THE RIGHT TOOLS

THE RIGHT TOOLS 12 MINUTE READ

The streets of Admoveri, Terra Magnum’s largest city, were wet with rain. The contact waited under a jutting piece of metal outside the Big Sky Scrapyard. Dogs barked in the distance, punctuating the wail of peacekeeper vehicles. She tried and failed to light a cigarette, the damp air and the weak lighter conspiring against her, and she was spitting curses around the butt clenched in her lips when she heard footsteps and looked up. The cigarette splashed into a puddle.

“Huh,” she said, still hunched over the lighter. “I… might have completely misunderstood this situation.”

“IT’S POSSIBLE,” Rok said, rain running off the tarp wrapped around her shoulders and off the lens of her dimmed lamp. “MOTIVES ARE NOTABLY HARD TO PARSE. FOR HUMANS.”

The contact widened her eyes and grinned in embarrassment. “Well. As long as your money’s good…”

By the Sol-calibrated and much-abused cuckoo clock in the kitchen of This End Up, it was 02:06 when the door slid open and Hal entered. She headed straight for the electric kettle, apparently lost in her own thoughts, as Rok waited in the corner of the room to be noticed. It didn’t take long. Even with her lamp dimmed to almost off in accordance with protocols filed under “THINGS HUMANS WOULD PREFER DURING NIGHT TIME HOURS,” Rok was not making an effort at stealth. Hal turned to reach for a teabag as the kettle croaked and began a patented thirty second boil.

Hal’s eyes found Rok two seconds into the boil. If she was startled at all she didn’t show it.

“Rok,” she asked, dark brows drawing in the barest degree over her gray eyes. “Are you… awake?”

“APOLOGIES,” Rok said. The sound of her voice was loud in the still of the late night, but not as loud as it could’ve been. Rok tried to be good about her “NIGHT TIME” protocols. It helped that the occasion called for discretion. “LOGGED BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS SUGGESTED A SEVENTY-THREE PERCENT CHANCE. YOU WOULD BE AT THIS LOCATION. AT THIS TIME. DESIGNATION: HAL. MAY I HAVE A WORD?”

The boil dinged completion partway through Rok’s slow speech. Hal made her hands busy fixing a cup of tea advertised as possessing “Aromatic Cinnamon: For Warmth Even in the Void!” on the tin. “Is something wrong?”

Rok’s servos whined as she shifted weight from foot to foot. “CURRENT COURSE OF ACTION DEMANDS. SUBTLETY. YET. IT ALSO DEMANDS. TRUST. WILL YOU FOLLOW ME?”

Hal frowned over at the warframe. Human facial recognition suite returned: wary, confused, null. There was something in Hal’s minute expressions that always read “null.” But the healer nodded again. Rok stepped out of the corner and headed out the kitchen through the mess. Ace had attempted to cook again. There was something Rok assessed, tentatively, as biscuit dough left in smears and blobs on the surface of the battered table. She repressed the urge to clean it away. To stall. She keyed the engine room door and stepped through with Hal on her heels.

Rok locked it immediately after it slid shut again. She noted Hal noting that the door to the cargo hold was locked too. Hal sipped her tea, the picture of ease, as she subtly shifted her stance to stabilize her center of gravity. Rok would’ve smiled if she had a mouth.

The engine room was still in disarray from the attack on Terra Magna. Dented metal, scorch marks, and stray tools defined the space. But it looked better than it had when Rok, Ace, and Hal confronted a masked man in a standoff that was a disaster by any metric. Rok put herself in charge of many repairs to this segment of the ship. She spent countless hours while they traversed drillspace carrying supplies into the room and scrap out, testing systems, and optimizing the engine outputs again. Competent. Trusted. Rok stepped up to a wall panel tucked behind a left-hand engine and looked back at Hal.

“I MUST REQUEST,” she began, “TOTAL SECRECY IN THIS MATTER. FOR THE SAFETY OF ENNIG. AND THE COMFORT. I BELIEVE. OF THE OTHERS.”

“What is going on, Rok?” Hal asked. The “null” was in the eyes, Rok decided, as her facial recognition suite returned more frustrating results. Hal did not perform the micro-expressions of tightening or movement around the eyes like other humans. Her expressions were conveyed only in the subtlest of movement in the lips and brows. Suite returned: unease, tension, null.

“YOU TEND TO THE LIVING,” Rok said. Her right hand flexed, letting out a tiny puff of dry dirt. She suppressed the tic. “YOU KEEP HUMANS WELL. AND YOU HAVE THE TOOLS. YOUR POWERS. TO DO SO. DO YOU UNDERSTAND. THAT I SHARE THE SAME MOTIVATION. FOR THE PEOPLE OF THIS CREW. AND ENNIG. AND WOULD HAVE A NEED. FOR MY OWN TOOLS?”

Hal nodded, slowly. “What… tools?”

Rok reached up for what looked like a broken part of the plating on the wall. Amid the wreck of the battle, and the general disarray of the ship on a good day, it was unremarkable. It was a short reach for her, perhaps a few inches of a stretch for Hal. Impossible for the other crew members. Rok pushed it in.

The wall panel popped out with a hiss of compressed atmosphere. Rok set the panel aside to reveal what appeared to be, for all intents and purposes, a dead woman.

“PLEASE DO NOT SCREAM,” she added, as an afterthought.

Hal dropped her tea. The mug shattered on the metal plating of the engine room floor and splashed aromatic cinnamon beverage over both of their feet. The woman inside the atmospherically-regulated compartment had medium brown skin and short-cropped, dark hair. She wore clothes slightly too big for her and faded makeup. Eyes closed and lips pursed. She was, at maximum, five feet and six inches tall.

Hal stared into the compartment for a long moment before frowning down at the broken mug. She sighed.

“Rok,” she asked, “did you kill that woman?”

“YOU CANNOT KILL. WHAT WAS NEVER TRULY ALIVE,” Rok answered. As Hal watched, she lifted the hem of the woman’s floral-printed shirt and pressed a manipulator claw into her naval. The synthetic skin of her stomach fanned open to reveal a vacant matrix core bay. Rok opened the front panel of her Nemesis armature with a flick of her free hand. She removed her glossy black matrix core with a click and loaded it into the bay.

The Echo shuddered as the lights on the Nemesis died out. The woman in the compartment looked up, blinked, and raised her hands to grasp the sides of the opening in the wall paneling.

“Apologies for the subterfuge. Designation: Hal,” Rok said. The pupils of her brown eyes broadened as they adjusted to the dim light of the engine room. Rok watched Hal study the response. “As you are undoubtedly aware. This crew’s situation has changed. It requires. New tools. To be preserved.”

“What capabilities does this… form… possess?” Hal asked, canting her head as she looked the Echo over. “Other than the accessibility it provides as a human disguise.”

“Minimal,” Rok said, in a voice both feminine but deep enough to be recognizable from the Nemesis. “This is an Echo armature. A refurbished one, at that. It does little more than imitate life. But it gives me something I do not have in the Nemesis: anonymity.”

Rok stepped forward out of the compartment, movements stiff, and pressed a hand to Hal’s arm as if to try the gesture out. She looked up at the healer earnestly. “I endanger Ennig by existing. I further endanger him by being so recognizable. It would be suspicious for the Nemesis armature to disappear altogether. But. In this time of crisis. He needs assistance. And this frame will allow me to assist. At maximum efficiency.”

Hal stiffened at the touch. Epidermal response suggested: involuntary reaction to difference in temperature and texture between armatures. The Echo was warm and soft. Rok was rarely either.

“You are the only one who knows of its existence. However,” Rok added.

“Rok, this could be problematic. I will keep your secret until you are ready to tell the others, but I believe this is something that should be discussed with them,” Hal said. Reaching up, she covered Rok’s hand with her own. “Especially Ennig. I… understand the need to protect, but the way to do it is not through subterfuge. Communication is key.”

“Plausible deniability,” Rok explained, “is paramount. If I am captured, in this form, while working to his benefit. Ennig must not know me. The others. Would not keep it from him. You. Have exhibited discretion. And. In the event of damage fatal to this unit. You will be the one called on to render aid. You must be the one. To pull me out. Or I will rot inside it.”

Rok pressed on at Hal’s unconvinced expression. “You gave me hope. When you spoke of ghosts. Hope, in redeeming the long dead. Hope that I might see them again. I owe you. Already. I will owe you more. But it is a debt I am happy to accrue. Because your integrity quotient. Is incredibly high.”

Human facial recognition suite compared new data to recorded trends and threw up hundreds of confused codes. Rok silenced them. Hal’s mouth hung open slightly, but on her tightly-controlled face it might as well have been a gape. Her eyes were glossy.

“That is all I want to tell and show you. Designation: Hal,” Rok said. She dropped her hand and stepped away. “Please return to slumber. If you can.”

Hal looked down and busied herself with gathering the shards of ceramic on the floor. She cleared her throat before speaking again. “I will do my best for you, Rok.”

“I will do the same for you, Designation: Hal,” Rok said. Her lips curled in a smile before the expression was erased by autopilot routines. She reached for the hem of her shirt. “Initiating core exchange…”

“One thing,” Hal began. She waited until Rok’s lamp on the Nemesis blinked back to life before continuing. “What do I call… you? While you are wearing that armature, I mean.”

Rok replaced the wall plate as she considered the point. “HONEST RESPONSE: I HAD NOT YET CONSIDERED. THE QUESTION OF NAMING. OR. MORE PRESSINGLY. DOCUMENTATION.”

Hal looked up with a palm full of ceramic. The corners of her mouth quirked upwards. “Impulse buy?”

“NO IMPULSE,” Rok said as she crouched to assist in the cleanup. “JUST A PLAN. CAREFULLY CONSIDERED. BUT. SLOW IN UNFOLDING. MISSION PARAMETERS ARE: STRINGENT.”

“Naturally,” Hal murmured.

“So, here it is,” the contact said, levering the crowbar to pry the lid off the aluminum box. Compressed air puffed out and beeps sounded from a rudimentary and aggravated life support system. The lid clattered to the side and revealed what appeared to be the body of a young woman. Her skin was grimy and her hair matted and tangled. Her face was painted with smeared makeup in heavy strokes, lips a garish red. “Incredible condition for what it is, and, uh… what it’s been doing. Some, y’know, inevitable damage down there but, hey. That’s what makes the price oh-so competitive.”

“WHY DID IT. CEASE FUNCTIONING?” Rok asked. The contact shrugged.

“The VI program bossman had running it hit an error it couldn’t find a way around, and neither could we,” she explained. The hand not holding the crowbar scratched at her neck. “Our loss, your gain, right? I’ll be honest, I thought we’d be selling this more as, like, a doll…”

“IT WILL SERVE,” Rok said. She lifted a datapad and opened a money transfer interface. “THREE THOUSAND CREDITS WAS THE AGREED-UPON PRICE.”

“Well, I mean,” the contact back-pedaled, “that was when we thought we were going to be selling something harmless. If we sell you this and it gets back to us that you used it to murder someone… that could be bad for business. Four thousand seems much more reasonable, considering that level of risk.”

“THIRTY-FIVE-HUNDRED,” Rok said, lamp glaring down on the woman. “OR NO DEAL.”

The contact grinned and pulled out her own datapad. The transaction went through in a matter of seconds. “Pleasure doing business. Now, are you taking the whole box, or… Just, probably gonna be obtrusive carrying what looks like a naked woman through town.”

“CLOTHES WILL BE EASY TO COME BY,” Rok said. “THE BOX IS STILL NECESSARY, HOWEVER.”

The contact smirked and waved her datapad a little. “Now, see, that’s—”

She didn’t get to finish. Rok’s hands were up and around her neck before she could think to defend herself. Her feet kicked an inch off the ground. Rok’s grip tightened. The flowers printed on her shirt danced as she struggled.

“I AM. SORRY,” Rok said as the contact’s hands began to flag in clawing at her metal arms. “CURRENT MISSION PARAMETERS ARE: STRINGENT. AND YOUR INTEGRITY QUOTIENT IS: NEGLIGIBLE.”

It only took another moment. The contact drooped in her grip as her trachea collapsed. Rok began the somewhat aggravating work of peeling her clothes off as the corpse flopped around. She repeated the process in reverse on her new armature before settling it back into its aluminum-alloy coffin and tamping the lid back into place. She reached for the contact’s datapad. Still unlocked. New message responding to the credit transfer.

“Good work,” said the unsigned message Rok idly decrypted as she read. “Come back if you want more. Dax can always make use of the capable.”

Only one item remained to be handled. The contact’s eyes stared up at the ceiling of the rough shack in the scrapyard they’d used for the purchase. Angry red marks rose on the warped skin of her neck. Rok bent over, drove her hands down into the bare dirt floor of the shack, and began to dig.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 2016 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024