Sunshine and Flowers

[keaalu]

When they spot what looks like a big garbage can tumbling through space, on a trajectory directly towards the Terrahawks' orbital battleship, Lieutenant Hiro makes the fateful decision to take just a quick look at it before letting Space Sergeant 101 destroy it. What they inadvertently unleash on Spacehawk is rather considerably worse than either of them could have imagined.

----------

Spacehawk’s Flight Deck was quiet, for a change.

Earth was languishing under a solar onslaught. It was the height of a period of increased sunspot activity, and the sun was putting out a deluge of exotic particles and high-energy radiation. Spacehawk, the Terrahawks’ combined battleship-monitoring-station, was perfectly capable of deflecting most of the radiation before it could cause any damage, but it left her fairly blind and her passengers uncomfortable. The EM shield did the bulk of the work, and the highly-screened high-density hull mopped up most of what managed to sneak through – but right now, even with all that, young Japanese lieutenant Hiro was uncomfortable. The air-recyclers were working overtime at keeping conditions ambient, filling the air with a soft, irritating fly’s hum and an ephemeral smell of ozone, and by now a fantastic headache had developed, drumming between his temples. Their onboard analgesics hadn’t even touched it. Spacehawk would soon pass into the Earth’s shadow, though, and the temporary slackening of the solar wind might give a bit of relief for a while; he was counting the minutes before then.

Everyone aboard was suffering to some degree, Hiro mused. His plants had come out in sympathy – Cymbidium had been sporting an extraordinary flower-spike at the start of the week, but now the poor orchid was flagging, her leaves drooping and her flower-spike only still standing after he’d staked it. The oleander, glossy and beautiful three days ago, looked half dead. Even the little heather, who until now had looked like she would grow through the worst of what space could throw at her, sat in a circle of dropped flower-heads looking dry and bristly.

The normally-chatty Space Sergeant 101, the command zeroid aboard, was too busy to try and strike up conversation, either, his attention glued to his scans. Hiro privately thanked the stars that his shipmate had found his volume control, for a change. 101 could be good company, particularly when there were no other humans around, but his chatter (or more importantly, sarcasm) wasn’t always what Hiro wanted, and at long last the zeroid had started to get the idea about picking his moments. Hiro had programmed the zeroid to be inquisitive, and with extensive heuristics to allow him to learn for himself, but the payoff was that he was increasingly human in manner – just like his commanding NCO, Sergeant Major Zero. (Hiro was putting it down to some complex interplay between his programming and his moderator crystal, which most other zeroids either lacked entirely, or had in smaller capacity. The other zeroids were just as idiosyncratic – one had decided to be French, after all, when none of his programmers actually spoke the language in any depth – but the two command machines took it to a ludicrous extreme.)

Unlike the sergeant major, 101 hadn’t expressed any desire to actually be human (thank goodness) but was turning out increasingly that way anyway – so much so that most stellar pilots didn’t have the first idea that the polite, friendly young man instructing them to return to their designated approach corridor (and occasionally getting threatening when they refused to do so quickly enough) was small, spherical, and with a serial number stamped into his steel exterior.

In any case, Hiro appreciated the peace and quiet. It have him time to think – time to work, and goodness knew he’d not been short of that lately. His latest project had taken weeks just to get off the ground, pardon the pun, with the nearly constant interruptions from Zelda, or failing her then from Hawknest, their secret South American base of operations.

He rubbed his temples, then cracked his knuckles and got back to work. He was working hard at developing some sort of atmosphere-capable interstellar fighter; small, sleek and pointy, it was currently dubbed Splinterhawk, and was causing him headaches additional to the one the recyclers had spawned. Hiro hoped it could be an equal to Zelda’s ZEAFs, the small Earth-Atmosphere Fighters she used so often to cause problems for them. They weren’t helpless against them by any stretch of the imagination – Spacehawk massively outgunned a ZEAF, and Hawkwing was easily equal in firepower and manoeuvrability – but the ZEAF had the advantage of being able to travel in both environments and often gave them the slip because of it. Something capable of carrying a chase from atmosphere to space was something Doctor Ninestein had been asking Hiro for for a long time, and finally the lieutenant had found the time to get it started.

Away by the main computer access terminal, where he sat on his perch plugged into the mainframe, the space sergeant would probably have argued that it wasn’t just the ship’s organic passengers that were suffering. Just because he didn’t have a headache, whatever one of those was, didn’t mean 101 was particularly happy about all the exotic radiation bathing Spacehawk; quite the contrary, it was making his life exceedingly difficult. The sheer amount of solar activity lately had meant the craft’s automated sensors were fairly well blinded, which had put the onus on 101 to keep a constant vigil; for the past three days he’d been in nearly-constant contact with the distant monitoring stations scattered strategically through the solar system, just in case Zelda should try and make use of their handicap. He’d been online for days and was wallowing in file fragments.

It helped that Mars was approaching its most distant point from Earth, making transit time between the two as long as possible, but that also put it in a solar blindspot. For some reason the old crone had been oddly silent, lately, so perhaps she found the solar interference equally troublesome. Although he knew Hiro enjoyed the peace and quiet, it put the space sergeant on edge, just wondering what was going to be thrown at them next. Silence was never a good thing, it usually meant she was building up to something big-

There was an object, tumbling towards Spacehawk, at the very operational limit of the giant vessel’s scanners. It instantly piqued 101’s interest. He briefly enquired with the deep-stellar monitoring stations if they’d seen it, but the replies quickly came back negative, and not because of solar interference. Whatever it was, it had passed through conveniently just beyond their scan ranges, showing up as just a blip if it showed up at all. That made the space sergeant instantly suspicious; instincts weren’t something he had, but weird statistical anomalies like this usually tickled subroutines in a way he didn’t like.

Sure it could have been a fluke, but all approaches to the Internationally-Agreed ‘Close-Earth Territory’ were closely monitored. Even now, at the height of solar activity, there were only a couple of transient and very narrow corridors through which objects could slip unnoticed – only a few hundred thousand kilometres across at their widest, they shifted as the tracking stations orbited and were only in any given place for a few days in each month. These days, 101 deliberately kept at least a couple of Spacehawk’s scanners on these moving corridors, and it looked like persistence was finally paying off.

101 peered across the room at his human commander, but the lieutenant looked busy, and the zeroid resolved to get some more information before he interrupted – experience had taught him that Hiro wouldn’t thank him for disturbing his train of thought for what was potentially just a meteorite. Instead, 101 narrowed the sensor beam, in an attempt to get a bit more power behind it, getting the larger externally-mounted space zeroids under his command to target the object’s predicted trajectory in case it proved hostile.

The closer it drew, and the less troubling the interference on the scanners, the less dangerous it looked; it was small, to start with, but probably not rock, being instead something metallic. Maybe a ship’s garbage can. So all he really needed now was permission to blow it up. Nice.

“Lieutenant?” 101 finally broke his silence. “We have a contact.”

Hiro glanced up from his work, and just stared through him for several seconds before pushing up his glasses to rub his eyes. “Details?”

“I’ve been watching it for a while,” 101 confessed. “I was just gonna blow it up but then I remembered, stop making decisions, defer to Lieutenant Hiro, bla bla bla.” He swivelled in a way that nicely approximated an exaggerated roll of the eyes.

Hiro lifted a warning finger. “Less ‘bla bla bla’, please. But go on.”

“It’s been too far away to hit- I mean, to make out anything worth telling you until now. It’s small, possibly metallic… that’s about all I can see, right now. Like debris maybe. Or something jettisoned. But it’s coming towards us, so I got suspicious.”

Hiro moved closer and had a look at the scans 101 had helpfully brought up, plotting the tumbling object’s path through the solar system. “Odd. It has been keeping away from our sensors.”

“That’s why I thought you should know about it,” 101 agreed. “I thought it could have been an asteroid at first, as it’s small and erratic, but it’s conveniently keeping to where we can’t get a very good look at it. I’m targeting it with Spacehawk’s main scanners now, and the research team are analysing the little we got off the monitoring stations.”

Hiro nodded, and waited patiently for a few minutes. “Anything?” he prompted.

101 sat with his antenna up, listening to what his boys had to say. “Nothing new,” he replied. “Spacehawk’s scanners are too disrupted to tell me anything useful, and there’s nothing in any of the other data we, ah, ‘borrowed’. It could just be well-timed interstellar junk.”

“Any idea of its origin?”

“No, sir. It can’t be martian, not with Mars all the way over the opposite side of the solar system. Could be from an asteroid miner, though. You know how clumsy they get.”

“Hm.” Hiro folded his arms and scrutinised the data. “I feel it could be a plant.”

“A… plant, sir?” 101’s LED optics scrolled slowly in confusion.

“Zelda could have dropped it out of a spacecraft to fool us; she could have planted it.” Hiro settled by his own scan readout, and pulled up the reports from the watching space zeroids. The pixellated blobs reminded him of turn-of-the-century photographs of planet Pluto. “I’m inclined to get closer. Does it look like it may constitute a threat?”

“Same caveat: too far away, can’t see much.” 101 paused to tighten the beam of Spacehawk’s scanners. “But no, sir, I figure it’s too small to constitute a risk – to us, anyway,” he confirmed, at length. “Looks like an old metal cargo canister. Probably garbage.” A beat passed. “Although… Hm. Funny.”

“Funny how?”

“I’m getting a really good infrared signal off it. It looks warm.”

“Define ‘warm’?”

“Definitely into the hundreds of Kelvin, maybe even above zero Celsius.”

“How strange.” Hiro drummed his fingers on the control board. “How long before it comes into Close-Earth Territory?”

“If it maintains its current speed and direction, thirteen hours and twenty six minutes. After that, a further two days to reach Earth – assuming we get out of the way first. It might impact atmosphere, but it might equally skirt past, if it remains on its current trajectory.”

Hiro considered his options; it couldn’t be as innocent as it was trying to look, there was too much that didn’t ring quite right. Like it was trying just that bit too hard. Perhaps it would be better to destroy it before it got too close to Earth to have many options left. “All right,” he instructed, at last. “Bring us out of geosynchronous orbit, and set a course to take us closer. We will go and get a better look at it, then we can decide what to do about it before it gets within CET.”

“Sir?” 101 looked puzzled and vaguely disappointed. “It’s just junk. We’ll soon be able to shoot it down from here, and the worst that can happen is that it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere.”

“It might be junk,” Hiro corrected, lifting a finger. “And it might not. It might be empty, but it might contain a deadly virus that will be seeded into Earth’s atmosphere if it is allowed to just burn up. It could be anything – and I want a closer look before it is too late to do anything about it.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” 101 agreed, already triangulating the course, then added, dolefully; “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“And that,” Hiro lifted a finger, “is why we make a good team, 101.”

Mollified, 101 made a sound of agreement and turned his attention to the Spacehawk’s controls. After a moment, the directional thrusters kicked in, and the big vessel nosed away from the bright rind of Earth’s atmosphere, swinging out towards deeper space. Her main drive flared into life shortly afterwards, an intense throb of power that reverberated up through the deck and was felt deep down in the chest. It sadly took them straight back out into the sun’s glare; Hiro resigned himself to life with a migraine, for now.

It didn’t take long to reach the tumbling object. The positioning motors spat out little staccato bursts of thrust and matched the vessel to the object’s trajectory.

Hiro watched the scans roll past on the viewing panel, and sensed 101 was busy calculating and correlating all the new data the scanners were feeding him. Every now and then there’d be a ripple of electronica, an incomprehensible bubble of coded chatter as the space zeroids imparted another little piece of information, and 101, able to translate what the human could not, would say something equally incomprehensible in reply and add the data to his analysis.

The space sergeant looked disappointed when he had his final report ready. “It has an 85% physical match to an old cargo pod off the Vigour,” he reported, bored. “We came all the way out here, just to confirm it’s garbage. Can we blow it up now please?”

“Hm, perhaps,” Hiro sounded reluctant to commit himself. “May I see the scanlogs?”

101 had already composited a lot of the data together, and flashed it up on the screens. The space zeroids, the larger but slightly stupider AF class, all saw a dented dark metallic object bearing a strong resemblance to an old cargo container, marked with what looked like letters but were illegible to them. The remote scan results confirmed that it was metallic and damaged, and possibly hollow, although containing what, if anything, was impossible to say; the metal interfered with the scans. 101’s own scans had been an attempt to match it to a known object, something from the vast library of starships and cargo manifests at his electronic fingertips. There were a lot of vague matches – 50% chance it was a chunk of the missing Zigon-8 probe, 52% chance it was the ‘black box’ from the Intrepid (lost in service after a chance encounter with an unfriendly asteroid). 101 had binned most of the matches already, Hiro observed, reading deeper, leaving only the most likely candidates on his list. And he had to agree with the sergeant, Vigour’s lost cargo looked a very likely candidate, in terms of size, shape, UDAR bounce and composition – all that looked strange was the likely origin.

“What do you want me to do, sir…?” 101 prompted, when the silence had stretched out for just that bit too long. “We already have a good weapons fix.”

Hiro lifted a finger, wait; Vigour had been carrying a small load of uncommon and expensive mineral ores when she’d been caught out by an errant meteorite, and she’d limped home with half her cargo lost in deep space; it would be nice to pick up the flotsam. (He was sure he could use it.)

“You have the scans. What do you think, 101?” Hiro suggested.

“I think Doctor Ninestein would be very unimpressed if he thought you were getting me making decisions again,” 101 pointed out, delicately, although he looked pleased by the invitation.

Hiro smiled, tiredly. “I will not tell him if you do not.”

101 brightened. “Well,” he replied. “There’s nothing about it strikes me as noteworthy, it’s small, damaged and probably empty. I would like to blow it to pieces.”

“Of course you would,” Hiro smiled, resignedly, drew a long, slow breath, and weighed up his options. There was something about it that had engaged his curiosity, and the idea of simply destroying without first double-checking what it was felt… distasteful? “Bring it aboard,” he instructed, at last.

“Ugh-”

“You say it has hallmarks of being of Earth origin?”

“Well, it is possible, sir…” 101 realised he’d been too thorough and blown a hole in his own argument. “But just because it looks a bit like it’s Earthly doesn’t mean it is-”

“And you say it is not dangerous?” Hiro interrupted.

“I wasn’t anticipating you wanting to bring it aboard,” 101 said, almost reproachfully. “And ‘it probably won’t shoot back’ is what I meant to say.”

Hiro smiled and gestured toward the zeroidoor. “If you would be so kind, space sergeant?”

101 pouted, recognising he wasn’t going to get his way – in spite of the fact he was content to argue the validity of any given order, he’d never actually disobeyed one, and wasn’t about to start doing so now. He closed his shutters with an audible snap, and flounced away.

oOoOoOo

Rather than rely on something as potentially damaging as big grabs, Spacehawk utilised her zeroid crew to go and fetch small things in from space. It was part of the job that 101 not-so-secretly enjoyed, purely and simply because it got him off the spacecraft; he was growing quietly impatient with always being stuck aboard, like the glorified secretary Zero was always telling him he was. (Like that ignoramus knew the smallest thing about 101’s job.)

101 sent a call through to his crew that he was after assistance, and numbers 17 and 73 met him in the small cargo airlock beside the main gun-bay. 73 was a quiet zeroid off the security team – the most monosyllabic zeroid in the entire fleet, as 101 recalled, so of course they didn’t get on that well – and 101 instructed him to keep the entry secure, which he agreed to do with a small rolling nod. 17, on the other hand, was a laid-back zeroid with a vaguely West Indies accent and an infectious good-mood that the space sergeant was friends with. Although technically off the repair detail, 17 was experienced in this sort of short spacewalk, and 101 trusted his competency.

101 confided his concerns to the other zeroid as they manoeuvred into position and got the object secured, so they could begin hauling it in. 17’s reply was typically unhelpful, for a zeroid – he observed that he didn’t know enough about the situation to comment on it and that the human probably knew best. 101 had disappointedly agreed with him. Hiro probably did know best. He usually did.

Curious in spite of his suspicion, 101 studied the container as they hauled it in. It was small and blackened, and – strangely – bore odd, worn gold sigils that he couldn’t read. So maybe it was alien? The lettering, if it even was lettering, matched nothing on Earth – it was closest to Ancient Sumerian, but it was curvier, and besides, 101 was fairly confident that Earth hadn’t had an active space program four thousand years ago.

“What do you make of it, 17?” he asked, over their short-wave comms.

“Dented old cargo pod,” 17 replied, casually. “Don’t know why you two are making such a fuss over it.”

101 made a non-committal noise in reply. “How about from a repair zeroid’s point of view? Predict what it might have looked like.”

17’s eyes flickered, briefly, as he got an idea of the dimensions. “It looks like it was caught in an explosion, but I can’t make out a lot else. I’d say it was probably just… smoother and shinier. Although it’s odd that the lettering survived whatever took the chrome off the rest of it.”

“Oo,” 101 realised. “Good point. Can you think of any reason for that?”

“Somebody recycled the pod, maybe? There’s nothing to say it wasn’t black and dented before it was picked up and reused. Not that hard to paint a new logo on.”

101 watched the other zeroid scrutinise it, briefly. “Does it look to you like it’s of Earth origin?”

“Matches a lot of schema I’ve seen,” 17 confirmed. “But then that doesn’t mean much, it’s just an oblong. Even the scheming Zelda could probably come up with the idea for an oblong cargo pod.” He chuckled. “This thing might have been drifting in space for millions of years, or it might have only been out here six months. Five more minutes won’t do it any harm.”

They nosed the old pod in through the open hatchway and closed the airlock, and settled back to the deck as the bay repressurised. 73 rolled back out of the way and took up position in the doorway instead, watching silently and alertly for danger as the other two ensured the container was secure and disengaged their own guiding clamps from it.

“We’re back aboard, sir,” 101 informed Hiro, over the shipwide intercom. “We have the container, and it looks even more bashed-up, up close and personal.”

“Thank you, 101,” Hiro’s disembodied voice acknowledged. “Have you been able to work out anything new?”

“Not yet. I’m just waiting for it to equilibrate.” 101 sat and watched as the feathering of ice crystals melted off the warming metal and dripped to the floor of the cargo port. “The exterior is frosted, but the interior is definitely above zero Celsius. I’m not sure I can explain it; there’s no active circuits inside that could have acted as heating elements.”

“Unless they were switched on until you picked it up,” Hiro suggested. “The fact there is nothing switched on now does not mean there has never been anything active inside it.”

“Perhaps,” 101 agreed, but it was doubtfully. “But it would have cooled again by now. And why go to the trouble of warming an empty container?”

“You are still convinced it is empty?”

101 glowered at the pod, and wished he’d let it slip past without flagging it up. “It’s certainly hollow, it’s light and it rings when I tap it.” He demonstrated with a scanning probe.

“Well, try not to hit it too hard in case it contains a vibration-sensitive explosive.”

“Of course, sir,” 101 agreed, unimpressed, and continued his examination (but slightly more delicately). Remotely-ported into Spacehawk’s systems, he used the ship’s more powerful scanners to give the object an ultra-detailed once-over.

“It looks like junk,” he confirmed, at last. “It’s small, blackened, dented… Definitely an old cargo container, but… kinda weird. The outside bears writing, I think, but I can’t read it.”

oOoOoOo

Hiro listened to his report, and pondered; in order to monitor thousands of digital frequencies, 101 had been programmed with the ability to read all earthly alphabets, and speak all known languages, and as such there wasn’t much that he couldn’t decipher. For this to be illegible to him made it fairly good proof it was nonhuman.

“Please can I incinerate it?” the zeroid prompted, in the silence.

“Can you make any estimates of what is inside it?”

A tinny little sound came over the intercom, and Hiro smiled. For all that he didn’t need to breathe, the sergeant had got quite skilled at sighing his annoyance.

“The scanner still says it’s probably empty, but the alloy is unusual and I’m getting an odd scatter pattern. It could be full of all kinds of nasties from Zelda, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t. Too small and garbage-y. I’m trying to compensate now.”

“Predictions?”

“Eeeemptyyy. There might be dust in the corners.”

Hiro chuckled. “Imagine if we had not and something terrible went wrong, 101,” he reminded the zeroid. “Can you open it?”

“There’s a hatch in the side, but it looks jammed. I’m going to have to cut my way in.”

oOoOoOo

Down in the cargo section, 101 had already turned away to the equipment store. All the little extra attachments zeroids could use were maintained in a special roller-gantry some way down the corridor, closer to “barracks”. Since there was only so much room in a zeroid’s upper casing for the carrying of tools, most kept just one or two about themselves and then borrowed which they needed from stores. 101 himself habitually carried only what he deemed essential – an advanced sensor and his energy pistol, and of course his high-power radio telemetry equipment.

Now, he swapped out the telemetry for a vicious little diamond-edged circular saw, and grabbed the specially-designed goggles to protect his optics.

“Take care, 101,” Hiro cautioned. “I would prefer we did not prematurely damage it. Or you, for that matter.”

“Thanks,” 101 drawled, making sure the saw was secure before engaging the correct protocols to operate it. “I don’t particularly fancy the idea of a hole in my electrics either. You two ready, over there in the doorway?”

“Ten-ten, boss,” 17 agreed. “Nothing’s going to get past us.”

“Yeah, well, make sure it doesn’t.” The tiny blade sang into life, and the instant it touched the metal a shower of sparks flew up. 101 pulled his shutters partially closed to cut down the glare, and felt the blade gnaw its way down through the tough alloy of the pod’s shell; sparks fell like raindrops over his goggles.

He worked his way down all four sides of the jammed hatch. The container whined in protest, a high pitched vibration that sounded rather reminiscent of a scream of pain, then the hollow thunk of metal against metal as the loosened oblong fell in. The blade jerked forwards through the new hole. “I’m through.” 101 briefly examined the wound in the metal, then exchanged the saw for a tiny camera.

“What do you see?”

101 eyeballed the opening and waited to see if anything would jump out, and when it didn’t, he moved closer, and telescoped the camera inside. “Not much,” he replied, at length. “A few inactive heating coils – must be why it was so warm inside – but aside from them it looks empt- wait… there’s a little device in here; palm sized, in fairly good condition. And – oh joy, you’ll like this – you were right about it being a plant.”

“Explain, 101?”

By way of answer, 101 simply piped his camera’s images through to the flight deck, and demonstrated the little mass of leaves nestling in a corner of the pod.

Hiro laughed. “How very strange,” he mused, out loud. “Do the contents look to be of Earthly origin?”

“No, sir. But they don’t look harmful, and scans don’t indicate the presence of anything like a virus. I can push the whole caboodle back out into space now-”

“Nono, wait. I should like to get a proper look first, if they aren’t harmful.”

“Sir-” 101 complained, but knew he was talking to deaf ears. The sight of that little scrap of vegetation – Hiro must be close to hyperventilating with excitement, the space sergeant mused, uncharitably. “Ugh.”

Hiro arrived not many minutes later. He delicately took the plant out of the darkened interior of the pod, and scrutinised it for several long seconds. It grew out of an almost spherical pot – flattened at the bottom to keep it upright, but otherwise completely enclosing the roots, to keep the growth medium where it was supposed to be and not all over the bottom of the pod.

101 sat watching him. “Please don’t tell me you’re going to adopt it,” he commented, in a tone of voice that said he already knew the answer.

“Most people appreciate being sent flowers.”

“That is not flowers. That is a bush.” 101 hesitated. “I’m not sure how to take being sent a bush.”

Hiro glanced down at him, amused. “You would prefer I let you incinerate what might be a gift of peace?”

“A gift of peace?” 101 canted over to one side, as though he had his head cocked. “We don’t know where that came from, and it was faar to convenient for it to appear on our doorstep like that. It could be poisonous. It could be worse than poisonous.”

“Well, then, if you would be so kind as to analyse it for me?”

101 muttered wordlessly for a moment or two. “Sir… You ask my opinion then you disregard it. It’s obviously a trap, and I don’t like it.”

“I took that as a given, since you do not like any of my plants,” Hiro reminded him, amusedly, fetching the device out. “Alien or not.”

101 flustered, bad-tempered. “That’s not what I was… it’s… that’s beside the point!” he grumbled. “And I never said I disliked all of them.”

“I know,” Hiro agreed, rising to his feet with the plant in one hand and the device in the other. “You just do not want another rival.”

“That’s not fair,” 101 sulked, but nonetheless followed Hiro towards the Research Bay, a few metres away and past a bulkhead, down the corridor. “I’m only looking out for your safety.”

“I know you are, 101,” Hiro chuckled, and set the plant down on the main research desk, where the sergeant could get to it. “And I do appreciate it.”

101 bounded sullenly up to the desk. The massive chemical analyser covered one entire wall, with its ranks of sophisticated nuclear-magnetic-resonance, spectroscopy and chromatography equipment. It was just one of a dozen ultra-sophisticated analytical machines that the Terrahawks had at their disposal, and several of those were on Spacehawk. No matter how sophisticated, however, it would still take a few minutes to warm up and calibrate, and sitting staring at it while it hummed and clicked to itself was never much fun. The sooner it was up and running, the sooner he could get his analysis done, and the sooner he could tell Hiro it was horribly toxic and could he please sling it out of an airlock.

Although, 101 corrected himself, glumly, the fact it’s toxic may not carry much weight, since Oleander is about as poisonous as they come and he lavishes his attention on that.

Unnoticed by either officer, a tiny striped dark grey creature smaller than a fingernail and not unlike a spider emerged warily out of the mass of stems and scuttled off down the side of the pot, lurking by the lower rim. It waited until the zeroid’s attention was on the scan readouts, and the human’s attention back on the alien device, then scampered clean across the table and up into an air-vent, where it hunkered down, and waited…

Eventually the chemical analyser was ready; the clicking stopped, and a small green light down by the “sample” port lit up. 101 amputated a little segment of the plant, jammed it into the inlet port, and set the machine to run an exhaustive sweep for all known or potential poisons (or other dangers). It was hard to be absolutely confident the thing was totally safe – the gene-sequencer soon pointed out that its proteins were full of unfamiliar amino acids, and its DNA had two completely different bases to anything seen in Earthly organisms, and that was just to start with. But the chemical structures in the plant’s tissues didn’t look like they would be poisonous to humans, and they similarly didn’t look volatile, so unless Hiro was planning to go biting chunks off it then it was 101’s opinion he’d be safe.

Knowledge that the plant was harmless left 101 feeling peculiarly irritated. His reasons for looking so hard stemmed almost exclusively from his determination to find some reason to be able to get rid of the thing. There was something about it that had made a whole bunch of imaginary alarms go off in his circuits, and he badly wanted to just chuck it out of an airlock and watch it burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

“Well, 101?” Hiro coaxed, waving a hand into the space sergeant’s field of view.

101 looked up, reluctantly. “It’s harmless,” he grudgingly confirmed, at last, annoyed that the plant hadn’t provided him with a reason to evict it. “At least, so far as I can tell. No toxins in the leaves, no volatile components, no thorns, no deadly flowers and poisonous perfume, and no big teeth.”

“Good. I will be interested to see what it grows into.”

101 sighed, exaggeratedly, and rolled himself off the sideboard, backwards. “Well, don’t let me interrupt you two,” he said, sourly. “I’ll be on the flight deck, if you decide you ever want me and my valueless opinions.”

Hiro watched him depart, and smiled. “Thank you, 101.” It was a small wonder Sergeant Major Zero took such an obscene delight in winding up the other zeroid, sometimes.

An electronic snort came back down the corridor, followed by the sound of the small lift whisking the zeroid away.

Hiro turned his attention to what had come out of the pod.

Contrary to what his disgruntled shipmate might think, he knew they’d have to destroy everything. Zelda had intentionally seeded extraterrestrial lifeforms into Earth’s biosphere before, and the results had been catastrophic, without exception. The idea all this wasn’t from Zelda, and wasn’t an environmental disaster in the making? A naïve assumption at best – suicidal at worst.

But destroying it without at least trying to work out what nefarious plot this was?

No. He had to at least make a bit of effort, before letting 101 have his fun.

Leaving the plant alone for now, Hiro examined the device. It looked a little like an old wireless-ready palm-held computer; slim and greenish-blue, it weighed strangely heavy in his palm for something that looked like a translucent polycarbonate of some form. Must be the power source, which wasn’t immediately obvious. The oily shimmer of an LED film suggested a screen took up two-thirds of what he took to be the top face. There were touchpanels beneath it, which didn’t do anything when Hiro experimentally pushed them, and a number of interface ports along the two longest sides, which also looked nothing like anything he was familiar with.

Perhaps it just had a flat battery? If it had been in that cold cargo pod for… he didn’t even know how long… it stood to reason it had probably lost charge. He sifted through a box of old connectors but couldn’t find anything that looked compatible. Instead, he optimistically set it down on an inductive charging mat while he examined the plant instead.

The plant’s pot was similarly unusual – it wasn’t just a pot, to start with, but more like a small computer in itself. On the curved face, just above the flattened base, were two ports visually similar to those on the device, almost as though they were designed to interact. There was nothing available to connect the two, though, and Hiro didn’t feel like pushing his luck by trying to invent to do the job something quite yet.

He weighed it in his hand. Like the computer device, it had a peculiar weight to it, as though there were something heavy in the base.

The plant contained within it was delicate, and actually rather pretty, in contrast to its possible Martian origin. It looked like some sort of vine, perhaps, albeit short and squat; each branch curled into tight spirals, covered in long tendrils like green springs which would help it climb, and waxy heart-shaped dark-green leaves. A sprinkling of tightly furled little yellow buds revealed it would even have flowers.

Hiro found himself at a loss to explain why it should be in such a technologically-advanced flowerpot – life support? Except that said life support appeared to be turned off. But something had kept it alive in the frozen airless dark of the container.

“I wonder where you came from,” Hiro pondered, aloud, resting his head on one hand. “And why you were in that pod? It is tempting to think you are an errant sample from a dying world – a small, broken ark to rescue a few precious lives.”

The plant, of course, remained silent, and kept its secrets to itself.

oOoOoOo

Well aware it was probably just his own personal green-eyed-monster rearing its head, 101 had quickly returned to the cargo port, to give the “alien” pod a more thorough once-over. He knew it was probably baseless, but something had convinced him that the object was just part of Vigour’s lost cargo – until someone (Zelda) had tampered with it. Which meant they’d been baited to pick it up. Memory of past mistakes reminded him it wasn’t fun to be taken for a sucker.

(And okay, fine. He was in an ugly mood and feeling vindictive, too. If Hiro was going to be all romantic about it being a gift of peace (what rot), maybe it was up to one pedantic little zeroid to save the day.)

Not sure what he was looking for, he hooked his telescopic camera back up and a high-beam lamp, and set to looking. Most of the interior was as blackened and scoured as the outside – which immediately felt odd, given the plant had survived whatever had caused the scorching. It looked like someone had been determined to obliterate any evidence of the pod’s real origin; there were patches that looked like they’d been scraped so hard – perhaps to remove a name etched into the metal? – that the superstructure itself had been weakened. Discouraged, he increased the gain and the magnification, and continued looking.

After a good half an hour, using increasing levels of magnification (along with the increasing desperation), 101 finally found what he’d been looking for, hidden deep within the dented, blackened hull; a set of engraved figures. Not just figures, either; these were standard Arabic numerals. After a bit of effort to read them, as they were just as blackened and obscured as the rest of the pod, he quickly correlated the serial number with one on the database held on Spacehawk’s supercomputer, and confirmed his suspicions; this was an old cargo pod off Vigour. It had been altered just enough to make it fit into that slimmest chance it wasn’t of Earth origin.

“The pod is from the Vigour, Hiro,” 101 supplied, struggling to hide the satisfaction from his words. “It’s a trap. Please let me get rid of it now.”

oOoOoOo

“You have already confirmed the plant is harmless, space sergeant,” Hiro pointed out. “And the device that came with it looks dead.”

Another exasperated noise. “I swear I’m not just being vindictive,” he said, unwittingly proving he was, at least a little bit. “There’s got to be something wrong with the plant, or the device, or both, and we both know it.”

“Indeed.” Hiro took his turn to sigh. “Thank you, 101. You confirmed some suspicions I’d been having. Forgive me. I should have let you know I agreed with you sooner.”

Evidently having been getting ready to argue his point, you could almost hear 101 deflate. “…you did? –uh, do?”

“And I am not saying it exclusively to flatter the ego you shouldn’t even have.” Hiro chuckled, tired, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What you have been suggesting had occurred to me also. It all seems rather too convenient, does it not?”

A very long heartbeat of processing time followed. “So… I can incinerate the thing now?”

“Not quite yet. I don’t like not knowing what they planned. I shall finish my analysis, and then…” he paused, and sighed, dejectedly. “Then we can remove them from Spacehawk. Just… tell me honestly, 101. Did you only go and scour that pod for its serial number because you want me to get rid of the plant?”

101’s momentary silence told him all he needed to know. “It would have been negligent of me not to investigate,” he protested, anyway. “Especially if we had any suspicion that it was of martian origin.”

“Well, thank you for your diligence,” Hiro offered, gently. “If you had been human, we would have said you were… following your instincts. But you could just stand to make your irritation with my plants a little less obvious. You may not like them, but I enjoy their company.”

There was another instant of silence, and 101 answered quietly in the affirmative. “Yes, lieutenant. I’m… sorry. If I upset you.” He sounded genuinely guilty. “It’s just-… I don’t get-… I mean-”

“Go recharge, 101. We have a nice lull in activity and I would like you operating back at peak capacity again as soon as possible.”

“Ten-ten, sir.”

oOoOoOo

Foregoing his pedestal, 101 sat on the floor of the flight deck for a while, gazing up at the broad shelf where Hiro tended his collection of more delicate plants – there were plants all over Spacehawk, these days (much to Doctor Ninestein’s increasing despair), even if you excluded the new specimen in the Research Bay. These few were either Hiro’s favourites, or those that needed a little more care and attention than normal.

With a precise bound, 101 leapt up to the shelf, and landed neatly between the Cymbidium orchid, which still looked sad and droopy from its toasting, and the fluffy mass of the Erica. Each of the plants had been immaculately groomed (at least until now) – not a dead leaf or nibbled stem in sight. But still just plants.

What was it that Hiro had said? That he found them calming, peaceful influences? 101 stared into the orchid’s first half-open bloom and tried to see what Hiro saw, but all he saw was furled white petals, from each and every angle he tried.

Perhaps it was just another one of those human things he was destined never to “get”, 101 mused, glumly. The plants didn’t contribute anything to life aboard, except dirt, cluttered the place up, and often did things that Hiro wasn’t expecting them to (although to be fair, 101 routinely included himself in the latter. Perhaps they weren’t that different).

What was the point to having a pet plant? A dog, sure – a loyal companion to shower you with adoration, something you could interact with. He even vaguely understood the point of having a goldfish – at least it did something. But a plant? What did a plant do except… sit there? They didn’t move, they didn’t interact with you, they just… sat. They didn’t even answer back.

“Why does he talk to you in favour of me, anyway?” 101 challenged the flower, leaning in closer to it. “It’s all your fault that I just upset him, and you don’t even do anything.”

The plant ignored him.

Hiro’s sad chastisement had evidently stung more than perhaps the human had intended.

It’s not even as if they remember anything I taught them about parallax, 101 considered, sulkily, recalling the time Hiro had asked that he talked to his precious houseplants when he wasn’t present, so they wouldn’t get lonely. 101 had rapidly run out of things to talk about and instead instructed them in the calculation of apparent distance and inertia. Hadn’t mattered that the sergeant himself had been going out of his mind with boredom, with Hiro gone and no-one else to talk to, Hiro still had to ensure his plants were well looked after.

(“You could make sure I have someone to talk to when you abandon ship.”

“You have a whole squadron of other zeroids here to talk to!”

“Not that many. And they’re all idiots.”)

Sulkily, 101 rocked backwards on his axis and glared at the ceiling instead.

His battery was low – the warning alert had begun to flicker between amber and red – and now he felt… Hiro said he should define it as “sleepy”. Not the same as a human would define it, of course, but he felt heavy and sluggish and only able to maintain a decreasing number of thoughts without getting distracted, so it felt like a fitting term. Maybe that was why he was in such a bad mood? He’d been online and active and busy for entire days, filtering a soup of solar radiation, and had file fragments everywhere.

And these stupid plants weren’t helping. Any of them.

101 knew he wasn’t meant to edit his own code – particularly not when bored or upset. It tended to result in what could politely be called ‘disasters’. But perhaps Hiro could be persuaded to help? Just so he could ‘get it’. Hiro had written all his code in the first place, after all – a lot had been based on a learning model, granted, but 101 discounted that for now because he’d tried really hard to learn plants and all he’d managed to learn so far was that they made him jealous and resentful.

He knew that for a technicality, he should be at his post, plugged in, his basal programs monitoring for alien incursions even if his higher brain was dormant, but he had a whole squadron of space zeroids watching patiently outside. Plus, Hiro was still awake, and knowing the human lieutenant, he’d be up for hours yet, trying to find out as much as he could about the device before they ejected it back overboard. If any alarms started screaming, he’d just deal with it when it happened.

oOoOoOo

Hiro had finally turned his attention away from the curly vine and its mysteriously heavy plantpot, and was re-examining the device that accompanied it. It was obviously some sort of control device, but none of it functioned. He’d tried a variety of tools on it, and hoped he’d managed to leave it on charge for a while, but whatever battery was inside it seemed thoroughly dead.

So, the next option was going to have to be a scalpel, so he could access enough circuitry to connect the power directly. Cutting it apart would probably destroy it, and he didn’t want to do that quite yet. He used his stylus to nudge some of the connectors in one of the ports at the side, just in case there was a bad connection.

The entire device lit up with a chirp, making Hiro jump and drop both it and his stylus. It continued to buzz softly against the desk, like a ringing mobile phone. What had he done, he wondered, trying vainly to see what switch he’d tripped or what he’d managed to rewire.

He leaned down to pick his stylus up off the floor, and found when he straightened back up it had already gone silent again; the lights went off, and the soft chirping it had been emitting died with a complaining gurgle. He frowned and scanned it for what must have been at least the seventh time, but it looked even more dead, this time.

Hiro sighed and pushed his glasses up, massaged his temples; that headache wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. The overworked air conditioning had drilled a migraine down between his eyes and he didn’t feel capable of any more leaps of brilliant thought until he’d spent considerable time in a dark room.

“I wish we could have met under better circumstances,” he apologised to the plant, brushing a finger over the spray of tightly furled yellow buds. One dainty flower was starting to creep open, and he could already smell its perfume. “You would have been an interesting study.”

He left the little collection on the table, under a reinforced glass safety-screen, turned out the lights, and left the room.

101 was away from his perch, Hiro noticed, entering the flight deck, wondering where the zeroid had gone – he finally spotted him among his plants, tilted at a strange angle, optic shutters closed, peacefully offline. He’d probably been grumbling to them, Hiro thought; since he’d first asked 101 to talk to his plants, to keep them company while he was absent from Spacehawk, it had turned into a bit of a habit. No matter what the zeroid might say about them – he was at his cattiest when he perceived they were getting more attention – the lieutenant knew that he secretly still occasionally talked to them when he thought no-one was looking, and when he wanted someone to unload poisonous feelings onto. Misery loves company, eh, 101? At least they won’t tell you to shut up and go away.

He looked like he was dreaming, as every now and then he’d twitch, or make a little chirp of nonsensical electronic noises. Hiro wondered what he was dreaming about – he’d never quite got to the bottom of why they were even capable of it, as he certainly hadn’t programmed them to do it, but both 101 and Zero had confirmed it was what was happening (much to Doctor Ninestein’s despair).

He debated waking him, but considered that 101 probably had his reasons for not being at his post. The zeroid had been active and alert for several days, after all, dealing with solar-related unpleasantness – and Spacehawk power tended to interact with zeroid power cells and give them vibrational disharmonies. It wouldn’t hurt for 101 to ‘sleep’ away from his perch, for once, Hiro mused, charitably, and instead left instructions with the eternally-alert space zeroids that they were to sound the alarm if anything non-human should come into their monitoring range.

Hiro left him to his dreaming, and retired to his own cabin.

oOoOoOo

…on a neighbouring world, a rust red planet with two small moons, an alarm chirped.

“Good,” Zelda crooned, running her long silver fingernails tenderly over the control board. “The accursed Terrahawks have found our little gift. I knew they would have been unable to resist investigating such a curious little wanderer in their territory. And they do say that curiosity killed the cat – or perhaps the tiger, if we are lucky.” She cackled delightedly at her own joke, and threw a switch; the low throb of power filled the room. “Prepare our battleships! That wretched clan will soon have plenty on their plates to concern them with over and above a little incursion by our fleet, and we must take advantage!”

oOoOoOo

Down in the research laboratory, the device chirped mutedly once… twice… three times… then fell silent once more; a diffuse blue glow built steadily around it.

The plant quivered, as though caught in a strong breeze.

At the tip of one squat branch, an unopened leaf-bud pulsed like a tiny heart – once, twice, three times… then it split open, lengthwise, a profusion of succulent pale green leaves and agitated tendrils emerging at a very un-plant-like speed. The tendrils grew outwards at a slow but steady and unnerving rate, crawling over the tabletop, seeking walls and ceiling.

Up in the air vent, something else was attracted by the pulse of pale blue light; the alien spider scuttled from its hiding place down to the tabletop, and then scrambled up onto the growing vine. It paused for a moment, looked around the darkened room and checked the human wasn’t returning, then began to gorge itself on the fleshy, expanding leaves.

oOoOoOo

Hiro hadn’t slept well. It had taken copious quantities of time and painkillers to get to sleep in the first place, and when he’d finally drifted off, he’d been troubled with bad dreams, of being unable to get 101 to come back online and stop Spacehawk flying blind straight into the sun. Then his alarm clock had bumped him out of it, leaving him mid-nightmare and feeling like he’d barely slept.

He felt… maybe not refreshed, that was a little too positive, but less dead, at least. The headache was still there, but more of a background discomfort than full-blown migraine. Small blessings.

Returning to his investigations, Hiro suspected something was wrong when he spotted leaves creeping their way up the ceiling of the corridor outside the lab, way above head height.

He peeked into the room to find at least half of the research lab was choked with plant. “What in Spacefire…?!”

It was the vine – the tiny, dainty plant, with its pretty heart-shaped leaves and promise of flowers, grown to monstrous proportions. Its sudden weight had folded the lab bench in on itself. The small leaves had turned into massive pale swords, pointed and fleshy with a sawblade of tiny barbs along each side – but each vine stem stretched out like a naked artery, like the plant had grown in length faster than it could clothe itself to keep up. Great orange and yellow trumpets cascaded down from the outstretched topmost branches, filling the air with a sickly, cloying perfume that made him lightheaded. The safety screen had proved no barrier at all, stems easily lifting it out of the way and pouring unimpeded over the bench edges and up the walls like some sort of noxious seacreature, fat corkscrew spirals of green burrowing into all the analytical machinery. (Hiro doubted much of that would run, any more. Oh well. They probably needed new equipment anyway.)

More importantly, perhaps, he could see it still growing. Stems dividing and curling, tapping their way along surfaces, twisting up together, like timelapse footage in real life.

He resolved to ask the space sergeant why he hadn’t seen what was going on, but later; right now he knew he needed to sort out exactly what was going on. It defied the laws of physics, to start with – he’d watered it once, but not fed it, and there was no way that tiny pot could have fed it all the nutrients it needed to grow to such a vast size so fast.

How could Zelda have done this? Hiro wondered, fitting a respirator around his face just in case the perfume was worse than just overpoweringly sweet, and warily entering the room. Something must be feeding it mass, somehow, providing it with the raw materials to turn into such a living monstrosity.

His initial idea that the pot might be somehow super-dense, to cram all that extra mass in, was rejected on the grounds it wasn’t also super-heavy – he’d lifted it easily in one hand. So that suggested it must be the pot and the device interacting – perhaps the device was a relay of a sort, transferring mass from some distant source? Which meant it was somehow “active”, which also meant he had to turn it off. Easier said than done without knowing how it had been turned on to start with.

After five minutes he’d managed to push his way through the twisting mass of tendrils to the ruined bench; sure enough, the device was lit up again, and this time it pulsed with a diffuse electric blue glow. It had dropped down into the gap beside the pot and the unexpectedly-vertical benchtop, almost out of reach.

Hiro leaned into the mass, stretching out an arm for the device. The leaves snagged in his clothing, holding him back. Grimacing, he forced himself to lean harder, using one of the leaves to try to scoop the device closer. The barbs dug into his skin but he carried on until it was just in reach.

He closed his fingers around it – unexpectedly hot, it made him hiss in surprise, but he picked it up anyway – and something large, furry, and black and grey dashed out of nowhere and up his arm. Hiro gave a cry of alarm and lurched backwards, swiping for it, but found only air. The device shot out of his fingers and clattered against first the wall, then the deck.

“What the-… where did that come from?!”

More importantly, where had it gone? He spun unsteadily on the spot.

It hadn’t tried to hide. It was in one of the few clear spaces of floor behind him, hunkered down like some sort of giant alien house spider, all its ten legs tucked in defensively beneath it. Three sets of eyes watched him, inscrutably.

It must have come across with the plant, Hiro knew, but how they’d missed such a monstrous insect, or whatever it was, he had no idea – unless, and he couldn’t think of a better explanation, it had started out like the plant – tiny and harmless.

It just sat there, though; immobile. Perhaps he’d just startled it? He reached up into the tangled mass of vines and pulled the safety screen down, hoping to be able to use it to trap the spider beneath (and hoping it wouldn’t be able to lift it straight back up).

It hissed, unpleasantly, lowering its body and lifting its zebra-striped abdomen, rattling the stiff hairs along each side. It reared its head back, revealing a vertical array of sharp black teeth, like a battery of intersecting obsidian splinters.

“Now now…” Hiro soothed, approaching with the reinforced cube. His breath sounded inordinately loud behind the mask. “I am not going to hurt you…”

It backed off, jabbing its tail skywards, threateningly, like some sort of heavy-bodied scorpion. Hiro couldn’t see a stinger but didn’t want to find out in the worst possible way that it did actually have one.

He could feel his fingers trembling against the glass as he inched closer. He had to be faster than it, somehow, and didn’t know when it would at-

The spider lunged for him with an unnatural, unbelievable speed, and the first he knew that it had bitten was when a bolt of agony flashed right up his leg. Hiro gave a strangled sound of pain and felt all the muscles in his leg first cramp up, then give way completely, pitching him into the sharp embrace of the creeper. He managed to grab the naked stems and lower himself clumsily to the deck before he could fall onto his face.

Turning his back to the wall, defensively, he found the animal had vanished. Shit. He scooted himself into as defensive a corner as he could find and for several seconds sat very still and silent, listening to his own heartbeat thundering in his ears, waiting for it to return. His ankle throbbed in time with his heartbeat.

The spider remained hidden.

Hiro sat still for long enough that the inquisitive plant had begun to drape down against him, and he could feel the tight corkscrews of its grabbing tendrils twisting into his hair. He swatted it off and tried to stand, but it felt like his ankle had melted and he fell straight back into the creeper.

He peeled his boot off, frightened that he’d find nothing but a digested necrotic soup where his foot had been… but found… nothing? There were big puncture-holes in the reinforced material but only a graze on his skin. He pressed at it with trembling fingers, ignoring the shooting pains that raced up towards his knee, and all the bones felt like they were there.

Good. Reassuring. Nothing is digesting you just yet. He spent a few seconds struggling to get the boot back on before deciding that getting out was what he should be focusing on. He tried again to stand. The ankle still didn’t feel like it’d support his whole weight, but sticking to his good leg he did at least feel like he might be able to move under his own power again.

Time to get help, Hiro.

With a grimacing hop-shuffle, he made it halfway across the floor to the intercom before the plant barred his way; an unsupported branch chose that moment to drop heavily from the ceiling, right in front of him, as though it could see him coming. Unlucky coincidence, maybe – until it pushed back at him.

Hiro wasn’t going to let it beat him that easily. He threw his weight at it, lunged for the intercom, using his weight to push the plant out of the way, and slapped a palm squarely down on the call button. “…101!” he croaked. “Wake up! This is a ten-ninety! Emergency! I need your help…!”

The plant forced him back again, gently but inexorably, throwing curls around his torso and bad leg and dragging him away from the intercom even as he flailed uselessly at it. Another caught under the edge of his facemask, forcing him to grab onto it to stop it stealing it clear off his head. If the rest of it was this fast and aggressive, whatever would the sickly scent do to him?

The device lay on the floor, still pulsing gently. Maybe he could grab it as he passed- Hiro reached down towards it as the plant pushed him back towards his corner, but the vine nudged upwards at just the wrong moment. His fingertips grazed the screen and-… then it was out of reach.

oOoOoOo

At the call from the intercom, 101 had woken with a start, and promptly fell off the shelf. “…ow…”

He rolled himself upright and looked briefly around the control room – empty. So where was the lieutenant? “Hiro?” 101 was sure he’d heard him call, but he wasn’t responding. He patched himself into the intercom. “Say again, sir?”

The speakers just hissed with solar static.

“Hmm.” 101 trundled over to his perch, jumped up and got himself a more secure connection, then flicked briefly through scanlogs, trying to trace where the human had gone.

…there he was; one human lifereading, in the research bay one floor below.

Of course he’d still be researching that stupid plant. 101 huffed and tutted and rolled his eyes, and tumbled off his perch to see what was going on on the lower deck.

“Lieuten- oh gosh.” 101 stopped dead in the lab doorway, as if he’d rolled across a patch of contact adhesive. “What’s going on?”

Somewhere hidden in the forest came the human’s voice. “Our guest has apparently had an unexpected growth spurt.”

“But it’s huge!” The zeroid inched warily into the room. “Wow. Can you imagine if this had got onto the flight deck?”

“I can indeed imagine, and I imagine that was probably the intention. We ruined it, by having a headache, and being jealous of it.”

101 ignored the jab. “…are you ok? You sound out of breath. Has it hurt you?”

“It does not seem keen to let me get up, but it hasn’t yet injured me badly. How long that good fortune will last is a question I would prefer not to answer.” Hiro coughed. “The plant is not the only danger here. There is a... let’s call it a spider, as well. It has already tried to bite me once.”

“A spider?” 101 looked around himself, doing a full revolution on his axis. “Uh how-how big a spider.”

“Maybe I should have said a chihuahua with ten legs and a poor attitude.”

“Ohh, yuck.” 101 backed into the doorway. “I definitely didn’t see anything like that yesterday.” He scrutinised the ruins of the laboratory, switching to infra-red to look for heatsources. “I can’t see anything now either.”

“Please, focus on the plant for now. We have to stop it before it damages the hull – and the more it grows, the more places the spider will have to hide.”

“Er. How do you propose we stop it? Talk sternly to it?”

“I’m not completely sure how it is growing so quickly at the moment,” Hiro confessed. “I think it is the pot it is rooted in. Perhaps wormhole technology, feeding it mass, somehow. You have to destroy the control device. Once that is broken, the plant should stop growing.”

“That ‘should’ is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting.” 101 spotted the device easily, on the floor where Hiro had dropped it – but by now the plant had grown to further enclose it, a forest of woody stems that’d he knew would be impassable. He wanted to give it an experimental shove, but didn’t want it to grab him before he’d even started. “I see the handheld but I’m not sure how to get to it.”

“Well. If you don’t, this is going to get exponentially worse. So, no pressure.”

“Huh.”

What I’d give for a biiig pair of scissors, 101 mused, wondering if he could shoot his way through – but he quickly revised his opinion when he recalled how close to the hull they were. Explosive decompression wouldn’t be good for Hiro even if it cured their plant-problem.

But as Hiro had implied, if he didn’t do something soon, there was every chance the monster creeper would breach the hull for itself.

Then he recalled the little diamond-bladed circular saw he’d used to cut his way into the pod. If it could cut through carbon steel that effortlessly, he felt reasonably confident it’d go through the plant just as easily.

“Don’t go away!” he called out and bounded for the doorway.

“Thank you, I will try not to.” Hiro sighed. “Where are you going?”

“To get a chainsaw!”

The circular saw was not in its proper place, where 101 had put it away. Don’t tell me someone else has it, he cursed quietly to himself, setting the gantry to roll over continually while he looked through it. Last thing he wanted was a game of hunt-the-tool.

It only took a minute or two to find it – someone had put it away in section A47 instead of A74 – but by that time 101 was more than just irritable, he was growing more and more concerned about his human colleague by the minute.

The plant hadn’t grown a lot, when he arrived back, but comparing visual scans proved it had grown. (No sign of the chihuahuaspider yet.) “Lieutenant Hiro? Are you still okay?”

“Yes. No change so far.”

“I’m going to start cutting it down now.” 101 set the blade to a medium speed and touched it to the plant, hoping it wouldn’t skip back and take a chunk out of him. The blade tore hungrily into the thick tendril, and all that flew up were green splinters; 101’s goggles were soon thickly coated at the edges, but he could at least see what he was doing.

The plant brushed a tendril down over the top of his globe, curiously, as if trying to work out what this strange creature was that was damaging it. 101 ignored it, only too aware of the increasing danger; plants could tear down buildings and break up rock, given time and their endless patience, and he knew that this impatient, vicious green monster might be just as capable of doing all that and more, at a hugely accelerated rate. It could crush him easily if he let it.

Better not let it, then, huh, sweetie?

101 revved up the speed of the saw, and dug in, determined. The vine shivered its leaves above him, like a hiss of pain; branches began to converge on his position, great heavy tendrils dropping down to block his way. He shimmied through a gap just in time and listened to the vine thump to the deck behind him. The growing tip reared like a cobra, stretching out to try and encircle him-

He twisted around and sawed the curling branch off at the base. It immediately withered, suddenly deprived of water and nutrients, turning to sad crispy blacks and browns… and another stem pushed it aside, crowding into the new gap. He repeated the process, but he could see more above and around, just out of reach, all growing down and coming for him. He could spend all day trying to fend them off, he realised – which was probably exactly what it wanted him to do.

Under the sound of his saw, 101 could hear Hiro coughing, wheezily.

Destroy the device, dummy. It won’t stop growing until you do. He turned back and focused on the glowing blue microcomputer, instead… but could feel the cool strength of something living and green coiling down against him. The corkscrew tips of its grabbing tendrils were testing his plating, looking for loose edges they could get under.

Only a few more feet to go, he promised himself, attacking the stems blocking his way with a renewed vigour and trying his hardest to forget the branches above that grew so frighteningly rapidly down towards him. A few more feet then we’ll see if Hiro is right.

Another vine broke and he gained another few inches of reprieve, rolling forwards through the gap, and watched as another section of plant withered to a brittle death in the same accelerated way it had grown. Another tiny section of deck cleared with the death of the section of vine; only an inch or two, but that was good! Right? Maybe they could beat this thing!

“Hurry up-!” Hiro wheezed, feebly; the plant knew it was in trouble and reacted just like any animal would – defensively. “It’s not enjoying you cutting it down. I think it might be trying to suffocate me.”

“Working as fast as I can!”

There were another dozen touches from a dozen angles; 101 had run out of room to run away and doggedly kept cutting, instead, hoping he could cut faster than the plant could grow. Just a few more inches and he could reach the device.

Two vines had snaked around him, insidiously, almost affectionately. More bright corkscrew tendrils were coiling against seams in his exterior, as though trying to split him open; some had already got in around the sides of his goggles and stolen them clean off him. A third was grasping for the glowing control board in front, as though it were a race.

101 sensed he was in trouble when the vine that encircled him finally lifted him off the deck, seeming not to notice when he increased his mass. “Ooh-… shoo-oot. Help!”

He fired out an anchor line and grabbed the rapidly-departing branch carrying the device before it could get too far out of reach.

Anchors were meant to help stop him floating off if the gravity went down, though – not designed to be yanked quite so hard by a plant determined to pull him apart. The line stretched taut and tight almost instantly and he could already feel connectors deep inside beginning to loosen, and recognised this had bought him a few extra seconds, at most. He struggled to reel it in, like a fisherman trying to land a nuclear submarine.

“Oh. No. You. Don’t!” he snarled. “Come here!”

Simultaneously twisting and pulling his anchor, and throwing as much weight as he could behind the saw, by some fluke he managed to snag the blade into vine that carried the device – and it grew drunkenly towards him.

...gotcha!...

101 jammed the saw into the device, and chips of plastic and wire and brilliant blue electrical sparks flew up around him like confetti. …just give me a few more seconds… he prayed to whoever might have an ear open for electronic thoughts, digging deeper into the device’s core and looking desperately for the power source even as the plant continued to drag him away. For such a tiny piece of plastic it was surprisingly tough and he recognised that he might have underestimated the tool he needed.

What in space were they going to do if this didn’t work?!

“101-! What is happening?!”

“Just a se-cond, kinda busy he-ere!” he singsonged. “…ahaha oh please stay still for just one more second.”

The plant was determined not to be easily beaten. It threaded a long tendril down through 101’s open equipment hatch and curled it around the connector that bore the saw. 101 gave a funny little squeak of pain as it twisted on it, slowly beginning to pry it loose-

His saw finally found what it was looking for: the power unit deep inside the control box. The blade screamed as it hit something metallic, skidded and jerked as the teeth snagged into it, then there was a bang, a cloud of acrid black smoke, and a shocking bolt of uncontrolled electricity that unfortunately only had one way to go – back down the saw and into the zeroid holding it.

Charge blistered through 101’s casing, whiting out every sensor and leaving him incapacitated and paralysed. He didn’t even get the chance to vocalise his pain.

…but even as he felt everything turn off, the plant went suddenly passive. The vicious grip didn’t ease, or seem inclined to put him back down, but at least it wasn’t getting tighter, and it had stopped trying to yank components out through his top hatch.

Then the lab sprinklers all turned on.

Ugh.

“…101? Space sergeant?” Through a fog of static and whistling overload, 101 could hear Hiro calling. “101! Are you alive? Are you okay?”

How long had Hiro been calling for? His clock had skipped six seconds. Had he passed out? How embarrassing.

After a little effort, 101 found enough energy to work his voice. “…mostly.” It came out a weirdly deep electronic grumble. “I think? …slightly fried.” He paused to reconsider. “…mostly fried.” Another pause while everything tried to recalibrate. “…’bout you?”

“I think-… I think I will be all right. Bruised, definitely. Maybe a cracked rib or two. But nothing worse.” There was a soft grunt of effort. “Assuming I can get up.”

“Saw’s busted,” 101 apologised.

“Don’t worry. I think I am just strong enough.” The vines were thick and somewhat woody, but Hiro managed to get his hands behind them and push them loose enough to wriggle out from. His ribs blazed with the movement – yes, definitely fractured. He stood up; a brief wave of nausea made him unsteady, but it passed. His ankle still tingled, and he really wanted to scratch it, but the acid pain of the bite had at least faded and it would support his weight again.

101 hung silently tangled in the vines, at a very lopsided angle, just out of reach; it had made a spirited attempt to break him open, threading long spiralling tendrils into any gaps it had found (or created), but he looked like he was still basically in one piece. Scorched, smoking slightly, and a little dented, but he was built tougher than his mannerisms implied. Hiro was confident he should be fine.

Hiro examined the ruined saw still embedded in the charred remains of the alien device, and exhaled softly in relief. The instant the alien influence was gone, the plant stopped that weird, hyper-accelerated growth, and became just a plant once more. Its leaves quivered in the air of Hiro’s movement, but no longer stretched out for him like clinging green hands.

“101…?”

One eye tracked slowly and found his face, then the other joined it, and 101 just stared dumbly for several long seconds. “…hey hiro.” He sounded exhausted – drained, battery just strong enough to keep him ticking over.

Hiro gave him a reassuring smile. “I will go and fetch some secateurs. I do not think we will get you out of there very quickly without them.”

“…no hurry…” 101 observed, placidly, and shuttered his optics. “…’m not going anywhere…”

“If you could at least turn the sprinklers off before I get back, that would be particularly excellent...”

oOoOoOo

It took Hiro a while to cut a path through the jungle to get to him, but 101 perked up quickly after that with a little power. Hiro carefully removed the broken saw out of its socket, once the zeroid had finally been persuaded to relinquish his nervous grip on it, then trimmed away the vine that had already attempted to do the same. (101 offered a little ow for effect.) After snipping through one individual vine at a time, Hiro used the plant itself to lower the heavy zeroid carefully down onto the deck.

“How bad does it look?” 101 asked, trying to direct his gaze towards his equipment hatch. He looked vaguely comical, still covered in those aggressive little green springs. “What I’d give for a mirror.”

“Not too bad, to be honest,” Hiro replied, relieved. “I think the only damage you sustained is that which you are already aware of. And to your pride. I may have to open you up to remove some of the last tendrils.”

101 made a noise of displeasure. “…stupid bits of green.”

Hiro smiled. “I’m sure you will be just fine after a bath.” Listening to water still plinking quietly down from the soaked foliage, he added; “That is, a proper bath.”

“…and how are you, sir?”

“I have some astonishing bruises already, and I am confident I have multiple cracked ribs.” Hiro grimaced and tried to stretch. “But they will heal. And we are both alive.” He turned and sighed up at the mass of plant still towering over them. 101 had killed half of it, leaving great tranches of blackened stems, and the sickly stink of narcotic perfume had faded away, but the rest was contentedly, placidly alive. And growing right into their extremely expensive analytical bank. “But maybe not for much longer, if Doctor Ninestein finds out.”

“I’d like to put forward a suggestion: ‘flamethrower’,” 101 said, from by his feet.

Hiro shot him a look but couldn’t quite work out if it was intended as a joke. “While I may disagree on that specific point, we would certainly struggle to make it worse.”

“He’s gonna have a fit.”

Hiro rested his chin against his palm. “Maybe if we try and tidy up a little, his wrath will be less terrible. Plus, we don’t tell him. Agreed?”

“Oh, ten-ten, absolutely!”

Relief at being out of the plant’s murderous embrace had allowed Hiro the luxury of temporarily forgetting that the plant hadn’t been his only attacker.

The spider hadn’t, though.

Something with ten limbs and a bad attitude sprinted out of nowhere and latched back on to Hiro’s leg – his conveniently bootless leg.

“-oh-!” He gave a strangled scream of pain and was already collapsing before 101 had even worked out anything was going on.

Even a zeroid’s computerised reflexes proved too slow. 101 tracked the spider across the deck and made a spirited attempt at intercepting it, but it dived straight back into the wet foliage and he just skidded helplessly against the leaves.

“Leave it- leave it!” Hiro gasped, clinging to the vines as a support. “Help me first-!”

“Sir?” 101 stared up at him, helplessly. “What can I do?”

“It bit me before,” Hiro explained, shakily, and raised a finger to counter 101’s protests before he could point out Hiro hadn’t said it had succeeded when it tried to bite him previously. “Only the tiniest graze but it left me nauseous and unable to stand. I know this will be far worse. I must get to sick bay.”

“I’ll get someone to come up here and help-”

“No, no. No time, and I think I can make it if I go now. But I will need an antivenom.”

Understanding had already begun to replace some of the alarm in 101’s expression.

“Get a sample of its venom and meet me in the sick bay.”

“Right!” 101 sounded an equal mixture of scared and urgent. “Um, right. Sample!”

Hiro dragged himself back upright, using the vines as a ladder, and lurched on one leg out through the door.

The spider sat in the far corner, hunkered down in the foliage, watching. It didn’t look remotely like a chihuahua, 101 recognised – but it was easily big enough to be one. Unlike the plant, this couldn’t possibly harm him, but if he couldn’t neutralise it? Any human aboard would be at risk. (He refused the contemplate the idea of it somehow getting off the ship.)

It unfolded some of its far-too-many legs and began to inch out into the room. It vibrated its mouthparts and squeaked softly, the sounds high and thin and threatening. It looked like it was trying to skirt around him so it could get out of the door and chase Hiro. Oh no you don’t. You don’t go near my human again, ever.

It got close enough for 101 to see the tiny beads of venom collecting on the undersides of its mandibles. How was he meant to collect them?

A whole lab full of tools and between them they’d managed to wreck the entire room? No, there’d be something tucked away in a drawer. Some sort of little sample pot. Hopefully it wasn’t exclusively designed for human use and he’d have some way of holding it.

The spider made an unexpected dash for the doorway but this time 101 was ready and rolled into its way, forced it to retreat.

He alternated between rummaging in the drawers, and chasing the giant bug back into its corner. Unwilling to shoot it in case he accidentally killed it before he had his sample, he ultimately had to cripple it, shooting out most of its five pairs of legs – and it still kept up that spirited effort to get out and chase Hiro. But he’d slowed it down enough to give himself time to find what he needed.

“Okay, you objectionable creepy-crawlie.” 101 had finally found something hollow that he hoped would tempt the spider to bite. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

It shuffled lopsidedly across the floor on three legs, dragging the damaged ones along behind it, still trying to skirt around 101 and get to the door. 101 waited until it was almost past him then shoved the collection tube in front of it.

Startled, it bit viciously hard down on the proffered target, and 101 watched in distaste at the amount of venom it injected – almost a teaspoonful of pale, yellow, thready liquid. It realised it had been caught out almost immediately, and yanked its head back, disengaging its wicked mandibles, and hissed.

101 glared at it, unimpressed, and targeted it clean between its many eyes. “Bite on this, sucker,” he observed, and brilliant, white-hot pulsed energy spat through the air between them.

The spider sagged against itself, its legs all folding inward, head suddenly replaced by a nugget of smouldering charcoal.

101 gave it a little poke, to be sure, and one of the legs fell off. “Oh, ewww. Okay that’s quite enough of that. Gross.” He fled up the corridor with his precious sample.

Hiro had made it to the gurney, but hadn’t quite managed to get onto it, instead mostly on his knees, clinging to it. “I already set up the machine,” he wheezed, pointing a shaky hand. “Just need to put the sample in. It should do the rest.”

“Ten-ten.” 101 leaped onto the workbench and sent sensitive equipment scattering to the floor. He jammed the precious sample into the flashing opening in the machine, and watched as it took it in.

Hiro sank the rest of the way to the floor, still clinging strengthlessly to the bed. “Is it working?”

“It’s doing something,” 101 confirmed. “I guess it looks good but medicine’s not really my speciality.” He glanced down. “Can you get up there?”

“Let me catch my breath and I’ll try again.” Hiro struggled to loosen his collar. It felt like there was no air in the room.

His increasingly feeble attempts to get up evidently spooked his extremely-inexperienced new healthcare provider. “You know what, the floor is probably fine! You can’t fall off a floor! Stay down there! I-I think the antivenom is ready anyway!”

The automated care facility looked confused at not having a patient on the bed, but soon found Hiro. He stretched out a trembling arm for it, and let the machine punch a short needle into the inside of his elbow. The serum stung as it infused, a long sharp cold that felt like it went all the way up into his shoulder, and there was a subtle urge to vomit, but it passed. The cannula hurt, like a loose piece of plastic straw jabbing into his elbow; he plucked at it, foiled by the film dressing holding it in place.

“Sir, you need to leave that. The autodoc is trying to give you fluid through it.”

Hiro felt like if he had any more fluids his throat would close up altogether, but tried to relax anyway. “Not sure I… need more… just now.” He clawed a pillow down from the bed and tried to prop himself up on it, instead. Maybe if he didn’t lay flat, he wouldn’t feel like all the water in his body was travelling up to his head to drown him.

Time crawled past, slowly as old glue. The antiserum didn’t look like it was having any effect, nothing in Hiro’s condition changing. The note of his wheezing breath hadn’t changed – if anything it sounded worse.

“Does it feel like it’s working?” 101 asked, faintly.

My human is dying. My friend is dying.

“It’s not, is it? I’m going to have to get an actual doctor. This is beyond my capabilities. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll get Kiljoy.”

Kiljoy – the “affectionately” nicknamed zeroid doctor – was perfectly competent in human medicine, and 101 had absolute confidence that he’d know what to do.

…but that was assuming he could get him to Spacehawk.

And all of that relied on being able to get through to Hawknest in the first place. On literally any other day, his own internal array would have been strong enough. He could have snuck the doctor out, remotely piloted Treehawk to Spacehawk, got Hiro cured, and returned everyone to their proper places before anyone even noticed. Well ok sure, they would definitely have noticed Treehawk leaving, so maybe ‘before they could do anything about it’.

Today he had to go through the main channel, because it was all he could get to connect. Chances he’d manage to avoid too much human involvement (and all the associated angry rebukes) were pretty slim.

“Hawknest, this is Spacehawk. This is a ten-ninety! We’ve had an incident, requesting you send Doctor Kiljoy now.”

Silence met his words. He gave it five whole infinitely long seconds before repeating himself. And again…

oOoOoOo

In the northwest corner of the South American continent, where Hawknest was located, it was actually the middle of the night, and almost everyone had been asleep.

Almost. Doctor Ninestein had drawn the short straw with the overnight senior on-call. A zeroid woke him at the alarm, and it took a few moments for his sleep-clouded brain to connect the words “Spacehawk”, “Kiljoy” and “mayday” and realise that was why the quiet machine that had woken him hadn’t done any processing of the call. Don’t spend ages taking a message – just fetch someone who can deal with it.

Hearing exclusively the space sergeant’s agitated voice deepened his unease – and heightened his suspicion.

“This is urgent. Like we needed him yesterday urgent. We have a situation! Ten-ninety, guys! Mayday! Please, drop the damn teapot and come to the radio!”

Ninestein slid into his chair, and toggled the display over to include visual, to reveal a filthy zeroid who looked like he’d just returned from full scale war with Hiro’s pot plants, covered as he was in green spirals and bits of leaf. A wisp of something green curled out from above his optics, jamming his equipment hatch open.

“What sort of situation,” he asked, flatly.

“Uhh.” 101’s gaze flickered briefly off to one side. “Could the debrief wait until after you’ve sent Kiljoy?”

“I’m paging him now.” Ninestein was already transmitting the alert through to the medical suite. “Kiljoy will be on his way in a moment. I still need you to warn me what we should expect when we get up there so we can ensure we have the right supplies.”

“You mean you’re also-… oh. Um.”

“Um?” Ninestein echoed, finally looking back up. “I am hoping that ‘um’ is going to be followed by an explanation so amazingly reasonable that I am going to immediately wonder why I ever doubted you, 101.”

Unfortunately the um was not followed in such a manner. “Hiro, um. He was. Bitten.”

Not sure what he’d been expecting in the first place, bitten definitely wasn’t one of the candidates. “…-what?!”

“There uh there was flotsam. We picked it up. There was a spider in it that we didn’t see and it bit him.”

“A spider bite. In outer space.”

“Sir, please. Can discussing it wait?” 101 pleaded, and genuine distress was suddenly clear in his words. “Hiro, he’s-... I don’t know what to do! I think he’s-… maybe very sick. We already generated an antiserum and it’s not working and I don’t know what else to do.”

“We will most definitely be discussing this,” Ninestein cautioned, tightly. “But yes, it can wait. We’re on our way. Give him best supportive care until we get there and do not let him die.”

oOoOoOo

101 had returned straight to the small infirmary, and scooted as close to his ‘patient’ as he could get without squashing him. “Hiro?” He could see the human’s breath condensing against the plastic oxygen mask, so at least he wasn’t dead, but it was shallow. His neck looked thicker than usual, as well, his eyelids heavier, his skin blotched. “Help’s on its way. You just have to hang on a little longer.” He sagged. “Please don’t die.”

“…have no intention… of dying yet,” Hiro managed, feebly, and managed to joke, squeezing the words out with difficulty; “do you honestly think… I trust you… with my plants?”

101 understood it was an attempt at humour, but couldn’t find the spirit to do anything about it. “Doctor Ninestein said to give ‘best supportive care’ but I’m not sure what that is,” he apologised, quietly. “I hope it’s just oxygen and fluids, because I can tell the machine to do those, and not like, blankets and snuggles, because I don’t think that would help, coming from me.”

Hiro wheezed a faint laugh into the oxygen mask; the whole situation was so absurd, it was either that or cry. “It’s fine,” he creaked, even though it clearly wasn’t. “For your first day… as nurse… you’re not… completely terrible.”

“Apart from the part where I accidentally killed my patient before he was even sick.”

“…granted… please don’t write me off… just yet, 101.”

Hiro really just wanted to rest, hard floor be damned, but it didn’t look like 101 was about to let him – fretting over every minor change in the readouts and chasing him to confirm he was still alive. It was probably a good thing. Wasn’t there something about critically-ill patients going to sleep and never waking back up?

That meant he was critically ill, then. Not a great thought.

He rested his palm against 101’s casing and felt the zeroid lean very very subtly into the touch. “You have been talking with… Doctor Ninestein… again.”

“…does that make a difference?” Another of those subtle electronic almost-sighs. “Yeah. He’s on his way up with Kiljoy.”

“You know his bark… is always worse… than his bite.”

“To a human, maybe. He doesn’t threaten you with the scrap-heap. One of these days he’s gonna go through with it.” A subtle hitch in 101’s systems. “This time might be that time.”

“Then I… will make sure… he doesn’t.”

“You might nnn-…” 101 swallowed the rest of the words before they could get out, but they both knew what he’d been going to say. You might not be able to because he might get here too late.

“Best supportive care,” Hiro reminded, with a cough. “Perhaps… more oxygen, please…”

101 seemed content to sit quietly with him for the next forty tortuous minutes, watching the medical readouts and occasionally fussing about them as they trended subtly down, but otherwise just watching anxiously for any significant changes to the human’s condition. He kept himself pressed against Hiro’s palm the whole time, cooking up something not entirely truthful about being able to monitor the human’s pulse better this way, and they both knew it was bullshit because there was an entire medical suite doing that already, but Hiro allowed him the deception.

Hiro himself grew quieter. It felt like the big hand at his windpipe was still tightening – like he was trying hard to breathe through a straw, and someone was putting their finger over the end of it. Unexpected muscles ached from the effort of sucking air into his lungs.

There was a subtle movement from the small robot, turning to look slightly off to the side; Hiro recognised that he was talking to someone, and an instant later 101 confirmed the thesis.

“They’re here!” 101 threw himself at the doorway and hurtled clumsily around the corner, and the sounds of movement very quickly faded.

“That’s good. That’s good,” Hiro wheezed into the silence. Maybe now he could sleep.

oOoOoOo

101 met the arrivals from Earth at the airlock, which spoke volumes about the current situation – it was rare for the space sergeant not to remotely steer Treehawk in, as though scared they’d scuff the paintwork.

“Infirmary?” Ninestein demanded, striding purposefully through, foregoing a greeting and scarcely waiting for 101’s urgent affirmative.

Now the boss and the doctor were here, 101 felt a little of the tension release – whatever happened, it wasn’t all on just him any more – but a different flavour of anxiety just swelled up to fill the gap. Hiro was still critically ill and now it was someone else’s responsibility and part of him didn’t want to let them take over, just in case-

He took an instant for himself, to try and reset. It was just his code, just a conflict in his code. He was programmed for command and this was his jurisdiction. That was all. He was allowed to defer to his designated superior officers. That was ALL.

That microsecond of delay was enough to spot that trundling on behind the two senior crew was a less welcome sight – a second zeroid, with no number, and three diagonal red stripes on either side of his brow band.

101 glared at the newcomer, but without much spirit. “Why’d they have to bring you along, Zero.”

The sergeant major unshuttered his optics and gave him a critical look, but miraculously said nothing about how filthy he was. “Well, perhaps they decided they needed someone in charge who knows what he’s doing, since the secretary they usually leave in charge up here brought the post in without checking what was in the box first, didn’t he?”

It took some skill to produce such a poisonous glare when you mostly lacked the facial architecture for it, but if any zeroid was up to the job, it was 101. “Hiro might be dying, and you come up here just to insult me,” he hissed. “Nice.” He snapped his shutters closed and pursued the others.

“That wasn’t what-… flaming thunderbolts. Just trying to lighten the mood!” Zero hastily followed in their wake.

oOoOoOo

Ninestein made it to the sick bay first, and for an instant was baffled by how empty it looked. Then he followed the long spiral of clear tubing down from the wall and realised the patient wasn’t actually on the bed.

“Hiro-!” Ninestein stumbled over to him. “The hell are you still on the floor for.” He got under his free arm and jacked him up just enough to get him onto the bed.

Hiro rasped something unintelligible that was probably an attempt at an explanation. He sounded like he was drowning in his own lungs.

Kiljoy settled at the controls of the medical suite and looked over the scans. “Oh, this is not good. Hypotension, significant angioedema, very poor saturations.” He patched into the autodoc and took over its automated functions, immediately accessing the drug bank. “Does he still have a good cannula?”

Ninestein checked his arm. “Yes. What do you think, doctor?”

“Well, he is still alive. So we have a fair chance.” Kiljoy didn’t look up. “The antivenom seems to be working but there is an allergic response on top. We will have to add to his record that Lieutenant Hiro appears to be allergic to spiders. Or… what passes for spiders, in outer space.”

“Do we have the supplies you need?”

“Yes. I am giving him the adrenaline now.”

Spotting the two command zeroids loitering in the doorway, Ninestein glared and threw an arm out in a point. “This isn’t a spectator sport, you two. Go find some work to do. There’s plenty of it!”

oOoOoOo

Zero followed 101 into what remained of the laboratory. “Wow. You went through this place like a wrecking ball, didn’t you, lad.”

“Huh.” 101 looked up at the towering creeper, not sure how to start to tackle it. He’d already wrecked the saw and didn’t think there was a spare. A plasma cutter seemed extreme, but at least he knew they had one of them. “Are you here for any particular reason or just to continue to give me a hard time?”

“Well, like the humans say, I like hard work.” Beat. “I could watch other people do it all day.”

101 didn’t even bother looking at him; Zero’s previous attempt to lighten the mood had fallen just as flat and he hadn’t even been here ten minutes yet. “I don’t really need that kinda ‘humour’ right now.” He lashed a cable around the highest part he could reach on the vine, adjusted his mass to the maximum the deck would tolerate, and rocked backwards. The plant slowly unzipped from where it was rooted into the GC-MS, but snagged close to the top.

Zero – for once – actually let it slide. “How are you going to deal with those big’uns up the top?” Seeing 101 struggling, he lent his weight to the vine and after a little combined pulling from the two zeroids it finally tore free, taking a piece of ceiling with it.

“Fetch a gantry from the garage, I guess? If I can figure out how to even get it up here-”

“Fla-aming thunderbolts.”

Both looked around to find Ninestein in the doorway of the wrecked lab, surveying the disaster zone.

“Oh dear,” 101 said, matter-of-factly.

Ninestein fixed him on a glare. “Zero? Out,” he said, not looking away.

For once the sergeant major didn’t argue, and silently rolled on out, leaving 101 trying not to look like he was hiding in the dead foliage.

The door wouldn’t quite close, jamming against stems that had escaped during the plant’s rampage, but Ninestein shut it as far as possible anyway – although whether it was for an element of privacy, or just to stop 101 escaping, wasn’t immediately clear. “I’m waiting for your explanation,” he said, his reasonable tone belying his anger.

“Uh.” 101 was used to getting yelled at; this felt different. Less frustrated and irritated by your antics, more genuinely seriously pissed off because you genuinely seriously screwed up. “Is-is Hiro all right?”

“Explanation.”

“Ten-ten, sir! I-I spotted it on the long range scanners. We thought it might have been garbage, but we had to double check it wasn’t something Zelda had, uh, planted.” Ninestein’s expression flattened and 101 hastily added, to reassure that it hadn’t been an intentional joke; “I couldn’t see inside it so we brought it aboard.”

“Why didn’t you jettison and destroy it when you realised it was such an obvious trap?”

“Hiro hadn’t finished his analysis. He wanted to ensure there was nothing that would pose a threat to Earth, first-”

“So I repeat, why didn’t you jettison and destroy it as soon as Hiro was finished?”

“He… hadn’t finished. He was still working on it. He-he just left it a little while because he had a migraine.”

“And you didn’t see what was happening because…?”

“I… was… on the flight deck…?”

“So you’re telling me that even though you’d brought a hostile alien onboard, the pair of you thought it would be fine to leave it on its own while you went to take a nap?”

“…it wasn’t hostile at that point! It was just some… tiny little potplant. It was smaller than the ones on the flight deck! We analysed it and-and-… it looked fine? There was nothing wrong with it? But I think I was in the way. Hiro sent me away to charge. I was expecting him to come and get me when he was done-!”

Ninestein stared at him for a second or two, then laughed, incredulous, and covered his face with his hand. “This just gets better by the second. You’re now saying that in spite of bringing an alien aboard, which you knew nothing about and couldn’t even remotely confidently say was harmless, you decided to abandon the human you’re responsible for, and leave him on his own with it, undefended, while YOU went for a nap?!”

“That-that’s not what I said-!”

oOoOoOo

Down the corridor and tucked just out of sight behind a bulkhead, Zero tried not to look like he was eavesdropping – although it was difficult, given Ninestein’s volume. The sergeant major had often gleefully daydreamed about the little space twit finally getting scrapped, but now his comrade was actually genuinely in the teeth of it, he found he really wasn’t enjoying it as much as his imagination had made him think he would.

After 101 had run out of explanation, and it had all proved inadequate anyway, he seemed to have lost the power of articulated speech altogether. He ended up mostly just making little jagged protest noises that didn’t really correspond to any actual words. Eventually even they had stopped.

Not all Ninestein’s words were audible through the door, but a large proportion of them were. Zero could see why his fellow zeroid was completely lost for words.

All those sensors at your disposal and you didn’t at any time notice what was happening in here? What were you doing? Why were you away from your post? And don’t give me any excuses about solar activity, because that isn’t some new phenomenon you’ve never encountered before and don’t know how to handle.

This whole farce is a complete disgrace. You should be absolutely ashamed of your behaviour. I was beginning to think you actually had your act together up here, but now I’m wondering if it’s all just Hiro massaging the truth so I wouldn’t find out.

Bringing it aboard was a whole new absurd level of incompetence! What did you think you were even doing? Your sole reason to exist is to look after this ship and its crew. To protect any humans from danger. Not to, to… bring the danger aboard in the first place!

The sooner you remember why you were commissioned, the better. This is your job. I expect you to do it to the very best of your abilities, at all times, and not to, to… prance around, roleplaying being human! And I shouldn’t have to be telling you this, either! Machines don’t have “off” days! If you’re not functioning at full capacity, get yourself repaired.

Now I somehow have to work out what the hell to do with you. Why I shouldn’t take you back to Earth with us and drop you off at the nearest breaker’s yard. I probably would, if you weren’t so far above top secret!

Get this mess tidied up. I want a detailed report on how much is salvageable. Last thing I needed was to have to replace this entire suite, on top of everything else.

Ninestein was still muttering when he left. “Never thought I’d end up dealing with the first case of corporate manslaughter caused by gross negligence on the part of a robot…”

When Zero finally decided he’d left it long enough to look like he hadn’t been right outside listening, and trundled back through the door, 101 had quietly got back to work. He looked surprisingly small.

“Leave me alone, Zero,” 101 said, but without any heat. “If there’s one thing I really don’t have the processor room for right now, it’s dealing with you.”

“I’m going to help you pull the rest of this jungle down, lad,” Zero half-lied. “Ninestein’s instructions.”

“I don’t need any help.”

“No, probably not. I could just sit here and watch you, make sure you actually do something right for a change. But that would mean trusting you to make sure you do it right in the first place, wouldn’t it, and I figure today you need a bit of instructions.”

101 recognised it as a convoluted attempt to say he wanted to help, without losing face, and responded in kind. “Huh.”

They worked in unnatural silence together, for a little while.

“How much did you hear?” 101 asked, at last.

“Hear of what?”

101 slid him one of those looks, that Zero could almost hear; a long, drawlingly disbelieving reeeally?

“All right. A little bit. He was very loud. Hard to avoid overhearing, really.”

101 sighed and deflated a little more. “That means so did everyone else. Great.”

“Oh big deal. The lads is always hearing him yell at me, and they still do what I tell ’em.” Zero bumped him. “Ninestein’s just worried. He doesn’t ever mean most of it – you got living proof of that, right here.”

“None of your humans have been hurt because of you, though, have they. You never killed anyone by being incompetent.”

“Now now, less of that. No-one’s dying.”

“They won’t tell me how Hiro is. How can that not be a bad sign.”

“Hmm.” Zero thought for a second or two. Why have rank if you can’t pull it? He commed Kiljoy for an update and got an abbreviated return that the doctor was busy and didn’t have time to talk but there was no immediate urgency or overt concern in his response. That felt reassuring. He left instructions to update him as soon as he got the chance.

“It’s academic, anyway,” 101 husked, so unnaturally softly that Zero barely caught it. “Even if they don’t have me scrapped, I don’t think I’d forgive myself if he didn’t get better. So I guess I deserve whatever comes. Incompetent. Too busy pretending to be human, not enough time spent doing what I’m meant to be doing-”

“Hey. Less of the histrionics, lad. It will all be fine. Lieutenant Hiro’s in best possible hands, and we zeroids is valuable assets – even you. No-one’s dismantling anyone over one mistake.”

“I’m not talking about disassembly. I’m talking about reprogramming-”

“Well they’re not going to do that either,” Zero scolded, lightly. “Like him what must be obeyed always says to me… ahem.” He pretended to clear his throat. “You could end up even worse, second time round.”

101 tried for a glare, but it turned into a faint exhausted giggle instead.

“If it helps? Kiljoy says he’s responding to treatment. So less of that snivelling. Let’s get this plant through the mulcher and we might even rescue a bit of your dignity.”

“Thanks, Zero.” 101 gave him a bump. “Turns out you’re not a total nightmare all the time after all. Who knew.”

“The feeling, my lad, is more than mutual.”

oOoOoOo

Ninestein had found a chair and pulled it up alongside Hiro’s medibed. The lieutenant still looked partially dead, but he was breathing without that hideous rasping death-rattle any more, not to mention sitting up and conscious.

“You pair of idiots have put me in a very difficult position, Hiro,” Ninestein sighed and folded his arms. “I don’t want to have to yell at you as well, particularly while you’re still in a hospital bed, but I don’t think you two could have done a worse job if you’d actively tried to.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t think simple scientific curiosity would end up having such a catastrophic conclusion.” Hiro knew he was going to ache for days, and the lights felt far too bright against his swollen eyelids, but it felt like luxury to be able to breathe again. Fresh air stung his throat, but felt indescribably good at the same time. “Perhaps I wasn’t quite thinking so clearly as I would have liked. Solar activity almost overwhelmed our shields and I had a bad headache.” He turned his face to his superior, but couldn’t get his eyes open more than a sliver, and Ninestein wasn’t betraying much. “I am afraid the Splinterhawk project will have to take a temporary back seat to upgrading Spacehawk’s shielding. Our effectiveness can’t be this impaired after nothing more than an increase in sunspots.”

“I won’t pretend to like it, but… fine. A battleship with no functional crew is effectively disabled. Which brings us to the little elephant in the room.”

“Sir?”

“Space Sergeant 101 bringing that thing aboard in the first place. There’s negligence, and then there’s… I don’t even know what this is.”

“I know.” Hiro let his head sag back against the pillow. “Next time he gets excited about shooting down something suspicious, I won’t overrule him.”

There was a fractional hesitation. “You overruled him?”

“Mmh. I didn’t like not knowing what Zelda was planning. I thought I could be cleverer than her. It never occurred to me that this…” Hiro lifted his hands, “…was what she was planning.”

“That puts a subtly different slant on things.”

“…sir?”

Ninestein rearranged his folded arms. “It would have been so much easier if you’d just programmed them like computers, if only so it’s more obvious what is human error, and what is the garbage they’ve taken it upon themselves to do. 101 is meant to be calm and competent, especially since he’s in charge of so much critical infrastructure up here, but he’s almost as… idiosyncratic… as Zero.”

“Yes, I heard how you weren’t happy with him. Maybe not the specifics but definitely the volume.”

Ninestein muttered something exasperated that Hiro didn’t catch. “Contrary to popular belief, I do not enjoy having to tear a strip off those little idiots. Especially when it sounds like they didn’t actually deserve all of it, for a change.”

The words you could just apologise hung in the air.

Hiro coughed. “At least credit him for saving my life,” he said, when the silence had stretched on just that little too long.

“Are we forgetting the part he played in putting it at risk in the first place?”

“Doctor… you do not like them to make decisions, and yet you seem to put the onus on them to do so. You would prefer he had been more stubborn, and refused a direct order? On safety grounds, perhaps.”

“…and I’d have said that was wrong, as well. No matter what he did, it would have been the wrong thing.” Ninestein blew a forced exhale out through pursed lips. “I know where you’re going with this, and I do see it, but there has to be a limit, Hiro. You might tell him to bring a baby sporilla aboard, but I wouldn’t expect him to go ahead and do it. Machines have safety protocols for a reason.” He covered his face with both palms. “They are responsible for our lives, sometimes. Oftentimes. We have to be able to trust them absolutely one hundred and one percent. If we can’t trust them to follow orders, then they have to be reprogrammed. That’s as complex as it gets.”

Hiro took a few moments to organise his own thoughts. “We both made mistakes of judgement here. But I am not dead yet. I might have been, had he not decided to risk your wrath and call for help. Had we programmed them to follow strict instructions, I definitely would be dead, as we would never have considered the need to program them with how to respond to an allergic reaction to an alien bite.”

Ninestein didn’t cut in with a sarcastic comment, even though Hiro knew exactly what he wanted to say. He could sense Kiljoy listening, as well – the little electronic chirps that often accompanied zeroid activity were curiously absent.

“Yes, we programmed them to do a job. We programmed them to have protecting humans as a core function. But then we gave them the tools to learn how to do that themselves, and they have grown so far beyond what we ever expected. And without even trying, we’ve given them the drive to want to. Isn’t that still a triumph?”

“I take your point.” Ninestein measured his words carefully. “But let’s not call Zero a triumph because he’ll get so big-headed he won’t fit through the zeroidoors.”

oOoOoOo

Still rather wallowing in self-pity, it took 101 a few microseconds longer than normal to realise someone was paging him. It was one of his zeroids; reporting… something unusual. Something big. Something coming across the solar system, from the direction of the sun – and Mars.

Oh, not now, not now!

101 patched into the intercom, already accelerating towards the flight deck. “Sir… doctor Ninestein, I have a contact. Still some distance away, but it looks big.”

“Details?” Ninestein demanded. Sounded like he was following.

“Nothing yet sir, just that it looks big.” 101 emerged clumsily from the lift into the command centre, lopsided and struggling to keep his traction. “But we have it on track – definitely Martian.”

Of all the times Zelda could have picked! But that was the point, wasn’t it. Take Spacehawk out of commission, then attack and destroy when she was most vulnerable. Had it all gone to plan, both he and Hiro would have been helpless, unable to mount any kind of defence. Further proof that headaches, jealousy, and pure dumb luck did have their uses.

101 leaped for his perch but couldn’t quite get stable on it; bits of vine got in the way. He was debating hopping across to the main desk when Ninestein appeared through the door and he thought better of it. Just have to hope they didn’t get much martian-induced turbulence or there may be some new dents in the floor after this.

“Have you been monitoring Mars?” Ninestein demanded.

“Of course I’ve been monitoring Mars.” 101 hastily checked in with the space zeroids. Without missing a beat, they all complained about the solar activity leaving them blind. “But we can’t see much. It’s behind the sun!”

Ninestein gave him a stern look that said today of all days he particularly wasn’t interested in excuses, and 101 wisely shut up and went back to his sensors.

Using processing powers he didn’t often have to flex, he patched into as many deep-space monitoring stations as he could grab; communications lag meant it was going to take a lot of interpretation and extrapolating, but relying on Spacehawk’s own sensors when he knew they weren’t up to the current job was a guaranteed one way trip to the car-crusher.

Ninestein gave him time to process. “Well? Not ZEAFs?”

“No sir, definitely bigger.” 101 threw his analysis up onto the screens. It was still annoyingly pixelated; he made an effort to clean it up but everywhere was still getting back to him with data.

His commander surveyed the screen. “What do you think it is?”

101 froze – was that a test? Even the LEDs of his optics stopped scrolling. “Sir-?”

“I’m not trying to catch you out. What do you think it is.”

“Uh.” 101 scrambled to clear up his analysis. No pressure no pressure. “Looks like a battle cruiser. But just one,” he finally decided. “Comparable size to Spacehawk.”

“Take up station against it.”

“Ten-ten, sir.”

Spacehawk broke orbit, swung her nose around and fired up her main drive, taking up position between earth and whatever it was that was approaching. The time it had taken them to cover the distance had also allowed the alien vessel closer. Ninestein paced silently the whole time; 101 resisted the urge to give him constant updates.

“Should I hail them?”

“Not yet.” Ninestein peered out into the dark. “I don’t see anything.”

“They’re running dark, sir. No lights, and they’re too far away to make a significant silhouette, either, yet.” After a second, he added; “we can see it just fine. It’s lit up like a Christmas tree in the infra-red.”

“Can you hit it?”

“Of course we can hit it– I-I mean- affirmative, sir.”

“Good. Do you have a lock on it yet?”

A battery of excited responses from the space zeroids responded to 101’s question about whether they were in a position to defend themselves. “Absolutely; we have it on a positive track and a good weapons fix.”

Ninestein nodded. “Good. Give them a shot across the bow, see if we can get them to turn and run before they get close enough to fire at us.” 101’s hesitation was fractional, but Ninestein noticed it. “Last thing we want is to get into an all-out firefight while Spacehawk is still operating far under her peak capacity,” he added, not entirely sure why he was indulging the robot’s doubt. “If they think we’re fully operational and their plan failed, they’ll turn tail. Contrarily, if we damage them, they may decide they have nothing to lose by taking us on.”

“Ten-ten, sir. Firing now.”

The deck thumped faintly and a blink of white light sped away into the dark, until it was indistinguishable from the stars. Seconds passed.

The beautifully-placed shot grazed within a kilometre, detonating close enough to pebbledash the alien vessel with shrapnel.

The ship was still too far away for the human to see much, but Spacehawk’s zeroids all had a beautiful view of its sublights firing. It began to slew to one side, fighting to overcome its inertia. Its trajectory shifted slowly towards something that would skirt upwards, over their position.

101 swallowed his triumphant little ha! “Successful detonation.”

“And?”

“They’re beginning to turn.”

“Good.” Ninestein moved away from the porthole. “Now you can open a channel…”

oOoOoOo

“Well, doctor?” Hiro swung his feet over the side of the medibed, and studied his lopsided attire. He still felt weak, a sort of bone-deep exhaustion that made everything feel weirdly heavy, like Spacehawk’s rotation was off somehow and the gravity was wrong. The swelling – the angioedema, Kiljoy had called it – had gone down, though, and he could open his eyes again. “What’s my prognosis?”

“Oh, I feel confident in saying you will make a full recovery,” Kiljoy observed, pleasantly. “The remaining toxins will be flushed out of your system in no time. Unfortunately you will probably feel the after-effects for a few days. Take antihistamines, painkillers if you need them, and stay hydrated. And call me immediately if you find you feel worse.”

Hiro wobbled to his feet and measured his balance. “Thank you.” He let go of the mattress – good, didn’t immediately fall on his backside – and limped unsteadily across the sick bay.

“Ah, Hiro.” Ninestein appeared in the doorway, looking very chilled for having just repelled an alien incursion. “Good to see you back on your feet.”

Rolling despondently along behind him was the unnaturally subdued figure of the ship’s command zeroid. It took him a second to process the scene – then hit the brakes.

“Hiro-!” Startled, 101 rocked back on his axis to look up at him. He was actually trembling, visibly. “Does this mean you’re okay?”

“Tired, and sore, and not one hundred percent, yet, but I do have the doctor’s blessing to be up-”

“Oh thank god-!” 101 leaped across the space between them in a heartbeat. His impact was exquisitely carefully controlled and barely more than a little nudge, but it still almost knocked Hiro flying.

Hiro laughed in spite of it, using the wall to prop himself up, and flattened his palm against the top curve of the quivering zeroid now pressed hard into his calves.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry-” It sounded like 101’s voice was stuck on a loop. “I thought I’d killed you. I’m so sorry!”

“I’m glad to see you too, my friend,” Hiro said, then added, in a softer voice. “but you are also very heavy. Could you please move back?”

“Very touching,” Ninestein drawled. “Well, seeing as everyone appears to be back in the land of the living? You pair of space cadets can finish clearing all that mess up.” He pointed down the corridor. “Zero, you too. Go and help.”

The sergeant major had been lurking in the corridor; unobtrusive but unwilling to miss out on any gossip. “Me, sah?! What did I do to deserve that?!”

“Well, I sure didn’t bring you up here to look pretty.”

“As if anyone could make that mistake.”

“And don’t you start pushing your luck either, 101. You’re lucky I decided not to test how gravity-proof you are.”

“No sir of course sir sorry, ten-ten on tidying detail.”

The former research lab quickly got crowded. 101 had called up some extra help from barracks, and 43 and 17 volunteered, bringing lifting and cutting gear with them.

Hiro had gamely found a broom, but was still too wiped out to do much more than cling to it and use it to prop himself up in the doorway, watching the zeroids scurrying around, sweeping dead plant into the waste chute. (They didn’t quibble; they liked their human and besides, gossip usually got round Spacehawk at the speed of light, so they all knew what had been going on.)

Even Ninestein pitched in, since he was the only person who could easily reach the ceiling. “The sooner this chaos is cleared up, the sooner I can get back to earth and not have to worry about whether it’ll still be here, mouldering away, until the next time I come back,” he’d said, by way of excuse. “And the sooner I can go back to bed.”

Zero and 101 were bickering, again, so they’d obviously recovered just fine.

“It figures that Zelda would send some weird little pot-plant to get your attention. Anyone else would send flowers.”

“Oh like you’re the expert. What would you know about sending anyone flowers.”

“I have often considered sending flowers, to our esteemed colleagues, as a token of my admiration. Or on their birthdays. Or… point being, obviously I would be giving Mary proper flowers, like roses. Not a bush, like this, this… murderpea-thing.”

101 gave him the longest most intentionally-innocent quizzical look. “Are you trying to imply the remotest similarity between you giving Captain Falconer roses, and this garbage fire?”

“Well obviously not when you put it in those terms-”

Ninestein whacked the closest zeroid with his broom and got a little ow in response that could have come from either of them. “Will you two shut up?!”

Good to see that whatever happened, some things genuinely never changed.

Eventually everything was cleared, swept away down the disposal chute, thoroughly mulched, and packed tightly back into the container it had arrived it – there was only just enough room for it all. The ruins of the lab stood empty – cold, and sterile. Not even a leaf or crumb of soil remained. They’d unplugged and pulled out all the ruined analytical machinery – a good third of the wall was empty, now. Half was going to have to go back to Earth to be replaced, but some looked like it would be good with a little work.

Hiro sighed quietly at it. He’d debated keeping a sample back, but knew Ninestein wouldn’t have been impressed, and instead reluctantly stood to the side of the cargo bay and watched 17 seal the garbage pod closed with a lance-welder.

101 drifted up by his feet. “Thank you for bailing me out.”

“I know you were trying to do the same for me. You didn’t need to. You could have just said I told you to do it.”

“From what I can tell, history doesn’t look kindly on people who say ‘I was only following orders’.”

“I think our situation is significantly different to theirs? But thank you for your bravery, anyway. The consequences to you could have been a lot worse.” Hiro used his broom to try and brush away a few of the straggly bits of green still caught on 101’s casing. They were all going to need a bath, after this. “I wouldn’t just let you take the brunt of Tiger’s anger when we both know it was me that didn’t let you shoot it down. Now you finally get your chance.”

The command crew retired to the flight deck to watch proceedings. There was a subtle flash from below and the pod shot out into space, trailing wisps of leaf and metal and dust that glittered in the sunlight.

“On my mark, boys,” 101 commanded, quietly. “Full power… and… fire.”

There was a blink of high-power phased-energy from the gun bay somewhere below, and the doomed pod turned briefly into a sphere of rippling blue flame and chips of metal. Tiny flecks of shrapnel made little rosettes of flame against the vehicle’s shields.

Hiro tried to swallow the sigh, but couldn’t quite hide all of it.

Ninestein patted him on the shoulder. “You’re sure you’re okay? Don’t need to come back to Earth for a little r-and-r?”

Hiro shook his head. “I just need some sleep, I think.”

“Good man. Come on then, Zero. We need to be getting back.”

“Ten-ten, sir.” After swapping one final traditional insult with 101, the sergeant major disappeared towards the airlock.

Ninestein stopped next to 101’s pedestal, and for several seconds just looked at him. It felt like the whole ship was holding its breath.

At last, he spoke. “You weren’t incompetent. Good job.” Then he left.

101 sat practically glowing for the rest of the day.

…Hiro went to bed.

He’d already showered and got himself a change of uniform, and felt physically refreshed at least, but he felt fairly emotionally exhausted and just wanted to sleep, more than anything. Preferably for the whole day. Maybe two. At least after everything that had happened over the last… god, was it not even 24 hours?... he knew he could absolutely trust his shipmate to have his shit together.

He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

oOoOoOo

The solar storm cleared and a wary, watchful sort of peacefulness resumed on board.

101 was back at his perch, looking none the worse for his own misadventure. Hiro had taken advantage of the quiet period to strip his casing and remove the last tendrils of dead vine from where they’d got inside, and since then the zeroid had found time to get a clean and polish. It was hard to tell anything had even happened to him – apart from the fact he was trying very very hard to look the absolute immaculate professional, and super-competent, to boot. (To be fair, it had probably shocked everyone aboard into a sudden burst of absolute rule-following proficiency.)

Hiro carefully worked his way along the row of pots. All the plants that were meant to be aboard had survived, at least. They’d all been watered, as well – and not by himself. The orchid had two big flowers open and a third beginning to unfurl.

“Lieutenant Hiro?”

Hiro glanced around; 101 was watching him, his eyes scrolling slowly. “Yes, 101?”

“Would that plant have grown like that without Zelda controlling it?”

Hiro sighed and leaned his weight against the counter. “Is now really the time for this, sergeant.” He still hurt that they’d had to incinerate it, and now 101 had to rub salt in.

“Would it, sir?” 101 pushed.

“I greatly doubt it,” Hiro shook his head, annoyed at the way the zeroid wouldn’t leave the subject alone. “It would disobey the laws of physics, if nothing else. Nothing could acquire mass at that speed without being fed it from somewhere.”

“Ah. That’s good. I hoped you’d say that; thank you.”

Hiro gave him a more suspicious stare. “What are you hiding, 101?”

“Like you said before. If you don’t tell doctor Ninestein, then I won’t.” 101 averted his gaze. “If it won’t turn into a monster, then maybe… it isn’t too big a deal that I might have accidentally-on-purpose missed a tiny bit when we were clearing up?”

When he turned back, Hiro spotted the tiny curl of greenery protruding from his shipmate’s equipment pocket.

Hiro laughed out loud, and accepted it; a tiny, carefully-trimmed sprig with neat heart-shaped dark leaves and a blob of water gel at the ‘root’. “This will be in quarantine, behind forcefields, and rigged to every alarm and motion and strain sensor I can find. But I shall absolutely enjoy watching it grow how it was meant to, with no martian influences.” He smiled. “Why the sudden change of heart? I thought you hated my plants.”

101 smiled back, sheepishly. “You could say it grew on me, sir.”

-----------

I actually started this one in 2005! But never finished it until this year (2024). Inspired by an unfilmed script for the original series, which I found on my DVD 20 years ago and then absolutely could not find again and assumed I must have seen it online somewhere? Until I unexpectedly found it again and realised it just… wasn’t listed on the case. *facepalm* That script itself has since been produced in real life by the Big Finish audiodrama company! My take is a little more serious than the original.

((I am so glad that I rediscovered the original script because I would have been SO DISAPPOINTED to find that "you could say it grew on me" was actually something I picked up out of it...))