(6) Tilly's Fourth Flight (Tilly and Tatyana)

>The Agency's launch complex had never been as full of activity and life as it was now, certainly a far cry from the hardly hundred men Tilly had been originally assigned to fetch coffee for in her first days after being donated by Sterling Robotics. Another fiscal year had rolled over since the plucky nandroid had been shot off towards Venus, and in that time her parent manufacturer had again used their carefully-tailored tax loophole to their financial benefit. This time however the robotics giant hadn't simply taken a run-of-the-mill product out of their stock to donate, instead opting to put the time and effort into improving on their baseline model to make a custom variant designed for use by the Agency. All of the upgrades Tilly had received during her servicing were included stock, as well as several new improvements even she lacked. The new custom nandroid's CPU clocked noticeably higher, she could juggle more mental tasks than Tilly thanks to expanded RAM, and her base-frame was made of stronger titanium alloy rather than the lightweight aluminum mix of the standard model. Not wasting time feeding the new machine useless training in child-rearing, this nandroid had instead been given a crash course in the basics of modern physics, astronomy, aviation training and an intro to orbital mechanics. By the end of her class-of-one schooling the fresh nandroid had been confident and ready for her new life, deactivated then shipped by crate to the Agency just as Tilly had before her.

>Kimmy first rebooted surrounded by curious Agency crew with the Director in his office, and had bowed extravagantly as her programming instructed her to. Tilly had not been present, but she'd heard the story secondhand from Georges while she delivered him coffee one morning. "You should see her, brand new model with all kinds of nifty customization just for the Agency! I tell you Til, she's gonna be a perfect fit!" Tilly frowned as the pair walked together around the VAB, Georges on an important coffee-and-smoke break she'd decided to accompany him on. "She's going to be flying from now on then, I take it?" Tilly asked, keeping her eyes on the sparse grass around the building. Georges took a puff then shrugged. "She's the best autopilot we have now, no offense. Hey, don't be like that." He nudged her shoulder lightly when the nandroid stared off away from them. "You were the prototype, you set the stage! You deserve a good retirement, it's what I said you'd get after your first flight isn't it?" Tilly could only nod slowly. "It is but, I just thought I'd get at least one more go of it after Venus, you know?" She looked up and blinked hopeful blue optics at him. Georges could only give her a shrug, feeling just the slightest bit of empathy for the strange bit of mobile hardware he'd come to know. Already he could see the glass cabinet display in some not-too-distant future, a case at the Smithsonian perhaps housing the motionless little robot who'd let the Agency keep up in the early days of the space race. He put on a smile for the nandroid.
"Eh, you never know, right?"

>It was nearly two months before the two Agency-owned nandroids met faceplate-to-faceplate. For the intervening time, Kimmy had underwent the same harsh conditioning training Tilly had done in her early days, establishing baseline readings for her records and surpassing several of her predecessor's benchmarks. Walking lazily outside towards her next delivery one day, Tilly had spotted the newer nandroid strolling across the tarmac of the runway at a brisk pace. Rushing to catch up, she'd flagged her replacement down with a wave. "Hey! I've been meaning to say hi! I'm-" Tilly was cut off by Kimmy giving a false snort and looking her up and down. "Tilly, yeah I know," she started, her dismissive tone immediately putting Tilly on edge. "Aren't you retired? I didn't know they kept you around to fetch coffee still. That's something though, right? Toodles!" With a flip of her barely shoulder-length red hair she kept walking, leaving Tilly processing the brief exchange wondering if she'd read something wrong.

>Over the following month, Kimmy continued to train aggressively, and Tilly continued to run her usual errands for the staff. After their short encounter, Tilly had grown slowly more irritated over the way her replacement had flippantly blown her off, but she tried not to dwell on it as she fell back into her pre-flight life at the Agency. One afternoon while going between buildings she'd been stopped by the sound of a distant rocket being fired. She looked up just in time to see the new lunar lander test rig rising through the air untethered, hover for a moment, then descend back beneath the line of trees in the distance. Tilly's optics narrowed, remembering her touch-and-go landing on the older rig a year ago. "Not bad for a first try," she muttered to herself, and continued on to her destination.

>Another afternoon, another fresh round of coffee. Tilly sighed as she neared the meeting room holding her tray of caffeine. Weren't there interns for this now? Opening the door she was met with the sight of a dozen men engrossed in conversation. "-new era for us now, we're in regular contact with the Soviet's agency and they're actually cooperating! Who'd have ever thought?" Georges was saying with a wide grin when she'd entered. "We've confirmed they've got their new robot up to standard, then?" The Director cut in, not giving Tilly a second glance as he took the offered drink. "They sent us her stats yesterday, not as good as Kimmy but definitely close." Collins, new head of astrobot training, was very confident in his new mechanical pilot's abilities, and had even argued against collaboration with the rival agency during the early planning stages. Nodding at him, the director spoke again. "Once the base-camp lander is down, we're going to need to be ready to launch when they do." Georges looked confident as he took his coffee from Tilly. "Two Z-3s are already built, a third is close and Congress has approved funding for an additional six launch vehicles!" He looked like a child viewing his still-wrapped Christmas presents, and laughed. "We'll be more than ready."

>When Tilly left the meeting and returned her empty tray to the break room, she looked around for anyone else who might have need of a nandroid in that moment. Finding herself alone, she made a relieved retreat back to her recharging 'suite' and closed the door behind her with a heavy sigh. From a small drawer below her mirror she pulled out Tatyana's most recent letter, her stylistic handwriting etched onto curious beige paper.
"Tilly: Heard more about replacement pilot today, name is 'Irina'. Sounds pretty, hope she likes flying more than I. Master says I might meet her before her launch, will tell you what she is like if I do. You meet new US pilot yet? Bet she has lot to learn. Boys need bed now, write later. -Tatyana"
>Tilly smiled at the Russian robot's update, then pulled her pad and pencil close to respond. "Tatyana: Yes, our new pilot's name is Kimmy, apparently quite good but kind of rude if you ask me. Hope your Irina can handle her when they're stuck in a capsule or Kimmy might have to float home!" She paused for a moment and read her own lines back to herself, before adding "Kind of wish it was you and me going, you know?" She capped the letter there to prevent herself from spilling out her fears onto the page, that she'd been outmoded in all but name, that she was growing more certain by the day that she'd never fly again, and her creeping worry when forced to think about what she was going to do without that part of her life now. Leaving the sealed envelope on the short desk, Tilly rested on her cot and plugged herself in to the recharging cable, vigilant to set both an internal alarm for boot and an additional reminder prompt to immediately unplug when fully charged.

>A crowd had gathered around the far perimeter of the launch complex, and even inside of it the engineers and mission planners had huddled together outside to watch a rocket lift off. Shorter by a serious degree than the average men of the Agency, Tilly had to squeeze herself around and through the group to get a good view, and by the time she'd found her place the large digital countdown timer had reached the one minute mark. She watched the numbers tick down, hearing the call-outs from the loudspeaker until it reached zero and the huge machine rumbled to life. Tilly was fascinated by the sight now having witnessed launch from two perspectives, and stared with an impossible-to-suppress grin as she watched the rocket arc beyond the clouds. Shielding her optics from the sun as they followed the missile upwards, Tilly thought about the packed-away little habitat on board heading for the moon. 'A place for humans to stay for longer than a few hours' Georges had called it, and the idea of a structure going up there had given her CPU a stir. As the rocket disappeared into the distance, Tilly's excitement ebbed back and she frowned. That would be the last she'd see of that moon-base in person, she thought to herself.

>From the sidelines Tilly had watched as signal to the unmanned habitat had been lost, then recovered again after it had touched down. She'd been impressed until Georges had excitedly begun telling her that it had all been a series of pre-timed burns based on data from her own landing adjusted for mass. "No AI? Not even a little? That AIn't no way to fly." She'd scoffed and her dumb pun was missed by Georges. Simple mechanisms were no match for a machine like herself made to think and act, and she was more than a little insulted that simple timed triggers had been made to work the landing instead of herself. Two weeks later, another launch was being prepared, this time to put Kimmy into orbit for her rendezvous with the new Russian pilot. The mission was simple, and hardly anything she hadn't done before, but Tilly still felt a growing jealously towards this new nandroid. Kimmy and Irina were to meet in orbit and dock their crafts together, then perform the lunar insertion burn as one. The Russians were providing a two-pilot lander flown by their pilot, while the American agency provided the capsule and service module operated by theirs. Unlike Tatyana and Tilly's flights, this mission would first put them into lunar orbit, leaving the command module there as they descended in the lander towards the empty lunar basecamp. With the lunar night scheduled to fall over the habitat just over a week later, they'd have to work quickly preparing the base for human's arrival, then depart for home before the two week night began.

>A knock came at Kimmy's door the night before her first launch, and Tilly had cracked the door to poke her head in. "Hey! I just wanted to drop by to wish you good luck!" She tried to sound friendly, since their first encounter they'd not spoken again, and Tilly had processed for a long time how to fix that. "Oh, I don't need any coffee thanks." Kimmy said dismissively when she saw the older nandroid. "See, it's funny because we don't drink." Tilly blinked at her, not finding it funny at all. "Well, if you have any questions about your flight tomorrow, I could-" she began, but was cut off by a curt laugh from Kimmy. "Sure I have some questions, like how do you mess up not one but TWO parachutes? Or, how do you go all the way to the moon but NOT take any pictures? Or an even better one, how do you foul up so bad at Venus that it takes another whole space agency to bail you out of trouble?" Kimmy began casually, but had grown more intense as she stood and put her hands on her hips. Tilly recoiled. "I don't know what you've heard, but there's a lot more to those stories than-" again she was cut off by the pushier nandroid. "Doesn't matter, the Agency has a real pilot now so feel free to hang around fetching reports." "Enough! What is your malfunction?!" Tilly yelled at her finally, raised voice not coming easily to her. With a start she noticed that her hands were balled into tight fists. Something about just hearing the modulated tone of the new pilot made one want to silence her. "MY malfunction? None, I'm brand new and perfect. I've got faster processing, I'm more durable, very user-friendly and..." Kimmy ran a hand down the curves of her torso. "I'm even made to look better on camera than you. But as for your malfunctions? Do you want a printout sweetheart?" Tilly turned, finding it difficult to even keep the harsh nandroid in her view. "I just came by to try and be nice, and you're glitched if you think you're anything close to 'user-friendly'." She shot back, measuring her tone and trying to keep her elevated mood in check. "No Tilly," Kimmy said as she sat back down. "You came by because you wanted to be involved somehow." Turning her back on the older nandroid, she added "You're not."

>Another Zeus-3 rocket, the workhorse of the Agency, lifted off the pad the following morning after the sun had risen enough to chase off the morning dew. This launch Tilly watched from her stargazing spot atop the VAB, and for one horrifying millisecond while recalling the argument with the other pilot, wished that it would explode. She shook the thought off as quickly as it had appeared, and forcefully wished Kimmy good luck to counter the dark impulse. For a long time after the rocket disappeared into the sky she stayed up there, having simply no other tasks that needed her attention. She thought about the two robots who would pave the way for a joint human crew in the near future, and despite the bit of pride she felt at her early role in that still felt she was missing out. Retirement, what did that even mean? As far as she could tell, it was serving coffee and generally milling around with little to do. "How long am I supposed to do that for?" She thought to herself, grimacing. It hadn't been more than a couple of months since her return from the long voyage beyond Venus, and already the time spent on the ground was beginning to feel more dull than the months she'd spent in that tin can. Was this it until her final outmoding and decommissioning? The thought of it scared her far more than her close calls, and she remained up there until the evening to view the stars rather than go back down to ferry another report.

>Four days after launch, Tilly once again brought a fresh round of coffee to the men of mission control without care for the menial task. "How are they doing?" She asked curiously when she gave Georges his drink. A couple nearby heads turned and gave her angry looks, and Georges kept his voice down. "We haven't heard anything since the landing, it's been hours." He paused to take a sip and gave her a serious look. "At least we're pretty sure they landed, hard to tell. Something's definitely wrong up there." Tilly looked back at the large displays worriedly. "Maybe it's just their antenna?" She asked hopefully, but he shook his head. "They'd be at the habitat by now and could just use that one to reach us or the Russian control room, neither of us are getting anything from them though." At this Tilly's CPU stirred, processing an array of speculation as to what might've gone wrong. "How are you going to find out what happened up there?" She asked as several thoughts converged at once internally. Georges just sighed and looked back at the displays. "Only way is to go look."

>The next day the media had ran rampant with speculation about the failure of the joint US/USSR mission, leaving many in mission control as frustrated as the public who had just digested the story of a Soviet robot saving Tilly a few months prior. After twelve hours of no contact from the two robots on the moon, communication between the rival space agencies had abruptly stopped as well, and nobody tried to reestablish the link. Tilly had been tracked down and summoned early the following day, and followed a young intern to the same meeting room where she'd been assigned her first flight. A small group of men including Georges and the Agency Director were waiting for her, and as soon as she'd taken the offered seat the greyed man in charge spoke quickly. "We need to find out what happened up there and no spysat would give us any usable information. We have a vehicle already on the pad being fueled, all it needs is an autopilot and you're our only backup for the moment" Tilly stared at him with uncertainty. Could they really launch again so soon after Kimmy's flight? 'Forget it, they know what they're doing, just say YES SIR already!' she said to herself internally, and gave the Director an energetic smile. "Yes Sir!"

>It took another twenty-four hours before the spare rocket was ready to fly, and in that time Tilly practiced on the new landing simulator the Agency had built for Tammy and other future pilots. Though she performed well she found the simulation lacking compared to the real thing. "You can't even feel anything in there, on a real landing you've got inertia and all your internal readouts helping orient you." She complained as she exited the simulator cabin. "Just a formality for you anyway, right?" Georges answered her, ready to escort her off to her last-minute tour of the mockup habitat she'd be landing near. In the hanger the large squat cylinder sat with an open hatchway, and inside Tilly had gotten to see the large interior space empty without gear or experiments. "It's wider than my flyby habitat!" She'd exclaimed, impressed by the scale. Georges fixed her with a serious look as she admired the mockup. "Tilly, just remember the time constraints on this mission, okay? You won't really have any time for sightseeing on this one." She nodded, but inwardly acknowledged that she was still going to take a moment to look at the real base when she was there, even if just for a second.

>Launch of the freshly-fueled rocket proceeded nominally, and Tilly felt a fresh perspective now having watched one from the outside. It was more than a year since she'd lifted off towards her flyby with Venus, and she'd been convinced over the last several weeks that it would be her last. Despite the routine nature of the flight's beginning she still relished every second of it, and overclocked on purpose to take it all in again. One orbit later the third stage lit up and flung Tilly out towards the moon once more before dropping clear of her lander. During the three day coast Tilly listened to the soft background music played from mission control, and read a book back to herself from internal memory. During servicing post-Venus her quickly diminishing hard disk space had posed a problem for Sterling repairmen as they couldn't simply keep adding more drives, and it had been bumped up the chain until an overworked debugger several states away had devised the novel solution. For memories like Tilly's favorite books the files could now be kept in a more compressed state, not instantly readable but there for recollection when she called it up and unpacked it. The fix had greatly reduced the space taken up by many of her larger files, and the space saving innovation was even being worked into the next nandroid models as a stock feature. As she grew closer to the moon, she found herself wondering about what could have happened to Kimmy and Irina down there. "Crashed maybe, suit heaters might've failed, could be they weren't radiation shielded enough or-" She stopped herself and shook her head. Too much could've gone wrong, could still go wrong, for her to worry about it now. She had her job: Land close to the 2-pilot lander, investigate and take photos if there was a crash site, and get out of there before nightfall froze the suit and her in it. As the final descent burn finished and she began falling towards the landing site, Tilly thought she saw a glimpse of something out the porthole window for a moment. It looked like a star slowly moving against the backdrop of the others, but then it winked out. She didn't have time to process the possibilities, and turned her attention back to the controls.

>Less than one mile above the surface, Tilly's lander floated along sideways towards the site that was only visible by instrument. As she watched the figures change in regular familiar pattern the procession was suddenly broken, dials spinning wildly for several seconds. "What the heck?" She said out loud as she looked outside for some explanation and found none. As the strange interruption ended the computer and mechanical dials both struggled to find their footing and provide Tilly with usable data. She knew she was close to the base, at least within a few miles but beyond that couldn't be sure. Shaking her head she reluctantly throttled up the lander after waiting a tense thirty more seconds, eager to set down and hoping she wouldn't have too far of a walk. Nervous, she watched her fuel closely as it ran low leaving her the barest amount needed for the return, if that. Kicking dust and small gravel up into long arcs, Tilly's lander touched down on the surface. As she sat in the cabin for several moments the landing computer finally stopped shifting values and settled on her position. The figure made her groan. "Eighteen miles?!" She was so far off that she had to laugh at herself there alone in the cabin for just a minute. Helmet attached, Tilly stuffed a lightweight nylon satchel with both spare batteries to recharge her and her suit heater, a flashlight, a newer smaller camera courtesy of the Agency, and a collapsing rock hammer. Stepping through the hatchway and closing it behind herself she hopped without pause to the surface below. A quick check of her internal chronometer told her she had a little over six hours before the slow sweep of the terminator line would cross her position and she'd be cast into temperatures far too low for her little heater to contend with. Comparing the saved file of the computer screen reading her position to the landscape around her she picked her direction with computed dead-reckoning, then bounded off at her most efficient slow-motion clip. Some highly variable internal computation told her this walk would take around five hours if she kept a good pace, and she'd be able to hot-swap batteries midway through the journey to keep the heater running. "Plenty of time to get into the hab before dark," she said to herself as she moved across the surface, the only motion on the sterile world.

>Less than an hour later Tilly was shaken from her determined trek across the surface by something appearing on the horizon, and moving fast. She stopped to watch it as it approached, and as it grew close she could see the dim light of the engine lighting up. "A lander!" The detail was just barely discernible at her distance when it came down, appearing to waver once on landing but setting gently. Before it was down Tilly was already off bouncing after it, her mission momentarily on pause. It took a further twenty minutes to reach the lander as she crossed what she judged to be roughly a mile. By the time she grew close the pilot had already left the capsule and was sitting on the ground working on something. The figure looked up as Tilly approached, and both of them recognized each other's facesplates through their helmets with a grin. Standing up Tatyana quickly embraced her nandroid comrade, and they pressed their helmets together to hear one another. "Tilly! I had suspicion you might come, but where from? Did not see your lander!" Tilly shook her head inside the helmet. "Overshot the base, something went haywire with my instruments when I came down." Tatyana nodded knowingly then released her and held up four digits before pointing at the radio controls each of them had at one wrist. Tilly turned hers on and switched to the fourth band, then heard Tatyana's voice clearly. "You too? I thought was my mistake overshooting but something really is screwy about that spot." Tilly agreed, then looked past her at the ground where the cosmobot had been seated. "What are you doing with that?" On the ground lay one of the two solar panels of the Soviet lander, plucked like an insect's wing. Tatyana knelt back down and began putting the finishing touches on her work, tying a set of wires down with a zip-tie. "I have two spare batteries for self and suit, but even together would not be quite enough to make basecamp. I figure I try to catch a little sun while I walk, da? Should help a little." Basecamp. Tilly looked up and scanned the horizon, locating her mental markers quickly. "The lunar night is coming, we've got to move." The Russian stood and nodded as she pulled two bits of nylon rope attached to the solar panel up around her shoulders. "Da da, am ready now if you are." One of the panes of blue glass came away from the rest of the strut, and she tied the piece in place atop her backpack looping the rope around her helmet's neck ring. "Let's go for a stroll!"

>The walk was long, but the pair filled the time with plenty of conversation now that they weren't constrained to short postcards, a necessary distraction from the approaching night present in both their minds. They both confirmed each other's suspicion that they'd been sent with the same task at nearly the same time, their parent agencies both now mistrusting the other to investigate fairly. "And naturally, no other pilots were ready on short notice again? You'd think they'd start training whole classes of us." Tilly said with a laugh, then stopped realizing that her joke was likely to be reality one day. "They already started trying, but first official pilots disappear and now they use old test pilots to go find them. Kind of funny, da?" For a while longer they filled the time with idle chatter, Tilly mostly listening as Tatyana rattled off numerous little stories of her household. She didn't find her day-to-day domestic life stories to be that interesting, but she knew Tilly hung on them intently and so told anyway to fill their long walk. At one point though she stopped, glancing over her shoulder idly and nearly stumbling. "Look!" Tilly turned and her optics widened. Where they'd come from hours before was obscured by a mountain's now-long shadow, and no light reflected off Tatyana's lander for them to see it by. "Okay go, let's go!" Tilly said stubbornly after a split-second of awe and dread.

>Another hour passed as they jogged along, stopping only long enough to swap batteries again. Shadows were growing long around them, and both could sense the imminent darkness. "I see it!" Tatyana shouted as they ran, and both made a break for it as the habitat glinted in the dying sunlight. Another ten minutes and the habitat had grown close enough to make out detail. "Hey, over there!" Tilly pointed off to her right at another man-made shape. "It's the Zorya lander, the replacements DID make it!" She began to turn towards the lander but Tatyana grabbed her harshly by the arm and pulled her back on-course. "Nyet! No time!" Only a hundred feet lay between the two machines and the front door of the habitat when darkness fell. All at once the landscape was bathed in black with only the stars visible above to give some definition to the darkness. Both of them tripped and went down, and within seconds they were already receiving internal warnings in their own programming languages of the rapid temperature drop. Tatyana could feel her legs stiffening up, joints responding poorly as her metals contracted in the cold. Tilly had a rapid recall of her race back to her lander on her first trip to the moon, following her and Tatyana's fist encounter. "C-c-come-on!" Tilly shook as she tried to force unwilling servos to respond, grabbing her fellow machine under one shoulder and lifting her on legs that were already failing to work as ordered. Holding onto one another the two robots limped their way the last few feet to the hatch and frantically pulled at the release. For several terrifying seconds it seemed as if the hatch would not budge, but Tatyana took the release lever from Tilly and dropped her weight on it with a groan, forcing it. Quickly Tilly pushed her inside and followed, slamming the hatch shut behind them. She tried fumbling with her flashlight, but her fingers weren't responding. Tatyana tapped her suit's sewn-in light and aimed it at Tilly who huddled by a control panel. Within a few seconds she'd found the button to cycle the tiny airlock, and when she pressed her numb hand against the switch warm oxygen-rich air pumped into the chamber. The longer they sat the warmer they felt, and for several minutes neither of them said anything as the airlock heater brought their temperature back up. When they were able to move comfortably again, Tatyana rose from her seated position and banged against the inner-hatch looking at Tilly. "Nobody come answer yet, you'd think they hear airlock cycling if anyone home." The nandroid nodded and put her hand against the metal. "Doesn't sound like anything's moving in there. I didn't see any lights on when we were getting close either." The cosmobot thought about this for a moment, then reached past her and pulled the release on the inner hatch.

>The door swung open into darkness, and Tatyana's beam of light swept across everything sitting just as it had been at stowed at launch. "Doesn't look like anyone's been in here yet," Tilly said, moving through the hatch into the open space and turning on her own flashlight. "Da, so where are replacement pilots?" Moving around the room, Tatyana found the main switchboard quickly and flipped on the lights. Another switch turned on the life support in the rest of the habitat, filling it with warm thin air that humans could breath. Tilly removed her helmet and began to scout around. The interior of the space was a small rounded room with table and stools set at the center. Along the curved wall surrounding it were set four doorways in addition to the airlock they'd come through, and an inspection of each revealed them to be a bunkroom, greenhouse, laboratory and cargo hold. Another section of interior space was closed off to them with no access point, but Tilly could feel the hum of machinery behind the bulkhead and surmised it was where the essential systems of the habitat were located. Everything was sealed up, packed away neatly and still awaiting the original machine crew to set the place up. In storage Tilly dug out a pair of sealed bags containing jumpsuits intended for their replacements. She didn't waste time and changed out of her suit right there in storage, pulling on the familiar blue uniform with a happy sigh. When she returned to the central room she found Tatyana without helmet and typing away at the control panel set against one wall. "Found us something that isn't thermally insulated to wear," she announced as she stopped behind the cosmobot. "Da, thank you. I'm just working on calling home for us, system is a little unfamiliar but I think I have it." She paused and looked back at Tilly with a frown. "Ah, who do we call first, mine or yours?" Tilly matched her expression and ran the possibilities through her processor. "Either way slights one of them in their eyes, so no winning move there," she began, segmented digits stroking her faceplate's chin in imitation of Georges. Optics lighting up, she smiled. "So let's tell both at the same time! Tatyana, can we put out a broadcast that they'll both pick up on simultaneously? Not direct it at either of them?" Tatyana thought for a moment, then slowly nodded. "Anyone down there who wanted to listen in could hear that, but da, is doable." She processed hard for several seconds before coming to her conclusion. "I think is good idea. Let's do it."

>A joint message was broadcast from the moon at the Earth, and the two space-fairing robots were careful but honest in what they said, knowing that multiple governments and untold scores of amateur radio enthusiasts were listening in. They'd overshot and had to walk, return was impossible until lunar day in two weeks, no sign of the new pilots so far. On Earth the steadily growing political tensions froze in place as both parties heard their pilots give updates together. On the moon Tilly and Tatyana busied themselves fulfilling their replacement's duties preparing the small base for future human missions. Much of the work was tedious, and in the lab neither of the droids had understood much of the checklist that they were fulfilling. One experiment captured both of their attention by the fourth day though, a small heated aquarium had been filled and used to hatch a collection of fairy shrimp who now swam with ease around the little box. "Such tiny things they are," Tatyana had remarked as the pair marveled at the small swimming shapes. "Second lifeforms on the moon," Tilly added in wonder. Preparing the greenhouse was even more engrossing for both as the basic principal of their work was easier for them to process without a vast library of background knowledge outside their fields. Some sort of lightweight synthetic medium, Tatyana said it reminded her of cat litter, formed a bed for the vacuum-sealed seeds they carefully planted under UV lights throughout two long beds. After several days, both of the robots had laughed and cheered as the first tiny green shoots poked their heads above the man-made soil. One item on the checklist they had to leave undone for now was filling a large box in the lab. It was meant to attempt extracting oxygen from the lunar regolith, but neither of them wanted to risk freezing outside to go get a few scoops of moon-dirt. After a week living in their new habitat Tatyana and Tilly had finished furnishing the structure and felt at home. With nothing left to do but check in with Earth now and then, the pair finally settled in and began to relax.

>Sitting at the round table in the central room, Tatyana and Tilly laid playing cards down face-up simultaneously from their halves of the deck, and the holder of the higher-value card took both. They'd found the deck while rifling through the supplies stowed in the cargo hold, but neither knew any serious card-games and Tatyana only knew War from playing it with her boys. The cosmobot grinned as she won a round and stacked the cards at the bottom of her deck. "So Tilly," she began with a mischievous expression molded across her steel face. "In factory training, classmates and I had question for one another. You know, 'breaking ice' kind of thing, everybody laugh, know one another better." Laying down a card and feeling confident at winning two back, Tilly shrugged. "Alright you've got me curious, what's the question?" Laying down her next card, Tatyana glanced at the table. "If you could pick any human, usually American actor, but any human you could...'you know', who you pick?" Tilly blinked and forgot to lay down her card for a moment. "What do you mean 'you know', I DON'T know." Tatyana glanced back up and cocked her eyebrow, fixing Tilly with a knowing look until the nandroid's circular cheeks lit up red. "OH! Oh come on, I've never thought about that!" The Russian chuckled. "So repressed! No YOU come on, every robot like us thinks about it at least once, be silly and deny it if you want I don't care, just thought it be funny conversation is all. Your move." Tilly blinked again at her, the glow at her cheeks not dying down. Silently they played several more rounds, and Tatyana took Tilly's cards every time. "Chuck Connors." She finally spoke up at last like a child admitting they'd broken a vase. Tatyana snickered and forgot her cards for a moment. "Who?" Tilly looked up sharply defensive. "I just like the way he works a rifle, t-that's all!" Tatyana threw her head back and laughed heartily, and the laughter infected Tilly until both of them were giggling away with one another in their little habitat. Finally their laughter subsided, and Tilly was able to get in her rebuttable. "Alright alright, so you've heard mine but what about yours? What meatbag has Tatyana's optic?" Now it was the cosmobot's turn to look slightly uncomfortable, rectangular lights at her cheeks flashing a bright red. "Well that's obvious isn't it? It has to be king cowboy himself, John Wayne." Now Tilly snickered, but covered her faceplate with her free hand. "Really? HIM? I mean that Genghis Khan movie he did was pretty....eh" she raised her hand and made a 'so-so' motion. Tatyana stiffened up and closed her golden optics for a moment. "I will kindly ask you to now keep the Duke's name out of your filthy mouth. Your move." She spoke politely enough that it made Tilly burst out in another giggle before she resumed the game.

-A few days later, the lunar daylight was approaching to banish their two week night, arriving in another 48 hours and freeing them of the habitat. A red light bathed the interior room as a siren rang out, and both robots assembled to puzzle out what was going on, Tatyana rushing to the console with Tilly nervously looking on over her shoulder. "Am no scientist so cannot interpret all figures, but I know what THIS is," Tatyana said nervously pointing at one of the small digital readouts. "Is magnetometer display, and right now it going pretty crazy. Lots of radiation outside, but think we protected well in here. Base made for fragile humans after all, da?" Tilly nodded slowly, remembering a random ramble by Georges on one of his escorted smoke breaks. "It's a solar flare, gotta be for it to be reading that high now," she said peering closely at the figures. "I can't believe we're here to see this!" Tatyana looked back over her shoulder at her nandroid friend and grimaced. "Even with shielding on drives and CPU that kind of radiation fry us like we being microwaved, we go outside that is. How you impressed by this? Space trying to kill us right now." Tilly stepped back and tried to compose her thoughts unsuccessfully. "It's just...." She thought about the nature of the star her planet circled, how the same collection of reacting material both gave life to the organics who'd created her and yet posed an ever-present risk to them and their machines outside the protection of Earth's magnetosphere. "..it's just amazing," was all she could offer with a helpless shrug. For the next day and a half the duo patiently waited out the solar storm, nervously playing cards and conversing. "What you think we find when we get to joint lander?" Tatyana asked, laying down a 10. Tilly sighed and laid down a 5 not expecting to beat the high card. "Don't know, maybe they tried to shelter in there and powered down?" She laid down a 2 after the Russian gathered their cards. "But why? Base not far off, you'd think they try for it. I mean, we made it and look how far we have to walk." Tatyana laid down another ten. "Well, what if they both fell and broke their helmets? That could account for them both failing to check in, right?" Tilly laid out a 4, not convinced by her own hypothesis. Tatyana gathered the cards and played again. "Both falling and freezing up like that? Not likely odds dummy." Tilly frowned, but knew her counterpart was right. "So then, what? Something happened to them after they landed, they never made it here, but why?" She laid down a 10 and looked across at the Soviet. Tatyana looked at the card for a moment and shrugged. "Hard to say, won't know until tomorrow when we go out, da?"
Tatyana laid down a 2, and Tilly nodded in silent agreement as she took the cards.

>The following day, both robots booted out of sleep mode in their bunks with light pouring in through the porthole in the quarters' wall. Day had dawned finally after two weeks of lunar night. The pair worked quickly to dress in the cargo hold where their suits had been left, pulling on the tight insulated garments as if they were racing one another. When the airlock light turned green signaling the small room had been vented of oxygen, Tatyana opened the hatch and the two machines stepped back out onto the surface. "Nights too long up here, not a fan." Tatyana offered as the pair moved away from the habitat. The joint-lander was just over a mile away by their reckoning, though a slight rise in the landscape obscured the vehicle from view. Setting off at a brisk pace, Tilly and Tatyana remained quiet during the fifteen minute walk up the hillside to look down on the lander. Both of them froze in place for a full minute as they surveyed the scene. The lander was pristine, though a long series of drag-marks in the ground leading to the legs told of a spotty landing. Around the small craft were a series of boot-prints, and several spots where the dust had been disturbed by motion. Without a word both of the robots made their way down the slight hill with the same curiosity. Tatyana went at once to the lander, inspecting it to see if there was some less obvious damage to the machine. Tilly followed the tracks in the dust with her optics, leading up another slight rise a few yards away. Following the boot-prints nervously, she crested the hill and looked down with grim acknowledgment. At the bottom of the short slope were two figures laying prostrate on the lunar surface. "Tatyana! I found them."

>"Irina is froze up and without power but doesn't look too damaged, broken helmet biggest concern." Tatyana said as she examined the motionless cosmobot. "Gonna give her some juice and try to force boot," she added while Tilly knelt beside the still form of Kimmy. Unlike the Russian robot, Kimmy had a jagged gash torn in her suit's torso. A sharp blow had struck clear through her outer plating and pierced her battery, black ejecta from it staining the rest of the suit and the rock-hammer that lay a few feet away from them. Tilly frowned and looked the still replacement pilot over. "Kim's battery is broken open, but she should still be able to run off the suit's power to boot." Looking back over her shoulder, Tilly saw Tatyana shake her head in frustration, then heard her curse in Russian. "No good, can't even boot safemode. CPU is scrap. Damn!" Her head lowered for several second before she sighed sadly. "She's gone. What about yours?" Tilly looked back down at Kimmy, then desperately plugged her spare battery into the newer nandroid's suit. For a moment Tilly had hope, but Kimmy's optics only briefly glowed and stared blankly forward without recognition, and putting a hand to the robot's chest she could feel the replacement pilot's drive clicking away in a dead state. "No good, she's..." Tilly felt a sense of loss she hadn't expected. "She's gone too."

>The dead machines were left where they lay as Tilly and Tatyana made their way back to the joint lander together slowly. "What do you think happened between them to make them do that to each other?" Tilly asked after a while. Tatyana shrugged. "Who knows, hard to say now. Would knowing make much difference?" Tilly only looked down. "Maybe." Looking at her for a long moment, Tatyana sighed. "Let's get off this dumb rock, da? I'm driving." Tilly glanced up at her sharply and gave her a quizzical look. "What do you mean?" Smirking, the cosmobot checked over the exterior of the Zorya lander. "We have thirty kilometer walk back to your lander which might not even have enough fuel left for takeoff you say, And my lander which is only rated for one, even that touchy power-wise since I pull solar panel off. Solution obvious, da?" Gesturing at the joint lander, she smiled. Tilly slowly returned the expression, then nodded enthusiastically.

>Within the hour, the "Zorya" lander was granted permission by radio to lift off, and the single engine bell had flared up at Tatyana's control. Minutes later they'd achieved orbit, and over the next several hours grew closer to and eventually reached the vessel that had been left in orbit by their ill-fated replacements. Docking went easily, and less than an hour later the lander was left floating free around the moon as the capsule and two passengers rocketed back towards the Earth. After their departure burn, both robots had found themselves quiet after their grim discovery on the moon. "What are you going to- hey!" Tatyana stopped mid sentence to watch a small bulb flicker out on the control panel. "This light, is only on when we talking, see?" Tilly watched the bulb flicker out again as the cosmobot went quiet. "Is it...recording?" She asked slowly, watching the Russian tinker with the control panel. "Da, writes whenever audio is picking up I figure, give me moment." A few moments later, the red bulb refused to light no matter how much they spoke, their words recorded only onto their own drives. "Hey, if that was recording during the flight out, there's got to be an archive right?" Tilly asked, suddenly feeling closer to finding out just what had befallen Kimmy and Irina. "Da, archive not only here, it has recording from lander too. Radio uplink, if I had to guess." After several seconds Tatyana began skipping forward through archive from the beginning, and both she and Tilly sat in their shared capsule with rapt attention as they sped towards home.

>File 0013: "Welcome aboard, took your time with the docking huh! Why don't you take a seat while I handle flying us?"  "Don't you think we should compare itineraries first? It is on checklist of things to do before burn."  "Forget the formalities, I can do this whole thing in sleep-mode myself. Watch, you'll see."  "These are NOT my orders..." "Just pipe down enjoy the ride okay?"

>File 0052: "Separation good, we are clear of command module." "Don't you think I can see that? I have optics too you know."  "Is standard protocol to call out events, how you not know this?"  "Quiet, I have work to do. Why don't you clean the glass or something and be useful?"

>File 0060: "500 meters! Damn, some kind of anomaly! We are getting bad altimeter data from the computer, targeting data is nonsense too!"  "Just tell me in feet! Can't you compensate? Fly by optics if you have to, what's the matter with you?!"

>File 0075: "We're off by more than a MILE you Soviet scrap!"  "Sensor readings went haywire, you saw it! Don't you lay this on ME you pompous junk-heap!"  *audible gasp*  "How DARE you! Fine, you just stay here while I go take the first step and do EVERYTHING!"   "You malfunctioning glitch, We already talked about this! I piloted us down, I'm going out first!"

>File 0079: "Off!"  "Stop shoving!"   "Get off me!"  "You want to be first?! FINE!"   "AHH!"  "You idiot, my helmet! Look what you've done!"  "Feh! Not my fault it's made inferior, just like y- OW! Did you really just throw a rock at me?!"  "You scrap!" "ENOUGH OF YOU!"  "STOP, DON'T!"  "позвольте мне отдохнуть сейчас,"

>Tilly and Tatyana sat for several minutes in stunned silence after listening to the recordings of the two pilots. "I can't believe it, I mean I know we saw them but, to think they bickered until...until they just killed each other like that," Tilly finally said quietly, suddenly glad for company to experience the unsettling moment with. Tatyana shook her head. "Nyet, solar flare killed them, fried drives and CPUs. They fought and shut down though, da." Tilly gave a shudder, remembering their first meeting in the crater. "Must have been awful." Both of them sat listlessly for several minutes alone in their thoughts, when suddenly the radio cut in. "Command module Soma, we have you on good approach home. Do you have any report on your mission? Missions?" Both Tatyana and Tilly looked at one another, and neither reached for the switch to transmit right away. "What do you think will happen when they learn there's been a serious fight up here?" Tilly asked cautiously. Tatyana frowned and looked thoughtful. "I not know of politics well but, if Master is any indication of general opinion? Maybe war over moon, war for war's sake." They both looked at one another worriedly as another request for communication came over the radio. Both studied one another, and without a word Tilly pressed the 'talk' switch finally. "Update, yes! Well, both pilots were deactivated, real bad accident it looks like. Can't be sure but looks like Kimmy caught a micro-meteorite to the battery compartment and the shrapnel broke Irina's helmet, must've been standing close when it happened. If they were recoverable before they're not now, the solar flare a few days ago wiped them, they're a total loss. However, we still managed to complete their mission! The base is ready for human occupancy!" Tatyana stared at her with wide optics as she closed the channel. "You lied!" She exclaimed, as if she couldn't even conceive of the idea. "And to your owners no less?" Tilly gave a shrug, It wasn't her first time. "Is that better or worse than them blowing each other up over some stupid robots?" Tatyana stared at her a long moment, then threw her head back and laughed. "I was right before, you really ARE crazy thing!" Reaching forward she deleted the recorded messages, leaving the two of them with a secret between them.


EPILOGUE

>"Micrometeor impact?" The Agency Director asked incredulously as Tilly sat across his desk from him once more. After splashdown, she and Tatyana had made a promise to keep the ugly truth of what had happened between them. Recovery teams were quick to respond, and in short order they'd been separated with Tatyana recieving a short flight to the Russian embassy awaiting her trip home. "That's just my best guess, sir. Kimmy had a broken-open battery and Irina's helmet was smashed by something hard." The Director eyed her suspiciously for a moment. Below his desk was a heavily postmarked box adorned with foreign cyrilic stamps. Inside had been a small note expressing good-will between national space agencies, and below that the bulky camera and folded flag from Tilly's first moon landing. "And if it was...something else?" the greying man said finally, steepling his hands on his desk and stared at her knowingly. Tilly tried not to wince, and shrugged instead to cover it. "I imagine there'd be some kind of international incident, right sir?" The Director lifted his eyebrows. "Same reason we don't talk about who the first robot on the moon really was." She pushed, feeling the momentum of the debriefing going in her favor. The head of the American Spaceflight Agency shook his head slowly at the machine sitting across from him. "Careful." he said simply, then leaned back and dismissed her with a wave. Long after she'd gone, the old man stared thoughtfully at the package from the Soviet agency.