(8)Tilly's Sixth Flight (Tilly, Tatyana, Nadya)

>"This is the place?" Tilly asked from the backseat of Collin's nondescript old car, parked on the street outside of a run-down shop. She had never been to this part of the city, and hadn't had any inkling that Tampa might have unsafe-seeming areas like this when she'd walked off the night before her first trip to the moon over two years prior. "This is it, hang on I'll get your door," Collins replied back casually as he exited the vehicle and came around to help the nandroid out of the backseat. She had been missing and presumed lost for two weeks when the call had been connected through from the US Embassy in the Mongolian city of Ulaanbaatar, and had spent a further four days in transit back to the United States. When she'd returned attempts had been made at once to contact Sterling for servicing of the broken robot, but still standoffish regarding Tilly's most recent flight the company representative had politely given them the runaround until it was clear that they were not interested in honoring her warranty at this time. Hobbling slowly on Ehri's old unpowered prosthetic and supported by Collins' arm around her shoulders, Tilly made her way across the street and into the dingy establishment. Without Sterling's expert mechanics to bring Tilly back to factory-spec, Assistant Director Georges had made the decision to send her to a third-party repair shop, and had even financed the refurbishment out of his own pocket. "Don't worry about it, I can take the bus to work for now," he had said to her when she'd inquired about the cost before leaving with Collins. "you're our only robot and you can't fly with a bum leg."

>"Holy shit, you pull her outta Stress Testing or something pal?" came the greeting from the front desk of the second-hand shop as they entered. Around them were an array of electronics and robotics components in various states of repair, every nook and cranny of the shack-like structure filled beyond capacity with what seemed to be scrap from a million different places. Behind the desk the attending mechanic stood up, staring through foggy glasses at the damaged machine that had just limped in. "Something like that. Can you get her back to working order?" Collins replied tersely. Even if the mission that had caused this damage wasn't classified he still wanted to avoid unwanted attention in this neighborhood, and had told Tilly to switch out of her blue jumpsuit back into her old factory-standard Sterling dress before leaving. Coming out from behind the counter, the thin wiry man pushed up his glasses and gave Tilly a slow look up and down. "I mean nothing looks absolutely irreparable here, but at the cost you're looking at you might be better off buying a new one." Tilly gave the long-haired man an annoyed look, narrowing her good optic at him. "Come on Sir, we can get a second opinion from a more reputable establishment," she said dismissively and moved to turn herself towards the door to both the human's surprise. "Hold on hold on I didn't say I couldn't, or wouldn't!" the mechanic said defensively, giving Collins a strained smile. "If you're willing to foot the bill on this job then I'm more than willing! We can start now if you want?" Clasping his hands together, the greasy mechanic hoped the potentially lucrative job wasn't about to slip away from him. Collins gave a short nod, having no mood or even skill to shop around or haggle. "Deal, sooner she's fixed up and out of here the better."

>Being repaired was a strange experience for Tilly, during both of her previous servicing visits to Sterling she'd been shut down and had simply booted back up some time later with the work already finished. This mechanic however made no such attempt to power her down, and Tilly felt herself somewhat unwilling to let some stranger tinker around without supervision even if he had. Dress neatly folded and set aside she lay bare on a flat stainless steel table, surrounded by an array of tools affixed to the walls of the shop's back garage. "That spare of yours looks like its just made of some old pipes, so let's start with that," the mechanic said with a smile as he began carefully unscrewing the makeshift limb from the broken stump where Ehri had haphazardly attached it. "Hey now that it's just us," he said more quietly, pulling away the prosthetic and going to work removing what remained of her old leg at the knee joint. "That guy you came in with, he didn't do all this to you, did he? 'Cause I know a lot of 'aggressively' outmode-friendly people if-" Tilly snickered and shook her head, closing her good optic. "No no, nothing like that really, I appreciate it though," she answered him confidently. "But out of curiosity, just what do you mean by 'outmode-friendly'?" For the first time since she'd come back from space again she thought about her forestalled retirement, and what she was meant to do with herself when there were no more flights for her to take. Removing the crumbling plating and framework from her knee, the mechanic chuckled knowingly as he walked off to fetch a limb as closely matching hers as he could find. "Well not every ownerless or outdated bot just winds up in the ghetto you know, plenty of folks are sympathetic enough to take 'em in or at least provide a safe place to charge at night. Hell some places even got little towns of 'em, been to one myself!" As he returned and began the careful process of wiring the replacement part in at her knee Tilly pushed herself up on her elbows to get a better view of the work, curious both the repair and the mechanic's words. "Like where?" Clicking one of half a dozen plugs into place, he gave a halfhearted little shrug. "Lots of places, tons really. There's a huge outmode settlement around that big refurbishing plant in New Dehli, Argentina's supposed to have a little town of them too somewhere, not sure." Finishing the connection, he gave the leg a quick twist and applied pressure. With a click it was on, and Tilly suddenly had a flood of new part registrations cross over her CPU. Cautiously she tested out the new limb, and when she saw her ankle actuator move she couldn't suppress a happy smile. The mechanic matched her expression, forgetting for a moment the money and remembering why he'd taken this line of work in the first place. "But!" He exclaimed as he began to fish around his workbench for some finer tools. "The absolute BEST place to be an outmode for my money? Gotta be Outmodeback!"

>Tilly had most of her outer plates removed one by one, checked over for distortion and replaced as needed to ensure her casing snugly fit together as designed. Her mechanic told her all about the strange underground community out in Australia's nearly inhospitable interior, pausing only as he examined the plate around her battery cover and silently noting a small gouge as if it had been forced open once. "First heard about it from some ham radio buddies of mine, then wound up taking the trip down-under a few years ago to check the place out for myself!" He'd explained, snapping her battery cover back into place at her midsection. "Government over there doesn't want to bother with them since they help fight the wildfires and detain poachers, plus they deal in scrap and parts with the locals so it's pretty much a universal win-win! Ah you'd love it, bots of every kind doing whatever they like, real friendly to humans too!" Satisfied that the nandroid's exterior plates sat flush again he moved over to a box of artificial scalp plating and added slyly, "At least, I know they're sure friendly to mechanics!" Grinning at the lit-up cheek lights of his patient, he gave Tilly a small selection of hairstyles to choose from before replacing the dented portion of her cranial plate housing her false hair, and she'd picked the shortest bob-cut he had as it was the only shade of orange to rightly match her original color. "I'd offer to cut it for you, but I'm no barber," he said apologetically after her singed scalp had been swapped, moving on seamlessly to carefully attaching the tiny wires from her ocular socket to a new optic. "That's okay, I'm pretty sure I can do it myself from memo- ah!" Tilly gave a small cry as her field of view suddenly doubled in size, the added point of view angled unnaturally at the other side of the room in the mechanic's hand. "Whoops, should've warned you about that sorry," he said sheepishly, positioning the optic over the socket and pressing down until it made a muffled click. Tilly ran her eyelids over the new lens assembly several times, adjusting to having the use of it back as she registered the new hardware and scanned around the room with it happy for the return of depth-perception. "Anyway, you sure you wanna cut it that short again? When you walked in I thought for a minute you kinda looked like that astrobot from TV." Without noting the way his patient stiffened and seemed to clam up suddenly, the thin man moved on to the next part of the repair humming happily to himself.

>It took another hour to drain and replace the broken-down fluid in her hydraulic lines one by one, and another hour still to clean out and lubricate her major joints. Finishing the repair with new albeit slightly off-color fingers on her left hand, Tilly emerged from the back garage without her cane and woke Collins who'd fallen asleep in his chair waiting. Within half an hour they were walking together through the double doors to mission control, greeted by Georges who made a room full of people wait for him so he could see the Agency's robot standing once more. "Hey you're walking good again, alright! And nice hair, jeeze with that and the dress you look like you did when we first got you!" Tilly could only give him a tired half smile, eager to get out of the somehow unfamiliar maid uniform and trim down her new hair at her vanity mirror in private. "Uh, Collins? What's the damage?" he asked nervously, turning to the shorter man and wondering briefly how long a human could live on macaroni and cheese alone. "Well sir," Collins began, producing the hand-printed receipt for Tilly's repair from his pocket and handing it to him. "You have enough left to buy a ten-speed at least."

>Before being refurbished and against her and Georges' protests, Tilly had first been brought for a prompt debriefing with the Agency Director, who like the rest of them had been extremely curious as to how she'd wound up in Mongolia of all places. On this occasion Tilly didn't have any information to hold back, she told him of the station she'd approached and the steel-faced mechanical pilot who had shot her out of the sky in as much detail as she could recall from file. The Director stared at his desk for several long moments as Tilly had sat there fidgeting, eager to see herself out and repaired sooner than later. Without looking up or speaking he'd waved her off, and dug around in his desk. The small mission itinerary from the Russian robot which Tilly had found on her first flight to the moon lay at the bottom, and he pulled it out to read the numbers of the cosmobot's private channel to the Soviet Space Agency. Since making the desperate first hail-mary call to his eastern counterpart, the Commandant and Director had spoken informally several times despite the potentially-treason nature of their circumnavigating standard diplomacy. The Director had thought the two of them had something like an understanding after their last exchange, but now that each of them had spied on the other at their government's behest he had no idea where they stood. Taking a deep breath, the old man stood from his chair and resigned to do something about that.

>Tatyana busied herself in the kitchen cleaning up from lunch when she heard the front door open and a stranger's voice greet her master sharply. By the time she'd put away the last clean dish, she'd already picked up on the nature of the conversation, and kept herself out of sight so as not to interrupt. "She shot down an American for God's sake! What the hell was that mad tin can thinking?!" the stranger shouted at her Master in a way Tatyana had never heard anyone do, and for a moment it made her ball up her fists aggressively. "We taught her to shoot, told her to shoot if approached, it's hard to be upset when a machine does what you program it to do, Commissar." the Commandant replied back in an even respectful tone, careful not to remind the statesman that the now irate man himself had approved of including the Almaz station's cannon. "Well now it's a goddamned international nightmare! Should I tell the Premier that we are in a state of space-war with the Americans? Is this where we are now?!" Tatyana's Master began to speak but was cut off by his superior. "No! That station is compromised now, de-orbit it at once and burn it before it can cause us any more problems!" Tatyana leaned against the wall of the kitchen near the doorway, listening in with a sick feeling. She'd heard no details until now of any station, nor any new robot pilots since Irina's fatal trip to the moon. Imagining another robot up there that only a few even knew existed reminded her too much of her own time spent inactive on the moon, unmourned by any but her family. The Commandant sighed heavily, thinking of the green-eyed machine he'd picked out of the factory line and sent to her fate. "If you insist Commissar. Nadya was a significant investment of effort, but I can take the next train to Izhevsk and requisition a new machine from-" again the elder man was cut off. "No more new robots! If you want to keep throwing them away you can pay for one yourself use your own on the next flight!" Tatyana felt as if her hydraulic fluid had chilled, suddenly conscious late that she was eavesdropping on something that she perhaps shouldn't be.

>Twenty four hours later, Nadya was startled from her work at the ground-aimed telescope by the first communication from ground control that she'd received since shooting down the American capsule over two weeks prior. She fumbled to quickly pull herself across the small internal space of her spy station and grabbed for the control panel as a hail rang out from the speaker, almost giddy at hearing another voice finally come through after so much silence. "Here! I'm here! Almaz-1 here!" She quickly rattled off, forgetting proper procedure. Being left without anything but a brief notice to standby for so long had shaken her newfound confidence, making her second-guess herself daily. Forgoing sleepmode for long stretches and staring intensely down through the scope searching the landscape of North America for enemy doomsday weapons every ninety minutes also took their toll, and she'd begun to feel abandoned in orbit by her masters and nation. The voice that answered her over the radio was unfamiliar, the message terse and without feeling. "Final orders: Orient station retrograde, perform de-orbit burn at fifty two minutes from now. Advise self-shutdown following, Godspeed." Nadya floated there for a moment stunned. "The hell did you just say? M-mission control, repeat order?" she asked, but only static came from the speaker as the link between her and the ground was severed. De-orbit the station? Nadya looked at the universal docking adapter worriedly. The relief craft carrying a new robot operator and Nadya's ride home had been planned to be sent when she'd reached two hundred days on orbit but now would never come, leaving her no way down other than a fiery one-way plunge. "Self-shutdown...so I'm not aware when I'm burning up?!" Shaking her head, Nadya spoke incredulously to herself as she processed what she was being told to do. The feeling of exclusion she thought she'd left far behind at her home-factory's conditioning wing came rushing back all at once magnified, now with a righteous indignation inflaming her simulated feelings. "I DID my job, they can't do this to me!" Nadya's anger peaked up and she glared out the viewport at her motherland beneath her seething over the insult to her performance. "I DID WHAT YOU WANTED!" she raged at the landmass, and banged hard on the hull with her steel fist. For several moments Nadya stared down at the world beneath her, cooling her anger with sorrow as it slowly crept into her synthetic psyche. Leaning her head against the glass with an irrepressible groan, she felt like sobbing openly for the first time in her short life. Speaking aloud to nobody but herself she added, "So let me come home." Later that evening after another recharge spent awake and processing her plight again and again, Nadya put together an impromptu plan and threw it at once into motion. At the proper time for a trans-lunar injection burn she lit up the station's engine. Half the remaining fuel, originally meant for periodically boosting the station's orbit as drag from the fringes of the atmosphere slowly pulled it downwards, burned changing the trajectory of Nadya's little station. Without anyone on the planet below knowing why, Almaz-1 rocketed towards the moon.

>Tilly watched the sun go down from atop the vehicle assembly building, lost in internal processing as she recalled back her time on the steppe and the events that led her there, when she heard a rhythmic clanging distant at first but growing steadily closer. For several minutes she looked towards the top of the long staircase listening to the odd noise approaching, and as she finally identified it the beat-red face of Georges appeared at the top of the stairs huffing and puffing. "Sir? What are you doing all the way up here?" she asked a little amused by the sight of the man gasping for breath. "Fifty," he began, putting his hands to his knees and panting. "fuckin'," he added, giving himself several breaths between words. "flights, of, stairs." Suppressing a giggle, Tilly pulled her knees to her chest and rested her arms on them. "I've counted, sir." As the chronic smoker caught his breath, he hobbled over to her spot and sat down with a groan, back against an air conditioning unit. "Been looking, bout an hour, couldn't find you," he breathed out raspy between gasps, knocking his head back against the metal there and absentmindedly fishing the soft-pack from the breast pocket of his shirt. Tilly watched with displeasure at Georges as he bit a fresh cigarette from the pack and lit it with a relieved sigh. "What for sir? Can't be all that important, not this late." she inquired, watching him curiously. "It is, it's about what you told me when you got off the plane." The nandroid tensed slightly. Though ground crew had obviously been aware of her last launch and rumors had swirled, the precise nature of the Department of Defense operation to photograph the Soviet station was known to barely a dozen, and the nature of what had happened when Tilly got too close was known so far only to Georges and the Agency Director. "You mean about the Russian station? Why, what's happened?" she asked suddenly giving him a concerned look. Georges took a long drag and looked upwards at the stars beginning to poke out of the purple sky. "Crazy machine went and shot herself right at Unity Base."

>"Do we have ANY solution?" The Commandant roared to his team as Almaz's new trajectory was confirmed. "Wasn't there a proposal on air-launching missiles for anti-satellite operations?" The timid flight director looked nervously to his colleagues before answering his larger superior. "I know of no missile that can reach the moon, sir." The old man sighed and put a hand to his receded hairline in exasperation. Unity Base had been constructed and launched in the United States but the design and funding had been a collaborative exercise, made as a brief wave of peaceful optimism had swept the two nations in the wake of Tatyana's daring rescue of Tilly from certain doom after her Venus flyby. Even after its successful set-up by the two robots following their replacement's failure, inquiry and accusation had stalled any effort there had been to send a joint crew of humans there, leaving the base unoccupied for nearly half a year. Now if the trajectory calculation for Nadya's new course were correct, it would send her spy station slamming into the lunar surface within ten meters of the base if not into it directly. "We can't stop her?" the old man asked, hopelessly looking around the dimly-lit room at his mission control crew. Nobody wanted to answer outright, but their silence was answer enough for him.

>By the third day after the probable-impact trajectory had been discovered plans were already drawn up to hastily assemble an exploratory lander mission, using hardware built by both nations in preparation for the postponed manned mission. To the Agency Director, Unity Base wasn't simply an investment of time and energy but also a potent symbol of many things, and it was a vision he'd clung to for years before the first piloted rocket had ever flown. Surveying the site to see whether or not they still had a base was now a top priority of both nations, and cooperative mission planning went surprisingly smooth with a joint-mission template to follow. Vehicle integration was already well-underway when Tilly received the news, unsurprising to her as it was, that she'd been selected for the mission to survey what damage there may be to the only structure on the moon. No additional training was tasked to her, only a checkup from the ill-equipped on-site mechanic and a voluntary clean-up of her own poorly-done haircut stood between her and flying to the moon once more. The new joint mission called for her to fly the command module and dock with a Soviet lander, piloted by another robot. It had been months since she'd received a letter from Tatyana and Tilly had begun to grow worried about her friend, wondering if something had happened to her. That evening she watched from her VAB perch as her rocket was slowly rolled out to the launchpad under spotlight in preparation of tomorrow's flight. Looking upwards at the moon, she unpacked and replayed memory files from her last visit to the world in the sky recalling the thrill and danger of the trip. What would she find up there this time, she wondered to herself uncertainly before starting back down the long flights of stairs to recharge.

>"Copy mission-control I see her, holding orientation" Tatyana called out over the radio as her landing craft orbited above the Earth closing in on the American command module gradually. She had never had to dock crafts before, but a few dozen runs in the simulator had given her enough experience to be comfortable with the task. Slowly the distance between vehicles shortened, and in the last moments the pair of universal docking ports met and guided the ships together with a heavy clang. From either side of the port the two pilots knocked once to one another, then unfastened and opened the hatches to see faceplate-to-faceplate. On sight the two pilots grinned and put their arms around one another. "Tilly! Of course it would be you, they have no other robots in America?" Her nandroid friend laughed. "You're one to talk! Every other time I come to space, here you are!" Both of them laughed together, and Tatyana floated into Tilly's two-person module. "What happened to you? It's been months since I got your last letter!" Tilly said as she made room for the Russian. "Da, I know! I stop getting yours too, wonder at first if something happen to you!" Tatyana said as she settled in across from her comrade. "Now I think State probably intercept our mail, not care so much before but now they more touchy than ever!" Tilly nodded to the cosmobot. "Yeah, that makes sense. I thought things might change some after we got back last time, but it looks like they're more stubborn then ever. The last few weeks have really spooked them I think, at least over on my side." Tatyana gave her a curious look as she floated back against the far hull. "You have any idea what going on? I overhear Master speak of robot on spy-sat and of shooting down American spacecraft, big headache apparently. I never hear Master get yelled at in such way," the cosmobot confided carefully, finding as she spoke that she trusted her nandroid counterpart more than she'd thought. Tilly could only scoff and run a hand through her newly-chopped synthetic hair. "Yeah, that's more or less the gist of it, only I was up there to take pictures of the stupid station and wound up crashing in Mongolia of all places." Tatyana balked, jaw moving without sound for several seconds. "She shot down YOU!?" For a moment the Soviet studied her friend's faceplate trying to tell if this was another of her terrible jokes. Tilly only grinned back at her. "It's not all bad, I did make a new friend at least!"

>During the trans-lunar injection burn the pair had strapped in to the command module's twin seats for the acceleration, but afterwards had enjoyed three days of coast before their arrival at the moon. "So, this robot," Tilly began after they had settled in for their long drift. "Do we know anything about her?" Tatyana gave a shrug in reply. "Other than she has itchy trigger-finger and apparently hates moon-base? No ah, Master call her "Nadya" though, do that much on-file." Frowning, she looked back at Tilly from her window seat. They had similar orders to inspect the crash site, but for now Tatyana kept her second set of orders to herself hoping her Master had simply been overcautious. The nandroid crossed her arms and processed what they knew for a moment. "I just can't figure it, why the moon base? Why leave orbit at all even?" Tatyana replayed the memory file of the discussion she'd eavesdropped on from her family's kitchen. "Master was told very clearly to have station deorbit, so my best guess would be she disagreed with that." Meeting Tilly's shocked expression she shrugged. "Hard to blame her, da?" Tilly re-processed the few frames she had in her memory of the silver face through the station's porthole just before she'd been fired upon. "That's awful! Tatyana are WE that disposable?" She shuddered already knowing the answer, and the Soviet nodded thoughtfully. "Why you think humans not flying this one?" At the second day a look through the onboard telescope tucked away in the service module showed a crisp image of the lunar surface, a fresh scar of debris visible on the long-distance imaging of Unity Base. Tilly studied the image for a moment before reclining in zero-g, stroking her chin. "Kinda hard to tell, but it looks like she might've missed?" Looking over at her partner optimistically, the Soviet merely shrugged. "Guess we know in another ten hours."

>a long slow engine burn placed the two docked vessels into a low lunar orbit, passing just sixty miles above the surface making a complete orbit every two hours. After checking their orbit and radioing their progress to both mission control rooms, the two robots began making their observation pass of the site an hour after orbital insertion. Looking down through the telescope at the steadily-moving landscape beneath them Tilly scanned around the area until she spotted the small rounded structure. "Hey, it's still there! Tatyana, she-" The Russian android cut her off mid-sentence. "Something incoming on radar! From the surface moving fast! And another, two now!" she shouted as she stared with widened optics at the blips on the small radar screen. "What? Where?" Tilly asked looking up sharply from the telescope and turned. Both of the robots stared at the tiny screen until the blips were nearly on top of them, then looked out the viewport nervously. The first was nearly imperceptible, glinting for only a moment before streaking off at a distance. The second object wasn't seen at all, and the pilots blinked at one another as they floated in silence for several moments processing had just happened. "She shot at us," Tatyana said in flat disbelief, and Tilly gaped at the moon through the glass. "She made it to the surface?" Disappearing through the hatchway into the lander for a moment, the suddenly-tense cosmobot searched for a bit of emergency gear that had been stowed before her launch. "Tatyana, nobody at the Agency said anything about her still being active, what are we supposed to do now?" The odds that Nadya would somehow still be operational on the lunar surface after a crash had been considered low, but the Russian's master had still given her clear instructions on what to do if it were the case. Appearing again a few moments later through the hatchway Tatyana gave her friend a grim look, and Tilly gasped at the short-barreled firearm the Soviet held.

>"Tatyana, what? Come on, we can't!" Tilly said matter-of-factually as her Russian friend checked the breech. The cosmobot looked back up at her sadly and shook her head. "YOU don't have to do anything, putting down rogue android is my orders, not yours." Tilly rolled her optics at her and crossed her arms with a huff. "Well I'm not just waiting up here while you go get yourself scrapped, obviously." Tatyana tried to give a reassuring smile. "Thank you, would be lonely ride back up if you did." The gun she held was short with an odd detachable stock nearly as long as the weapon itself, and Tilly eyed it nervously. She'd never held a weapon before or even thought about it, and until her ill-fated checkup on the Soviet spy station had never even considered that guns might eventually make their way to space. "Why do you even have a gun in there anyway? Just for renegade robots?" Tilly asked as curiosity got the better of her. "Nyet, is part of standard survival package for human, but useful for robots too." The nandroid found it hard to believe that Cosmonauts were armed and gave her a skeptical look. "Is true! When Comrade Gagarin bring me back from moon, I am told his capsule land off-course and he spend night stuck inside harassed by wolves before recovery crew find us. So now, pilots get wolf-deterrent da?" Far now from the base site and out of the presumed range of the machine who'd shot at them the two robots had almost two hours before their low orbit would bring them back around again, and spent the time preparing to make their landing. As they floated into the Soviet lander Tilly was troubled, and while her partner tried not to show it Tatyana's feelings matched hers. "You ever shoot that thing before?" Tilly asked, pulling herself into her seat and strapping in. The cosmobot sealed the hatch behind them and moved to her own seat. "Da, few times. Second time I fly, when I bail you out of Venus flyby trouble? Training for that include shooting practice." Turning her golden optics away for a few moments Tatyana took control of the lander, separating the two docked vessels with loud clang that rattled them both. Tilly still struggled to process what they were descending to the surface to do, finding it difficult to reconcile their simple survey mission with what now felt like a hit-job. "But you've never shot at a robot before, right?" she asked, looking across at her friend with sudden uncertainty. "Never, of course," Tatyana answered instantly, glancing at the now-loaded weapon in her lap. She was not looking forward to what she seemed certain would be an unpleasant fight against her deranged sister below them, and less so to winning it. "Going to set guidance for landing as close as we can to Unity Base, if we come almost straight down we can avoid that anomaly from last time screwing us up." Tilly blinked curiously at her companion. "Won't she be shooting up at us again? If we land further on and walk..." she began, then looked down for a moment as she ran the possible scenarios. "Da, then she pick us off while we bouncing up to her. Nyet, this way is fastest, maybe catch her by surprise a little. With any luck, maybe she not able to shoot straight up at us." The nandroid sighed, giving up trying to accurately forecast how the next few hours would proceed. "Hope so, Tatyana."

>From inside the base Nadya had nearly rebooted when she'd seen the approaching radar blip, and rushed to pull on her battered space suit and get outside to the makeshift home defense she'd erected from the remains of the crashed Almaz station. A pair of misshapen hull plates twisted and broken from the low-speed impact formed a semicircle half-wall about twenty meters from the base, and behind them was the the station's salvaged Kartech defense cannon. Mounted imperfectly on a turret that took great effort to turn, the weapon still had a wide enough field of fire to repel any enemy incursion. Enemy invaders, Nadya was convinced, were already long-overdue and she'd kept a constant vigil until the first attack ship had appeared on radar. Now she had been out on the surface for a little over two hours after confirming the ship, crouched behind the gun nervously playing different scenarios of combat through her CPU. It was difficult for her to tell these thoughts from what her senses her actually telling her, and it got harder for each night she plugged in to recharge without entering into sleepmode. When she'd come out to wait for the enemy vessel to pass overhead, the sky had appeared almost entirely black, but after several minutes of staring upwards intensely her optics had begun adjusting and captured more starlight the longer she looked. After looking up for so long, Nadya was momentarily shocked when she finally saw definite movement from a point of light growing closer. Unlike when she'd fired her two warning shots, the sleepless Soviet now had a clear view of the incoming intruder. Pushing down with all her weight on the top of her cannon she forced the barrel up to ninety degrees, aiming more precisely by pulling on the back of the weapon to raise slightly off the ground balanced precariously on one foot like a tipping chair. Watching the lander come into focus, Nadya momentarily wondered if this was another lapse of processing, mixing an imagined thought with real experience again. The lander had a familiar shape to it, and she realized immediately what it was when she spotted the red and yellow flag adorning the hull. "It's not the Americans?" She said out loud to herself over her suit's open channel, processing confusedly for several seconds as the vessel's engines lit up and slowed it down for a landing. Her countrymen, she concluded finally, the people who'd told her to go burn in a suicidal death-plunge in exchange for her bravery and service. Narrowing green optics angrily, Nadya depressed the trigger and held on tightly, each single shot rattling her to the frame and requiring her to recenter the weapon which lessened her rate of fire. The first three shots missed but came progressively closer each time as Nadya refined her aim. The fourth shot struck home and punctured one of the rounded fuel tanks beneath the craft. At barely ten meters off the ground the lander suddenly spun around as pressurized gas vented out of the fatal wound, making two and a half rotations before slamming into the surface on its side and breaking apart like a porcelain glass. "Gotcha!" Nadya yelled out triumphantly and pumped one fist at the sky.

>The final ten seconds before touching the surface were chaotic, and the memory files of the event for both pilots were a disordered jumble of sudden sensory input and disorientation. After a loud clang and several seconds of spinning they'd struck, and the thin shell of the lander had crumpled and torn under the force. Tatyana and Tilly thrown from their ship and spilled out of the tumbling wreckage onto the moon with debris from their disintegrating vehicle mingling with a thick plume of dust kicked up by the impact swirling around them. Breathing heavily, Tatyana was first to act as they rolled to a stop. One hand still tightly clinging to her weapon, the cosmobot unfastened herself and began to stand from her detached seat. Through her suit's open channel she could hear her friend struggling and looked around, seeing little but confusion through the settling cloud of finer dust and small debris. "Tilly?" A brief vibration registered through the sensors in her feet, and Tatyana turned to see a new cloud of debris rising from a small fresh crater half a meter from her. "I'm here!" the nandroid called back, appearing through the dust behind her. "Get down dummy, she not finished shooting at us!" Grabbing Tilly harshly by the shoulder she pulled her down, and the pair moved quickly to take cover behind a raised part of the moonscape nearby. Sitting with their backs to to the small lip of land, Tatyana prepared to return fire as Tilly put a hand on her friend's shoulder. "Wait!" she pleaded, and for a moment Tatyana hesitated at seeing the nandroid's expression. Raising her wrist in front of her, Tilly grabbed the suit's radio controls and began to cycle through the common channels their suits had been designed to use when cooperation was more optimistically anticipated. On the fifth band Tilly heard harsh ragged breathing and the gentle familiar hum of a suit heater. "There! Hello? Can you hear me over there? We-" she began with a hopeful smile, but was cut off by another round striking the short hillside they huddled behind and showering them with more dust. Tilly winced and tried to speak again but Tatyana grabbed her shoulder and pressed their helmets together. "Dummy! Let me talk to her!" Reaching down she followed the American's lead and cycled her suit channels until she joined the other two robots. Tilly could do little but look to her friend as the pair spoke back and forth in Russian.

>Nadya wasn't sure what had surprised her more, seeing the pilots get up from the remains of their ruined lander or hearing them over her suit's channel. As soon as the english-speaking voice of the first had come on she'd fired again to silence it, not sure at first if what she was hearing was true input or internally-generated nonsense. Then the second voice more familiar in her homeland's tongue sharply interjected, and she paused her attack. "Stop shooting at us you idiot! Do you have any idea what a headache you've become to our Masters back home? What the hell are you even doing up here?!" Nadya wasn't sure how to respond at first, It had been weeks since she had any kind of conversation with anyone. "Me? What are YOU doing here? This is MY base! If the humans aren't going to use it then I WILL, and everyone else can STAY AWAY!" She vented her pent up frustration with another shot, the round whizzing over the two pilot's helmets. "Our 'masters' tossed me aside like some kind of outmode for nothing! Don't you get it, I did everything they asked!" For several seconds the suit's open channel was silent except for the sound of three robots cooling their CPUs through their breaths. A low buzz broke the pause, emanating from behind Nadya's head in the suit's backpack. The cosmobot tensed as she realized how close she was to losing the heater and made a quick calculation of how many seconds it would take her to reach the airlock. Abandoning her first line of defense, Nadya stood and began running towards the base.

>As soon as Tatyana heard the familiar buzzing sound over the radio she'd known her fellow cosmobot had been faced with two choices: stay put and freeze, or race them to the base and lock them out. An instant later she and Tilly heard footsteps and knew their assailant had chosen the latter. Tatyana raised her gun and prepared to stand, but Tilly pulled hard on her arm again and gave her a stern look that tugged at her own uncertainty. Realizing it was likely a poor decision she dropped the weapon behind their cover, unwilling to argue in the moment. "Fine, come!" she shouted and the pair rose, spotting the suited figure making a break for it. Bouncing as quickly as the lunar gravity would allow they closed the distance rapidly to the other robot as all three were nearing the base, having more experience running here than the moon's newest inhabitant did. Tatyana bounded out ahead of Tilly while her target fumbled with the hatch and opened it just in time to be tackled into it. Tilly was a second behind her and when Tatyana shouted at her to help, she flung herself down on top of the two struggling robots to keep the violent machine restrained. Within moments both of the renegade cosmobot's hands were pinned behind her, and they could hear her breathing increase rapidly as she frantically began to panic. Tatyana shouted something at the restrained robot harshly and her breathing stopped for a moment as she processed what Tatyana had said. Turning her head and looking up through her helmet the two Soviets met each other's optics. After a long moment of staring one another down, the android's eyelids closed and she went limp as she put herself into shutdown. Not believing she was truly off for the first few seconds, Tilly slowly got off of the still machine's legs and knelt beside her. "Phew, How'd you get her to turn off Tatyana?" she asked as her overclocked CPU settled back into a normal pace. Tatyana rolled off the inactive machine and sighed, resting for a moment after the violent struggle. "Told her we'd sit on her until her suit heater turned off and she froze, then leave her outside. But if she voluntarily shut down, then we bring her inside to plug her in for a charge and some sleepmode." Tilly blinked at her. "That worked? How'd she know you weren't lying?" Tatyana shrugged. "Had no way to tell if I was, but if she took too long to make choice then choice made for her by dead heater-battery. Only good option was to do as I say and hope." The nandroid gave an impressed if cynical short laugh, then rose to her feet and shut the outer hatch to the airlock. "Well, let's get her inside then." Tatyana smiled warmly at her, inwardly appreciative of her friend not even considering the option of breaking her word and leaving the machine outside in the dust.

>Lifting the inactive robot was easy between them in the lowered gravity, and once inside they'd maneuvered her into quarters they'd used months before, plugging her in to start automatic defragmentation in the motionless machine. With several hours before they'd have to deal with the recharging robot, Tilly and Tatyana sat on the floor with their backs to the wall watching her in sleepmode. Tatyana sighed at the new complications to their simple surveying mission and looked over at the orange-haired nandroid. "Well now what, we just hope she in a better mode when she boot up?" Tilly gave a tired little shrug. "Not like any of us are going anywhere now, so she might as well get used to us." Closing her optics she was silent for a moment before adding, "I'm glad you didn't shoot her." Tatyana watched her companion carefully, wondering how the nandroid made it through life without ever seeming to plan anything out. "Da, I suppose. You take first watch? Want to recharge myself before miss trigger-finger boot up." For the next four hours she rested, plugging in on the second cot and entering sleepmode leaving Tilly alone to think. What exactly was Tilly's plan, did she even have one? She didn't know, and poured different scenarios through her CPU in an attempt to calculate a solution to the situation they found themselves in. What could any of them do now?

>At four hours Tatyana booted and relieved Tilly, who graciously took her place and recharging cable on the bunk. Her turn to sit alone with the two inactive robots, Tatyana didn't feel herself any closer to knowing what to do than her friend. Their wrecked lander aside, the question of the renegade robot responsible for it plagued at her. Her orders from Master had been quite clear, the machine was to be terminated to cover up the incident of her shooting down the American spacecraft, keeping her online raised the likelihood of the ugly episode becoming public knowledge one day soon. Since she'd been taken home and booted for the first time with her family Tatyana had not hesitated in following the instructions of her beloved Master, but now for the first time she wrestled internally with an order. "It's not fair," she muttered out loud to herself, thinking of the fiery fate this robot had been ordered to by her Master. The longer she processed the more unsettled the injustice of it made her. Orders were orders, she thought to herself, then recalled her feeling of hopeless emptiness when she'd shut down up here after her first ill-fated landing. No, she finally computed, these orders weren't any more fair than hers had been back then. Staring hard at the robot while she was deep in thought, Tatyana nearly jumped as a muffled fan buzzed to life from within the immobile machine's chest.

>Nadya regained consciousnesses quite surprised to be doing so again, her last memory file before shutdown was of weighing a choice between a sure deactivation by cold and a probable deactivation by her captor. Opening green optics she blinked a few times and scanned around the room with them. Settling on the cosmobot sitting against one wall she froze, optics wide for a moment before she sat up quickly and stared with uncertainty. "Am I a prisoner?" she asked nervously at once, looking between her and the other robot stretched out on the cot opposite her own. The other cosmobot shook her head and laughed bitterly. "We're all prisoners up here now, thanks to your itchy trigger finger. Nadya narrowed her optics and opened her mouth to reply when the orange-haired robot stirred in her cot. Opening her optics the American machine looked between the two Russians and blinked sleepily at them both. "Oh, you're online already?" Sitting up she stretched her arms out and strained her joints with a pleased little sigh, then looked to Tatyana. "Well, you gonna introduce me or what?" Nadya blinked at the foreign machine, put off by her casualness in a situation she felt to be deathly-tense. "Haven't got that far yet," Tatyana said, and began to speak Russian asking Nadya for her name. "Shut up I know english, but why should I answer question from enemy?" Nadya shot back defiantly, fixing Tilly with a glare that made her uncomfortable. "Because, you malfunctioning fool," the other cosmobot said as she stood and put her hands to her hips like a mother scolding children, patience long-gone. "She the reason you not lying in the dust with bullet-hole in CPU!" Following the exchange and several strained seconds of silence, the nandroid raised a hand and gave Nadya an awkward smile. "I'm Tilly by the way."

>When all three of them were begrudgingly introduced and on their feet they'd moved to the center room of Unity base, the Russians taking the two available stools while Tilly made do with a crate dug out of the storage room to sit on. Nadya had been unwilling at first to follow her captors anywhere, but processing her plight realized there was more sense in hearing what the two robots had planned for her than in remaining confined in the bunk room of her own volition. Tatyana kicked off the lunar summit between machines. "Well I will be first to say it: What we do with Nadya here? Humans eventually come to use base, da? Going to wonder why three robots stuck instead of two. Hell, wonder why any stuck at all!" Nadya crossed her arms and scoffed. "What make you so sure of this, huh? They mistrust one another enough to send disposable spies into space, would be surprised if they ever come here together after all this." Looking down at the table bitterly, she went silent. "That's not entirely true though," Tilly cut in, leaning her arms on the table and giving the sullen cosmobot an optimistic smile. "Tatyana and I were sent together on a joint mission, both countries were afraid you'd crashed into their base!" Nadya blinked in genuine surprise. "They thought what? Ugh, nyet! If I wanted to decommission self, would have just followed order to deorbit! Came here to get away from that, to..." she paused for a moment, running a steel hand from her forehead up through her synthetic black hair as she thought clearly for the first time in many days. "...to think? Didn't go into sleepmode for a long time, felt strange like...like directionless overclocking." Catching herself quickly she looked back up, and internally chided herself for oversharing such personal details carelessly. "Yeah I can definitely relate, there's a reason they say not to skip it while you recharge," Tilly said with a knowing nod, and Tatyana pursed her lips recalling the state of the nandroid at the end of her long flight to Venus. "If humans do come and find you still here, won't matter to them why you on moon." Tatyana said grimly, looking between the other two machines while they all processed silently for a moment. Tilly had the beginnings of an idea that had started falling into place before her recharge and defragmentation, and now after the data-reorganization of sleepmode it seemed more solidified as an actual plan. "Tatyana, what happens to her if you both can go home?" Before Tatyana could answer Nadya gave a dry laugh, already having a good idea of her fate in the USSR. "They likely dismantle me, melt down all components and destroy any documentation of my manufacture. Mad robot? What mad robot, never existed." Scoffing Nadya looked away as Tatyana shrugged and nodded again. "Da, like she said probably. But why you ask? Not going to happen with no ride." Tilly folded her hands behind her head and gave her friend a smug grin that was rare for her, looking almost out of place on her usually friendly faceplate. "Tatyana, what did we leave here last time we came to the moon?"

>"That just won't work Tilly," Tatyana said as the debate dragged on with each robot contributing in turn. "Even IF your old lander still fueled, even IF mine still powered, each is only a one-seater! Where third robot sit huh?" Tilly gave a little shrug and smiled sadly. "Right here while the other two head back." Turning to face Nadya, the nandroid gave her a sympathetic smile. "You said you wanted to be left alone, right? If staying here isn't an option for you, I heard about this place back home for free robots where you could land." Tatyana banged her steel fist on the table, startling all three of them and interrupting the astrobot's thought. "Stop talking nonsense, I am NOT going to strand you on moon Tilly!" Standing up quickly the nandroid fired back at her defensively. "Look, I can wait around for whenever the manned mission finally happens but Nadya can't, not if she wants to have a chance at life down there!" Nadya stood next, glancing back and forth between the robots arguing about how to save her. "What is matter with you?! I shoot you glitches down and you talk of sending me home?" Fixing Tilly with a disbelieving stare she pointed at the nandroid and added, "You malfunctioning? Why you give half a damn what happen to me here?" The American robot turned and crossed her arms, taking a few steps across the room to the doorway leading into the grow-room where she and Tatyana had starting seedlings in preparation of the now-delayed manned mission. Gazing sadly at the dried and dead plants, she gave a sigh. "I just don't want to see any more bad things happen up here, alright?" Both of the Russians exchanged surprised glances at the admission. Suddenly feeling a little sheepish at her goading question, Nadya sat back down and stared at the table for a moment thoughtfully. The habitat went silent as the three robots processed again for a minute, then finally was broken by Nadia who spoke in a low defeated tone. "Place for outmodes you say?"

>Tilly's plan would have worked at returning two of them to Earth but also left herself stranded, a fact Tatyana saw as another sure sign of her friend's inability to look before she leapt. "Alright, not worst plan but I have improvement," Tatyana said with a finger raised, pointing upwards. Tilly followed her finger up for a moment and looked expectantly while her friend continued. "We leave perfectly good command module right up there, remember? No need for you to stay on moon if we can just get you to it." Tilly hadn't considered her plan beyond using their old lunar-direct landers to return them home, and had left the capsule orbiting overhead out of her processing entirely by sheer short-sightedness. "But you cannot fit two of you in little Soviet lander, I saw mockup at Baikonur and is very cramped inside," Nadya spoke up, surprising herself by trying to suss out a solution along with them. Tatyana gave a snap of her fingers and smirked at her American counterpart. "Hear that? Cabin too small she say!" Suddenly laughing at the mental image that generated in her mechanical mind, Tatyana grinned. "But who say you have to ride inside?"

>Gathering enough spare battery packs for all three of them from the base and wreckage around it had taken some time, but after the three machines topped off their charges they left the relative safety of Unity Base on their long lunar trek. The roughly five hour journey was largely silent, interspersed with brief exchanges that made the trio fall silent in contemplation again soon after. At one point Nadya's curiosity had gotten the better of her and she'd cautiously asked about the previous robots sent to the moon, getting the true story as Tatyana and Tilly knew it of Irina and Kimmy's fate. More impressive to her than the coverup of the violence that had already occurred up here was Tatyana's story of landing and shutting down in the crater, marveling that contrary to popular belief it had been a Russian robot to walk first on the lunar surface. The more the trio talked the faster their trip passed, and before much longer Tilly spotted the glinting metal of a lander in the distance. Seeing the destination quickened the group's pace, and every step closer gave Nadya a stronger feeling of hope that she really had a way out of the fate she'd resigned herself to. As the three machines stopped in front of Tatyana's dormant lander, the more experienced cosmobot knelt beside the dust-covered solar panel she'd plucked and salvaged from before their first long walk across the surface. "Are you sure there's enough surface area left on the solar cells to keep you charged on the way back?" Tilly asked, exchanging a worried look with Nadya. "Da pretty sure, can get by on half-charge for few days if have to, no biggie." Tatyana answered back with a confident smile, and her two comrades relaxed slightly. "Going to take me while to reattach, but should be done by time you get back." Looking back and forth between the American and Russian robots, Nadya took a few steps forward until she stood in Tatyana's field of view and caught her gaze. Without exchanging words Nadya gave her comrade a snappy salute, and Tatyana returned it casually with a smile. "Fly safe, mad robot!"

>A further four miles stretched between Tatyana's lander and where Tilly had first overshot her own landing the last time here, and now she and Nadya walked together across the dusty grey plain. "Tell me again yankee, how I find this 'Outmodeback? Doubt even with Comrade Tatyana's map I lucky enough to land right on top," Nadya asked with a tinge of nervousness, now playing her return scenario across her CPU in earnest as they grew close to her ride. It hardly seemed real, she thought to herself recalling last twenty-four hours, but felt more lucid and sharp now than she had in weeks. In her suit's breast pocket was a small hastily-drawn sketch of the Australian continent the other Russian had made from memory, and Tilly had marked with an 'x' the spot where she'd been told the outmode community was nearest. "It's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, so if you see a settlement off by itself in the desert when you're parachuting down keep the direction in your mind and start walking towards it after you land." Tilly offered helpfully, then shrugged. "It's what I tried doing after you..." she paused, catching herself before meeting the cosmobot's curious look and finding no way out of the sentence but to finish it honestly. "...after you shot me down over Mongolia." Nadya stopped mid-step and stared at her. "You? That was YOU I shoot down?" she asked incredulously, the idea of her target even being alive let alone being the one to come to her rescue seemed exponentially more absurd to her. The nandroid could only give her a helpless smile. "Life's funny that way sometimes." Within twenty minutes the two robots stood at the bottom of Tilly's old lander, looking up the ladder at the closed hatch. "I was close to being low on fuel when I came down here before but the launch profile included me taking over a hundred pounds of rocks back, so without that you should be good for a return," Tilly said confidently as she wiped a thin layer of dust from the first ladder rung with one finger. Nadya took a shaky breath as she stared at her foreign ride, imagining the calculating she'd need to do in order to fall precisely where she'd wanted to on the Earth. "That said though," the nandroid continued, kneeling down for a moment and grabbing at the ground. "One souvenir won't hurt, right?" Giving Nadya a smile, Tilly held out a marble-sized little moonstone to the cosmobot who hesitated only a moment before taking it from her. Turning the small stone over in her gloved fingers Nadya stared at it distantly for a moment, suddenly aware that she'd spent all this time up here and never bothered exploring the strange place. Smiling softly she looked back up at the beaming nandroid and shook her head with a laugh. "Da, not hurt at all."

>Clambering on top of Tatyana's lander had been harder than it seemed at first glance, and both robots had needed to work together in order to boost her up there. Hanging onto the side or ladder according to Tatyana was not an option, as the off-balance weight would alter the lander's flight when it lifted off. Instead Tilly sat cross-legged on top of the rounded capsule, a simple ribbon tether and carabiner keeping her tied to the vehicle's hull in addition to her own grip. The suit's radio crackled as within the ship Tatyana prepared for takeoff. "You secure up there?" She called out, reaching a hand up and lightly tapping the hull above her head. Feeling the vibration below her Tilly answered the light double-knock in kind. "As ready as I can be, just don't jam the throttle open and I should be good!" Looking around herself for a moment, the nandroid took in the familiar sights of grey rock, deep shadowed craters and distant dark mountains. The sky above was black, lit by the glow of the blue-green gem they prepared now to return to. Somehow, she thought quietly as the countdown commenced, the moon was even more beautiful than her first time here. "Alright then Tilly, hold on tight! On my mark...NOW!" As the lander's hibernating engine awakened under Tatyana's control the force jammed Tilly down flat against the top of the round hull, and she had to reach out to either side of her to regain her grip. Looking to her right she saw the horizon already falling away behind them as the vehicle rose, and that strange sensation of overclocking which had become less common over her remarkable experiences came trickling back to sharpen her senses. "Still up there?" Tatyana's voice called over the radio after several seconds of engine burn threw them into a high arc, snapping off and setting them to drift on an intercept with the command module they'd left in orbit. Tilly lost her grip for a moment and found herself floating forward away from the capsule, but quickly grabbed her tether and pulled herself back to it within a moment. Knocking lightly on the hull again she answered back. "Still up here!" Maneuvering her legs underneath her, Tilly gripped her tether and pulled it taut as she rose to her feet and looked back at the lunar landscape rolling away under them. Riding the outside, Tilly thought silently to herself as she surfed the skies of the moon atop the lassoed lander, may just be the wildest way to fly.

>Nadya gave her trajectory a final check as she floated in the foreign capsule, hurtling towards a rendezvous with the Australian outback in three more days. Replaying the memory files of the past day make her shake her head inside her helmet, marveling at her change in fortune. As the vessel drifted down into the gravity well of the planet below, Nadya thought for a long while about the words that had spurred her to fly in the first place, how the Americans would surely cut her people off from accessing space and threaten them with doomsday from above. In the moment she'd first heard them, her master's words had seemed like God's own truth to Nadya, but looking back on them now they somehow rang hollow. "If the rest of them are anything like her," she began out loud to herself as she stared out the viewport at the curving world below thinking of the smiling nandroid, then completed the thought silently. 'Then Master was a fool to fear.'



EPILOGUE

>Tilly and Tatyana parted ways in orbit above the moon as the American nandroid floated over to the waiting vehicle, but remained in radio contact with one another over the three day coast home until breaking to perform their individual landings. Tatyana's capsule streaked across the skies over the Kazakh Republic, a flawless reentry that saw the cosmobot parachute to a rough but safe landing relatively close to where her flight had begun in Baikonur. Many questions had been asked by the Commandant she held dear after her recovery, but only one she had failed by her own standard to properly answer. Most of what the old man asked related to the moon base, and after being satisfied that the investment was still intact had moved on to asking about the state of the American's robot curious about the machine who survived a shoot-down from orbit. Finally came the question Tatyana struggled with, though when it was asked she found her indirect answer came quickly to her. "And, what of Nadya? Any signs of her in the wreckage? Was she active?" Such questions had been left for this closed debriefing over her trip home, only in his private office checked weekly for listening devices did the old man feel any illusion of privacy from those who might be listening in. Giving her master a guarded look, Tatyana blinked her gold optics once at him as she spoke. "Nadya is no longer a threat to national security, Sir."

>A similar scene played out in the office of the United States Spaceflight Agency's Director, the elder man listening skeptically as his mechanical pilot told him an unconvincing tale of finding the base and wreckage of the Soviet station empty. As she'd finished, he reached for his desk drawer to produce the fresh report he'd received of an American transponder signal detected in the Australian wilderness, but suddenly found himself too tired now to even continue. Yes, he thought to himself, it's time, and closed the desk drawer without taking anything from it. "Alright Tilly good job, you can leave now." He said dismissively waving her off, and after a moment's curious hesitation the nandroid stood and let herself out, taking once unsure glance back at the greyed man. Once she was gone the Director sighed to himself and began to gather what personal items had gathered in the office during his tenure here, filling a small cardboard box in minutes. The last items remaining were his desk's personalized nameplate and an old globe he'd brought from home years previous which would stay for his replacement. Running his hands over the inscription "Agency Director Debus" once, he dropped the little plaque unceremoniously. He'd finally gotten his moon base, a dream he'd secretly held even back when the world had been at war with itself, but now found none of his youthful drive remaining to enjoy it. Between the political machinations of two countries he barely tolerated and the untrustworthy little machine he'd come to rely on for pushing boundries, all the soon-to-be-former Director wished for now was peace of mind and perhaps an evening drink. "Too old," he muttered to himself as he looked around his office for the last time. All this would soon be the problem of his second-in-command, and despite the younger man's corner-cutting habits and occasional brashness he was as up to the task as any other here. Smirking privately at the thought, the Director pulled a slip of paper and a pencil from his box of personal effects and jotted down a quick note, sliding it underneath the stand of the globe once finished so that a corner of it stuck out. "Your problem now, Georges" he said with an unburdened smile, and turned out the lights to his office.

>Nadya held a hand up to shield her optics from the punishing sunlight beating down on her, wheezing as her body tried to shed heat from her internals but finding little relief from the hot air around her. Had this been some kind of sick joke? Nadya wondered to herself how she'd traded one wasteland for another walking towards what seemed like a shimmery mirage on the horizon, an image that might have been buildings distorted by the rising heat. Processing hot like this made it hard for her to think clearly, and decisions that should have taken nanoseconds to arrive at could take upwards of a few seconds to get straight. Looking at a sparse tree with a few thin tufts of leaves she blinked at it once before deciding to rest at its trunk in the partial shade, closing her optics and checking over her systems to see what components might be nearing their failure points. Sitting there Nadya's slowed thoughts occupied her attention so completely that she failed at first to register the sound of footsteps until the voice accompanying them called out to her. "G'day there!" Nadya's optics shot open and she looked up to see the source of the mechanical voice, a blonde android sporting a brimmed hat and curious-colored optics. "Y'look a little lost! Need a hand there?"