(7) Tilly's Fifth Flight (Nadya, Tilly and Ehri)

PART 1: NADYA

>The City of Izhevsk's robotics plant was an imposing wide structure of only three stories yet covering an enormous footprint. The second largest robotics factory in the nation after Moscow's, production was still a laborious process that was always behind schedule, and demand was ever-increasing as the wealthier Party members each in turned claimed robots for themselves from the inventory. The factory manager tried to hide his displeasure at having to submit another of their hard-built machines to the Commandant of the nation's spaceflight administration. "Such a shame about Irina," he said in a pained tone as the elder man looked over a line of inactive machines inspecting each one carefully. "I'm sure she would have given you many years of flight time, but we just never planned for her to encounter that sort of radiation, a design flaw on our part I suppose." The Commandant held up his hand. "These things happen, it's why we use machines instead of people, they are easily replaced." The factory manager winced at 'easily', thinking of the countless hours he and his workers put into each robot they built even before the extensive conditioning training began at first boot, but said nothing of it to his superior. "This one with the green eyes, what's she called?" Peering intensely at one of the robots he didn't wait for a reply, grabbing at a small tag tied around her wrist carrying her designation. "'Nadya'. She will do, have her shipped to Baikonur."

>One week later the Commandant stood in front of her again, this time at the Cosmodrome after her first bootup with her new owner. Like Tatyana and Irina before her Nadya ran the gauntlet of endurance trials and intense study of procedures that would one day soon let her fly. When first informed of her purpose she'd enthusiastically accepted, though only because her desire to please her new master. Robots like her were becoming more common, and her early days of synthetic life at her home-factory learning to work and serve were filled with gossiped rumors and stories the other machines told of their kind fitting into all kinds of roles, as many as humans could find for them. Nadya had always been at the edges of these little gossip-groups, listening intently but rarely included by her classmate's choice. For reasons beyond her ability to process she'd found herself excluded by her sisters in their conversations between class, and once 'outside' had never found her way back 'inside' the friend group before being shut down and shipped to her new assignment. Serving not just her new  master, but in effect ALL her master's countrymen gave Nadya a much-needed boost of confidence and a feeling of importance as she threw herself at the training demanded of her. Nadya's first true moment of hesitation came three weeks in when she'd been brought outside to a hastily-arranged range with rows of sandbags and a simple target at the far end. Much closer was what had caused Nadya to stop in place for a millisecond before doing as instructed. A long cannon with a strange design she'd never seen before sat in front of her, and when ordered she'd laid her hands on the weapon cautiously. Behind her were a team of engineers and scientists all eager to see if their new robot could be made to shoot what they'd built, and with them stood the Commandant to indulge the same curiosity. "I've never shot anything before sirs," Nadya said apologetically as she looked over her shoulder at the group. "But I'll try my best!" For the next two hours she put round after round down-range, and long-before the patience of the waiting men wore thin she'd mastered the strange weapon to their satisfaction and nearly her own. Improving her accuracy and ease with the machine had given her an unexpected thrill of fresh confidence, and she was almost sorry to be pulled away from it as the test concluded. That evening while she laid down to recharge in the little room kept for mechanical pilots, Nadya thought about the day's experience. She was glad to have performed well, but still left wondering without answers. "Why would they want me to learn to shoot?"

>Nadya's training progressed in a pattern that confused her, extra-vehicular-activity exercises in the pool one day and small arms shooting practice the next. Another week she practiced station-keeping burns by simulator to train for operating a low-orbiting spacecraft, then reported directly to a large military officer who gingerly at first instructed her on how to disarm a human opponent. After running through the exercise with him several times she'd finally had the courage to ask her instructor what she was learning this for, but the stern man had only shaken his head and said "I follow my orders just like you little robot". By week's end the man no longer had to be gentle when running her through a hand-to-hand drill, and she'd disarmed him of a knife nearly fast enough to have done it for real. During another neutrally-buoyant dive in the complex's wide indoor pool Nadya floated through the mock-up of her future spacecraft, going through the motions of moving around the vessel in zero-g but thinking more about her livelier training the previous week. After another week of alternating between the mundane and the unknown Nadya was brought into a concrete room with a mat placed on the floor at the center, again surrounded by several engineers and now military men all looking her way when she'd entered. At the corner of the mat stood a skinny man with a fearful look in sunken eyes that darted around the room until the robot was led inside. "That? Alright, yeah I got this then" he said with a nervous glance back at the guard who kept his hand tight on the man's shoulder. "If she's damaged it's another ten years," the guard said simply. He gulped, then turned back towards Nadya who gave him an uneasy glance to match his own. Behind her the engineer who'd led her here gave her a pat on the back. "This man will attempt to rush you, you must subdue him. Force is permitted, though lethal force will not be required for this task." Without waiting for a reply he gave a firm shove and Nadya was on the mat stumbling to regain her footing. The skinny prisoner didn't waste any time and took several steps forward, putting up his balled fists scarred by some previous untold violence. A reduced or even lifted sentence was worth boxing a robot a little, right? Nadya mimicked him while carefully watching his stance, and when he threw the first punch she was ready. She leaned away from the blow and caught the man by the wrist, turning it and her opponent around quickly. He gave a sharp cry of protest, but Nadya completed the maneuver she'd drilled repeatedly and lightly kicked the back of his knees to get him on his belly quickly. The engagement lasted all of four seconds and at the end the prisoner had begun to kick and struggle against her grip, but Nadya only tightened it harshly. Pressure-sensitive sensors at her fingertips registered a sudden crack from within the man's wrist and he cried out louder, cursing her. Quickly she let go and stood up, eager to take several steps back from him. One of the earliest things she'd been taught after taking her first steps between the factory assembly floor and the conditioning wing had been to avoid dealing such damage to fragile humans at all costs, yet the orders from her owners now superseded factory conditioning in a way that made her feel strange and unsure. Her handler for the day stepped forward and escorted her from the mat as two guards roughly hoisted her moaning opponent to his feet. "Very good!" Nadya was told, and after some uncertainty decided she agreed. She HAD done well.

>Early one afternoon Nadya had exited her simulator once more to see the old Commandant waiting for her. She'd not seen the busy man but a few times since he'd been there for her first boot at the Cosmodrome, and she smiled at seeing the familiar face. "Sir!" She happily saluted the old man who smirked sardonically at the military gesture. At his beckoning she followed him, and the two walked together across the complex. Nadya had wanted to ask about her strange mission, but didn't need to as the elder man began to speak first. "Very hush-hush this one, important. Come, I have a special invitation today and you should accompany me." She couldn't argue with the agency's head, didn't want to either. The pair left by car then transferred to train, a ride of several hours stretching between them and Kurchatov city, with nearly another hour from there out onto the steppe. Over the trip the Commandant had first regaled Nadya with tales of heroism from the last war, boastful bravado in booming baritones that made every story into a performance which she soaked up with relish. By the time he'd finished with his triumphant retelling of the fall of Berlin, Nadya was a dyed-in-the-wool patriot for her motherland and the people who lived there. It did not matter that the stories he'd told were borrowed and not his own, with the little machine's priorities now set correctly the Commandant began laying out the details of her upcoming mission. Nadya's vessel would be relatively small, a little less than the length of a school-bus, and would contain an array of sophisticated camera equipment and radar. "You see," the Commandant explained as they transferred from train to military truck in the remote city. "that doomed lunar mission with the Americans? Now they're using it as an excuse to pause cooperation with us, but I think what they're really doing is buying time. I suspect right now they are building up the resources needed for militarizing the space around the Earth, and the moon itself." Nadya gave him a worried look as they bounced around inside the rough cabin of the vehicle rumbling across the dirt road on the steppe. "You think they're going to shut us out from accessing space?" Nadya asked, processing this scenario for the first time. "The fact is we just don't know, which is where your mission comes into play." Their ride stopped near a thick concrete bunker set against a rise in the land, and they were escorted by military personnel inside. Sitting with a group of around twenty men mostly military and engineers, Nadya suddenly felt out of place despite her important escort. The Commandant tapped her lightly on the shoulder as she was looking around, and when she looked back to him he was offering a pair of dark sunglasses. Perplexed she took them but only held them for now, seeing the men around them each keeping theirs in hand as they made quiet serious small talk. "What are we doing here, Sir?" She asked in a lowered tone. The Commandant matched her volume, but spoke with deadly import. "Every advantage must be countered, if we lose our footing up there and the Americans take it for good you must realize that it would be the end for us, ALL of us" he said, then turned back towards the viewing window as a small radio crackled to life from a corner of the room and called out "sixty seconds". Around the room goggles and sunglasses started going onto faces, and Nadya was quick to keep up with her own borrowed glasses. Even through the thick dark glass covering her optics the flash was enough to offset the white-balance in her vision for several seconds, and she'd had to look away briefly. When she could refocus Nadya could see a distant fireball rising from the ground, roiling in on itself as it lifted and formed a distinctive tree-like shape. Around the bunker came some pleased 'oohs' and 'ahhs', but Nadya sat deathly-still as she watched the fireball darken into a still-rising cloud, memorized by the unrivaled spectacle. "T-that,?" she stuttered out incoherently, unable to tear her green optics off the vision of doomsday burned into the afternoon sky. "That Nadya, is what we can expect to have over our heads if the Americans put weapons in space."

>"Flight nominal, passing the horizon in fifteen minutes." Nadya called out with a shaky sigh from the command seat of her small station as it hurtled silently over the top of Earth's atmosphere. The violent force and noise of the launch had forced her again to recall the great explosion she'd witnessed, but her training saw her mostly-fearlessly through the stages of flight until the final cutoff placed her in low-orbit. Unstrapping from her seat she floated throughout her new home, inspecting the various stations proudly and allowing herself to thrill at the sensation of zero-g. She was now the operator of a spy satellite, and her new role as protector of her Master and his people had never felt so important. She breathed in and sighed happily. A low buzzing caught her attention, and turning her head she noticed a small moving shape that alarmed her. "A fly?" Forty-five minutes later Nadya breathed heavily to cool her CPU, a rolled up manual smeared with housefly clenched tightly in one hand. Predicting the strange flight patterns of the insect had proven more difficult than she'd assumed, and chasing it back and forth across the cabin had increasingly frustrated the machine to the point of near-madness. Calming herself back down took more effort than it should have, and she had to distract herself by unfolding the manual she'd used and reading to herself about the station's armament. "R-23M Kartech," she read out loud slowly, and tried to forget that her triumph over the fly left her alone once more with little to do up here.

>Every pass gave another chance to run the station's sensitive instruments, data gathered up and delivered home to the eager men of the agency and military. The photos of the American's launch complex were hard for Nadya to make heads or tails of herself, but every report radioed home brought a grateful thanks from mission control which made her feel fulfilled in her given task. A month prior she'd spotted a star moving against the background through the view-port and had nearly panicked herself into rebooting. She'd manned the Kartech cannon and gone over combat procedures on being boarded for nearly an hour before slowly realizing that nothing was coming. A bit of stray space junk perhaps, or an asteroid somewhere glinting for just a few minutes while it rotated endlessly, whatever it had been drove Nadya further into paranoia as she stayed vigilant for any approaching intruder. After the scare she'd spent a long time looking at the universal docking adapter from inside, computing every possible scenario she might have to endure should she fail to deter any approaching American vessels. "Anything that comes within 2 kilometers, turn to scrap. You are a military satellite, and cannot afford capture. If capture becomes inevitable, you must destroy the station and yourself," she'd been told shortly before launch. The orders had startled her at first, but made sense when she'd processed it. Getting caught spying in this fashion could easily be spun by the American media as a 'bad faith' move by her nation, potentially even a first strike of sorts. Secrecy was of the upmost importance, even if she had to defend that secrecy at the cost of her life.

>At the beginning of her third month in operation, Nadya finally had her resolve tested for real. The American launch had been spotted on the previous pass, and mission control had confirmed an object placed onto her orbit when she told them where to look. For a full day it crept up on her traveling only a little faster than the station so as to approach slowly, and she'd watched it by radar hour after hour as the distance between her craft and the American's shrank. A boarding party? Possible, but then humans or robots? Maybe it was a missile, and would accelerate hard after sneaking up close to disguise its true nature? "What if, ugh!" Nadya tried to shake off the speculation and found it impossible, her CPU buzzing like mad with the numerous possibilities. "Five kilometers, just what the hell ARE you?" Floating across the cabin Nadya focused the station's optical telescope and tried getting a look at the intruder to her airspace. During her training she'd learned to identify the American Agency's Capricorn and Libra capsules by sight, and noting the shape of the offending visitor gave her a shiver down her spinal struts. "It's a ship!" For a moment she froze up, despite having prepared for just this moment. What if it were a human crew? She narrowed her optics at the enlarged image of the vessel and set her CPU to the task, re-processing her crystal-clear orders. "Turn it to scrap."

>Three hours after the American vessel was spotted, it crossed the two kilometer invisible boundary and entered Nadya's approved area of engagement. She was quick to maneuver the station so that the stationary cannon was aimed in the correct direction, then gripped the firing controls for the specialized weapon. "Just a little closer," she muttered to herself as she stared out through the glass at the approaching vehicle. It made no apparent attempt on Nadya's station, and for several minutes simply floated up towards it, rotating slowly and exposing several camera lenses glinting in the service bay. CPU overclocking hard Nadia pressed the trigger and the station was rocked by sudden vibration and noise. The shaking rattled her sensors, but she held onto the weapon as it discharged round after round at the enemy ship. Looking through the view port she watched the steel slugs zip out from her station's armament and tear through the American's ship. Solar panels shattered, tiles from the heat shield spiraled off, glass broke off into shards that spread out in a cloud. Nadya kept firing, a brief frenzy overtaking her as she ruthlessly fulfilled her Master's command. One round struck a compressed tank of some gas and the resultant venting sent the crippled capsule spinning away from Nadya's station behind her. Debris from the encounter remained in place next to her, and for the next hours Nadya would be able to hear each piece as it bounced harmlessly off the station's hull. For several minutes she floated there in silence with her hands gripping the controls of the station's cannon tightly. She'd done it, the station was defended and the enemy defeated. Slowly willing herself down from overclocking, she had to focus to let go of the gun before floating to the radio, letting out a long nervous laugh before she could try talking to anyone back home. "Whew, c'mon Nadya be professional!" Turning on the encrypted transmission, she kept her tone even and made her update in previously-established code. "Almez-1 calling mission control: I swatted a fly today..."


PART 2: TILLY


>Orbiting high above the Earth yet low against the top of the atmosphere, Tilly's terminally-damaged capsule continually slowed as pressurized oxidizer sprayed out from a bullet wound to the service module. The moment the rounds had begun to strike she had shut her optics in fright as her ship was torn asunder around her. Panting to cool an overworked CPU, she looked around now the ruined cabin of her capsule, glass and shrapnel floating around her in a cloud. Internally an important set of components failed a regular check and she looked down at herself. Her left leg was unresponsive, most of the connective material lost when one of those heavy slugs had torn through it leaving only wires and her outer plating to keep the limb attached. Looking back up at the ruined control panel Tilly tried taking stock of her predicament. The capsule's power was ebbing away, leaking and only powering herself now that the controls floated in pieces around her. Through the remains of the porthole Tilly could see open space, and nearly reached out to put a testing hand through the open hole as if it weren't real. "Now what?" she muttered weakly to herself as she stared at the edge of the atmosphere below.


>One month prior she'd been on the grounds of the launch complex, settling in once again to her default role of coffee delivery-bot. After she and Tatyana's return from the moon together Tilly had been optimistic about future missions together, but the chilling of relations between the rival space agencies after the failure of the first joint mission had put a stop to all talks between them regardless of the cooperation the two latter robots had displayed. "Idiots," she'd thought privately to herself one day in the break room. "Just hurry up and go fly together already, what's wrong with you humans?" A few days later a pair of black vehicles had arrived at the complex together, suited men filing out with clear guards standing beside their cars. Tilly had seen this only from the astronaut building as she was leaving it, and wondered for the rest of the day what sort of visitors her launch complex had gotten. The day following the strange visit she'd been in the break room of the administration building again when Georges, now assistant-director, had barged into the room and violently kicked a garbage can. "Bastards! Every single stinking Sterling suit!? BASTARDS!" Tilly looked at him in shock, his occasional bouts of extreme anger frightened her and she'd never quite learned how to handle it. Finally noticing the nandroid in the room, Georges put a hand to his sweaty forehead and sighed. "Sorry, sorry, I know," he apologized, then holding up both hands in defense. "But Til those people are devious, I swear! We get ONE little visit from the Department of Defense and suddenly the next day we're on Sterling's shit-list? I wanna know how THEY knew, those sneaky pricks!" Stomping around the room Georges ranted, and Tilly struggled to keep up. "What do you mean Sir? What did Sterling do?" she asked cautiously, nervous about another outburst from the man. "It's what they're NOT doing! We've been working on getting a replacement for Kimmy but suddenly today they're saying she wasn't under warranty after leaving the atmosphere, can you believe that shit? I mean they still serviced YOU didn't they?" Georges seemed to be reasoning with her, and she could only nod in agreement with him. "And it's worse! They don't want to even SELL us any new nandroids now that the DoD spooks have been shopping around here, I guess Sterling only likes to do their military business through subsidiaries." Shaking his head, Georges put his hands on his hips and looked away, adding "Sneaky fuckers wouldn't want their squeaky-clean little nandroids getting associated with war machines, right?" As Tilly followed the rant, the situation crystallized for her and she had to suppress a small smile as the realization processed. "You're not going to get any replacement pilots for a while, then?" Staring at her a long moment, Georges eventually smirked and shook his head at the too-eager robot. "Yeah guess that's about the gist of it, looks like we'll have another job for you"

>Unlike previous missions, specifics of this upcoming flight were vague in a way that made Tilly feel strange, as if she were doing something she wasn't supposed to. Most of her training updates had been studying various aspects of orbital photography, both of the ground and other objects in orbit, and she'd been drilled again in the simulator on the practice of changing orbits to rendezvous with another craft. "Can you at least give me some kind of idea of just what it is I'm supposed to be doing up there?" She'd asked of Collins, a relative stranger to her who'd joined the team during her Venus flight in order to handle preparation of new nandroid pilots. Since losing Kimmy and being denied any new replacement, the man had been annoyed but did his best to hide it. "I don't know much more than you, you won't be up for long and you'll be doing some photography. Beyond that ask Georges, this mission is his problem. Finding Georges on a smoke-break hadn't been too difficult, and cornered the man had given up a few extra details to Tilly's needling. "It's a flight for the DoD, but a real quiet one right?" Taking a drag he blew the offensive smoke above the nandroid's head before continuing. "The Department, and a lot of other folks up in D.C. want to know what the ruskies are up to over there." Looking back and forth for anyone listening in, he leaned down close to Tilly's face, the harsh smell of tobacco making her want to recoil. "Rumor is they're scared of the reds putting weapons up there, and a few of the louder Senators are flapping their gums about the joint moon mission maybe being sabotaged by 'em too!" Tilly nearly jumped, a chill running down her spinal struts as she thought about Irina and Kimmy motionless on the lunar surface. "W-well that's just....lunacy?" she said, forcing a grin at her cliche pun. Georges choked on his smoke and laughed out loud. "Couldn't have said it better myself, HA!" he exclaimed, and roughly slapped her back enough to make her stumble.

>A final coast phase separated the initial burn of the first and second stage from the orbital insertion burn when the second stage re-lit and circularized the capsule's orbit. During the minutes waiting for the second burn Tilly re-processed the uncertain thoughts that had crossed her CPU the previous night. No public had been permitted to watch the launch nor did they know it was happening, and the secret nature of the mission made her feel she was definitely doing something wrong. "Is this really a good flight?" She'd asked herself before recharge the previous night. "Should I be doing this one?" As the engine burned and died out placing her on orbit, Tilly tried to shake the thoughts loose and focus on the familiar sight of the world outside the porthole below. Somehow each time she'd seen this sight had carried a different feeling, and comparing the memory files gave her a sense of perspective on how much she'd done since that first flight. Over the following two days, Tilly's capsule passed again and again over the Soviet Union, photographing areas of interest marked in advance by someone deep within the Department of Defense. The work was easy, but somehow Tilly felt lessened by it, the wonder and joy of feeling weightless again dampened by such underhanded spying. At the third day of her flight she performed a short burn to change her orbit following a strangely terse transmission from mission control. The order came to close distance with an 'object of interest' as the unfamiliar radio operator had put it, and photograph it up close. The change in the mission gave Tilly a bad feeling, processor running wild with speculation on just what an 'object of interest' could be, but she dutifully followed her orders and slowly drifted towards the unknown satellite from half a world away. Three hours after beginning the approach, Tilly could see a defined point of light through the glass growing steadily closer. "Is it...a capsule?" she asked to nobody as she gazed out through the window. Over the next forty-five minutes the object came into focus as the distance closed, and Tilly was reminded of her Venus flyby habitat. Was it manned? She checked her radar and saw that she was approaching within a mile of the strange ship, and adjusted her trajectory ever-so-slightly to lazily drift by at an even closer distance. Whatever it was, she was going to take some pictures. When the slow-speed flyby occurred, Tilly changed her ship's orientation to point the service module's cameras at the vessel and from this angle got a good look of it through the porthole. It was a tapered tube, an engine at one end and a docking port at the other, and bristling with three wide solar panels, a sun shade, antenna and what Tilly thought might be an auxiliary antenna. At once the foreign station began to rotate, and Tilly gasped as she caught a glimpse through the station porthole of the pilot's steel face for just a moment. Then the shooting began, and the next moments were a violent blur.

>Ninety minutes passed after the attack and Tilly's uncontrolled capsule orbited once more, skimming through the top of the atmosphere for several minutes at periapsis and losing even more velocity needed to overcome the planet's pull. She could do nothing with the control panel shot through, and instead had focused her efforts first on wrapping the damage to her leg in order to hold in as much heat as her suit and CPU could generate now that the capsule had cooled to the ambient temperature outside. Next she checked over her emergency parachute, and was relieved that it was unscathed. After her first flight had suffered parachute failure of the capsule, the extra precaution had been part of the standard load-out for all robot-driven missions since. Without getting out to look around the outside, Tilly had no way of knowing if the capsule's chutes were still intact, and was glad to have a way out. As her ship began the gradual drift down into the atmosphere, Tilly watched grimly as she passed the terminator line into Earth's night-side. Even with the benefit of sunlight it was hard for her to point out nations without a map to reference, geography had not been part of her study at the Agency. Now in darkness with only the twinkling of city lights below matching the unblinking stars above she couldn't begin to guess where she was heading. Tumbling slowly the ship began to meet more resistance as the air grew thicker around it, and after several minutes Tilly was shaking in her seat as the oscillation increased harshly. The shriek of tearing metal reverberated through the cabin and the capsule spun wildly. She tried to catch a glimpse of the service module breaking away, but all she saw was the yellow-white heated atmosphere catching on the open hole in the craft and heating the cabin rapidly. The next two minutes were as chaotic as the attack by the station, Tilly's capsule rolled and rattled as it plunged deeper into the atmosphere. The shield below her was shot through in places, and the heating was melting through the bottom of the capsule raising the cabin's temperature even more. Breathing hard to try and get rid of the heat, she unfastened her helmet and let it fall away. Part of the hatch and the hull next to it were glowing, and the door began to rattle on its hinges. She reached for it and took hold of the handle, trying futilely to keep the doorway from opening. The capsule was slowing but still burning as one of the hinges holding the hatch on burned through and the rushing air caught the edge. Tilly was still gripping the handle tightly when it swung open violently, tearing her out of her seat-belt faster than she could process it. The capsule rotated under the new aerodynamics and in an instant the other hinge snapped, sending the hatch flying away from the burning vessel with Tilly clinging to it for dear life.

>She barely had time to react or even process the numerous instantaneous heat-warnings her system flashed at her, the hatch spun once then oriented with her weight on top of it, shielding her from the intense heat now striking the other side. She gripped the handle hard and tried to get a hold on the open porthole, but quickly pulled her hand back missing the tips of three digits. A heat warning went off in her left thigh then went silent as she looked down just in time to see her ruined leg dangle off the edge and be wrenched clean with hardly any resistance. Smaller than the heavy spacecraft, the hatch and its passenger bled off speed quickly. After only thirty seconds of this unpleasant reentry her speed had slowed to only supersonic, the air below her no longer pressurizing to plasma. With the glow gone her vision went with it, and the only thing she caught a glimpse of was the still-burning debris of her capsule in the distance until it winked out of view. The steel of the hatch was warm even through her insulated suit, but cooling rapidly now as it hurtled down through the clouds. Pulling her knees up beneath her, Tilly counted to three before kicking off with her remaining foot. Free of the top-heavy weight the hatch spun away from her, and she spun as well trying to discern for a moment which set of twinkling lights in her rotating field of view were stars and which were distant cities. Stretching her battered limbs out she oriented herself face-down, and saw only darkness beneath her. With the wind rushing up at her, Tilly silently thanked Sterling servicing technicians for giving her an internal altimeter, as it was now the only thing telling her whether she was five miles up or two seconds from impact. At two thousand feet she pulled at the ripcord and deployed her parachute, feeling the sudden lurch of deceleration a few seconds later. Her internal accelerator still read her speed as worryingly fast, and though she couldn't see it she could hear wind rushing through a hole that had melted through the nylon material during re-entry. Looking up at the darkness in frustration, Tilly could only give a groan at her misfortune, narrowing her optics angrily at the damaged chute. "Oh fuck you"


PART 3: EHRI

>Evening ended like so many had in the past few years for Ehri after sunset. The evening chores had all been finished, and she'd sat with her elderly owners while they ate the simple noodle soup she'd prepared for them in their cozy Ger. They enjoyed her company, and she enjoyed theirs, having been assigned to the task almost five years ago now. The aging pair had been prosperous nomads in their prime, possessing a sizable herd of Kashmir goats back when the family had been large and had worked together. As time had marched on and local politics had changed, the herd had shrunk nearly to nothing and was now kept more for pride than practicality. Children long-since grown had attended school in Ulaanbaatar nearly one hundred and twenty kilometers away, and as their parents became the last of the group to carry on the lifestyle they'd been raised under had made sure to keep them financially solvent and comfortable despite their refusal to move into the city. At first it had been easy, despite advanced age the elderly couple alone were well-equipped to take care of themselves and had at first shooed off any attempts by their city-bound children to coddle them. Years of hard work accumulated though, and not even the clean air of the steppes could keep them youthful forever. Their eldest son Ganbold had been the one to seek out and purchase a second-hand machine at market, meant to care for his stubborn elders during the times that they could not care for themselves. Ehri was an American product, beyond warranty but not officially outmoded by the time she'd been shipped overseas for resale. The beginnings of her life were a mystery even to her thanks to a harddrive-swap somewhere in eastern Europe, before her eventual arrival in central Asia that robbed her forever of her early memories. The lack of memory hadn't bothered her however, and of her numerous short assignments to various owners in the last decade, her life on the flat landscape of the steppe had been by far the most peaceful and fulfilling. Seeing her grateful owners to their sleep, Ehri stepped outside the rounded structure to be alone for a few minutes before plugging herself in to the solar-charged battery she relied on for life. Above her stretched the heavens, stars unencumbered by city lights with the wide band of the Milky Way naked for her to see. When she stared upwards at the spectacle, her CPU only processed the beauty of it and her contentment with life here, to her the stars may as well have been a pretty painting to be observed each night. Tonight the slowly-moving work of art above her was marked by something new however. Shooting stars were not something new to Ehri, she'd seen hundreds during these nightly viewings of the sky and a few had been large enough to take several seconds to arc across the sky unlike the average quick zip of a small meteor. This was not an average shooting star however, and with uncertain optics full of wonder she watched a bright fireball cross slowly above her, eventually trailing bits that became shooting stars of their own. She had never seen anything quite like it, and kept her optics on the object until it cooled and dimmed beyond her sight. Lifting the brim of her fur hat from her optics, she gaped at the sight. "What on Earth?" she said to herself softly in the tongue of her owners.

>The following morning Ehri raced through her tasks, finishing her chores faster than her usual practiced pace. She'd thought about the strange vision in the sky all morning, and by noon had been given free reign of the camp. Outside she stopped in front of a gas-powered generator, meant for charging herself and her fellow mechanical if overcast weather rendered the camp's large solar cells useless. Teneg was a hefty robotic beast, an imitation only of its natural counterpart but stronger and more obedient than a yak. Ehri had given the machine its name after first attempting to wrangle it after the unexpected delivery by her master's son, but had come to treasure the simple automaton during the brief periods it was online. Checking over the charge which had been building from the solar cell's excess for days, Ehri made the decision to activate Teneg. The steel-plated quadruped, adorned with an array of ad-hoc replacement parts added over the years, gave a shudder as it booted and blinked dull brown optics at Ehri, awaiting instruction. Fifteen minutes later the encampment she and her owners called home for now was a distant point behind her as Ehri raced across the landscape atop her thoughtless mount. Riding Teneg came second nature to her after several years of handling the galloping machine, and she'd learned not simply to hang on but to guide the mechanoid expertly. The strange light in the sky the previous night had arced out of the west and seemed to fall somewhere north of camp, and that was where Ehri now headed following her computed trajectory of the mysterious light. Bouncing along on Teneg's built-in saddle she wasn't sure what to look for or even expect, but it was an interesting enough excuse for a long ride regardless of if she found anything or not. She had explored the surroundings of each encampment her owners made season to season sometimes out to a distance of thirty kilometers or more, but hardly ever in search of anything other than a missing goat. This afternoon took her farther from her transient home than she'd been since her last visit to the capital several days away, but with her duties accomplished early and the sight of the falling star replaying on her CPU she was compelled to go searching for whatever had caused the brilliant light.

>Ehri stopped for a moment but did not dismount, staring down at a hand-sized bit of blackened metal in the small crater it had made on impact. "Whatever it is, it's fresh," she said to Teneg quietly, who shook its head imitating a living thing. The wind here would soon smooth the edges of the crater down, but now Ehri was certain it was related to what she'd seen the previous night. "Too small though, that couldn't have been all of it." Galloping along further she replayed the file and studied each frame internally. It had been more than one light, she realized on inspection, rather several pieces that seemed to be breaking off from the largest. Within minutes she'd passed two more small craters filled with burnt metal, and a third which contained debris Ehri could swear looked just like her own foot. After another half an hour of trotting through the wide field of far-scattered debris she spotted what seemed to be a fresh black scar on the horizon, and smiled. "That's got to be it!" Giving a pull at Teneg's reigns the pair turned, but before she could urge him onward she spotted something else. Raising a small hand to her brow Ehri shielded her optics from the sun and watched the distant shape for a full minute. It was moving, slowly but definitely not a trick of the light. A sense of worry came over Ehri and she looked down her dimwitted mount quickly. "Teneg, it looks like somebody crawling!" She looked back up and searched the surrounding landscape, her mission to find the fallen star momentarily forgotten, and saw little else to indicate where the figure might have come from. Settling herself on a new task, Ehri gave a short snap of the reigns and spurred the mechanical bull forward, racing across the flat ground towards the figure. Whoever it was, she thought to herself, they were clearly in trouble.

>At full-gallop it had only taken ten minutes to close the distance between Ehri and the crawling figure, and as they slowed to a halt she hopped off. "Hey! Are you alright?" she called out in her adopted tongue, jogging a few steps forward and meeting the stranger's gaze when she looked up. Ehri saw at once that it wasn't a person at all, but instead a nandroid like herself. Seeing another of her kind all the way out here gave her a momentary shock, but not nearly as much as did the state of her fellow robot. Oddly-short orange hair was singed along a portion of her head and the right blue optic was dim, shattered by whatever had dented the faceplate there. Parts of the nandroid's strange attire were burnt and ripped, and the left leg below the thigh was missing entirely with a few exposed wires dragging behind. The sight of the damaged machine almost made Ehri recoil, but she instead knelt and offered a hand with a smile. Blinking her remaining optic the strange nandroid lifted a hand missing digits and tried to grip hers, then fell back to the ground and ceased moving. "Eh?" Ehri lifted the nandroid's head for a moment and examined it. "Out of charge?" She wondered inquisitively, then nodded. "Gotta be. Alright!" Nandroids weren't so heavy that one could not lift another, but even still it was a struggle for Ehri to drag the motionless robot over to Teneg and heft her onto its back. Minutes later the three machines were galloping again across the open land towards camp, Ehri glancing back every few seconds at her passenger. "Just hold on, we'll get you powered again!"

>Ehri had to wait four days until the battery banks connected to the solar cells had gathered enough excess energy to charge both herself and her guest for the day, but had at last hooked the unresponsive robot to the charger at sunset. Sitting on a flattened blanket in the small auxiliary tent that housed Teneg and herself, Ehri did her best to finish cleaning up the charging nandroid. Dirt was scrubbed where it could be found, and she wrapped a rag around the broken optic to keep any more from falling in through the cracks. While trying to brush the blackened soot from the burnt portions of the nandroid's odd suit, Ehri gasped in recognition and began wildly speculating about who this machine might be. "American?" She'd asked out loud to herself as she brushed her fingers over the discolored flag patch on the right shoulder. She'd learned after-the-fact that she herself was originally a product of America as well, a forgotten lifetime and several owners ago. Aside from the damage to the stranger and Ehri's own long dark hair they weren't that dissimilar in build, maybe a few model generations separate in some minor internal details, she thought. "Wait, do I even still know english?" Ehri asked herself as the thought suddenly occurred to her. Putting a hand to her chin and looking off for a moment, she tried to read the relevant files internally but found only a few scraps, disconnected word translations with few useful ones coming up at first search. Frustrated, she laid herself down on her blanket and closed her optics to put herself in sleep-mode, resolving to de-fragment herself and locate enough of her language files to attempt communicating for the morning.


>Tilly regained consciousness after rebooting some time after dawn the following morning. She was groggy at first, having suffered a CPU-rattling blow to the head on landing that had cost her an optic. She groaned quietly and brought a hand up to her faceplate only to see three fingers missing at the second joints. She remembered re-entry, riding the hatch and burning, the impact. "My leg," she muttered, and leaned herself up on her elbows slowly. Much of her body felt out of sorts, outer plating in several spots no longer sat flush at the cracks, joints ground with bits of sand stuck in them, and hydraulics responded sluggishly as if the fluid was breaking down. Looking down at herself she winced at the unsettling void where her limb had been. "That's right." Recalling the attack on her capsule she sighed and looked around herself. Some sort of tent she thought, though she'd never seen one made of natural materials like this. "Where am I?" she moved to stand without thinking, but found herself unable to complete the motion now, and caught herself with both arms as she fell forward. The flap of hide at the entrance to the tent opened and she looked up to see another nandroid, dressed exotically in clothes she'd never seen before. The foreign robot took one look at Tilly and her faceplate lit up. "Oh hi!"

>Ehri grinned when she entered her tent and saw the rescued nandroid online and moving. She tried greeting her, but the words felt unfamiliar and so she tried to let her simulated body language speak for her instead. Kneeling for a moment she helped her guest into a sitting position before moving to the chest of tools set against one wall. Several years ago she'd taken a tumble and snapped her own leg's frame, requiring a long wait before an offcolor replacement could be sourced and delivered by Ganbold. During the intervening months she'd had to make do with a limb cobbled together from scrap, and now was glad to have kept it after the replacement had been installed. "Leg!" She said in english, recalling the scrap of language file as she held the makeshift limb up for her guest to see. The nandroid looked at it with uncertainty, then back down at herself. Ehri didn't waste time and knelt beside the confused robot, rolling up the loose material of her suit's leg and positioning the prosthetic carefully. The orange-haired nandroid watched cautiously, but made no move other than to ask a question hesitantly. The sentence sounded strange to Ehri, but she'd understood the 'who' part of what she'd been asked. Looking up she gave the nandroid a friendly smile and tapped herself on the chest. "Ehri!" She announced her name cheerfully, then reached out and gently tapped the other machine's chest with one finger and cocked her head inquisitively. "You?" The strange robot blinked one good optic at her before a more relieved smile crossed her dented faceplate. "Tilly."

>Over the following week the two nandroid's had done their best to communicate, often through pantomime and imitations of human body language. A small patch of bare earth just outside of Eheri's yurt served as a makeshift chalkboard for them, and any idea more complex than they knew how to act out was instead drawn, often poorly. Tilly had asked through mime 'where is this?' and Ehri had drawn an unfamiliar shape that she hadn't known how to interpret. When Ehri had used hand gestures and broken english to ask "Where did you come from?", she'd been unsatisfied with Tilly simply pointing upwards. Employing her meager art skills the astrobot had attempted to draw a simple rocket with a wide plume of exhaust. After a few seconds of staring at the attempted drawing, Ehri raised an eyebrow and cocked her head at her. "Carrot?" Tilly laughed, and Ehri easily laughed along with her. The spacesuit had been ditched as soon as Tilly had been able to stand, and the space-faring robot now dressed like her host in a thick coat she'd called 'deel' that crossed in the front and was tied with a wide belt around the midsection. The billowy fabric had left Tilly feeling like she was swimming in it as she hobbled along on her unresponsive prosthetic leg and cane, but she'd liked how it looked on her when Ehri had given her a small compact mirror to examine herself through. Looking into it for the first time made her wince, and she'd touched the distorted metal of her faceplate and patched-over optic gingerly with her good hand. Ehri had done her best to keep her new friend in good spirits, involving her in chores as best she was able to be and continually jumping from her owners back to the smaller ger outside to check on both. Several times now, she'd caught Tilly looking either sadly upwards or into the distance at nothing, lost in her own strange processing. "Eh!" Ehri said with a smile, a friendly greeting both had come to recognize and use between each other. She'd left the dwelling of her owners after they'd put themselves to bed, and found Tilly sitting beside the entrance to their shared tent, propped up on her arms and looking upwards again at the wide swath of stars in the night sky. Glancing from them over to her new friend Tilly smiled and returned the greeting. "'eh Ehri." Pulling the bottom of her coat up first, Ehri sat down beside her and followed her gaze up. "Want back soon?" she asked innocently, and Tilly blinked her good optic. "Back? I don't know..." she trailed off, staring upwards and thinking about the hostile satellite. Somewhere up there a dangerous robot operated an armed station, and for the first time in her strange career as astrobot she had something besides accident to fear when she next flew. "No no!" Ehri said vehemently, shaking her head and tapping at her shoulder where Tilly's flag patch had been. "BACK soon?"

>Preparations were made the following day, and both nandroids charged themselves to capacity that evening and dumped the remaining power from the battery banks into Teneg. Tilly had no idea what the nomad had in store her her, but at this point had enough trust in her new friend to go along with whatever she had planned. Before settling in to sleepmode for the night, Tilly had tried asking again what kind of trip exactly they'd packed for, but Ehri only understood a quarter of what she said and offered a shrug. "City! Sleepmode, tomorrow ride ok?" Tilly couldn't exactly argue, and simply nodded before resting on her outstretched blanket and setting her bootup for eight hours forward. Before the internal automatic prompt could boot her back up, Ehri was shaking her shoulder and calling out their greeting. Blinking one glowing blue optic in the pre-dawn light, Tilly brushed off Ehri's hand and sat up. "Right right, I'm up!" Grabbing the short worn cane Ehri had given her Tilly shakily pulled herself to her feet, stabilizing the dead prosthetic to support her weight evenly. "Let's do this!"

>The rest of the day stretching into dusk was spent on the back of Teneg the mechanical bull, trotting along at an efficient pace. They'd tried to make small-talk as best they could, but the language barrier made such efforts fruitless. On the open landscape there wasn't much that either could point out and talk about either, though Tilly still found herself enthralled seeing the strange part of the world she'd landed in. When the sun was setting they'd stopped, and Ehri had unpacked a small tent from their mount and set up. Teneg remained powered down when not being rode, and the nandroids powered themselves off the charge they'd generated off the mechanoid's attached solar panels which covered the flank during long-duration rides like theirs. Ehri had made this trip over fifty times during her half-decade of nomad life, enough times to know the power limits of both herself and her mount. A full recharge would be there for them all when they reached Ulaanbaatar, she thought to herself as she and Tilly lay beside one another in their tiny shared tent. The next two days followed an identical pattern, by day they rode and collected sunlight to power themselves, and by night they made camp and recharged. Ehri had gone for years not charging to full-capacity each night, solar power was often varied and some days she'd barely gotten enough to operate without resorting to generator power. Tilly was not so conditioned to it though, and functioning under half her battery's capacity left her feeling over-taxed with every movement. Once while riding Teneg behind Ehri she'd inadvertently slipped into sleep-mode due to an internal monitoring algorithm assuming that her low-power state and lack of activity meant she needed recharging, and she'd fallen off the mechanical mount's back. On the fourth day both of them had whooped and cheered upon seeing the distant but unmistakable shape of a city on the horizon. For Ehri it meant the nearing the end of this leg of the long journey back to the city for this month, but for Tilly it was her first glimpse of relative civilization in two weeks. That evening they camped with the glow of the city persistent on the horizon, and Tilly shut down wondering what was in store for them when they arrived tomorrow.

>After several more hours of travel they reached a paved road and began to follow it along the shoulder, passing an airport along the outskirts as they moved into the city proper. The metropolis seemed foreign to Tilly, and it wasn't simply the signage being unintelligible to her in this strange country but being surrounded by buildings again after even a short time spent in the open wilderness with her host. The city reminded her of Tampa near the launch complex she'd left just a couple weeks earlier, wide and spread out with many short buildings interrupted by the occasional taller structure. None of the pedestrians they passed seemed to take notice of their strange dress or their mechanical mount, and Tilly spotted at least three others like Teneg being used as they passed through the city. Other robots as well, designs and models she'd never seen before roamed the streets alongside the humans they served. She was distracted by the unfamiliar sights, and when Ehri brought Teneg to a stop she bumped into the steppe-bot's back. "Here! Want go home, yah?" Ehri gave her a wide triumphant smile. Tapping her shoulder where Tilly's flag patch had been, she pointed up above them. Flying outside the building they'd stopped in front of was the American flag. Tilly blinked her good eye and read the small plaque placed outside the structure. "US Embassy," she muttered out loud in disbelief, then matched Ehri's wide grin and put her arms around her with a laugh. "Thank you!"

>Ehri helped Tilly dismount, the damaged nandroid unable to stand without the added balance of the cane. A pair of guards outside the embassy gates had eyed them curiously when they'd stopped, and were speaking inaudibly with each other about the strange machines. "Good?" Ehri asked as she held Tilly's shoulders to steady her. Tilly nodded and smiled warmly. "Yes, thank you, for everything." Ehri matched her expression and hugged her again. "Eh soon, kay?" she said when she released Tilly, and reached into an inner pocket on her large jacket. Pulling out a small bit of cardboard salvaged from some packaging, she handed it to Tilly as one of the guards from the embassy began walking towards them. The handwriting was hard to read but printed in usable english, spelling out an address. Ehri beamed when Tilly took her forwarding address. "Kay!" Tilly answered back enthusiastically, matching her smile as she turned to great the Embassy guard. "Hello Sir! I need to get in contact with the United States Spaceflight Agency! Can you help me?"


EPILOGUE

NADYA
>"Standby" was the last order Nadya had received, over a week ago now. Photographs had been taken and transmitted home, but no congratulatory messages ever responded to them. After several days she had become restless, nervous and desperate for any kind of reply. "I know you can hear me, so say something already!" she'd shouted into the void, without any response. She'd done her job well, hadn't she? Why wouldn't anyone tell her so? After days of no contact with home, Nadya grew paranoid. Perhaps her signal and the messages from home were being blocked somehow? Perhaps mission control was only relaying instructions while she was in sleepmode by some coincidence, and perhaps the radio equipment had failed to record the transmissions? Resolving not to miss a single message, Nadya began forgoing sleepmode, charging while awake and keeping constant vigil over both the radar and radio.

EHRI
>It had taken a further five days to return to her family's current site, but arriving had given her a satisfying sort of relief. As with any of her long jaunts into the city to resupply each month, Ehri unpacked from Teneg the supplies she'd bought until the mechanical beast was unloaded completely. Her masters had seen themselves to bed not long after she'd returned, and leaving their ger she stopped outside her and Teneg's small tent. Looking at the bare patch of Earth where she had Tilly had drawn to communicate, she sat down where she had with her strange friend the night before their trip to Ulaanbaatar began. Staring upwards, she tried to envision what she'd thought the American nandroid had said, and pictured a vessel arcing across the sky. Unlike all others, tonight Ehri wondered about what might be above her, rather than simply admiring the pretty lights from her place on the steppe.

TILLY
>Three bus-rides and and as many flights later, Tilly was back on American soil. Greeting her as she got off her final plane was Georges, standing tall in a beige suit that did not at all compliment him. "Tilly! we all thought you were dead! God, I've never been so glad to be wrong!" He exclaimed cheerfully, making Tilly wince as she descended the airliner's stairs and stood level with her superior's chest balanced on her cane. "Yep, I made it Sir!" She responded with a smile, then added "and if you ever try sending me on a DoD mission again I'm declaring myself an outmode."