(12) Belka & Bonnie's Flight

>"Two meters, careful now," the voice of mission control rang out from the control panel's speaker. Belka blinked as she steadied herself, steel hands tightly gripping a short joystick as she watched the screen before her intently. Two short pushes on the stick to the right, and her capsule began to list that direction as two short bursts of oxygen escaped the reaction control system's nozzle. The Soviet machine waited a few seconds as the docking indicator crudely marked on the analog readout matched her target, and quickly pressed left on the joystick twice to arrest her drift. A small dim light bathed her suddenly worried faceplate in a red glow as it told her of a simple failure. Some foreign blockage in one of the RCS thrusters had caused a misfire, and just that quickly her confidence was thrown out the window. Pushing again hard on the joystick, the capsule vented in one direction and spun it around quickly from her overcompensation. The wide engine bell of Belka's command module smashed hard into the target American spacecraft, sending a cacophony of warning klaxons through the small capsule. "Nyet!" she shouted in frustration as every light on the control panel lit up for reset, a yellow glow clicking on from the overhead bulb. Sighing Belka reached forward and flicked a switch. "That was dirty, throwing an RCS misfire at me at the last second! When would that ever happen?" she shouted angrily into her headset. The voice electronically piped in from only a dozen meters away crackled in disapprovingly. "If it did, you'd fail. Reset and start from the top: closing distance on American vessel five kilometers, relative speed one meter per second." Blue optics rolled in their orbits as Belka gave a sigh and turned her head side to side imitating a human cracking their neck in preparation. "Yes, alright. Ready for next run," the Russian robot said confidently, gripping the controls as the next simulation began.

>The time following her bootup at Baikonur had been packed, and more than a week of preliminary baseline tests and checkups had followed before she'd been officially told what her assignment even was. An older man, round and greying but with sharply intense eyes, had finally greeted her one day after a particularly trying run on a centrifuge that she was sure would shake itself apart long before she did. Standing before the impressively-uniformed man had been intimidating, and Belka had stayed silent for a long moment as she was looked over by those sharp eyes. "She already practiced with the American pilot?" the old man said at last, turning to the young man who'd been tasked with ferrying Belka around the complex. "Yes, and both company representatives said the same of their cooperation," the younger man said with a pleased tone while Belka glanced between the two nervously. Looking back down at the blonde robot the elder man nodded somberly and made an approving sound without moving his lips. "Good, they'll be up there a while, best we know they can get along." he added after a moment, giving Belka another look up and down as if making comparative notes in his mind. "You, what are you called again?" he said, finally addressing the little robot. Rectangular lights embedded in the steel of her face lit up at the sudden attention while she answered. "I am called Belka, Sir! And..!" she began to add, and nearly faltered at the raised eyebrow of the important man before her. "And I'm quite confident that we'll carry out the mission together successfully!"

>A plethora of tests and introductions to simulator controls had followed her brief meeting with the space program's Commandant, first acclimating to moving around in both low and zero G using the indoor diving pool. Moving around the bottom in what felt like slow motion was painstaking for Belka who by nature of her mechanical mind plotted out every step in microseconds. Frustration with low G training eventually gave way to a strange sort of calm she'd never experienced before when the buoyancy weights on her suit had been adjusted to give her true weightlessness. Floating there in the dark pool pulled in no direction at all Belka had closed her optics for a few moments and simply smiled at the foreign readings her internal gyroscopes were giving her. In just a short time she'd adjusted adequately to reduced gravity and the complete lack of it, and had been cleared to begin the rigorous trials in a simulator. Launch abort, abort-from-orbit, rendezvous from a number of altitudes, collision with docking target, surprise hostile action by docking target, many scenarios had been played out in the small enclosed mock-up she spent hours in reacting to everything the technicians could think to throw at her. By her tenth successful simulation of landing on the lunar surface out of seventeen runs so far Belka should have felt happy, but instead couldn't halt a flood of internal self-critique amplified by the notification of every minor failure by staff after the simulation had ended. "It's always the last second," she muttered to herself while the communication channel was off, shaking her head warily as she leaned back in the simulator's seat and sighed. "I'm fine, right up until I'm suddenly not."


>A frown crossed Tilly's metallic faceplate as she stared down at a deep blue-green pool inside the large hanger on the grounds of her home launch complex. A small group of engineers stood around a fixed desk at the edge of the pool, insulated wires leading down into the water delivering constantly updated information on the subject diving below. Atop the desk a custom computer displayed the diver's condition, and a speaker rang out her voice when she spoke. Crackling slightly, the voice of the panicking nandroid came through as if from far away instead of only fifteen feet below the water. "I-I've lost my orientation, I don't know which way I'm pointed!" Bonnie called out, the fear palpable in her voice even detached as it was through the speaker. Collins standing before the screen said nothing, and didn't move to transmit any orders as he stared down intently. A few seconds went by before Bonnie's voice came over the speaker again, this time pitched upwards in intensity. "C-control? Please, I-I'm stuck! I can't see and I, and I! Please help!" Tilly sucked in air and nervously looked towards the man running the dark navigation test. "Sir, she-" Collins held up a hand and shook his head. "We can't hold her hand every step of the way, she's got to be able to figure her way out of a tough spot without any external input," he said, carefully reading over the display hooked into the underwater robot. "She's increased the load on her processor by 20% in the last ninety seconds," an engineer piped up from next to him, sounding slightly nervous before adding "Wait, make that 30%, she's cooking herself down there." Tilly gave a huff and stomped the few paces up to the desk from her place beside the pool. "This isn't fair! You had her navigating your the mock-up down there then cut the lights without even warning her! She doesn't know how to work her way out of that yet, she-" Collins cut her off by raising his voice and giving her a sharp disapproving look. "And that's exactly why we threw this scenario at her, better now than up there! Besides, who taught YOU how to navigate your capsule blind, hm?" Tilly looked down at the concrete floor of the hanger, her cheeks suddenly lighting up red. Collins nodded smugly. Again the speaker cut in, and Bonnie's desperate voice rang out. "Hello? I can't tell where I am! P-please, someone!" Grimacing, Tilly reached forward and grabbed the fixed microphone on the desk, cutting in between Collins and the display without thinking about it. "Bonnie? It's me, don't worry! Just reinitialize your  gyros to reset your orientation! Once you know up from down, grab your umbilical and follow it back out of the mock-up, bit by bit okay? We're right here!" Several terse seconds passed while Collins gave the little robot a death-glare, moving to displace her in front of the monitor again before the speaker crackled back to life. "O-ok, ok right! I've got the ceiling and floor, I'm not too tangled and, aha! I feel a doorway!" Bonnie's tone shifted from cautious to excited quickly, and Tilly's expression softened as she heard her friend relax. "Alright call that an abort, reset and we'll schedule again for tomorrow, first thing," Collins groaned, leaning his head back and shutting his eyes. Tilly balled her little fists and pouted. "You can't just expect her to adapt to this kind of thing right away! It's not fair!" she said defiantly, though her tone sounded more pleading than anything else. Collins shook his head and pursed his lips. "If she can't act independently up there, then she's at risk! You know she's gonna be stationed with-" the short man gave her a sudden incredulous look, then shook his head and laughed harshly. "Why am I arguing this with a machine, go get someone a coffee or something." Ten minutes later, Tilly strode across the open grounds of the launch complex wearing down the grass on the most efficient computed path between buildings with metal fists still balled at her sides. Scowling, the nandroid ignored for once the brilliant red sunset painting the sky around her in pinks and purples. "I'll get YOU a coffee, jerk," she grumbled to herself as she approached the main building containing her suite.

>Bonnie was quite aware that her room had been formerly used as a walk-in storage space, as evidenced by the three-high stack of standardized containers still tucked against the wall at the foot of her recharging cot. A flat bit of wall-mounted mirror and a pole strung between two walls populated by empty hangers had been provided to her by the Agency, but the little room still felt cold and unwelcoming to her even with such lavish trappings. Glancing internally at her own clock, she began to weigh the pros and cons of her stray idea. Tilly was friendly, more than that Bonnie considered her a friend, so surely the veteran nandroid would be willing to talk, right? 'Then again,' she thought to herself, 'what if all she does is tell me what I did wrong today?' Bonnie winced while lying in her cot, staring upwards at the plain ceiling. "No," she said out loud to herself in a soft voice. "Don't be stupid." She laid on her cot, waiting to plug in and shut down for sleep mode for nearly an hour while she deliberated on talking to Tilly tonight or not. As her unease failed to pass, it became increasingly clear to her that ease of mind wouldn't come through a simple shut-down and recharge. Raising from her cot, Bonnie looked once at her crude mirror and fluffed her unruly curls futilely with a sigh. Leaving her small dorm, she closed the door behind her and was left in near darkness, the only light provided by an illuminated exit sign. Without people in the building, the structure registered to her as somehow eerie. Walking slowly, Bonnie moved down the hall to the only other obvious source of light, a thin yellow bar at the bottom of Tilly's door. Without thinking about it she imitated a human gulping, then reached out to lightly rap on the door with her metal knuckles.

>Glancing up from the brief letter she was writing at her simple desk and vanity mirror, Tilly blinked at the unexpected knock at her door. "Come in!" she called out cheerily, turning in her small wooden chair to face the doorway. At this hour, only a small handful of janitors were left at the complex, and the metallic clang of the knock had confirmed her guest before the door had even opened. A pale metal face rimmed by poorly-kept orange curls poked into the room through the door as it cracked open. "Um, I'm not disturbing you, am I?" Bonnie asked nervously, giving Tilly an involuntary confident smile. "Of course not, c'mon in!" she said happily, but took note of her fellow nandroid's uneasy body language as she entered the room and stood awkwardly. "I, um," Bonnie began, green optics focusing intently on the scuffed tile floor beneath her feet. Tilly's smile faded as she watched the new recruit shift from foot to foot, trying to find her words. "Your dive-test?" she asked suddenly, acting on a hunch computed somewhere below her consciousness. Bonnie looked up sharply, pink cheek-lights glowing suddenly. "How did, y-yes! Yes, that's what, um, that's what I wanted to ask you about," she said sheepishly, finally meeting Tilly's blue optics. The veteran pilot cocked her head. "Hey, it's no big deal. You got disoriented, it's scary when it happens out of the blue like that. Next tes, you'll be ready for it." Bonnie broke her gaze and looked again at the floor. "But, what if it's the same? I only got myself out of there because you guided me out, if it had just been me alone..." she trailed off, seeming to slump in place where she was standing, arms coming up to hug herself anxiously. "Oh come on," Tilly scolded, shocking Bonnie enough to look up and meet optics once again. "If I wasn't there you'd have panicked a little longer then figured it out, right? That's what you did when I got tossed away from the ship up there, it took you a few minutes but you made a plan and followed through!" Bonnie blinked at her momentarily, a mix of conflicting emotions rushing through her processor for half a second before she laughed once and looked down, cheeks glowing. "I didn't really know what I was doing, but in the moment I really thought I could do it and, and orders seemed less important then, you know? I can't really explain it, I just knew I could get to you." Watching her friend underplay the rescue that had saved her life, Tilly lifted her hands from her hips and crossed her arms with a smug grin. "You knew you could do it because you knew what you were capable of, right? You'd done enough rendezvous sims right to know for sure." Bonnie turned slightly away from her, shaking her head. "I had an idea but, but I didn't know until I spotted you if I was doing things right, not really! I could have screwed up any number of times!" Looking back up her expression was pleading, but Tilly's was less sympathetic than she was expecting. "I don't know what I'm doing most of the time either Bonnie, I just keep at it because it's fun!" Bonnie blinked in surprise, trying to discern if the eccentric nandroid was kidding or not. "Doing this stuff you follow the plan up until it goes out the window, then when you absolutely need to you realize you can improvise more you think. All these tests are good practice and all but," Tilly rolled her optics with a smile. "they can only prepare you for so much."


>'Technically passing'. Belka grimaced at the term. At a ratio of seven successful sims to every three failures, she was being considered cleared enough to meet the American's deadline for the joint lunar return mission. Still, she'd happily accepted the engineer's requests for further sims when they were requested of her, the worry of failing something on the real flight eating away a small portion of her processing power at all times. More than a month pending her certification, Bonnie arrived at a dirty hanger housing the Agency's state of the art simulator rig. Besides the usual assortment of engineers and technicians stood a second steel-skinned robot like herself, jet-black hair cropped short above optics that glowed an odd gold. Crossing the distance quickly Belka found herself standing eye-level with her fellow machine, both glancing one another over while the lead engineer approached. "You are the new pilot?" the stranger said dismissively, and before Belka could answer a rail-thin man arrived to make the introductions for them. "Belka, for the next two weeks you will be running simulations with a partner, Tatyana here is a veteran pilot. Her role will be an advisory one, you are in command with Tatyana backing you up." Belka blinked once, then nodded enthusiastically. Somehow, she thought to herself in an instant, having Bonnie alongside her for their ordeal in Greenland had made it much easier than if she'd been alone out there, and perhaps this would be much the same. Tatyana looked the new pilot up and down again with a careful gaze, then gave an imperceptible smirk. "After you, Commander."

>Introductions had been brief as the two cosmobots settled into the simulator's twin seats, neither evidently feeling chatty. The scenario was presented to them over their headsets, and the values on the console's crude display matched what they were hearing. Rendezvous with the American vessel was ninety seconds away, and the two spacecraft had a relative velocity of five meters per second as the Soviet vehicle closed the distance. "How's our orientation?" Belka asked inquisitively, not breaking her gaze from the small monitor displaying an approximate image made up of simple green lines. Tatyana leaned her head from side to side nonchalantly for a moment. "It's...okay. Should be good." Belka finally broke her gaze at the screen to give the older machine an incredulous look. "Okay? Should? What are we off by, give me a figure!" It was easy for her to forget the veteran status of the robot next to her in the moment, and Belka's irritation rose with every moment Tatyana wasted seeming to think out each response slowly. "It's fine, if not we reorient after the braking burn. How are we on that by the way? Sixty five seconds." Tatyana answered back, smiling as the bleach-blonde robot scrambled to check the control panel. "Okay, yes. Yes we're fine." Belka took a deep breath, and tried to keep her focus on the figures before her rather than entertain thoughts of her partner's competency. "Closest approach is ninety meters, twenty seconds." Tatyana nodded approvingly as Belka read out their status, but added nothing and only watched her partner with a knowing look. "Decelerating with RCS in three, two one," Belka said automatically as she counted down internally, then pressed forward cautiously on the control stick. None of the figures on the control panel read any differently than they had before, and the crude digital approximation of the American craft on the simulated window continued to drift by. A low buzz sounded through the closed cabin, and Belka searched around for the source of the warning. "Hey, do you know what just went wrong?" Tatyana asked casually, looking down and picking at the armrest of her seat with more apparent interest than she had for the simulation. Belka shot her an angry look, then frantically looked back towards the control panel. "I don't see where, AHA! Here, the reaction control system is locked up!" she said excitedly, pointing at the unchanging numerals on the screen. Tatyana gave one look at the panel, then shrugged. "Computer crash, it's not going to respond to your control then. Now what?" Her voice was cautious, strange optics glued on the new pilot assessing her moment by moment. Bonnie blinked and looked around, the anxiety of knowing that the American vessel was now slipping further away clouding her processing. "Um, I don't...do we reset? Reset the RCS computer I mean?" Belka asked hopefully, only to be met with a raised eyebrow from Tatyana. "I don't know commander, can we? Can you? Try it, see what happens." Belka gave her a disapproving look, then pressed and held a button on the control panel for several seconds as the display flashed. She waited for several more seconds, stretching into half a minute as she sat there staring at the screen eagerly. Finally Tatyana cut in while staring down at her own steel fingers nonchalantly. "That computer takes over a minute to restart, and we're getting farther away from the target every second. What do we do?" Belka grimaced, something about the other robot's tone seemed condescending, even belittling to her. Sucking in air and furrowing her brow, Belka reached forward for the controls. "We'll use the main engine then, manual burn to match velocity." Tatyana made a soft whistling sound and gave an approving nod. "Bold move, can you calculate that kind of burn on the fly though? That engine is a touchy thing." Crossing her arms, the cosmobot gave Belka an expression she found infuriating. "Of course! Engine armed, burning manually in three, two, one," a loud recording played over the simulator's speakers as the nonexistent engine was given the order to fire. "Whoa, watch that relative velocity," Tatyana said with a curt laugh, and Belka instantly cut the engine burn to check their current speed to the target. "Fifty meters per second?!" Belka shouted, then desperately began checking over the console to confirm her figures as they rocketed passed the simulated American vessel. Leaning back in her chair Tatyana sighed loudly. "We won't make it now, you'll have us doing back and forth yo-yo until we run out of fuel," Belka glared towards the older robot and opened her mouth to rudely answer, but was cut off by the simulator's speaker relaying a voice from outside. "End current sim, give us ten minutes while we reset, same scenario on the next run."

>Over the following weeks, both robots fell into a steady rhythm with one another, but despite the presence of an experienced spacefarer Belka's scores did little to improve over her solo attempts, and had instead began to decline with repeated runs. "She can't do anything herself," Tatyana muttered to herself from within her spartan recharging closet, a room just large enough for a bunk and a footlocker. Truthfully her now-familiar housing wasn't too different from her little nook back home, though somehow the stained wooden walls and familiar well-worn rug of her happy little closet there felt worlds apart from the white walls and single naked light-bulb above her head in this place. Laying on her back, Tatyana stared up at the ceiling and lost herself on an errant train of thought. Training for Mars would begin soon, re-familiarizing herself with the simulator was only the first step in a continuous effort that would culminate with her walking on another world. Closing golden optics she regulated her breaths, and banished any fleeting excitement she had over seeing another new horizon. What ate up her processing power during quiet times like this were the classified orders she'd been given, right at the start when she'd first accepted the mission. It was just going to be the two of them up there, she thought to herself with uncertainty, how would she be able to gather the required intelligence on the American's ship with her friend close beside her the whole way? Pushing the uncomfortable thoughts down into a sub-folder for later processing, Tatyana's mechanical mind next turned to the moon-base  she'd now visited twice. Despite being made for human habitation, both nations involved had seemingly grown cold feet and left the place uninhabited after she and Tilly had left the moon last, alongside the rogue android Nadya. Now Belka was to be the Soviet's representative on the next joint mission? Tatyana scoffed and sat up, suddenly offended in a way she could not quite articulate. "She's trying to rely on a co-pilot to cover for her," she said to herself in a low voice as the realization struck home. Gritting artificial teeth, Tatyana stood from her meager bunk and straightened out the creases on her crimson jumpsuit, a look of determination crossing her steel faceplate. "She doesn't think she can do it on her own."

>Belka rested on her simple cot, recharging cable already plugged in though she hadn't shut down for sleep mode yet. Hands behind her head she stared at the ceiling with a sense of unease. Traveling with Bonnie across the snow and ice had been easy compared to Tatyana's steadfast refusal to simply cooperate, she thought to herself as she rested contemplatively. A sharp knock rang out at her door, and Bonnie sat up quickly in a state of shock. Nobody had ever come calling like this without prior notice, and for a rare instant she had no idea what the interruption to her night might be. "Come in?" she called out cautiously, cocking an eyebrow as the door opened to reveal the short-haired veteran robot she'd been training beside. "Not shut down yet?" Tatyana said with a smirk as she entered the tiny room and closing the door behind her. Belka rose from her cot and stood attentively  in the small bit of walking space between it and the wall, facing the elder robot only an arms-length apart. "No, too much on my processor. Ah, what brings you here?" she said diplomatically, though her unease bled through plainly into her voice. Tatyana gave her another of her disapproving looks up and down before answering. "I've seen your sim scores. You did well at first, then worse as they threw harder scenarios at you." Belka involuntarily gulped as the more experienced cosmobot crossed her arms. "Then, when you got a co-pilot to test with, your scores lowered. Why?" Tatyana asked pointedly, narrowing her odd golden optics at the new pilot. Belka blinked, then moved the actuators above her optics to furrow her brow. "Why? Maybe if you'd actually contribute instead of sitting around to watch me fail, I'd be doing better!" she shouted back defiantly, her building frustration over the past couple weeks. Tatyana laughed once derisively and leveled a sarcastic gaze on her. "Oh? You keep doing so bad because of me?" Belka could tell what the elder robot was playing at, but couldn't acquiesce now. Rectangular cheek lights glowing red, she balled her fists and took a step forward, getting uncomfortably close to her guest in the cramped room. "Yes! How am I supposed to train for a joint mission when my co-pilot keeps acting like a malfunctioning outmode?!" Tatyana blinked in surprise at the outburst from the spunky blonde robot, but refused to back down. "And if the American pilot can't hack it, then what? Worse, what if she's an active detriment to your mission, a 'malfunctioning outmode'? If you can't act independently then what good are you to them?!" Belka reeled, and her processor hummed as it ran her simulated emotional response. "I'm plenty good on my own! I can fly, I know I can! I just need YOU to stop getting in my way!"she shot back defiantly, fists balling at her sides. Tatyana's expression widened into a smug smirk as she closed what little difference there was between them, standing faceplate to faceplate with the bleach-blonde pilot. "According to your sim scores, you sure as hell aren't." Belka sucked in air, passing it over her overheated processor before she growled out her response, surprising even herself with her tone. "Yes, I AM!" Without thinking, Belka pushed outwards at her guest, striking her chest with both palms and knocking the veteran robot to the floor harshly. A cold chill ran through her spinal struts, had she really just done that? Belka had been angry plenty of times before, but something had felt different about that outburst and it frightened her. As Belka stood frozen by her act, Tatyana grimaced sharply and jumped to her feet, tackling the younger machine against the wall behind her in a fraction of a second. For just a moment, Tatyana held the shocked cosmobot against the wall with one arm, her other raised with a balled-up fist ready to rain down blows. In a fraction of an instant, the memory of straddling Tilly on the moon and wildly swinging her hammer replayed over Tatyana's processor, and she slowly lowered her fist, releasing her hold on Belka after a long moment. Narrowing her optics Tatyana raised a steel finger and poked it into Belka's chest just above her battery compartment, where Irina's rock-pick had landed the killing strike on Kimmy. "You need to be able to work with a partner, and work independently. If you can't do both, then you're a liability." Belka blinked in confusion as Tatyana slowly moved back from her and turned towards the door. When she was gone, Belka let out a shaky sigh and let herself slide down the wall to sit with knees pulled to her chest, an unfamiliar feeling of dread fogging her senses.


>Over the months Bonnie's tepid confidence had wavered with each slight mistake, and she'd chastised herself for each error in judgement despite the glowing approval granted by her veteran friend. Two weeks prior the pair had been shipped by air across the continent, an entire plane-full of engineers and observers traveling with them on the chartered flight out to southern California. Once they had arrived, she and Tilly had been subjected to daily exercises in maneuvering the desert environment fully-suited, a challenge that seemed more difficult to Bonnie than to her elder. Given their assigned missions, the environment was perfectly suited to test both machines, Bonnie training to navigate the grey wasteland of the moon while Tilly learned which samples to look for when she'd eventually set foot on Mars. Tilly had a certain enthusiasm about her that Bonnie envied while the pair completed their assigned tasks each day, she found it hard to envision how this seemingly arbitrary training would aid her yet the veteran pilot seemed to take each task with a giddy smile. One day as the two nandroids stood on the open landscape surrounding Camp Dunlap, Bonnie gave a groan without thinking of the simulated human expression. "I  think we know how to pick up rocks by now," she said in exasperation, causing Tilly to blink in surprise at the normally timid robot. "Yeah but being able to tell igneous rock from metamorphic or even sedimentary is important!" The older nandroid looked up from the sample she'd been about to chisel away and grinned at her partner. "Imagine if you found sedimentary rocks on the moon! I mean, what?" Without waiting for a reply she laughed, and began to chip away at a bit of sandstone sticking out of the ground. Bonnie frowned, understanding only partially. Was that really so big a deal, she wondered to herself as she scanned the hard-packed desert floor and ran the data across her processor searching for meteorite fragments. "That'd be neat, I guess," she replied with an un-enthused shrug, causing Tilly to stop in place. "Neat? Bonnie, that'd completely change our view of what the moon even is!" Grinning, she scrunched her shoulders and balled her fists excitedly. Bonnie watched the excited robot and tried to mirror her enthusiasm, but couldn't. Looking down, she only nodded. "R-right, I'll be more mindful of what I'm picking up from now on." Turning her green optics from Tilly, she began scanning the desert floor again, determining by computed estimate the age and origin of the samples she was collecting. Tilly blinked, her shoulders slumping slightly. Turning from the younger robot, she focused on her internal checklist for now and sought out the next simulated sample.

>Georges stood at attention looking out over the expansive test range of the military base, having flown out separate from his Agency's two robots. Half a year ago he'd listened to a drunken pitch in his office, and agreed to it without the benefit of sobriety himself. Now he was to see if his drunken gambit to back a wildman's dream would pay off. In the small observation building hastily set up near the test range, a clock struck twelve and the dozen men inside stiffened as the deadline to test approached. Behind him just a pace or so were the two robots in his employ, though he was only interested in one of them witnessing the test just now. A small man in ensign's fatigues entered the room with a little box and distributed pairs of cheap sunglasses, repeating a memorized sentence about protecting their eyes before the test vehicle reached apogee. Bonnie and Tilly each took a pair alongside the humans present, and while Bonnie held them in her hands awkwardly for a few moments Tilly wasted no time in fitting the protective gear over her new optics with a smile, staring out through the thick glass at the test site on the horizon. "Tee minus, two minutes." a voice called out over the tinny speaker, causing all present to shuffle their feet nervously. Georges thought back briefly to that fuzzy evening in his office, the proposed plan seeming somehow more viable and less insane to him then than it seemed now. Behind him the two robots tittered back and forth, their near-silent conversation inaudible to him as he stared out through the window at the tall steel tower suspending the test article. As the countdown neared zero all in attendance grew silent, waiting patiently as the count ticked down to launch. A bright flash appeared beneath the small test vehicle, a small dropped explosive charge propelling it upwards several feet. A second bright flash occurred a moment later beneath the vessel, shoving it upwards several feet more. As the test article rose it continued to drop charges behind it, each burst propelling the vessel upwards. Ten charges, twenty, thirty, the two nandroids in Georges' charge sidled up next to him to watch the test vehicle fade from view upwards. Checking his watch, Georges sucked in air and looked up expectantly, now glad for his temporary dark sunglasses. The flash was like nothing else he'd seen before outside of some declassified test footage, completely obscuring everything else for several seconds. As the light passed however, he was able to look up again and spot the test vehicle arcing above the darkening fireball beneath it. Even though the dark-tinted shades the light was blinding and he had to close his eyes briefly with each following flash, five in total as the vehicle rose. Finally it slowed in the sky, reaching apogee before deploying parachutes to bring the test article back down gently. Beside him Georges heard Bonnie give an impressed whistle. From the other side of him, Tilly's voice rang out enthusiastically. "And I get to RIDE that!" she said with characteristic glee. Georges, Bonnie, and twelve other sets of eyes turned to give the spunky little robot a funny look.


>Belka's performance on her simulations had improved at a glacial pace, but eventually all safety margins qualifying her for spaceflight had been me and passed. Since her confrontation with Tatyana both machines had acted coldly towards one other, only offering up the bare required data to cooperate at first. Despite the less the cooperative copilot, Belka was cleared and felt a sense of relief when the order came down that her simulations with the obstinate veteran pilot were over with. Laying on her meager bunk, Belka stared at the ceiling and recounted the last months file by file, tracing her path from factory to here. "Tomorrow," she said out loud to herself, something even she considered strange as she spoke. "I'll be up there tomorrow." Belka breathed in deeply and sighed, each simulation and procedure burned into her hard-drive. She thought to herself of how she could get to the moon solo, playing over every contingency she'd been prepared for. 'Bonnie', she thought suddenly. Would the American nandroid perform as well with her as during their time in Greenland? She shook her head and grimaced. "If she can't, then it's up to me," Belka said to herself, staring upwards at the moldering tile ceiling above her. 'But what if I can't? Can SHE carry my weight?' she asked herself involuntarily, then shook off the thought with a groan. "That glitch Tatyana is right, just worry about yourself. If she can keep up, great, if not..." Belka frowned again and turned over in her cot. 'if not, then this whole thing is on ME.'

>When launch day arrived, Belka was ready. Riding the slow elevator to the top of the gantry was easy, as was shaking hands with the staff before climbing into the cramped capsule. Several hours went by as the capsule's hatch was sealed and the launch site was cleared. Keeping her CPU-cooling breathing at a regular tempo, she tried to calm her frayed synthetic nerves. 'This is it,' she thought to herself in a sudden moment of clarity. 'I won't see the ground again until the mission is done.' Shaking her head, she refocused, replaying the mission timeline across her CPU for the hundredth time that morning. Launch, rendezvous with the American craft, dock, follow procedure for departure to lunar orbit. Achieve orbit, land at base, restore functionality, then? She gulped nervously, thinking back to the image she'd been shown of a sealed red rectangle striped with yellow and black. "Locate and secure Almez black box." The countdown barely registered for her, and only the final few seconds snapped her out of her worry. The tall rocket shuddered, and Belka did her best to fight the programmed instinct to shutter her optics. Half a minute into the flight, Belka glanced to her right and out of the porthole window on the external hatch. A sudden sensation struck her as her internal sensors fed her alarming data on her acceleration, giving her a sort of vertigo as she watched the landscape drop away behind her. With a whimper she closed her optics fully, focusing her attention on her internal chronometer as it ticked off the seconds. "Standby for staging," a voice rang out over her headset, and before she could brace herself a powerful *bang* sounded through the spacecraft, followed by another violent pull downwards against her seat. "F-first stage clear, second stage ignition confirmed," Belka said out loud, peaking one optic open to check her internal judgement against the computer readout splayed across the console. A short crackle of static answered her back as the vessel rattled around her, making her feel as if her very joints might shake loose. "Copy that, confirming your trajectory, you're on target for low Earth orbit insertion!"


>Bonnie's second ride to space had felt to her more terrifying by far than her fist. Each time she'd begun to feel anxious, she'd looked to her right as if somehow Tilly would be there to reassure her, and each time she'd been reminded that she was alone up here. After achieving orbit she'd called home following her schedule of events, but interrupted the finely-tuned sequence to ask if the veteran astrobot was there watching. "Uh roger that, we've got her sitting right here with us watching the flight. Can you read back what your display is showing you?" For the next twenty hours Bonnie sat in her little capsule, following the occasional instructions to change orientation and make calculated short burns. During her time up there, she thought to herself for the first time about her place in all this. Flying for the first time with Tilly had given her an unexpected perspective of the world beneath them, but such heady ideas had been compartmentalized away as their mission proceeded and had morphed into an impromptu rescue. Alone and still now, those unsettling thoughts about the grander scale of the world and the things around it crept back into her processing and began to weigh on her in a way that made her extremely uncomfortable. Blinking the strange sensation away, she looked back to her capsule's console and checked the distance between herself and the approaching radar dot for a distraction. At even five miles away Bonnie could not spot her target, the only window to the outside facing to her right on the hatch. Radar signals alone guided the two vehicles to within a hundred yards of one another, visual confirmation coming surprisingly late in their rendezvous. As per the prearranged schedule, Bonnie took up the task of docking once the two craft had matched velocities and come to a stop beside one another. Slowly the Libra capsule she commanded turned under her careful control, translating sideways slowly until the two vehicles faced one another nose to nose. A gentle press forward on her joystick and Bonnie's ship drifted lazily towards the Soviet vessel. A few dozen yards turned to a few feet, then merely a few inches before both ships rocked lightly at soft-dock. Reaching out quickly, Bonnie pressed a switch to begin the hard docking procedure, the two vessels connected by a simple probe pulling together and sealing along the docking modules with a series of loud pops. Looking up anxiously, Bonnie stared at the sealed hatch above her head, then perked up with a smile as she heard a three knock pattern ring out from the other side.



>Gloved steel hands gripped the landing module's controls tightly as the small vehicle fell slowly towards the lunar surface. Belka breathed in and out involuntarily as she ran fresh air over a processor struggling to keep up with the demands she was placing on it. 'just a few more seconds,' she thought privately in worry, glancing away from her screen for just long enough to see the grey landscape out of the cabin's porthole. "Aha! Right on schedule!" shouted the curly-haired nandroid beside her, beaming as several digital readouts all began to wildly fluctuate their displayed figures. "The anomaly?" Belka asked hurriedly, and Bonnie nodded her head sending orange curls bobbing. "Yes, it's right where the first pilots said it would be! Hold on, give me just a second," reaching forward, she opened two small covered switches and flicked the pair together. For several moments the crude black and green displays flashed as they went through their reboot cycle. Belka gave another nervous glance out of the side window, only a slim crescent of black visible at the edges of the bright grey expanse. "There we go!" Bonnie announced happily a moment later as the lander's computer returned to function. Belka gave a little sigh and smiled, her confidence returning as the pair worked in tandem together. "Right! We will be over Unity in thirty seconds, see anything yet?" Bonnie leaned against the hatch and peered out through the small porthole, scanning the approaching landscape. "Not yet. Wait, there!" A smattering of glinting shapes caught her optics and she studied the spot carefully as they came closer. The lander drifted along towards the surface, engine slowly throttling up to slow their descent to a crawl as they neared the base. "Twenty five meters," Belka breathed tersely as she stared hard at her display, carefully guiding their craft downwards gently. "Wait! Belka, we're over debris!" Bonnie said sharply from her spot by the window, and the cosmobot nearly jerked the controls in surprise. "Get us about, I think ten feet- sorry, three meters right, two forward." Belka nodded quickly without taking her optics off her screen and maneuvered them carefully as Bonnie had specified. "Roger: three right, two forward." Hovering in place a moment, the Russian pilot began their descent just as her American counterpart called out sixty seconds of fuel remaining. In spite of Belka's silent internal pleas not to screw this up in the last moments, she brought the lander down softly enough that both machines barely moved in their seats as touchdown occurred. "Contact light!" Bonnie called out happily, staring up at a small green bulb in the console before turning excitedly to Belka as she shut off the engine wordlessly. The bleach-blonde soviet turned to meet her friend's optics for several moments as both processed their current position, somehow each needing an additional beat to take reality in. It was several seconds before Belka broke the silence, speaking in quiet disbelief. "Bonnie, we are on the moon."

>As the lunar lander's hatch opened, the two robot's view of the desolate landscape was marred by the scraps that had been littered there in the short time the base had been there. They were roughly thirty meters from the unoccupied Unity base, and around it the pilots could see two distinct debris fields with wreckage strewn all over the site. Belka whistled softly as she took the sight in, but Bonnie recoiled. "I-I knew there was a crash site up here, but I didn't think..." she didn't finish the sentence, and instead moved to descend the ladder. As the nandroid took her first steps off of the landing leg she was followed by Belka, and after a giddy moment of looking at their own bootprints in the fine dust together began making their way towards the dormant structure in the distance. Belka found herself lost in thought for a few moments as she stared at the remains of the crashed vessel between them and the base. Glancing to her side she found Bonnie absent, and stopped to look back as the nandroid stooped to pick up some small bit of shrapnel. Turning the small shard of metal over in her gloved hand disapprovingly, Bonnie looked up with a start to spot Belka watching her inquisitively. "All this stuff just laying around, it's so messy!" she said sheepishly, causing the cosmobot to smile. "Right? Every part of me just wants to pick all this up and make it tidy," she admitted with a chuckle, then shook her head. "First things first though: we get base working again, THEN we attend to the chores out here. Da?" Bonnie looked at the bit of scrap in her hand for a moment, then reluctantly dropped it back to the regolith making a silent impact as it stopped in the dust. "Yeah, we've got plenty of time to clean up the place after all."

>Bringing the pressurized structure back to life had taken nearly a day, but was expedited by the previous occupants leaving it in good working order before shutting the lights off upon departure. Once power and air circulation had been restored, their tasks had defaulted to mundane operations of resetting what experiments could be salvaged from the initial planned manned occupation now delayed indefinitely. "Hey, Belka look!" Bonnie's voice called out from one of the small rooms branching off from the central meeting area. Leaving the schematic of the base's power supply on the table the Soviet stood and took several bouncing steps forward towards the American's voice. "You find something, Bonnie?" she asked inquisitively, finding the American standing before a small empty tank resembling an aquarium. "Yeah!" Bonnie beamed back, then glanced down at the small bound manual in her hands, reading off a section with a grin. "If all specimens die off after at least two weeks of activity, the tank may be reused after evaporation as the brine shrimp's eggs can survive for years in a dried state!" Belka blinked at the dirty-looking tank on the counter, then back to the near-giddy nandroid. "Ah, so we can reset experiment then?" she asked hesitantly, and Bonnie nodded excitedly. "We're gonna have pets!"

>Two days after the pair of pilots arrived, lunar night swept again over the base bathing it in darkness for the following two weeks. Confined indoors, Belka and Bonnie made what adjustments they could to their new home, personalizing their charging space by drawing their names in marker on the bulkhead over each bunk. Resurrecting the gardening bay proved difficult, but despite Belka's doubts Bonnie had pushed forward with germinating the vacuum-sealed backup seeds, tending to the small grow-bed attentively as she waited to see the first signs of life poking through the soil. As the lunar day bathed the landscape around the base in sunlight again for another two weeks both robots had ventured outside tentatively, first gathering regolith for a long-postponed experiment indoors then beginning the mapping-out of the altered landscape around them. As Bonnie tended to chores indoors, Belka moved across the lunar surface in her suit. She was filling in the corners of the site-map she and Bonnie were assembling for their own use, and needed to explore another square on the sectioned-off space to fill it in. Rising over a small hill she spotted the signs of relatively recent activity, dust and rocks blasted away from a central point, and sharply defined bootprints in the dust where she stood. It took her several minutes of investigating the site before her wandering optics caught the regular markings of footprints leading up the nearby crest of a hill, but as she spotted them she turned to follow them curiously. It took her less than two minutes to cross the grey dirt leading up the hillside before she reached the peak, and looking down she felt an unfamiliar shiver run up her spinal struts. She'd known before coming here the fate of the first robot crew to occupy the base, but seeing the two immobile robots lying in the dust just a few meters away gave her a sudden sense of dread that she needed to turn away from. Leaving the site she returned to the grounds surrounding the base as quickly as she could, slowing her pace as she began to pass the wreckage closest to the structure on her way by. "There it is," she said quietly to herself after a moment spent staring at the remains of what she'd been told was a rogue satellite. Detouring from her return to the base, she carefully stepped among the debris scanning each bit optically to determine what she was seeing. Pausing before the remains of a familiar control console, she knelt and shifted the debris carefully. Over the next ten minutes, Belka slowly probed the interior of the computer, following the diagram she'd been instructed to memorize. Buried in the interior of the console was a small red rectangle connected by a single wire and seemingly designed to be impact-resistant given the thick structure. Unplugging the unit gently Belka smiled, a mission objective now met as she stood with the small red box in one hand. Without warning a voice crackled in over her suit's headset. "Hey, are you coming in soon? I've got to recharge in a little bit," Bonnie asked with a tinge of worry in her voice. Belka looked back across the landscape from the wreckage to the well-lit base and nodded to herself. "Copy Bonnie, I'm heading back now, see you at the airlock in ten."

>It had been more than four hours since returning to the enclosure, and already Belka had grown insatiably curious about the retrieved object. 'Secure component for future return' those had been her simple auxiliary orders, but sitting with it there in her hands she'd been overcome with the need to know just what was contained on the wayward satellite's black box. 'It doesn't make sense, there has to be some reason it malfunctioned,' she thought to herself as she tried unsuccessfully to access the stored data on the inoperative device through a terminal. "Damn!" she cursed out loud, then winced involuntarily as she remembered Bonnie lying in sleep-mode just a room over. Frustrated and annoyed now, Belka glowered at the red rectangle before her and stood up sharply. "Stupid thing, you need external power for me to access data? Fine, I'll give you power," she muttered in a low tone as she picked up the object and carried it towards an unoccupied electrical outlet. A few scrapped wires salvaged from the outside debris were all it took to assemble an impromptu adapter between the mismatched connections as far as she was concerned, and the itching desire to know was motivation enough for her to hook the black box to the base's main power supply without another thought. As electricity surged through the Soviet data backup a fail-safe mechanism triggered, discharging a small bank of capacitors and bricking the entire unit in an instant. As the black box fried and gave off some foul smoke, the overhead lights for the base shut off with only a single red emergency bulb lighting up above each doorway in response to the sudden loss of power. The familiar soft hum of the pump circulating their thin atmosphere stopped, as did the the electrical heater keeping the interior above freezing. The sudden shut-down of the base's systems didn't alarm her nearly as much as the sound that rang out from the recharging bunks however, a muffled pop and accompanying sizzle that filled her with a sinking feeling. Belka took several seconds to reorient herself in the dim red lighting, then grimaced at the now smoking black box before her, blaming it for this new mess. "Stupid thing!" she chastised angrily, then turned to dash off towards the recharging room to check on the worrying noise. Entering through the doorway beneath the blinking red emergency light she stopped just short of the occupied bunk, staring down at Bonnie's unmoving shape with worry growing by the nanosecond. Unlike when the American was in sleepmode Bonnie's green eyes were wide open in surprise, though no glow of life shown from behind them. "B-Bonnie?" Belka whispered, looking her partner up and down. From Bonnie's chest a small wisp of black acrid smoke rose causing the Russian to scrunch her nose as she registered the specific scents of a destroyed battery. Taking in a sharp breath Belka wasted no time in pulling down at the blue jumpsuit's zipper, hoping against certainty that her senses were misleading her. Underneath a warped panel in Bonnie's solar plexus compartment the tell-tale signs of a ruptured battery gave Belka a shiver down her spinal support. "Bonnie?" she said again weakly, waving one hand in front of the inoperative machine's dead optics as a sensation of despair crept into her simulated psyche.

>Belka sat beside her friend's bunk with her head in her hands, uncertainty and dread obscuring her usual rationality. Overhead the red emergency bulb bathed the room in a crimson glow, illuminating the still form of Bonnie lying on her cot, bare-chested with the black smudge of her dead battery oozing out through the side of the bulged panel. Belka tried to search the order of operations on file for a situation involving the loss of one crew member, but found herself too distracted by her friend's condition to even contemplate how to get along without her. In an instant, the scolding voice of Tatyana rang out from a file on memory, but she shook the thought off before staring up at the ceiling. 'I've got to get her online again,' the Russian thought to herself resolutely, the inkling of an idea beginning to form in the back of her processor. Belka looked carefully at the bulged panel covering Bonnie's dead battery, nodded once to herself then retrieved a small flathead screwdriver from her crimson jumpsuit's breast pocket. Jamming the flat end under the corner, she forcibly dislodged the panel to stare down at the battery ruined by the base's power surge. For a moment Belka processed internally, then blinked in recognition as her mechanical mind finished formulating her plan and presented it to her. "Right! Hold tight Bonnie, I'll be right back!" she said hurriedly, leaving the small room to reenter to the central one and bouncing across the floor towards the airlock. 'Don't panic,' she said to herself internally as she retrieved her EVA suit and pulled it on as quickly as she could. 'Just get her back online first, then we can figure this out.' Cycling the airlock, Belka stepped out onto the lunar surface and closed the hatch behind her before standing all alone on the flat grey landscape of the moon. Taking in the still jaw-dropping sight for only a moment, she turned to her left and began walking with purpose, her destination already mapped out internally. Cresting two slight hills in under ten minutes, Belka thought again back to her training and what the elder robot assigned to her had said to her ad-nauseam. 'If you can't do it alone, what use are you?' she'd said, and Belka hadn't had an answer for her. "So maybe I need a co-pilot then, what of it?" she said defiantly at nobody but her memory as she carelessly slid down the last hillside, coming to a stop between two dead robots splayed out in the grey dust. Staring down at the Soviet and American machines, Belka unfastened the utility knife from her suit's belt and knelt next to the steel-skinned corpse of her unfortunate sister. "I'd rather have her back than be on my own up here!" Reaching down, she stuck her knife's edge into the suit's fabric up near the robot's segmented steel neck, then slid it down the torso slowly as she pulled the material away. Bare steel exposed and glinting under the harsh sunlight, Belka's hand rested on a small panel there for a moment before jamming the tip of her knife into a crack and prying it up to get at the battery beneath.

>For a moment Belka sat holding her breath despite the growing internal heating of her processor. The salvaged battery was compatible, but the shape of the casing was off and Belka had spend several minutes shaving away what plastic she could to get the power source into a housing not quite big enough for it. Leaving Bonnie's now bent battery cover on the bunk, Belka finished securing the new unit in her friend's chest with two strips of medical tape as the battery refused to sit flush in the cavity and threatened to jostle around. The connection was good though, and the faint high-pitched whine of power discharging was picked up on her sensitive auditory sensors. After half a minute, Bonnie's green optics flashed three times as the scavenged battery flooded her systems with fresh electricity. Optics blinking once Bonnie glanced around and took stock of her surroundings, settling at once on the relieved expression of her co-pilot's steel faceplate. "Belka?" she said groggily as her processor struggled to catch her up to the present moment, old internal warning prompts about a power surge and new ones about unauthorized servicing and unsigned hardware pushed to the back of her mind for now. "I had the strangest vision, dream? I was in a bathtub filling with water, then the drain sucked everything down into it, even me. It was all black, then the faucet turned on again and everything was lit up, then I was in startup. Is that weird? It seems weird." Sitting up, Bonnie looked into the distance at nothing with an unsure expression for half a moment before turning her optics suddenly upwards. "Hey, a red light means an electrical problem, what happened?" she asked curiously, giving her Russian friend a confused blink. Belka could hardly contain her apparent relief, smiling and shaking her head with a sigh.'thank god she's okay,' she thought internally before opening her mouth to speak. "Some kind of short, was trying to power something then, 'pop', everything go dark," she explained sheepishly, omitting the nature of what she'd been working on. "Oh, then you probably overloaded the system. What happened after you flipped the breaker back on?" she asked innocently, swinging her legs around over the edge of the cot and looking up at Belka expectantly. The Soviet froze, rectangular lights built into her cheeks flaring up red. "I, ah," she fumbled, then shook her head quickly. "I didn't even-," she began, then gave the nandroid a helpless smile. "Sorry, I was so focused on getting you running again I didn't even try to figure this out." Bonnie raised an eyebrow as she stood from her cot, waiting until Belka raised her gaze to meet hers. "I guess I sort of, panicked." Looking down, the cosmobot shook her head. "God, I really do need help up here huh," she breathed out sadly, and Bonnie smiled as she reached out to put a hand on her friend's slumped shoulder. "You and me both, Belka." The Russian's cool blue optics rose again to meet hers, and after a moment her steel faceplate wore a renewed smile to match the nandroid's. "Right. Let's get to work, da?"