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Her Favour

After Zelda plays the long game to successfully sneak past Terrahawks defences, it's totally not even remotely an unjustified punishment when Ninestein sends Spacehawk's crew out to Egypt to help find her and send her packing.

But it looks like the queen of Mars has possibly upset more than just the human population of Earth in the process…

Just a silly Halloween-y short featuring an out-of-place worried little round boy trying his best to scare the martians away from Egypt and save his humans, too - helped out by a mysterious little temple cat.

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Space Sergeant 101 (or “Owun”, to friends) was in trouble.

Again.

This was all becoming something of a nuisance habit he didn’t much care for. Come to Earth – on purpose or otherwise – somehow end up at the mercy of the Martians.

This was meant to have been a good visit to the surface, too! He’d actually been invited down from orbit by the lovely Kate Kestrel, to attend the little Hallowe’en party she’d been organising.

A party! And he’d been invited! He didn’t often get to join in with things on Earth because of his “essential role in their front-line defences” (meaning, most of the time they forgot him), but every once in a blue moon someone remembered he existed and asked if he’d like to come along. It had left him simmering in a weird anxious excitement that couldn’t decide which direction to push itself. Excited, because party! That meant costumes, and music, and most importantly people! Interactions! Conversations! Company!

But anxious as well because what if Zelda showed up, and he wasn’t there to deal with her? Of course he trusted his boys implicitly but something about not being there to make sure it was getting done right always made him just a teeny tiny bit twitchy.

As it happened, Zelda herself made his worries moot by turning up early, and surprising everyone by already being on Earth when they spotted her. (Perhaps 101 had “tempted fate” by worrying about it, as Captain Falconer sometimes said.)

The self-styled Queen of Mars had attached a miniaturised, modified ZEAF to an earthbound tanker while it was still way out beyond the Oort Cloud, then sat unnaturally quietly and patiently for the month or two it took the lumbering vehicle to get all the way back home. Spacehawk had spotted her energy signature the instant it came into range of their remote scanners, because maintaining her ship and its occupants in its miniaturised form required a phenomenal amount of power, but the zeroids hadn’t been able to spot any signs of Zelda actually approaching the ship, and couldn’t find the ZEAF and anyway, the tanker was such a bashed-up old shed leaking energy out of every damaged plasma conduit on her hull, they ultimately concluded it was a false positive.

And everyone had concluded, thank you very much. The zeroids might have collected and analysed the data, but the humans had been the ones to have the final say in the matter.

When the tanker operators had finally handed over their data, a whole week after it had arrived on Earth and long after Zelda had made her presence known, hacking lumps out of a newly-discovered ancient temple in Egypt (and the archaeologists who’d just started researching it)… Spacehawk’s crew had finally got their actual visual proof of Zelda approaching it.

Very clear visuals, too. (Sigh.)

Although the human didn’t say so, in so many words, Doctor Ninestein had looked distinctly unimpressed at the way the Martian androids had managed to get all the way to flaming Egypt on 101’s watch, and told him and Lieutenant Hiro to go join the mission out in the desert, instead of go back to space where they could actually be useful. Like a punishment, as if it was somehow exclusively his personal fault? For not somehow knowing it wasn’t a false positive, and not challenging the humans? As if he’d been more interested in having fun than doing a good job.

Huh.

(Of course, Sergeant Major Zero had loved that. Jumped-up little bossy-boots getting his just deserts for not doing his job properly, or something.)

((Deflated but determined not to let Zee-ro win, 101 had obediently gone along with it, although he’d been sulking hard at the same time and ignored all attempts at conversation, even from his humans.))

(((Granted, trying to prove the sergeant major wrong in the past had led to some unmitigated disasters, but he had a better feeling about this one.)))

((((Well. Originally he had. Now he wasn’t quite so certain.))))

So now here he was, barely conscious and hurting, in the heat and dust of the middle of nowhere in Egypt, deep underground in the tunnels beneath the newly-discovered temple-tomb-he-didn’t-even-really-know-what, without the smallest clue where he was, or more importantly where his beloved Hiro was.

Summed up in a single word?

This. Sucked.

No party was worth all this. (Was it?)

…something faint drifted to his struggling awareness, out of the shadows.

Just the faintest tickle of sound, but he latched onto it.

…

…Owun…

…

Huh. That was new. Was that a voice, calling his name?

And not his number – his name-name.

Everything was still unstable and multiple systems kept crashing and rebooting, but the voice felt good. Somehow familiar, even if he couldn’t place it. Optimistic, too – he knew that even if she’d bothered to learn his name, Zelda wouldn’t use it, which meant probably (hopefully) this was a friend.

He tried to pin his attention onto it – use it as a beacon to guide him out of the fog.

…Owun-!...

He didn’t recognise it. It definitely wasn’t one of his friends. He wanted to cross-reference it with his sound archives but his searches were still crashing. Whatever flavour of hideous electromagnetic field he’d been kicked through, it had left him feeling thoroughly scrambled.

Focus on the important stuff first (move, shoot, find Hiro), he told himself; luxuries like being clever and figuring stuff out could come later.

How had he actually got here anyway?

He’d been assigned as part of the little party looking for Zelda, in the subterranean temple complex she’d taken over for her base. The evicted archaeologists had described it as a bit of a maze.

Last Owun remembered for definite was Yung-star appearing out of nowhere and bestowing upon him a good solid kick to the head, before he could alter his weight, sending him careening off down a dark tunnel, and… falling down a hole.

Great.

Whatever certain people might say, he didn’t mind the dark – he saw a lot of it, living in orbit, every time his home swept around into the shadow of the Earth, which it did multiple times a day. Not to mention, if he needed it, he had an inbuilt little light tucked inside his cowling, and he didn’t need the visible spectrum to ‘see’ anyway.

No, the dark was just fine.

He did mind being stuck at the bottom of a hole, under a creepy old pyramid-temple-whateveritwas, out in the middle of the Egyptian desert, with no idea where his humans were.

Ugh.

He really hated Earth, sometimes.

OK, no, that was unfair. He loved Earth, it was his home and it was beautiful and his friends all lived there and he would look after it with every last flicker of power in his circuits.

He just didn’t like being in such close proximity to it, compared to the nice clean security of his beautiful ship up in orbit around it.

And especially sand. Ugh. Almost as bad as moondust for getting inside everything. He could already feel a fine dusty layer of it coating his exterior. Goodness only knew what his poor air filters would look like.

…come on, Owun. A touch of impatience had crept into the mystery voice. Time for you to work, now…

He still couldn’t place the speaker and her words seemed to be dropping into his auditory centre without touching his antenna in the process, which he didn’t quite understand. Zeroids chattered inaudibly like this all the time, but never bypassing the hardware that let him pick their signals up in the first place!

Yes; come on, Owun, he scolded himself. Don’t fuss about explaining it. The quicker you fix this the quicker you can go home and get all this sand washed off. Hiro can explain it to you later.

He managed to find enough energy to work his systems, and drew his shutters open.

It… wasn’t quite so dark as he’d been expecting? It should have been completely totally dark, down in these tunnels so far from sunlight, but the walls were suffused with a very dim golden light. Like… several thousand year old candle-light.

Ridiculous. Even if they had phosphorescent paint three thousand years ago, it wouldn’t still be glowing now.

But it was. And brightly enough that he immediately had to dial down his optical sensitivity to avoid overloading the sensors.

It took a second to focus, and-

Less than a handsbreadth in front of him, staring him acutely in the eye, was a small cat.

“Oh!” He jumped, startled, and rolled back a whole rotation, bonking into the wall.

The little animal just looked back at him, inscrutably. It sat primly on the sand, like a little statue, all four paws tucked neatly in, and for an instant, he thought it was a statue, until its tailtip moved.

It was physically quite small, even for a cat, but with long limbs and a slim, tapering tail, and a regal, wedge-shaped head, rather like a small oriental shorthair. Rather than white with a dark brown face and paws, though, it was a rich mahogany brown all over, so deeply coloured that its faint tabby stripes almost disappeared against it, apart from a single pale patch on its forehead, like a droplet of gold between its brows. The blue eyes that stared unblinkingly at him were almost luminous, with their pupils expanded appealingly wide in the gloom.

At first he assumed it was feral, because there were no humans settlements so far out in the naked desert any more, but then he noticed it wore a collar, so must – somehow – be someone’s pet.

On the leather collar hung a little gold cross- no, wait, it had a loop at the top. An ankh? (He thought that was what it was called, although being underground meant he couldn’t get a signal to look it up.) A small bright gold ring went through its nose.

“Well how did you get down here?” He looked around himself. Just a featureless, mostly square tunnel, unfinished and rough-hewn, with a sand floor, stretching off in front and behind, where it vanished into the dark in both directions. The hole he’d presumably fallen down through was nowhere to be seen. He added; “How did I get down here?” After a beat, he added a further; “where even is ‘here’?”

The little cat’s ears swivelled like radar dishes, and it looked away into the distance down the tunnel behind him, before getting to its paws and walking past.

“Yeah yeah, I know I’m boring.” He sighed his annoyance and pouted after it, in that hurt way he’d perfected on his humans. (It had somewhat less effect on the cat.) He was used to getting teased by his fellow zeroids. Coming from a cat, it stung. “You don’t have to make it quite so obvious.”

It – she? – turned her head to briefly look back at him, before sitting neatly down in the middle of the corridor and curling her tail around over her toes.

Owun considered it, for a handful of microseconds. There was a slightly-above-zero possibility that he’d offended the little animal somehow and she was making a big deal out of how much she wasn’t interested in interacting with him. (Not that he’d know anything about that, of course.)

But that didn’t quite fit with the data he had. They’d barely interacted – not to mention, she… was a cat…?

So, was she staring off into the distance like that for a reason, instead? He approached, a rotation or two, wondering if he’d be able to spot what she was looking at. His optics seemed fine now his systems had (mostly) all restabilised, and would be just as sensitive as hers.

Frustratingly, that didn’t solve it either. In spite of flicking through various spectra, and even retuning into the infrared, he just couldn’t see what she might be looking at. It was just an empty tunnel.

Maybe she was watching a ghost. In some cultures it was the right time of year for it. He wasn’t sure he’d enjoy that, personally.

He parked next to her, staring off into nothing in the same direction, and synthesised a small, tinny electronic sigh. She twitched an ear.

He wasn’t really sure what he expected, but felt the need to check; “Was that you, earlier? Talking to me?”

The tip of her tail waved, very slightly, but she didn’t look at him.

Owun instantly felt stupid. “Of course it wasn’t you. You’re a cat. I’m not sure why I even asked.” He studied the three thousand year old sandy floor, still smooth and undisturbed by either cat pawprints or zeroid trails. “What should I do now, huh?” he wondered, gloomily, albeit mostly to himself. “Try and find my own way out? It’s all pretty quiet. Maybe the Martians are already gone and I’ve just been forgotten again.”

Either curious at all the sounds he was making, or just tired of listening to him grumble, the cat turned to him, and gave him a thorough sniffing before butting her head up against him, rubbing her cheek against his brow. He froze, slightly startled. She followed the cheekrub with the rest of her body, arching her flank against him as though trying to push him over, even though she was far too light to ever move him, ending with a little flick of the tailtip over his face.

“Well, you’re suddenly very friendly,” he said, turning to watch her as she circled back to him. “Does this mean I’m doing the right thing, following you around?”

Her fur had been cooler than he’d expected – and in spite of the way she’d leeeeaned into him in a long luxuriant stretch, he barely actually felt it?

Well, he defended himself, he’d never interacted with a feline before. Perhaps that was just how it was. They had fur, after all; a yielding barrier between their exterior and the body beneath. Humans were comparatively solid, and their skin carried enough charge to disrupt his electrostatic field so he could feel it, having no specific touch sensors laminated into his exterior. He could pick up all sorts of details out of it – plus it felt nice, of course! – but this? Had felt more like having a feather duster wafted over his exterior.

Humans made a big deal out of petting furry animals, but if this was what it was like, he couldn’t see the attraction in it. (To be fair, some of the humans he knew seemed to like petting zeroids as well, so… perhaps he should just stop trying to analyse human behaviour as if it should make sense.)

With one final flick of the tail, the cat set off at a leisurely amble down the tunnel.

Weirdly, the little pool of light seemed to have followed her, as though she was secretly carrying a candle. Owun was fairly confident he hadn’t seen a candle anywhere. And he wasn’t sure how a cat would carry it anyway? But he wasn’t all that keen on staying in the dark on his own, either.

“All right, then, Miss Kitty,” he said, fully aware that perhaps it wasn’t the most terribly logical thing to be doing, continuing to talk to a cat like this. He decided he’d save getting his circuits checked for when they were out of danger. “Lead the way.”

He obediently set off behind her. Perhaps the phosphorescent paint had been applied to her, not the walls? (Who paints a cat, Owun? But it was the best answer he had, and it made enough sense that it kept his logic circuits quiet.)

Unless he was looking at her in the visual spectrum, Kitty was tricky to see. Her soft feet made no sound and left no prints as she trotted ahead of him, and the walls interfered with his sonar, so he had to keep pausing to look where she was, make sure she hadn’t looped back in the opposite direction. Reassuringly, she was never too far ahead.

When she hesitated and looked up at the wall, it seemed different to the times she’d waited for him to catch up. Owun followed her gaze to realise their surroundings had changed their appearance, somewhat. Closest to him, the rough stone of the tunnel had been covered in plaster, still remarkably perfect for how old it was. A little further along, a loose handful of charcoal lines marked out the intended designs – at first loosely, then with more precision. People, possessions, animals. Cats.

At the distant limit of the candlelight, he could see where the real art started, where the charcoal lines had been transformed into neatly carved bas-relief scenes, enhanced with paint still surprisingly vivid after thousands of years. Every square centimetre of space carefully, delicately engraved with mathematically-precise humanoid figures, objects, and animals, with every spare space between them filled with columns and columns of hieroglyphs.

It felt odd, seeing words in a language he couldn’t read.

Owun came to a halt next to Kitty and looked up at what held her attention.

“Oh. Huh. Well, that’s not good, is it,” he said.

He knew Zelda had already defaced a number of the artefacts closer to the surface, engraving her leering face on top of what had once been elegant statues, as though proclaiming her right to rule over humanity by aligning herself with ancient gods and pharaohs. It was part of the reason they’d managed to track her down so easily. (Well, that and her attacking the archaeologists.)

The wall art down here hadn’t escaped her family’s clumsy attention, either.

Androids had the benefit of being able to replicate images very accurately, when they chose. Zelda’s face had been rendered over the top of the head of the pharaoh, in a deeply-engraved style that completely obliterated the regal features the figure had once had.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t been done in such a way it looked like it fitted. Like someone had opened a photograph in decades-old graphic design software and just pasted some lineart in on top, at a weird angle and resolution. Not only was it somehow almost pixellated, it was far too big.

And there was a caricature of Doctor Ninestein, as well – his face on top of that of the fallen enemy, hands up in supplication, beneath the Zelda-pharaoh’s sandals. His pasted-on face was at such an unnatural angle, staring straight out from the wall, it made his neck look way too long, as well as very broken.

So not only had she defaced priceless ancient artworks, she hadn’t even done it well. No wonder the humans were upset.

Kitty walked a close single orbit around Owun and with a stern flick of her tailtip across his optics, reminded him he wasn’t here to admire the handiwork of the ancient artisans. She trotted away down the tunnel.

“Right,” he confirmed, and set out behind her again.

After a few dozen metres further, the tunnel came to an abrupt end at a junction, with what might have been the rooms of a tomb on either side.

A tomb.

Owun hesitated on the threshold. Old temple tunnels were fine, but he didn’t like the idea of going blundering around in someone’s grave, however old and archaeologically important it might be.

What if there was a curse on it? Like in that creepy movie 22 had picked for them to watch yesterday?

How dare you disturb my eternal resting place! You that breaks the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose!

Kitty stepped out onto the floor of the grave, oblivious to the danger. Clinging close to the wall, he watched her, waiting fearfully for her to be struck down by some ghostly hand.

Don’t be silly. Ancient Egyptians had liked cats, he reminded himself. As if it wasn’t obvious, from how they were drawn all over the walls down here. Would they like zeroids too? Humans tended to treat him a bit like a little round cat, sometimes, and he’d learned how to generate a pretty decent purr with his fans. Would that be good enough to keep an angry ghost from smiting him?

Well I don’t think the humans three thousand years ago had zeroids in mind when they were setting curses, he reminded himself. You don’t have to worry about deadly diseases, either.

Probably don’t have to worry about deadly diseases.

And besides, Kitty was looking at him in a way that came across as distinctly impatient. What are you wasting time sitting there for?

What indeed. Bravely, he crossed the threshold.

When he wasn’t immediately fried by a bolt of lightning from a vengeful spirit, he allowed himself to relax, just enough to analyse the tomb a little more closely.

One thing it definitely was NOT was quiet as a grave.

Although he hadn’t actually seen any of the Martians yet, Owun finally had his first indication that they were indeed still down here. He could hear Zelda some way off in the distance, although she was too far away for him to make out what she was saying – just her screeching cackle, ringing out with all the subtlety of a hammer drill. He could hear Yung-star, too, gurgling away about something (probably sampling the walls, knowing him). Possibly Itstar as well? Their nasal sneer droning on in the background. But no Cystar – her laugh would have been immediately diagnostic. (Perhaps Zelda had just decided on this occasion that the fewer potential screw-ups, the better.)

Underneath all of it, he could hear the sharp repetitive tink tink tink of some form of metal on stone – a chisel? Or something. Presumably continuing their defacement of the artwork.

It was hard to see very much, sometimes, from less than half a metre up off the floor, but the doorway had opened onto a cluttered antechamber, which the archaeologists had apparently been using for storage, before Zelda drove them out. One corner was occupied by a rickety stack of large wooden packing crates, rolls of protective wrap spilling out and cases for delicate antiquities piled on top. Heaps of protective dustsheets and dismantled trestle tables and scaffolding poles and small generators and floodlights littered the rest of the space.

More doors led off in front and to one side – the frontmost was lit with a stronger light and crossed with bold shadows, which supported his assumption that it was where the Martians were… doing whatever they were doing.

Miss Kitty flicked her tail and trotted ahead, before vanishing through the second doorway, with its much dimmer lighting. Hesitating every couple of rotations to check for vengeful gods, Owun anxiously followed her-

Thoroughly wrapped in fabric like an Ancient Egyptian mummy, apart from his eyes and nose, with his arms crossed over his chest, apparently asleep in a pile of old sacking, was someone very familiar.

“Oh!” Owun managed to restrain his squeak of alarm, and scurried hastily over. “Hiro!” He collided carefully with his human’s feet, hoping to wake him up. “Lieutenant Hiro?”

No response.

That didn’t feel very good.

The open-topped stone sarcophagus he could see nearby felt even less good.

For a single horrifying half a second, Owun almost convinced himself his sweetheart was already dead. Murdered by the Martians, who’d wrapped him far too tightly and stopped him breathing. He could feel his fans already kicking up a tiny anxious notch-

But no – Hiro still looked reassuringly warm, for a corpse. And if Owun focused really super hard, he could just hear his friend’s stifled breathing, rapid and very shallow but definitely there.

He gave him another, slightly sterner bump, leaning into his ankles.

There was the smallest shift in the human’s position.

Owun’s fans skipped again, but for a different reason, this time.

Quietly, he added, hopefully; “…honey? Come on. You can do it. Please wake up.”

After a little more careful nudging and bumping and generally being as annoying as possible, refusing to leave him alone to go back to a sleep he might never wake up from, Hiro finally stirred, flinching slightly at the light. He blinked dumbly at nothing for a second or two, confused and aching, then spotted what had woken him. Without his glasses, his vision was terrible, but Owun was pretty unmistakable, even as a set of strangely-yellowish blurs.

Hiro’s head briefly sagged in relief at seeing his friend. For a few seconds they just leaned against each other, relieved to be reunited.

Owun broke. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know you’d been hurt. I should have been more careful! Why do they always manage to sneak up on me? I promise I’m still good at my job!” He pressed his face into Hiro’s legs, trembling. “I’m so sorry.”

Hiro let him lean, for a few seconds, before nudging him gently with his knees, and shifted his shoulders, in a small but meaningful wriggle: can we please save the apologies until I am free?

“Right.” Owun gave himself a shake. “Right! Focus, focus.” It was all too hot down here to draw stabilising cool air through his fans, but he allowed himself a microsecond or two to ‘breathe’ anyway. “Right.”

He turned his attention to closely study the wrappings. Not bandages – they looked more like narrow strips torn from one of the dust sheets. That meant they’d be more resilient than soft linen. Owun couldn’t work out how they’d been secured, but wasn’t sure how he’d have dealt with knots anyway. “I think I’m going to have to cut these.”

Hiro gave him a very cautious look, and arched an eyebrow.

Owun knew what that meant: how are you going to hold a cutting implement? Assuming you can find one. “I have my laser!” he reassured. “If I set the focal distance really tight, I can snip through the fabric.”

Hiro’s cautious look turned much more wary, frowning slightly.

“I’ll be careful, I promise!” Owun leaned up against him. “But I have to get you out somehow and I don’t know if I’ll even find a knife, let alone be able to use it.”

Hiro just continued to look at him, for a handful of seconds, before sighing faintly, and giving a tiny nod.

The hesitation probably saved them both. Because in the silence, they both heard it – the clump of approaching boots.

Hiro’s eyes flew wide, and he tried hard to use only his gaze to gesture off behind himself.

Owun didn’t need telling twice. He hurtled for the mound of discarded archaeological supplies in the corner of the room so fast, it was as though he’d been shot from a cannon, and burrowed underneath it just in the nick of time.

Yung-star stood in the doorway for several silent seconds, surveying the scene, chisel still in hand.

“Trying to escape again?” he sneered. “I thought I heard something. You should know you will never win, you disgusting meat creature. You’re just too weak and stupid.” He advanced over the dusty floor. “You lack the precise mathematical purity of android brains, with only that… squishy wet excuse for a processor.” Leaning down, Yung-star gave Hiro a sharp tap on his forehead, making him flinch. “The people who built this place were right when they thought your brains were worthless organs. They preserved everything else, but not those.”

Not that he could do much else anyway, Hiro sat quietly, and hoped that looking suitably cowed by the android’s gloating would distract Yung-star enough that he didn’t suspect anyone else was down here.

“I suppose you want to know when your friends are coming to rescue you?”

Hiro couldn’t help the hopeful glance.

“Well, as soon as they agree to make the exchange, we’ll give you back to them.”

Hiro sensed that the android’s odd phrasing had been intentional, and didn’t necessarily mean he’d be alive when they gave him back.

“The accursed Ninestein has yet to agree to our terms, but he will. I promise you that. Especially when he sees what else we have planned for you.” Yung-star was already down in a crouch, and now leaned very close; so close that even Hiro could make out the smirk on his ancient face. “Did you know that back then? The human culture that built these temples? They were so primitive, they just scrraaped all their brains out down their noses.” He looked at the chisel he was holding very close to Hiro’s cheek. “…granted, they usually waited until the human had died first.”

Hiro turned his face away, shuddering feebly.

“But I’m sure it won’t make much difference if you’re not. You probably won’t be for very long after I shove this up into your skull, anyway. What do you think? Shall we try it?”

In the rear of the chamber, something in the pile of supplies came dislodged, and rolled to the floor with a clatter.

Hiro thought his heart might have just stopped. No. Owun-

“Is someone down here with you?” Yung-star narrowed his eyes and stood up. “Something? One of your idiotic little round slaves?” He advanced a handful of steps. “I hear you, Earth scum! Don’t think you can hide from me! You’ll never rescue this revolting specimen from the fate we have planned for him, and if you even try, we might just make it worse for him! And you!”

Silence. Not even a rustle.

“Come out now and I won’t kill yeeeouuuugh! Oh!” Yung-star’s threats turned into a strangled yelp of shock. “Oh no, oh ew! Mother! Help!” He recoiled with a flail of his arms, tripping backwards over his own feet and ending up on his rump. “There’s a thing in here-!” He scrabbled the rest of the way to the door on all fours.

Hiro wasn’t sure what the Martian was looking at, but it obviously wasn’t Owun. (They didn’t like any zeroids, seeing the little robots as traitors to their kind, but Zelda’s family had a particular dislike of a handful of individuals, and Owun was one of them. Yung-star would definitely not have run away from him.)

The long, low hiss was immediately diagnostic.

Hiro froze.

There was a snake down here.

“It doesn’t have any legs! Oh, ew! Go away, you horrible creature,” Yung-star gurgled, colliding with the doorframe as he crawled backwards into the antechamber. There was a heartbeat of silence while he tried in vain to recover his dignity, then he leaned around the wall. “Maybe it will save us the job and kill you for us! Painfully and horribly!”

His nerve failed him and he fled at the sound of another hiss.

Hiro sat very very still and quiet for a little while, after the sound of Yung-star’s running footsteps had faded into the general background hubbub. Although zeroids could be excellent sound mimics, Yung-star had definitely been reacting to a physical thing he could see. Without his glasses and in the dark, Hiro had no idea what or where it might be.

If there was a cobra down here, he doubted it would bite unless he gave it a reason to feel threatened. And he had absolutely no intention of doing that.

…it would be nice if his zeroid could come out of hiding and deal with it, though. Maybe use that laser he’d made a big deal of having and scare the reptile off.

Owun finally emerged from his hiding spot after a good thirty seconds of silence had passed.

“I’m not sure what that was that Yung-star didn’t like, but we better get you out of here before it comes back,” he whispered. “Or he does.”

Relieved that the snake had apparently already gone, Hiro nodded, stiffly.

Like a giant caterpillar preparing to pupate, the human managed to wriggle off the pile of sacking and a little closer to Owun’s level. It was a miracle he hadn’t already suffocated, because he was so well wrapped he could barely even squirm properly.

Owun came up close, and gave him a reassuring nudge, then found a good position where he could target the fabric with his cutting laser. “All right, honey, you just sit tight and don’t wiggle; I don’t want to zap you by mistake.”

Hiro mmh-ed an affirmative, barely louder than an exhalation.

The smell of charred fabric as Owun got to work wasn’t particularly pleasant, or all that reassuring. He trusted that the zeroid was keeping a close optic on what he was doing and wouldn’t end up setting the whole lot on fire because… yeah. At least it would save the Martians a job.

The sting of heat burning into the back of his hand made Hiro jump, with a sharp little intake of breath.

“I said, don’t wiggle-!” Owun half-scolded, before putting two and two together. “Oh, I zapped you! Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was trying so hard to be careful!” He tried hard to wriggle up against him, apologetically.

Hiro allowed him a few seconds snuggling, before patiently directing his attention back down onto his pinioned arms.

Owun gave him a very long wary look. “Are you sure? I might hurt you again.”

Hiro did the eyebrow thing and Owun recognised it was a silly question. Either he cut his bestie free, or Hiro would end up staying like this until somehow some other people found their way down here, and Owun could tell the human already wasn’t in great shape for it. His breathing was unsteady, shallow and sharp; even a zeroid knew positional asphyxia was a thing.

Owun recalibrated the laser’s focal point and even more carefully than before, began to cut.

It took a tortuous amount of time. Snip snip snip. Burning through just a few threads with each tiny pulse of superheated light. Snip snip snip. The Martians might return at any time and if they found him, well. It wouldn’t go well for either of them. But if Owun was quiet and methodical about it, not drawing attention by making lots of noise, perhaps they had a chance.

Snip snip snip.

And it was working. With each handful of threads cut through, Hiro could wriggle his bonds a little looser, until-

Suddenly the whole lot came loose from around his chest.

The breath Hiro took – long and shuddery as he properly filled his lungs for the first time in over an hour – spoke to his profound relief. He immediately went into a coughing fit, yanking the fabric off his face and trying desperately hard to stifle the noise in his hands.

Owun waited patiently for Hiro to catch his breath, then the human nodded and gave him a reassuring pat, and he got back to cutting.

It was a lot easier to get through the fabric on Hiro’s lower half now the human was able to help him. Some of it was just too well wrapped to easily remove, not to mention weirdly tacky, but all Hiro appeared to want to worry about right now was having two independently mobile legs again.

Finally freed, he sat forwards, legs crossed, and allowed himself time to just… breathe, for a moment or two.

Owun seized the opportunity and nuzzled carefully into his ankles. “Are you all right?” he wondered, quietly, peering up from beneath a lowered brow. “Are you hhh-… I mean. Did they hurt you?”

“Small blessings, but no. Once I have my breath back, I’m sure I will be fine.”

“…I’m sorry I zapped you.”

“You didn’t hurt me either. Just made me jump. Thank you, Kyusu.” Hiro let the zeroid lean into his legs, and flattened both hands gently across his top hemisphere, allowing him to hear the stabilising bump of his heartbeat through his palms. “I thought I might suffocate if I was restrained like that for much longer.”

Owun leaned into the reassuring hands, purring quietly.

“Such a relief to see you still in one piece, too,” Hiro added, softly. “The Martians were gloating over having killed you. Again.”

“Well, you know me. Bossy little square, always out to spoil everybody’s fun.” Owun chuckled, not entirely self-deprecatingly.

“I think that is a little unfair. You are only bossy some of the time,” Hiro said, fondly. “But, since she invited us both down here, perhaps we should go and spoil Zelda’s fun – together.”

That was at least rewarded with something like a more genuine smile. “How are we going to do that?”

“I am… not completely sure, yet. But we will come up with something. So long as we get a few minutes of thinking space.”

“For all the effort they went to, this doesn’t appear the most practical way of restraining someone,” Owun pointed out, studying the remnants of the fabric twisted around his friend’s legs. “When they could have just tied your wrists.”

“I concur.” Hiro sighed. “Given where we are, I think Itstar considered it amusing.” He found a smile, buried somewhere in all the worry, and encouraged it up to the surface. “Perhaps they had been watching some of the same bad movies you all have been. It is that time of year.”

The zeroid just said hmm and didn’t smile back. Scary movies were fine but he wasn’t entirely sure how much he was enjoying any of this, or how Hiro was apparently finding humour in it. And his gaze kept hunting involuntarily off in the direction of the stone coffin nearby. “I do hope they weren’t planning on putting you in that thing,” he said. “I’d have never got you out of there by myself.”

Hiro turned his head and joined him in looking at it. “I don’t think I would like to hypothesise. Fortunately, Zelda’s family have short attention spans, and are apparently quickly bored. Plus, I suspect they would have wanted to wait until they knew Doctor Ninestein would have to watch.”

“Yeah, I heard what Yung-star said about pulling brains out.” Owun shuddered involuntarily. “Disgusting. Did they really do that?”

“You were the one watching scary mummy movies yesterday, Owun.”

“I don’t think it covered that part?!”

Hiro looked optimistically up at the doorway. “Have you seen anyone else down here?”

“No. Only Miss Kitty.”

“Miss Kitty?”

“The cat?” Owun glanced around, but couldn’t see where his small friend had gone. “Hmm. She’s vanished? Oh, I hope that doesn’t mean Zelda’s got her-!”

Hiro frowned, confused and apparently not sure he was convinced ‘Miss Kitty’ existed. “I am sure she is probably fine…?” he suggested, warily.

“She led me here to you so I haven’t really looked for anyone else.” Owun glanced towards the doorway. “Do you think I should, while you recover?”

“No, no. Better we stay together, from now on. From the way Yung-star has been gloating, I would be fairly confident that we are the only ‘Earth scum’ down here at the moment. Apart from perhaps your mystery feline.”

“Why do you think no-one has come to try and save us yet?” Owun wondered, sadly.

“Just because we have not seen anyone, yet, it does not mean they haven’t tried. The plans the archaeologists showed us suggest we are quite deep underground. It must be difficult to get to us.”

“You don’t think maybe it’s on purpose?”

Hiro quirked an eyebrow.

“Yes, I mean you too, Space Sergeant. Go to Egypt with the rest,” Owun griped, quietly, in Doctor Ninestein’s voice. “You could do with a refresher on what you’re meant to do.” He reverted back to his usual tones. “Doesn’t feel like much of a refresher to me-”

Hiro flattened a symbolic palm over the zeroid’s mouth display, and said shush! but he was smiling while he did it. “He is not punishing you, my ridiculous little friend. And even if you had done something deserving of punishment, he would never be so cruel as to leave us both in the hands of the enemy.”

Owun said a quiet huh and looked away, sullen.

“Come on. The longer we sit here, the greater the chance Zelda will find we have escaped.” Hiro pushed himself to his feet, and tottered unsteadily into the wall. At Owun’s questioning chirp, he waved a hand. “Half blind, and my legs are sore. Forgive me. This may take a little getting used to…”

Slowly, with Owun shepherding anxiously around his ankles, Hiro made his way out of the little tomb chamber. A lot of the wrappings still clung to him, making his movements even more stiff, but Hiro ignored them, for now. Together they scuttled quietly through the shadows until they reached the large entrance chamber the Martians had chosen as their base.

Lurking in the doorway, just hidden from view behind a plastic equipment case, licking her forepaws and washing her whiskers, was a familiar little dark shape.

“Oh-!” Owun hastily swallowed the rest of his words, restraining the urge to verbalise his relief. Kitty! He bounded ahead, and collided carefully with her.

Kitty looked absolutely fine. She butted her head against him, rubbing cheeks, her whiskers tickling.

Hiro crouched low, bracing his hands against Owun’s top curve, and peeked around the doorframe. It was temporarily empty, although Martian voices were coming from the next room along; thankfully, no-one was paying attention. All three earthlings hid together behind one of the crates, hunkering down in the shadows.

“I overheard Yung-star talking to Zelda, when they thought I was unconscious,” Hiro whispered, in tones so hushed they were barely audible even to sensitive zeroid ears. “Apparently he thinks it’s very creepy down here, and wants to leave already.”

“Well I agree with him on that part,” Owun said, quietly. “Didn’t think I’d be running around in an actual grave at the end of October instead of Miss Kestrel’s Halloween party.”

“That was why I thought maybe we can use his unease to our advantage. Our enemies have never struck me as the bravest? If we allow them to think they have disturbed an ancient king, asleep under the sand, then perhaps we can get them to run away.”

Owun cocked onto an angle, puzzled. “How are we meant to do that?”

“A little plaster dust in my hair and some charcoal on my face, and in the gloom I will hopefully look appropriately prehistoric.” Hiro pursed his lips in an ironic smile. “It will help that I can’t see where I am walking, without my glasses.”

“You surely don’t think that’s going to convince anyone. And they might recognise you!”

Hiro pulled a strip of fabric down over his eyes; the weave was just loose enough that he could see a little through it. His hair stuck out fairly wildly. “We will just have to hope they don’t. And when you start making noises, they will be too distracted to pay me enough attention to do so.”

“…making noises?”

“Yes. You proved you can mimic Doctor Ninestein. Perhaps you can also mimic an actor, playing the role of a mummy. Some nice groaning, moaning, angry noises. Maybe pretend you are cursing them.”

“I- what? Which actor?”

Hiro quirked a brow at him. “Forgive me, but who was watching ‘Revenge of the Mummy’ last night? Are you trying to tell me you were not being quite so brave as you want us all to believe, and not actually watching?”

“Hey, it wasn’t my choice! Ducky picked! It was a terrible movie! And it’s hardly scientifically accurate, they’ll never fall for it-”

Hiro laughed in spite of himself and hastily stifled the noise in his hand. “No, perhaps not. But we can still draw some inspiration from it. All we have to do is startle them and get them to run away.”

Kitty leaned in against the zeroid, rubbing her cheek against him as though nodding along, watching Hiro intently.

“Fine. Miss Kitty seems to agree with you,” Owun grumbled, dourly. “I guess I’ll go look up ‘groaning mummy noises’.”

Hiro glanced back at him. “Are you still claiming to have a pet?”

“The-the cat! She’s right here!”

Kitty flicked her tailtip and tickled under Hiro’s chin – he swiped at it, as though batting away an insect. “You are being very strange. Perhaps the heat does not agree with you.”

Owun stared at him, mystified. “She’s right there!?”

But Hiro was already peering around the distant end of the box, looking down the long central gallery with its flanking statues, away towards the so-called King’s Chamber, where everything all vanished in the dark.

(Owun was a little bit hurt that Hiro apparently didn’t trust him about having an extra new helper. He’d adjusted Hiro’s glasses enough times to be more than 50% certain that the human’s eyes weren’t that bad, but it was hot and gloomy down here. Maybe human eyes did the same thing as electronic eyes and got fuzzy when it got too warm.)

((Which did make him question whether he was the one seeing things, after all. It was all very detailed and in-focus for a hallucination, so he really rather hoped not.))

Hiro ducked back behind the crate and raised a finger to his lips, and after an instant Owun heard what Hiro had seen – Zelda. The shadows of the approaching Martians cast up against the wall behind them.

With her back arched, ears flattened, and her tail puffed up like a bottlebrush, Kitty bounded out from their hiding place and vanished behind a board. Dust sheets flapped in her wake and a pile of wooden support blocks fell over.

Owun sucked back a squeak of alarm at the last microsecond. No; she was going to be caught!

Yung-star had already recoiled into Zelda. “Mother! Did you see that? There was a thing! A little black thing that ran behind the board! Oh, no. Do you think it was that snake again?”

Zelda gave him a little whack with her stick, although she didn’t look quite so confident as normal. “Don’t be absurd. Little black thing, indeed.”

“But there was-!”

“I saw nothing, meine grandmother,” Itstar interrupted, trying to sound like they were humouring their uncle but not quite carrying off all the unconcerned ease they wanted. “But… perhaps it would not be a waste of time to just check one of those ridiculous spheres has not got down here?”

“Huh. Fine. Yung-star? Help Itstar look…”

While the Martians were distracted, Hiro seized his chance and slipped away into the dark of the gallery. The Martians gave no indication they’d spotted him, still too busy looking for Kitty. Owun allowed himself a microsecond to ‘breathe’ again, before puzzling over the next problem.

‘Make noises.’

Sigh.

‘Making noises’ was all well and good, but if he made them using his own hardware, someone would come looking, and they’d find him in seconds.

No, he needed to find something remote that he could transmit his voice to. Would there be any electronics down here…? He was fairly sure the scientists had at least a bit of kit he might be able to hijack temporarily. He waited while the search moved off into another room, before beginning a little rummage of his own.

Under a sheet at the end of the crate, the zeroid found a computer – just a desktop, nothing fancy, humming quietly to itself, but at the centre of a whole rat’s nest of cables. Almost every port was occupied with a connection already. He glared at it, as though it had done something to personally affront him, and was dithering over whether he dared unplug something and whether that would set off an alarm and get the Martians coming running over… when he finally found an unoccupied socket.

Owun unspooled a plug and dropped himself into the system. Previous interactions with Zelda’s computer systems meant he did speak a little Guk, but this was all still gloriously earthly. Thank the stars for small mercies. He quickly rustled through the systems and checked what was available to him.

Most of it was imaging hardware – laser scanners, digital cameras, a woefully-inadequate security system. Useless, useless. What else-… aha, there. Were those walkie-talkies? He focused his attention on the traces he could see in the system. Yes – although not strictly walkie-talkies, they were wired into the system like a jerry-rigged intercom for the archaeologists to talk to each other while they worked.

One was, conveniently, right next to Yung-star’s head, where he had (warily) gone back to his chiselled graffiti.

Carefully, Owun sent a little packet of sound data to it.

It… crackled, very faintly. He watched through the CCTV lens, cautiously optimistic, as the Martian glanced at it, but apparently dismissed it.

OK, good. He sent something else; a soft, rasping wheeze of air, like a long slow exhale of ancient breath.

This time Yung-star actually jumped. He stared at the speaker for a very long time. “Mother?” There was a faint quail in his voice.

No response from Zelda. He looked around himself but apparently satisfied himself he was alone. Maybe just imagining things. Maybe mummy had just leaned on a control.

Owun waited until Yung-star had started work again. He concentrated hard on his memory of the actor’s voice; the hollow, groaning near-whisper of words from desiccated vocal cords, the whistle of air from paper-dry lungs.

“….whoo daares distuurb my eterrnal slummber…” he moaned, drawing out the sounds into an eerie lament of pain. The words whispered up from as many speakers as he could get hold of, like a desert breeze rustling through dead papyri.

Yung-star jumped so hard he dropped his chisel. “Motherrr…?” he called out, warily, looking around himself. “Was that you?”

Zelda’s voice came from a distant chamber. “Was what me, you useless cretin?”

Patting the floor around himself but refusing to look at what he was doing, just in case something should sneak up on him, Yung-star scrabbled uselessly for his chisel. “That-that voice. Something about… eternal slumber.” His hand landed on a paintbrush; not caring that it was the wrong implement, he clung to it with both hands, as though it was a weapon. “Didn’t you hear it?”

“First little black things, now voices. You will be getting your circuits thoroughly checked when we get home!”

Owun waited until an uneasy silence had descended again before whispering …you will never pass through Duat…

With a clunk and a crackle of grounding electricity, the lights all snapped off. Yung-star yelped in fright. Even Owun flinched in anticipation of getting zapped – had he really overloaded that generator? – but the short had apparently grounded already. That faint, three-thousand year old candle-light was all that remained.

Swinging a torch in front of them, splashing weird shadows up the wall behind Owun’s hiding place, Itstar led a very stompy Zelda back into the antechamber.

“What are you playing at, you insufferable moron?” she snapped, giving Yung-star another good whack from her cane. “We need to be able to see-”

“It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! It just went off!” Yung-star protested, flapping his hands at the generator as though that would somehow turn it back on, then glanced up over his mother’s shoulder and-… attempted to stuff his hands into his mouth to stifle a squeal of fear.

Zelda whirled to look in the same direction as her son. She too took a very large startled step back.

Approaching out of the gloom was a figure.

A shuffling, broken, twisted figure, dragging its feet behind it, reaching out for them as though pleading for help.

Or about to grab them.

Hiro had really outdone himself. The remains of his dust-sheet restraints hung in tatters around him like genuine ancient linen bandages, brown and frayed. That “bit of charcoal” had left his skin looking stiff and dried out, as dark brown as Kitty’s fur, his lips pulled back off his yellow teeth in a permanent rictus of anger. The fingers at the ends of the reaching arms were like blackened, naked bones. His limbs all contorted in strange ways that Owun wasn’t totally sure that human limbs were really meant to bend, and his back curved strangely to one side. A few straggly wisps of hair poked out through the bandages.

The twist of fabric over his eyes obviously hid some sort of electronic device, because his eyes were glowing. Only a murky orange-yellow, but shockingly bright in the depths of the tomb.

Equal measures alarmed and astonished, Owun watched Hiro stumble closer and almost forgot he had a job to do. He hastily spoke through the speakers again, deciding not to ask why they were still working when the flaming generator itself had turned off.

“…I haave alloowed my kaaa to ooccupy the khet of this youung maan you brought dowwn here.”

(Now what in spacefire did that mean, Owun? The words had just appeared right there in his vocal processor, fully formed, and he’d piped them straight through to the speakers without actually evaluating them.)

((Perhaps he’d heard them, in that movie. Yeah. That must be it. No real ghosts down here.))

“…hee will be the instruuument of your destruuctionn… yooouu that caame heere, to defiile and destrooy…”

The words were getting louder, without him specifically asking them to. Less of a rustle of dead reeds; more like the howl of a baking wind scouring down a canyon.

A dark mass darted through the shadows, like a streamer of liquid pitch, flowing over the walls. Yung-star whirled to face it but it was gone far too quickly.

“I’m not staying here even one second longer, mother!” he asserted, voice shaking, backing off towards the entrance gallery. “You can confiscate my Granite Crunchies and I don’t even care. I don’t even care if you confiscate all my goodies! I’m going home!”

Itstar looked like they were trying hard to deny what they could see unfolding in front of them. “Do not be so ridiculous, meine uncle. This is all an absurd trick, by the humans!” they asserted, shakily. “It cannot possibly be anything else. Thousand year dead biological scum does not get up and walk!”

…they still backed hastily out of range of Hiro’s hands, when he reached for them, a low, brittle snarl rising from his throat. Trying hard to swallow their whimpers, Itstar reached for the chisel Yung-star had been using to hack lumps out of the ancient wall art-

The dark mass, the living, mobile blob of unfathomable void, or possibly Miss Kitty, leaped at the android child and crashed into their chest.

(It… looked to Owun almost like she went right through them. Which was obviously impossible. Maybe his optics weren’t quite as fine in this heat as he’d thought.)

The impact lifted Itstar clean off their feet and threw them into one of the crates. They actually squealed in alarm when the lid fell in, trapping their legs on the outside. Switching to their innocent little girl’s voice, they shrieked and kicked their feet, hammering on the top of the crate from the inside. “Granny Zelda! Help me! Help me!”

Zelda scooped Itstar out of the crate and virtually threw them at the entrance gallery. “Get a move on, you little idiot! Stop talking, for once in your life! Yung-star! Stop dithering! I will leave you behind if I have to!”

Emerging from behind his crate, Owun watched Yung-star continue to back away from Hiro, who was almost, almost in grabbing distance of him now.

“…yoouu whoo have distuurbed my reest, you will paaay with your eterrrnal soouuls!”

Yung-star made a strangled noise and whirled to run, but tripped over Kitty and went sprawling into a pile of support scaffolding, bringing boarding and lumps of masonry down on him. “Help! Mother, help!” he squealed. “I’m under attack by a leopard!”

Using her ability to control matter, Zelda grabbed him out of the debris, teleporting him into the gallery they were labouring up, powered by fear. “Stupid boy. We shall leave the humans and their vicious vermin to rot in this stinking place of death!”

“Hey! Don’t you call Kitty vermin!” Owun squeaked at her retreating back, outraged.

Hiro – miraculously untouched when the roof fell in – hastily swooped in and scooped his zeroid out of the way, before Zelda could spot him and realise that this possibly wasn’t all as spectral as they were trying to convince her.

He suddenly looked remarkably normal again, up close like this.

“Well done!” he whispered. “Now we probably ought to find some shelter-…”

The ZEAF was close enough that its engine backwash roared down the tunnel into the underground chambers. The two Terrahawks hunkered down in their sheltered spot behind the crate, beneath a pile of rough blankets, until the dust had settled and the sound of engines had faded.

Owun recovered first. “Wow, Hiro! That was amazing!”

The candlelight had completely faded and the only light behind the crate now came from Owun’s vivid crimson optic display, and the flickering white of his mouth. He was excitedly bright, for a change.

“I don’t even know how you did it! You have got to do that as your costume tonight!”

Hiro frowned, but he was smiling as well. “It is just plaster dust, and three thousand year old charcoal-”

“No, no, I mean the glowing eyes thing. That was genuinely pretty scary! You almost convinced me that you were a real-life mummy!”

Hiro’s smile faded, just a touch. “…glowing… eyes?”

“Well… yes? They were-…” Owun reviewed his visual record, and deflated. “They-… they… I don’t understand. I know I recorded it, but… there’s nothing there? Why is there nothing there.”

Hiro stroked his crown. “We will figure it out later. I think I would prefer not to stay in someone’s else’s grave any longer than I have to.”

He threw the blankets off, and triggered another little whirl of dust, making him cough. The solitary shaft of insipid sunlight meandering down the entrance gallery seemed to suck all the light out of the rest of the tomb, but one of the big floodlights was slowly coming back on, plinking as it warmed up. It pointed off into a corner, illuminating a picture of a woman with the head of a lioness, but the rest of the lights were scattered in disarray, either broken or unplugged.

“Hiro?” A familiar voice – albeit distant – was shouting, urgently. “101? You guys okay?”

Owun peered out into the dust. “Hawkeye’s looking for us.” He rolled out from behind the crate and immediately came to an unceremonious stop against a nest of fallen scaffolding. “Oh, oops. This isn’t so good.”

“Yes, I hear him too.” Coughing, Hiro climbed over the debris and almost tripped over his zeroid. He surveyed the chaotic scene. “How in space did none of this land on me?”

“It’s a temple, so maybe we had some ancient god’s favour, or something? Scaring the Martians away before they could totally wreck the place.” Owun raised his volume. “We’re down here, lieutenant!”

Off in the distance, he heard Hawkeye reply to someone else – yeah, I hear them, I think they’re okay – before the man hollered down the tunnel again. “You two stay put, right? I’m coming down there when I got a rope set up! That ZEAF made a real mess of the walkway!”

“Made a mess of everything, if even I can see it,” Hiro sighed, and rubbed his head. Plaster dust billowed liberally out of his hair. “Hopefully the laser scans mean some of the damage can be repaired. I am sure I can design something to accurately replicate the bas-reliefs…”

Owun had bigger things on his processors. “Kitty!” he called, into the dust. “Here Kitty Kitty! We can get out now!”

Hiro sighed at him. “You are not still obsessing over that cat that only you have seen, surely. We need to start to find our way out.”

Too distracted to really argue, Owun peered off into the dusty gloom of the darkened tomb. “But we can’t leave her behind. I’d have never found you, and the Martians would still be here, without her!”

Hiro gave him one of those looks and he hmm’ed unhappily and closed his shutters, so the human could start to help him over some of the debris, towards the entrance.

Enough old scaffolding boards were still clinging in place to form a ramp up the uneven gallery floor, towards the surface. Hiro managed to get Owun up onto it, and began the laborious task of rolling him up the slope. Even with his weight as its lowest setting, the zeroid was a good hundred kilos, and not really ideally-shaped for rolling uphill.

Owun offered his very saddest look, when Hiro paused to catch his breath. “You think I imagined her. Like you think I imagined everything else.”

“I think,” the human panted, mostly for effect, leaning hard on him, “I would like you to help me get you out of here? We can debate the merits of ghostly felines when we are no longer underground.”

“Oh, fine.” A huff. “I guess that’s a fair point.”

Hawkeye had scrambled halfway down the tunnel, by now, meeting Hiro on the way up, and joined him behind the heavy little robot. Between them, the two humans heaved the zeroid the rest of the way up the steep ramp, and plopped him out into a small soft heap of sand just outside, before scrambling out themselves.

“I know our halloween party got unexpectedly delayed by the lovely Zelda, but this is taking it a bit far, don’tcha think, Pharaoh Hiro?” Hawkeye joked, pulling on one of the loose wraps around the other man’s shoulders.

Hiro inclined his head and smiled, going slightly pink under his layer of dust. He spread his arms. “Well, it seems to have convinced Zelda’s family…”

The sun was beginning to creep towards the horizon, afternoon sun slanting across the desert and making the soft stone of the above-ground parts of the temple glow a warm golden colour.

The temple wasn’t the only thing glowing gold, either.

Owun sat on his own on an old wall half-buried in a sand dune, some distance away, sulking. Since getting out into daylight, everyone had realised it wasn’t a trick of the light at all – unlike the other zeroids, who were just yellow with a layer of Saharan dust, he really was genuinely gold all over. Although he was covered in dust as well, and it was not helping matters; he felt clogged up and itchy and uncomfortable.

Captain Mary Falconer clambered up the dune, and sat carefully on the sand next to him. “What’s upset you now?” She wondered, gently. “Don’t you want to bask in the glory of a job well done?”

He glared into the distance and refused to meet her gaze. Her words had been kind but she’d used that tone of voice; the one that said are you being oversensitive about something again. “Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. No. I mean… everyone’s making jokes. Like I hallucinated it out of stress. I was not that stressed! And I did not faint! The sergeant major is the one who has the weird fever dreams, not me. But no-one wants to believe me and it’s not fair.”

(Mary thought about it for a private second or two; she had heard some of the jokes going around, and nobody had tried keeping Owun from hearing them, either. ‘Figures it’d be Owun needing to be saved by a kitty’. Although ‘kitty’ hadn’t been the word most of them had used. Followed swiftly by well I’ll be impressed if he knows what one of THEM even is from the sergeant major.)

She patted his top curve, affectionately. “Is it bad that we want you to celebrate your success? Not defer our thanks to some little ghost that only you saw?”

“There. Was. A. Cat,” he said, firmly.

“Maybe you could show me.” Mary gestured with her tablet. “That’ll stop all the arguments.”

“I can’t.” He studied the sand. “My visuals didn’t save properly. She doesn’t show up in any of them.”

Mary gave him a sympathetic smile, but he could tell she thought he was making excuses.

“It was a little brown cat,” he huffed, stubbornly. “With blue eyes and one of those… ankh things on her collar, and a little gold ring in her nose. She showed me the way out. She led me to Hiro. She helped scare the Martians away. And I don’t even know where she is!” His voice had grown more anxious the longer he’d been speaking. He made a soft descending note. “I hope she got out ok. When all the roof fell in I lost sight of her.”

“I’m sure she’s fine. Cats are clever. They always land on their feet, so I’m sure she’ll have escaped being hurt. If she got down there in the first place, she can probably get herself out. But, if it makes you feel better…” She smiled and stroked his brow. “I’ll ask the archaeologists to put out some cage traps. If she’s still down there, hopefully when she gets hungry they’ll catch her.”

Owun sighed a tinny little zeroid sigh and rocked sidelong to lean against her. “Thank you, Captain Falconer.”

“At least one good thing came out of all this,” she chuckled, fondly. “You both have your costumes sorted for this evening, King Owun.”

“Ugh.” He rolled his eyes so hard, it spread to his entire body. “I don’t even know where this all came from! It better wash off.”

“It’s already rubbing off a little. Twenty minutes with your buffer and I’m sure you’ll look good as new.” Mary demonstrated her hand, the palm of which shimmered faintly. “I thought you liked costume parties.”

“I do! I probably wouldn’t mind this if I’d been asked!” An impatient sigh. “This feels more like when Zero pulled a prank and painted me to look like a police car. I was still picking bits of blue enamel off for weeks afterwards.”

“Well, I hope I can reassure you that this is a lot more attractive than blue and yellow squares. You look very regal. A little round pharaoh, perhaps. We’ll find you a nice headdress so you look the part.”

Owun grumbled, mollified. “Fine. Maybe it’s not that bad. I guess I can live with being a king, for a few hours.”

“Come on.” She pushed herself to her feet and brushed sand off her backside. “Let’s get home. We have a few hours before the end of Halloween. I’m sure Kate can still squeeze a bit of party in there.”

They slithered together down the little dune to the flat of the rocky desert floor.

Something caught Mary’s eye as they made their way back to Battlehawk. She hesitated, then picked something up out of the sand. “Owun?”

He paused and looked back at her. “Yes, captain?”

“I think you might like to see this…”

She turned to face him, brushing sand off whatever it was she’d picked up.

In her hand was a statue, covered in hieroglyphs.

Of a little dark brown cat, with a hoop through her nose, and luminous blue eyes.

---

(Yes, the actual joke is “figures it’d be Owun needing to be saved by a pussy”.)

(Ducky = 22, of course.)

(Re: the police thing - “101” is the UK’s nonemergency police number. Every time I see it on the side of a police vehicle, a certain little gremlin in my head makes a comment on it.)

(101 and costume parties seem to be a thing? They were going to do an animated series, and the only episode that was finished was a party - and even 20 years ago, I felt it was a way my boy could actually win just every so often against Zero.)

(You know they'll have swapped wigs in about 20 minutes. It was just an enormous victory getting Zero to wear it in the first place.)

#lieutenant hiro

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