasm. Even if the alien had allowed him to speak (and he’d quickly tired of what he dubbed Slipstream’s “lies”, taping up his mouth and not even allowing him to defend himself), no coherent words would have passed his lips – just distorted, incomprehensible electronic squeals of pain. Even his father’s worst enemies had never beaten the bolts out of him quite this hard! His static envelope was spiking so hard he was convinced his magnetic bottle was about to spontaneously dissipate in his chassis and he’d lose his harmonic. What a way to die – taken prisoner by some police-hating psychopath in the sewers under an alien city, and electrocuted until feedback destroyed your electric field.

     Every sensor, every system had been thrown into such disarray that he didn’t even notice when the flogging actually stopped. The dirt crackled with static as the excess charge finally grounded, and silt stuck to the damp trails on his face.

     “All right, all right,” a gentler voice interrupted through this hissing of distortions. “That’s enough, don’t you think, Artur? You’ve made your point, now leave the poor guy alone.”

     “But it-”

     “ He, love. Not ‘it’.”

     “But… but… Police!”

     “Not our police. Police from a very long way away, across the galaxy.” Beat. “Besides, what’s he gonna do to me, you got him so wound up in old chain he can’t even sit up. Go on, sling it. It’s all been sorted out with that chickie we nabbed the same time as him.”

     Slipstream rolled partially onto his side and watched the exchange through blurred, soggy optics. Had Mirii put in a good word for him? That meant she was alive and ok, too, right? Please let her be ok. It was probably too much to hope that the newcomer would be friendly, because she had the same sort of getup – loose trousers with portions of fishnet, a slim-fitting top worked up in green and black with sharp studs all over the shoulders. But she had a nice voice, and he clung to that instead of the image.

     “But that-… I’m not leaving you alone in here with it – or, or him, or whatever!” The male gestured at the door, angrily. “ ‘Chickie’ could have fed you any old pack of lies! Just cuz she’s got a cute little face and innocent little blue eyes doesn’t mean she’s not a scheming little power-tripper like all that rest of her species.”

     “Aw, for goodness sake. Do I have to relieve you of duty again? It’s sorted. I know you feel entitled to your paranoia after some of the things that have gone on down here, but please.” She lifted her hands in a sort of placatory gesture. “Calm down. I’m in no danger. You beat the poor kid so hard he’s probably gonna be crying for the rest of the day, anyway, so I don’t know where you think he’s gonna get the energy to attack me from. Just let me do my job, all right?”

     For a split second, the male looked torn between staying, and storming off, and finally elected to go for the latter. The door banged loudly behind him, the echoes loud enough to make her wince.

     Slipstream cringed back away from her as she approached, hoping to convey what he wanted to say with his wet optics alone. Please stay away, please don’t hurt me. He managed to keep his optic pumps from stuttering any more moisture out onto his face.

     Delivering more pain looked like it was far from her mind, however. She crouched down and gently teased up the edges of the tape, peeled it carefully back off his lips. “There you go,” she soothed, gently. “I’m sorry he got so carried away. You gonna to be all right?”

     Slipstream nodded, feebly, and gave his head a little shake to disperse the droplets of cleanser that remained in his optic pumps. “…be ok,” he crackled, hoarsely. His vocaliser was struggling to reboot.

     “Good lad.” She smiled, reassuringly, and brushed the worst of the silt off his face with a scrap of old rag. “Okay, now. Before we go any further, I’m going to do you a little deal, all right?”

     He didn’t nod; just stared, frightened.

     She seemed happy to pretend he’d made some noise of agreement. “I’m a nice medusi, and I’m going to give you my word that I’m not going to let anything else like this happen to you from any of my people while you’re here with us, okay? I just want one little thing in return from you, and that’s for you to promise the same thing in return. No acting up, no violence, no attacking me or any of my folk if I let you out of there. And no jumping straight up and knocking me over in your haste to get away once I have got you out. Right?”

     He nodded, feebly.

     “Ah-ah.” She wagged a finger, gently scolding. “I want you to say it. If you say it, you mean it. It makes it into something you won’t just back out of because you changed your mind. Ok?”

     Hating the way his vocaliser still crackled, Slipstream forced the words out as steadily as he could manage. “I promise I don’t mean anyone any harm. And I promise I won’t hurt anyone if you let me go.”

     “Thank you.” Her smile broadened, just a little bit, reassured. “Now let’s get you out of that lot, eh?” She crouched next to him with a set of bolt nippers, and carefully set to work removing the chain, first from his legs so he could sit more easily.

     “So what-… what’s going on?” Pleased though he was to be being released, Slipstream couldn’t help wondering if this was just another elaborate trap, to trick him into talking. “Why are you letting me go?”

     “Well, I could leave you all parcelled up, if you’d rather, you do look kinda tidy, there…”

     “N-no!” He blurted the words out, then caught himself and revised, in a softer, more pleading tone; “that is… please don’t.”

     She chuckled. “It’s all right, I won’t. It was mean of me to joke about it. You suffered enough already.”

     “Why are you doing this?” he wondered, watching as she wielded the bolt nippers carefully down his arms. “After everything your friend did to me-…”

     “I know, and I wish I’d caught him earlier, but it took a while for your friend Mirii to explain it to us,” she explained, quietly apologetic, carefully snipping away at the links. “What’s going on, the guy you’re chasing, all that.”

     Slipstream was silent.

     She glanced up to meet his gaze. “I know you didn’t want people to know about it, in case it gets back to him,” she accepted. “I’m sorry we had to pry. But, you know, you weren’t really making things easy for us. What did you think being all secretive was gonna achieve, except make us suspicious of you?”

     “I don’t know what I thought I was thinking,” Slipstream mumbled, quietly. “I just… I was scared, I guess. Nothing I’ve done so far has really turned out the way I planned it.”

     “Ach, I hear you on that one.” The last link pinged quietly to the floor. “Things often don’t, do they. I know my life these last few years is a whole long trainwreck of things not going the way I planned it. You just have to take it on the chin and hope it works out, right?”

     He nodded, reluctantly. “You seem to have me at a disadvantage. You know who I am. Who are you?”

     “My name’s Rasa.” Pause. “I sense Artur might have mentioned me,” she observed, dryly, seeing his eyes already going huge.

     “He thought we were here to kill you I mean I promise we’re not!” Slipstream gabbled the words out in a rush, just in case she had any doubts. “I don’t know why he thought it was a bad thing that I’m a Policebot I wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt you and I don’t even know who you are-!”

     “Shh-hh!” Rasa soothed, and laughed kindly. “It’s all right. I know. Art… goes over the top a bit, sometimes. I don’t think he really means any harm, he just… doesn’t know any way to react that isn’t to overreact. And heck, you’re police, if he’s gonna be over-reacting to anyone, who better than the fuzz?”

     Slipstream studied the floor. “I still don’t understand,” he confessed, quietly.

     “Yeah, maybe I should have just started at the beginning, eh? Okay, let’s see.” Rasa paced, thoughtfully, for a moment or two. “If you listen to Upworlder propaganda, I’m the leader of an, ah, ‘terrorist organisation’. Which we’re not, and they know it, but it’s easier to say ‘terrorist’ than ‘political activist who was framed and now works to quietly, peacefully disrupt normal society until their views are taken notice of’. Besides, calling us terrorists means we’re evil, irredeemable and wrong. Activist means ‘actually yeah you do make a few good points…’. Soo… what I mean is, we’ve had a few problems with the police trying to arrest folk. See?”

     “No,” Slipstream shook his head, miserably. “I don’t see. If they keep trying to arrest you, why not change how you work so they have no excuses to?”

     She chuckled. “If only we could. I mean… we’re all down here, part of this society, for different reasons,” she explained. “Art’s here because he’s got a big old chip on his shoulder. Daddy was a policeman, see? Pretty high up, too. Wanted his beloved son to follow him into the service. Art… rebelled. Even I ain’t too sure why.” Her face creased in a frown. “I guess he wanted to prove he was his own man, didn’t need Daddy for anything…”

     “So he attacked me because he has ‘Daddy issues’?” The explanation was somewhat crushing. “Not… not because… your police are bad?” His voice softened and almost faded out completely by the time he finished speaking.

     “No,” she smiled, sadly, and cupped his cheek. “I’m sorry he took it out on you.”

     He covered her fingers with his own, at least marginally comforted that they weren’t all raving psychopaths. “What about you? Why are you down here?”

     “Me?” Rasa made a face. “I’m in this because I’m hoping I’ll eventually catch that sneaking, cheating, lying lump of filth that I stupidly married, who set me up, accused me of murder, then tried to kill me in ‘self-defence’ and forced me down here to escape a prison term.”

     Slipstream blinked, startled by the unexpected ichor in her words.

     “Don’t get it, huh,” she commented, tiredly.

     He shook his head.

     “Okay, lessee.” She settled on the ridge in the floor that ran like a grimy bench all the way around the small room, next to where he sat on the floor. “I hope you like stories, because you’re gonna get one,” she commented, dryly, and sighed, semi-wistfully, while she gathered her thoughts. “My little saga started getting on for… eh, almost seven years ago now; hn, seems longer’n that. Anyway. I was the Founder, Owner, Boss, Whatever, of a Ceutics Company. Built it from the ground up, recruited all the people, promoted it, sold it, all that malarkey, finally made it into something that was worth a pretty bit of money. We made designer drugs. A few fancy medicines to keep the shareholders happy, sure, but mostly it was fancy things to give ordinary folks a little spice in their lives – things to relax the stressed-out company executives, things to excite the bored housewives left at home with just toys to keep ‘em company, things to improve the party scene… You know?”

     To his shame, Slipstream – a long-term, habitual user of ‘Tempo’, his own people’s equivalent of an amphetamine – knew exactly what she meant. He nodded, quietly, and tried to ignore the blue crystals he had lurking like demons in his subspace.

     “Anyway. My so-called beloved husband… ha! Decided he wanted a bigger share. Now, I’m medusi, so with me still in the way, he couldn’t get what he wanted, see?”

     Slipstream shook his head. “What’s medusi mean?”

     “The laima – that’s my species – we’ve got three genders, and I’m up there at the top. High female. Top bod, major breadwinner, all that. Without girls like me, there’s no little laima, not even if you can afford top-billing artificial insemination, because we have the important genetic material. Spurs – that’s the little bastards like my ex-husband, and well-meaning little bastards like Art – they’re your typical males. All they can usually think of is what’s dangling down here.” She waved a hand between her legs. “They’ve got gametes to spare, and like to put ‘em around to as many fessine as possible. Fessine, on the other hand, are genetically barren. No gametes at all. Plenty of hormones! But no eggs. That makes us medusi rare, precious gems on the babymaking scene, and gives us a whole big heap of power in the process. So without me, my ex-husband couldn’t have got my ex-wife pregnant. Make sense?”

     Slipstream nodded, even though it sounded far more complicated than it needed to be. In his own species, there was no such division between genders, and a machine could spark off – or spark up – anyone they wanted. Any machine could carry a new life inside itself; two mechs could have children, if they wanted, just as two femmes could, and although rare, it wasn’t unheard of for four or five machines to all pool code into one member of the group and produce a new harmonic that way.

     Rasa propped her chin on her hand, and sighed, wistfully. “For a long old time I thought we were the happiest, luckiest married trine in the whole of Stolica. We shared everything equally, all three of us, cuz I was a sap and thought that was what they wanted, too.”

     “Trine?” He interrupted, quietly.

     She nodded. “Three individuals, you know? In a married group?”

     “I know what a trine is.” He nodded, sadly, gaze downcast. “Back home, a lot of my family had lived in three-unit family groups before my parents got together. Still do. They’re just not… breeding groups.” The idea of his father and two uncles getting together to make ‘babies’ made his pumps surge. “Trine-bonds are as strong as spark-bonds, just in a different way. It’s more… brotherhood. Sisterhood.” Like twins, can’t think how to function without your mirror.

     Rasa chuckled, bitterly. “If only. Faith and devotion are optional extras. To be honest, I shoulda suspected something when it was just the three of us for so long. Laima bonding is more of a power struggle, see? Spur fight each other to be a medusi’s primary consort, and it’s really strange for a group to only contain one fessine. I guess the bastard wanted to turn heads by being ‘different’. Just one spur and one fessine – quiet, devoted, bringin’ up baby with no medusi interference. Turns out he’d just been biding his sweet time all along.” She spread her hands. “Pretty much the instant we’d got confirmation the wife was pregnant, and he didn’t need me any more? He shot himself, and framed me for it, got me accused with murder. Now he was good – real good. Been working on planting false evidence for months – even bought the gun in my name and keyed it to recognise only my geneprint. Small wonder I didn’t see it coming.” She studied her hands. “Even Niele believed him. My pretty little wife, and she believed that scum over me.”

     Slipstream felt awkward – an interloper on a private drama. He placed a hand on her knee, awkwardly. “You don’t have to go on, if it makes you uncomfortable.”

     Rasa emerged from her introspection with a sheepish chuckle. “Lordy, no, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be inflicting my baggage on you!” Her features flushed, sheepishly. “I’m sorry. I get carried away, sometimes. It’s what happens when you let yourself dwell on something for this long, I guess. Plotting retribution isn’t as satisfying as it used to be.” She pushed herself to her feet. “Come on, hon. We’ll get you introduced to the rest of us Undercity denizens, then we can see about tracking that Fire-guy down.”

     “Have you seen him?” Slipstream wondered, following her towards the door.

     “We’ve seen him, sure,” the alien woman nodded. “Nobody gets in our domain without us knowing about it. He’s never got quite close enough to us for us to worry about him, but we’ve been tracking him.”

     Slipstream’s optimism took an upturn, for once. “Could… could I see your results?” It was an effort not to blurt it out!

     “Sure you can,” she grinned, not needing any fancy telepathic senses to see the sudden up-spike in his mood. “I’ll see to it that Ilta gets it all together for you. First of all, though?” She gave him a serious look. “Go take a shower, hon,” she suggested. “You’ll feel better for it.”

     He gave her a semi-reproachful look. “I smell that bad?”

     She laughed, and he was pleased to note she had that gentle sort of manner that instantly put a person at ease. “It’s nothing to do with how you smell, love – or not, as the case so happens. I just know you’re probably suffering the same old feelings we all suffered from; you’ve been slogging it through the filth for so long, you start to feel like you belong down here, just another bit of old detritus, swept along in the current. Right?”

     He studied his grimy, chipped blue fingertips, and nodded.

     “Getting yourself a bath will just help you feel a bit more like a person and less like sludge again,” she reassured, touching her fingers to his arm. “An’ for what it’s worth, if I smelt as un-smelly as you, I probably wouldn’t ever bother showering ever again.”

     He knew she was only saying it to lighten the mood, but it made him smile anyway. “Thank you. Did you need me to do anyth-”

     “Nah, it’s my pleasure.” She dismissed his concerns with a playful little flip of her hand, and winked, broadly. “Besides, you’ve got a cute wee face, I might just try and sneak a glimpse of you in there and see if you’re cute all over.”

     His optics flushed brighter in a sort of electric ‘blush’. “I think you’d be disappointed,” he mumbled, faintly.

     Mirii met him just outside the cell door – she seemed to have been waiting there for a while, if all the footprints paced into the silt were anything to go by! “Slipstream?” The instant he knelt, to be closer to her height, she let herself relax against him, arms around him. “I am so glad you are unharmed,” she murmured, faintly. “I had begun to fear for your health, especially when I could not get them to stop…”

     The small Policebot rapidly got over his surprise at the unexpected hug, and returned the gesture, a little stiffly at first but quickly relaxing. Her static envelope was pleasant against his own – harmonised nicely. She was nice to hold, he decided. Nice to be held by. A faint floral scent rose from her damp, clumped hair, so she’d presumably bathed.

     “I’m tougher than I look,” he lied, softly, with a self-deprecatory little smile that acknowledged he wasn’t being entirely honest, and he knew that she knew it. “Tougher than I sound, too. Just a brilliant actor.”

     She gave a single soft laugh, relievedly, and pressed her cheek against his chest. “Now might not be the time to explain how good an actor you are. If not for Rasa, they might still believe you are harbouring harmful intentions.”

     “…good idea. Proving you’re cleverer than me, as usual.” Her face still had traces of dampness about it, he noticed, using a blunt fingertip to gently chase the moisture from beneath her eyes. “Sorry I upset you.”

     She laughed, embarrassed, and wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “Forgive me,” she mumbled.

     “Forgive you for what?”

     “...I had hoped I could be strong for you, and not have to make you watch me crying.”

     He lowered himself a little closer to the ground, so her could rest his chin on her shoulder, and hugged her a little closer; he felt her small hands coming up onto his shoulders. “Don’t put yourself down. You were thinking about me. That means a lot.” It meant more than he wanted to let on, too – there was already something deeply affectionate towards her, growing deep in his psyche. She was so openly kind to him, even after he’d been a brat. It wasn’t often that someone took steps to look after his emotional well-being.

     …It turned out that the time for snuggling was going to have to be postponed.

     “Slipstream?”

     He looked up; Rasa stood in the archway that led to the main communal living space.

     “Before you go and get cleaned up, do you think you might be able to calm your pet down?” she asked.

     “Pet? You don’t mean Fred, do you?”

     “ Whatever his relationship to you is,” she lifted her hands in a pleading gesture. “He’s pretty much bouncing off the walls, and won’t accept that you’re okay. We’ve had to catch him in a box because he keeps biting people.”

     Slipstream raised a brow. Biting people? He’d never seen the little creature do that before! “Um… fair enough. I’ll come and see what I can do…”

     To say Fred was upset didn’t really do justice to the strength of the little creature’s feelings. As soon as Slipstream carefully lifted the box away, he launched himself off the ground, bristling, baring his fangs-

     Seeing his blue friend standing there, well and whole and unrestrained, the felnid calmed rapidly, and instead crawled into his friend’s arms, purring quietly. Slipstream – not usually one for affectionate gestures from the ‘housecat’ – just let him snuggle up under his chin.

     “They wouldn’t say where you were,” Fred explained, quietly. “Scared you were lost.”

     Slipstream ran his blunt fingers through his friend’s fur, and listened to the purr that came up from the little chest. “No-one else is going to get lost,” he promised, quietly. “And we’re not going home until we’ve found Lara.”

0o0o0o0o0
      At least, Celerity thought to herself, it’s nice to have some company. Being a lonely prisoner is worse than being a prisoner with fellow inmates.

     Wen – Celerity now knew her full name was “Analia’Wen”, and agreed that “Wen” was far less of a mouthful – had sat either in the scaffolding by her shoulder, or on her shoulder itself, for most of the time since she’d woken up, quietly talking through things with her.

     It turned out that Celerity’s guess that she was a lot further north than she had been was right – a full few thousand miles further, in fact. Instead of being under the small, tropical city of Shahr-Pieni, she was now (effectively) under the larger planetary capital of Stolica-Sostine. Essentially, the capital was two cities that had grown into one, and she was on the slightly smaller, slightly more attractive and affluent northern “Sostine” side.

     Slipstream, she considered, sadly, probably hadn’t even noticed she’d vanished. That, or was pleased to have finally got his annoying, dithery, stupid aunt out from under his thrusters. I hope you forgive me someday.

     With nothing better to do – even if her motor cortex had finished stabilising, she was still locked into the scaffold, and probably would remain so for some time – Celerity had sat at the bottom of the hole in the ground, and quietly taken in her surroundings. To say she’d been rather alarmed to find out the name of the place hadn’t really done justice to the strength of her feelings! In her peoples’ mythology, the ‘Pit’ was the place of the doomed, where the spirits of the unfortunate and unlucky and the unkind and damned ended up. And as it turned out, the scope of this Pit wasn’t so different, either – there were plenty of doomed souls stuck in limbo here, too, waiting to find out if they were destined to go somewhere better… or worse.

     At least in terms of appearance, the Nuori-Deuchainn Pit wasn’t too hideous – an irregularly-circular shaft, a couple of times her height in depth, and almost the same across, drilled straight down into the bedrock on which the city was built. Three-quarters of the inner surface was lined by dozens of floors divided into cells, where the Merchandise lived. Some floors were cut into the living rock and some constructed of metal, some accessible by ladders, some by ropes, some by flights of stairs inside. Some had a pleasant, homely feel, some looked just like old caves; some had plants spilling out over the lip, and bright, welcoming lights inside, some were raw bedrock and unlit like the dens of predators. In all, it reminded the femme of a big open prison, or maybe a zoo, a cylinder lined with hundreds of open-fronted cells from which the prisoners were allowed to come and go, but never leave. The top was capped by a forcefield; it kept the elements out, and the inmates in. The only way in or out was via the cargo lift (or by big-rig, if your name was Celerity and you were too big and too unconscious to manhandle into it) – it ran in a shaft bored through the rock behind the remaining quarter of the inner surface that remained free of habitation, just big enough for a conscious Policebot to cram herself into, if needed. The lift access itself opened out just to the femme’s right, where the rock had been covered with a concrete raft to keep the feet of important staffers off the dirty bare rock floor where the Merch lived.

     Celerity had quickly proved that her giant size was not the only big thing about her – there was a big heart inside her, too. And for all her enormity, she came across as the soft-hearted, gentle sort of femme that would make a good mother. It worried Wen, a little, because although “Pit society” itself was fairly friendly and peaceful, the ones in charge weren’t so sweet-natured – the lab director was a tall, broad-shouldered, bad-tempered spur called Otto, and his boss, the primary shareholder, was a mean-spirited medusi with a taste for the finer things in life (and no scruples about how she got them) called Madame Pabishka. They’d no doubt walk all over the gentle soul they’d abducted into this weird sort of slavery, given the slightest chance.

     “You’ve lived here all your life?”

     “Hm?” Wen glanced up, realising the big newcomer was talking to her; the Pit’s self-appointed counsellor and moral guardian had taken it upon herself to look after her – at least while she ‘found her feet’, to pardon the pun, and for a little longer if need be.

     The large head had turned so the gentle blue eyes could watch her. “You say you’ve lived here all your life?” Celerity repeated, quietly. “It sounds so… intolerable. Being property, not a person.”

     “Yes, I have,” Wen confirmed, quietly, with a sad little smile, waving her plumed tail thoughtfully. “And it’s not so bad. You just… have to know what to expect, I suppose.”

     Celerity was silent for a few long heartbeats before speaking, and her voice when she finally spoke came out as a reluctant murmur. “What do you suppose I can expect?”

     “In all honesty? I don’t know,” Wen admitted, patting the scuffed blue blinker on the side of her head, comfortingly. “You’re someone the like of whom none of us have ever seen before. You’re obviously a machine, but you think like one of us.”

     “Do you think they’ll try to sell me?” Celerity tried to keep the edge of fear out of her voice, but her words still trembled. “Like… like property? A thing?”

     Wen hesitated. Most of the Merchandise was here solely for that one purpose – to be sold. A few were designed to work in factories, but most were destined to be household staff, some even genetically designed to co-ordinate with the home décor of the richest households. Some were simply menial staff, working out of sight, bred to be docile, accepting, and mute; some, like Glura, were designed to be in the public eye, a child’s guardian or a medusi’s personal assistant.

     A few, like the beautiful long-haired Ifé, would be destined for a rich couple’s bedroom; even her name meant “make love”. Ifé was a sad example of the cruelty Nuori labs dealt out on a daily basis. The little female was based off ruta stock, without the erectile crest on the back of the neck and bearing a long, smooth, mostly-hairless tail instead of the thickly-furred flag she should have been born with. (No-one needed to ask why, because the phallic look immediately put questions to rest.) She’d additionally been engineered with a connective tissue disorder to maximise what could safely be put into her – whatever that ultimately was – that left her with ‘floppy’ joints and made it very difficult for her to walk at any speed without a crutch. Her engineer had already experimented with her ‘capacity’, and left her unable to walk for three days, to the delight of her ultimate owner. Ifé had… smiled, patiently, and never once complained. Wen wished she would have, but she just… didn’t have a complaining gene in her biology. She behaved a lot like one of the sentient machines that lived in their more popular science fiction – patient, smiling, biddable creatures, who’d do anything demanded of them to keep the master happy. So long as master was happy, the slave was happy.

     “Will you be sold? I don’t know. Maybe,” Wen admitted, at last. “But I think it’s unlikely. At least in the short term. If they sell you, they lose their specimen. They might be able to charge a ridiculous fee in the short term, but if they can study you, learn how you work and replicate you… they’ll get more in the long term.”

     Celerity studied her feet and her folded legs. “I don’t feel that much more comforted,” she admitted. “I don’t think I’ll enjoy being a lab specimen, either.”

     “Well, maybe we just need to hope your nephew gets here soon, eh?” Wen comforted, with a smile. “Soon as he gets here and explains, they’ll let you go.”

     It was a thin lie, and both of them knew it was a thin lie, but… it was at least a tiny bit of comfort to cling to.

     From somewhere deep in the wall behind them there came a series of long, dull clonks as the cargo lift rattled into life.

     “That’s probably going to be one of our beloved shareholders, coming to inspect Nuori-Deuchainn’s new acquisition,” Wen observed, dryly, and patted her friend’s big shoulder. “Must admit, it took them a while longer than I’d been expecting.”

     Celerity remained quiet, and just watched, uneasily.

     The lift finally ground to a halt, and the painful groans from within the wall stopped. The first to emerge from the tunnel that led to the lift was a ruta – bounding on all fours like a squirrel, its white fur dyed a variety of shades from blue, through the lilacs and ending up a shocking pink. It stood and flicked its tail, and barked out an incomprehensible command in its native voice, and every head in the complex turned to face it.

     A moment or two later the rest of the party emerged – a tall, pale tan-grey spur in an expensively tailored charcoal-coloured suit (who Celerity assumed must be the director, Otto), and a slightly taller but equally lavishly-dressed laima half a step behind, apparently scolding the spur. She seemed irritable, rather than angry, as such – although, was it even a she? The build and manner of dress was ambiguous, at best. Celerity decided to go with feminine, solely on how her voice sounded.

     “That’s Madame Pabishka,” Wen explained, in a whisper. “I mentioned her, didn’t I?”

     Celerity nodded; such a tiny movement of her head, it was almost invisible, and Wen only noticed by merit of feeling it.

     “You need to be polite to her,” Wen added, softly. “You won’t want to, because she’s one of the rudest people I know, but if you’re impolite back to her… I’ve seen enough people punished for ‘backchat’ to know I don’t want it myself.”

     “I’ll bear it in mind,” Celerity whispered back, not moving her lips.

     ‘Madame’ Pabishka stood on the little platform in front of Celerity for so long, the big Policebot began to wonder if she wasn’t ill. At last, the laima gestured with an irritable little flap of a hand, and demanded; “this is what you brought me all this way down here for?”

     Otto cringed a tiny bit. “That’s right-”

     “ This is the ‘incredible new thing’ you think will put us back ahead of Provident Electronics on the stock market?”

     “Well… yes?”

     Pabishka gestured, irritably, a great big dismissive sweep of the arm. “It’s hideous! What’s it supposed to be, to start with? A giant-sized, lumpy, misshapen doll that you thought it’d be a good idea to drag all through the Shahr-Pieni sewer network?”

     “But it’s got-”

     “A cold fusion core, I know that, you told me three times in the lift alone. You’d show me a turd that was capable of it, if you could find one, doesn’t mean it’s saleable.”

     Otto hunched his shoulders and cringed backwards a fraction. “I was also hoping you might know who it belonged to-”

     “Don’t lie to me, Otto, you know I can see clean through you.”

     “I’m serious!” the spur complained. “It didn’t evolve in the sewer! It was built by someone. So it’s got to belong to someone!”

     “Begging pardon…”

     Both laima jumped and took a step back at hearing the deep, velvet voice roll out of the powerful chest above them.

     “…but I do not belong to anyone,” Celerity elaborated, gently. “I came here from a planet a very long way away, on police business.”

     “Great! You’ve abducted a giant alien police officer,” Pabishka threw up her hands in something like despair. “How long before we get the rest of its fleet on our doorstep?”

     Otto growled something impolite under his breath. “We’ve already taken steps to neutralise any threat it might pose,” he growled. “We researched it and there’s no record of its ‘species’ on any of our databases, so they’re from extremely far away from here. We’ve disconnected its radio, and we found it in the sewer after it was attacked by razorbacks – to all useful purposes, it was dead. No-one knows its here, and we can claim we were helping it if anyone challenges us.”

     “Um, excuse me… I am a ‘she’, not an ‘it’,” Celerity interjected, helpfully.

     “Who asked your opinion?” Otto rounded on her. “You will be silent unless directly addressed, machine. Speaking of which, you’re a machine, aren’t you? So keep quiet about your fake gender, we’ll address you how we see fit.”

     Celerity’s optics had gone a dim cobalt, hurt, and she backed down.

     “Was that a ‘yes sir’ I just heard?”

     “Yes sir,” she responded, softly.

     Pabishka watched the exchange from considering, narrowed eyes. Cogs were turning, but she wasn’t sure if she was about to make a declaration just yet.

     “Get it cleaned up,” she instructed, instead, already flouncing towards the lift in a billow of silk ruffles. “Get it cleaned up, de-scented, and remove those awful colours, and I’ll reconsider. And if you call me about it again before you’ve done that, I’ll personally see to it that it’s smelted down for something more useful!”

     Celerity watched her go, quietly dismayed, and wondered what exactly she’d got herself into…

39092 / 80000 words. 49% done!