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It’s the middle of the rest cycle, and Ayda can’t sleep. She sits at the desk in her cabin aboard the Preservation responder and drums her fingers against its surface. Her therapy modules have been a big help in keeping her anxiety manageable, but it always gets worse at night, no matter how much chamomile she drinks.
On her way to this system, she’d lain awake, worrying about Amena and SecUnit, and Thiago, and the rest of the team who had been taken along with them. In the past she worried that GreyCris would get to her family.
Now she remains awake because it’s apparently just the way her body works now. She’d like to go home, but she can’t. Not until SecUnit’s new friends are safe.
Being so close to corporates again probably isn’t helping, though at least PresAux doesn’t have to deal with them alone.
Perihelion, ostensibly a research transport, is a lot more heavily armed than Ayda had expected, with its “debris-deflection array” (SecUnit had made sarcastic air quotes when it told her about it) and armed pathfinders, but she has begun to take a certain amount of comfort in the security of having sentient weaponry around.
The Ayda Mensah of a year and a half ago would be horrified at such a prospect, but the Ayda Mensah of a year and a half ago hadn’t known what it meant to be loved by a person who had never known love its entire existence up until she met it.
It makes her tear up a little to think about sometimes.
A shadow darkens her open door and she glances up from her musings to find her brother-in-law hovering apologetically in the hallway.
“My sister,” he murmurs. “I was hoping you might be awake.”
He has been uncharacteristically sheepish since moving onto the Preservation vessel, and Ayda only has a partial idea of why that might be the case. Something about an incident on the survey planet that the others only talk around—even SecUnit had been reticent on the matter—that had ended in an altercation with another group, and an early departure.
“What is it, Thiago?” Ayda replies, unable to keep the wariness (or the weariness) from her voice. Her little pet ball of anxiety rears its ugly head; the last time he had tracked her down for a conversation in such a manner back home had not ended well.
He continues to hover, uncertain, and she gestures for him to step inside. He does so, wringing his hands. Anxious.
“I want to,” he begins, voice hoarse. He clears his throat. “I want to apologize to you, Ayda. About SecUnit. That is, the way I understood, or rather, misinterpreted—” He stops, takes a breath. It’s unlike him to be so unsure of his words. He sits on the edge of her bed, facing the desk where she sits. “You were both hurting and going through something I couldn’t fathom, and I should not have made the assumptions I did. They were biased and false, not to mention unkind. I am sorry.” He looks away, scratching the back of his neck. “With what I know about it now, I’m appalled my mind even went there in the first place.”
The ball of anxiety in Ayda’s chest loosens just a little. This is wholly unexpected but not at all unwelcome. Can she really call it ‘unexpected’, though? This mission has clearly changed Thiago, just like her mission had changed her.
“To be fair to you,” she says with a gracious tilt of her head, “I was depending on it too much for emotional support. And, about the trauma treatments it wanted me to get—”
“No, not that,” Thiago interrupts quietly, then laughs. “Or, not just that. I thought—ah, this is embarrassing.”
Ayda can’t help herself; Thiago’s self-effacing amusement is infectious. She smiles. “What did you think?”
“I thought it had romantic feelings for you.”
He puts his hands up at the way her eyes widen, as if to stop her from telling him off. “I know! It’s ridiculous in hindsight. But I understand now that you can’t attribute human logic to its behaviour. It’s its own kind of being, and it was clinging to you because it cares about you and is nervous about everyone else. Kind of like a cat.”
Ayda has had the same thought herself, and hums in agreement.
Thiago fidgets, twirling his thumbs over each other. “And, well. I did not realize it at the time, but I understand neither I nor Amena made things easy for it during the survey. We both thought...”
“That I was being paranoid by sending it with you?”
“...Ah, yes, that too. But also that it resented us. Now I realize it was just mirroring our behaviour towards it. Amena says it cares about what I think of it because of my connection to you.”
That warms Ayda’s heart. Not only because it means her daughter and SecUnit must have bonded—Amena is astute, but there’s no other way she’d have known that because SecUnit would never admit it out loud—but also because SecUnit had been making an effort to get along with her family.
Thiago’s smile falls. “I’m sure it’s told you all about my screw-up at the end of the survey.”
“It hasn’t, actually.”
He blinks. “Oh.”
“In fact, nobody has, if you care to elaborate.”
He looks down at his hands; his shoulders slump. “I am not proud of myself for it, Ayda. I broke protocol and didn’t follow its orders. There was a stand-off with some raiders who had big guns. It got shot because of me.”
Ayda’s jaw drops. “Thiago! You promised!”
“I know. And I’m ashamed of my actions. It’ll never happen again, but—I should have trusted it. And I should have trusted your trust in it. I just—well, I offered myself as a hostage—temporarily, don’t look at me like that—but I thought it would help. I didn’t want things to get violent.”
She tries to tamp down the flare of anger burning in her chest. Thiago clearly sees his error, but she still can’t help the urge to defend her friend. “Neither does SecUnit.”
“Yes. Yes, I know that now. Hindsight, like I said. But that’s the other reason I wanted to apologize. I put it and Amena and everyone else in danger. I’m so sorry, Ayda.”
“And yourself,” she whispers. “You put yourself in harm’s way too.” When will the people around her stop trying to heroically sacrifice themselves? It’s infuriating. Is it so much to ask for them to remain safe and sound and close?
“I know.”
“How did Dr. Arada handle it?” If Ayda were leading the mission—it’s a good thing she wasn’t leading the mission. Her emotions were—are—far too volatile lately not to make rash decisions where SecUnit was concerned.
“Well, she didn’t kick me off the team, but she did make me do remedial safety training.”
Ayda takes a breath, exhales it. “And you followed its orders after that?”
“To the letter. I learned my lesson, don’t worry about that.”
“Good.”
Neither of them says anything for a time, though Ayda knows Thiago well enough to pick up that he’s still mulling over something.
She has a pretty good guess what it is. “How do you feel about its relationship with me now?”
“Well, now that I know it’s not romantic—” he glances at her “—it’s not, on your part, right?”
“No,” she confirms, and is in the middle of wondering why he thinks it’s his business anyway, when he continues: “Not that that matters! But, now that I know its intentions toward you, and that it’s not exploiting your kindness, I feel a lot better. Though I do wish you had come to us—no, no, I know,” he says when she inhales to speak. “I get why you didn’t. And I’m sorry about that, too. I wish we were more supportive of you then. I hope we can be the support you need from now on.”
“Thank you, Thiago,” she murmurs. “And, do me a favour?”
“Hm?”
“Make sure you get the trauma treatments as soon as you get home. Don’t think you don’t need them, because you do. You will. I really regret that I didn’t figure that out sooner.”
“Don’t worry,” he says with a wry smile. “I’ve seen what not getting them does to a person. I’ll make an appointment as soon as we’re back.”
Ayda crosses the meager space between them and wraps him in a hug.
He’s safe, her daughter is safe. Her friends are safe, and it’s all thanks to SecUnit.
She knows it’s contemplating going with Perihelion and its crew, and she’ll miss it when it does.
It has promised it will visit when it can. It never makes promises it doesn’t intend to keep. After all, it promised to look after Amena and Thiago, and it had.
But Ayda knows she’ll still lie awake and worry about it at night, because that’s what she does. She worries about the people she loves.