Love the idea that Humans like dinosaurs too much and keep making robot versions of them.
While classic sentinels are used to contain/kill drones, other types of Sentinels are used for broader reasons. Like V.021, a water-based maintenance robot. Hind claws separate like a duck’s foot, using giant paddles alongside a large lightweight tail to move about. Their front paws are for repairing underwater cables and whatnot. They’re also used as WiFi hotspots for data transfers. Oh, pollution control was more so a JCJ promotional tactic, they don’t really do much other than put trash back into trash cans or pull up sunken loot. Pre-apocalypse Copper-9 variants don’t have mouths… post-apocalypse they are very different.
Back in the day they were popular among kids because cmon, it’s a friendly spinosaurus.
For KV Week 2020, I wrote a story about an arranged marriage . . . in SPACE. Here's the sequel.
Under the Stars
The door swished open. "Cisco! Where have you been? Didn't you hear my page? You're missing the best part!"
Cisco just groaned.
"Cisco? What is it?" Caitlin crossed the tiny cabin in a couple of steps. "Are you all right?"
"Peachy keen," he moaned. "My guts are trying to crawl up my throat, but hey, who cares about that."
She sat on the edge of the rock-hard bed - no, berth, it was a berth, Cisco reminded himself. Seemed like everything had a different name in space. He pressed his face into the pillow and groaned as his stomach pitched.
"Give me your hand," she said.
"Nuh-uh." He needed it wrapped around his middle to keep everything where it was supposed to be.
"Give," she commanded, and pried his hand loose. She held his wrist and pushed her thumb into a certain spot, not quite hard enough to hurt.
"Hey. Hey, what - " He realized he'd lifted his head from the pillow. HIs stomach was settling. His head wasn't twirling around like the merry-go-round on the kids' playground at home. He actually felt like he might? Survive?
She let go of his hand. "Acupressure," she said. "Why didn't you tell me you get g-sick?"
"You didn't ask!" And if she had, he wouldn't have known what she was talking about.
"Ugh!" She jumped to her feet, easily avoiding the low cabinets that he'd already bonked his head on twice, and jabbed her finger at a loose door. "And this, I told you, nothing unlatched during takeoff!"
"Nothing fell out."
"That's not the point! It could have."
"So?" She was picky about clutter, he'd learned. Always picking things up and putting them away, sometimes before he was done with them.
“So that’s how people die!”
He gaped at her. “From a little clutter?”
“No! From - “ she waved her hands wildly. “From things that come loose and fly around during bad takeoffs and landings. I’ve seen concussions, broken bones, lacerations - I know a cargo loader who lost an eye to a stylus someone left out."
“You’re not kidding,” he said slowly.
She turned on him. “Of course I’m not. Takeoffs and landings are some of the most dangerous parts of space travel. Everyone knows that.”
"Well, I didn't! Stupid rockfoot, remember? Colony-born, never been off the planet. I don't know any of this stuff." He sat up without thinking and his head crashed into the bottom of the cabinets. He howled a curse, clutching his head.
Somewhere in the middle of the blinding pain, he felt her cool fingers, peeling his hands away from his scalp and then poking gently at his hair. "You're not bleeding," she said.
After a moment, she said, "I'm sorry."
He looked up.
She looked abashed. "I should have thought. There were so many things you had to explain to me about life planetside. I should have explained about g-sickness and why everything is locked down and - "
"You were so happy to be coming back here." He waved a hand around to indicate the ship where she'd grown up. "I didn't want to - " He rubbed his sore head and winced. "I don't know."
He did know. He'd been grumpy and sour and jealous. He hadn't felt like reminding her that her temporary husband knew about as much about space travel as she did about living planetside.
She'd lived in his house for two months, ever since they'd agreed to a temporary handfast marriage so she could be registered as a colonist on Trappist-d, and the ship she and her mother owned could make cargo runs for them. He'd shown her all his favorite parts of his home, from the mountains to the ocean to the fields, taken her to every community event from someone's (permanent) marriage to the harvest parties.
And she'd never once looked as excited about anything at home as she'd been about going back to space.
He had to go with her. If they were apart for longer than three days over the next year, their marriage was null and void, and both the colony and Caitlin's ship would have to pay a heap of fines they couldn't afford.
He'd thought it would be all right. Fun, even. But so far, his first venture into space was decidedly un-fun.
He rubbed his aching head and winced as his stomach rolled again. "I'm not dying, am I?"
"No, it's just a reaction to all the changes in gravity we get during liftoff. Most of us just feel the pressure, but some people get sick."
"I don't suppose it's like, a space virgin reaction," he said hopefully. "And I'll be . . . fine next time?"
She screwed up her nose. "Mmmmm. No. With g-sickness, you either get it or you don't."
"Lucky me."
"If I'd known, I would have given you a patch."
"There's a patch for that?"
"Of course there is! Do you think we spend every departure curled up and moaning?"
"Shit, I don't know. You spacers are weird. Do you get g-sick?"
"Well. No."
Of course she didn't. She'd been born on this ship, lived on it all her life until two months ago. She'd been everywhere, from Earth to the farthest flung human colonies, including his.
And of course her rockfoot colonial husband would get sick on takeoff.
She fiddled with a latch on a cabinet. "You said I was so excited about leaving."
"Well, yeah. And I get it. You've been wicked homesick." For a tin can, he didn't add. "Of course you couldn't wait to get off my little dustball planet."
"Your planet is nice," she said. "I - I like it there."
"But it's not home. I understand." He was trying to.
"I was excited for this trip," she said. "I couldn't wait to show you all the things I'd missed."
He blinked. "Show . . . me?"
She nodded. "You showed me all around your colony," she said wistfully. "All the places and things you loved. I wanted to show you what I loved about space."
"Oh." Okay. Now he felt like the worst husband ever.
She latched the cabinet firmly closed. "Which is why I came down here. We're still in the system and we can - well, never mind. You just need to see it for yourself. Do you feel better?"
"Yeah, I'll probably live," he said, easing out of the berth and straightening up. "Does it come back?"
"The grav field is on," she said. "You should be fine until we approach Kepler-c, and I'll give you a patch then. Don't let me forget."
"Oh trust me," he said with feeling. "I won't."
He expected them to go up to the cockpit, where she and her mom and a couple more of the crew had sat during liftoff. But she turned down a corridor he hadn't noticed and then started climbing a ladder to what seemed like blank ceiling.
"Where are we going?" he asked.
"You'll see," she said mysteriously. She hooked her knee over one rung to steady herself and reached up to a small knob in the ceiling. A few twists, and a section of the ceiling opened up to reveal a small room above them. She climbed up into it, and her voice floated down. "Come on!"
He followed, trying not to say, what's so special about a storage compartment? Because that's what it seemed like.
It was even tinier than it seemed from below. He could just about wedge his butt into a corner and dangle his feet through the opening.
"Hold up your feet," she said, reaching down for the door.
"You're shutting us in?"
"Yes, because you won't be able to see if I don't."
It seemed the other way around to Cisco, who had noticed there wasn't any lighting in this dinky storage compartment. When the door clanged shut, they were plunged into darkness. He stretched his legs and found them tangling with Caitlin's. "Oh, hey, sorry - "
"It's fine," she said, shuffling her legs around until they both fit. "Are you ready?"
"For what?"
"Do you get vertigo? Or agoraphobia?"
"Okay, now you're worrying me."
"Just tell me. I don't want to repeat the whole g-sick thing."
"Uh, no, I don't think so."
"Okay! Great!" Something clicked, and suddenly the ceiling and walls disappeared.
Cisco almost choked on his own spit before he realized that she'd just hit a switch that made the panels transparent, and they weren't about to die a hideous death in zero-g.
Then he realized what he was looking at.
Stars.
They filled his field of vision, like sand spilled from a cupped hand. Millions of stars. Billions. Every speck of light a star light-years away. Some of them dead already, maybe, only the ghost of them left to reach his eyes.
Everywhere he looked, more and more and more stars. The universe all around him.
The closest he'd ever come, maybe, was when he'd be out in the fields at night and flop down in the middle of the grain to bask in the starlight. But he'd only seen half this many. Maybe a quarter. The rest all hidden behind the blanket of the atmosphere.
And he'd had the whole planet at his back, solid beneath him. Now he was just a little speck of dust, riding the back of a tin can, floating through eternity.
"You like it?" Caitlin said shyly.
He swallowed, and realized that he was crying, tears slipping down his face. "Yeah," he croaked. "Yeah. Wow. I - " He shook his head. "Wow." He scrubbed his hands over his wet face. "Wow."
It almost hurt to tear his eyes away from the starfield, but he looked at her. She was beaming at him, starlight falling over her face.
"Where are we?" he asked her.
"You mean this?" she asked, indicating their hidey-hole. "Or in the solar system?" She waved at the stars.
"Yes?" he said. "Both."
"This is the crow's nest," she said. "We're the topmost point of the ship. If you look down and to starboard, you can just see the cockpit."
"And starboard is - ?"
She pointed to his right.
He glanced that way and saw the two sets of glowing windows, just as she'd promised. "Technically speaking, isn't every side of this ship starboard?"
"No," she said, pointing to his left. "That side is port."
"You know what I mean."
"I do," she said. "But it's just the way ships work."
"So what's the crow's nest for, exactly?" The layout of the ship he'd seen so far was ruthlessly efficient. He couldn't imagine them having a whole room just for looking at stars.
"There's a gunport aft of us," she said, hooking her thumb behind her. "If we fly into systems with pirate action, we have someone stationed up here. But we don't fly those systems unless we really need a job."
"And the Kepler system is . . ."
"Pretty peaceful," she said promptly. "And as for the other part of your question, if you look over your left shoulder, you can see Trappist-d."
He twisted around and squinted. "Wait - that? That little blob there?" He'd mistaken it for an asteroid or something. "How far away are we?"
She squinted. "I'd say about three or four light-seconds. We took off at a little angle relative to the orbital disk to get a clear path in."
"In? Into where?"
She hooked a thumb over her shoulder at the smoldering red coal, burning in the sky.
Cisco considered it for a moment. Aren't we going out of the system? Like, isn't that the point of this trip?"
"Mhm."
"Just because it seems like we're heading toward the sun."
"The star," she told him. "In space, it's always a star."
That distracted him for a moment. "Wait, even when you travel to Earth? You call Sol a star?"
"Of course," she said. "When we're in space."
He shook his head. "Okay, back to my original question, though. Why are we headed in instead of out?"
"Oh, we're going to do a slingshot around the star," she said casually, like she'd said, "Oh, we're going to stop by the commissary before we head out to go swimming."
"A what now?"
She smiled. "It's an old spacer's trick. We let gravity swing us around, and eventually eject from orbit in the direction we need to go. It saves fuel and help get us up to sailing speed."
"And sailing speed is - ?"
"Ten times the speed of light."
"Oh, is that all? We'll be cruising."
"Oh, no, cruising is five times the speed of light."
"My mistake," he said. "So what's one times the speed of light?"
She giggled at him. "Light speed."
"Obviously," he said. "But seriously? Going millions of miles out of our way to save fuel?"
"It's only a few light-minutes," she said. "And it saves a lot of fuel. A full cube easy."
A cube of fuel, he knew from listening her chatter on about it back home, was enough to get the Snowfall from one side of the system to the other, and calculating the amount of fuel needed for each run sounded like high-level mathematics. Saving a full cube of fuel wasn't chicken feed.
"So, uh, not that I don't totally one-hundred percent trust you," he said, "but out of academic interest, how many times have people miscalculated that slingshot thing and gone screaming off into deep space?"
Or plunged into the sun, he thought.
"Oh, it's happened." She'd tipped her face up to the stars again. "But never to us. Mom's a really good pilot. And she always has me double and triple check the calculations." She squinted at the star. "She'll probably page me down there in a few minutes. Which reminds me, did someone show you the paging system?"
He shook his head, and she pointed out the small speaker embedded in the wall, and the button next to it.
A few moments later, the speaker crackled to life. "Captain on the bridge, to first mate."
"You always call and answer like this," she explained, "so they know where you are." She hit the button. "First mate in the crow's nest, proceed, captain."
"Gravity assist imminent. Report to the bridge for double-checks."
"Roger, captain. Reporting." She let go of the button and sighed. "Time to go."
As she closed the windows and opened the hatch, she paused. "Do you want to see?"
"See - the slingshot thingy?"
"Mmhhm. I mean, it's a lot of math, but you're good at math, and it's kind of fun to see."
Their ideas of fun diverged wildly, but suddenly Cisco found that he did want to see. "Sure," he said. "Love to."
She grinned and reached for the button again. "First mate in the crow's nest, to the captain."
"Captain on the bridge, proceed."
"Request permission to bring passenger with me to the bridge."
"Permission granted."
She grinned bigger. "First mate and passenger, reporting."
As they climbed down the ladder and set off down the corridor, Cisco said, "Hey, Caitlin."
"Hmmm?"
"Thanks for showing me that. It was . .. amazing."
Welcome to Anon von Valencius, cynicle (and squishy but don't tell her) pirate. Also a little confused but it looks like there's booty to be made so whatever.
