2024.05.04 Awkward Moments Plumb Local Socialization

I had to pause before opening up my ship to this port, so I could collect myself. To hold onto all the things I've learned about myself, and consciously recognize the truth of them. Because this is a hard place to be: the place I'm originally from. And they think they know me here. It's awfully easy to become what other people tell you that you are, and it very rarely serves you well.

Grey light from overcast skies bundled between rocky peaks flooded my hatch, and my hand reflexively went to drag my helmet over my head so I could see better - but I stopped. To stride out of my ship with my helm already in place sends a message, and if I had any hope of making this go well I needed to embody being relaxed. So instead I shrugged on a cloak to obscure my habitual gear, and met the tech ambling towards my still-pinging ship.

"Cargo or repairs?"

I give them a terse shake of my head. "Nothing right now. Maybe later." They give me a squint, to wonder wordlessly about why I'm even here then. "I pre-paid the landing fee and parking for a day on my way in. But..." I dip my chin and make sure to catch their eye. "Try to keep folks from getting to near to her. The security system is a little aggressive."

The tech gave a glance at the well-patched hull, and gave me a shrug. A worried little part of me thought there was a good chance I'd be scraping a charred limb of theirs off of the hull later on, and hoo-boy that would definitely make future visits home even more awkward.

Wending my way past other parked ships, I eventually made it through the personnel gate. It stood open, as it does generally - other than in times of trouble. Apparently I couldn't help but make an amused face at the backwater half-assery of the security measures as I walked through, because one of the guards sitting in the guard station yelled down. "Something funny, stupid face?"

Stupid face? I have a feeling I know that guy. Probably doesn't recognize me, though. Not yet, anyway.

"Nope." I keep walking, and head toward the public transit station.

No crowds here. Which made sense, this is hardly a busy port of call. And this is the end of the line for the train, so it was completely empty when it glides into station. The meta-ads for taxis suddenly drop their prices before the train stops, as a last-ditch plea for my credits. But if I wanted to float into town in a hopper directly to where I was going, I would have just taken my own out of the hold.

A minor bug in the train's schedule sharing protocol caused a glitch in my predictive path metrics. Not a big deal, but I asked the train's AI if it needed help with that. It patiently informed me that the issue was already in the maintenance queue, though it let slip that it did not have an estimate for when it would get done because the original had expired. I told it that I might be able to help, as I had just run a superficial diagnostic and found a simple variance in a drive controller. It accepted the corrected parameter without comment. Leave a place better than you find it, and all that utilitarian philosophy.

The train hummed happily to a stop at the next branch - which connects to the industrial district. District is a bit of a laugh - it's a section of valley out of sight of the main town habitants, where the large ugly machines of industry can efficiently turn materials and effort into credits and means to do more things. And most of both of those are generally heading off-world. Or, at least, out of town.

Onto the train, fresh off of shifts of grimy toil, several burly people trundle wearily. I don't stare, but I watch them, doing that thing I can't stop myself from doing every time I'm here: asking myself, "Do I know them?".

Perhaps because of my watching them, however low-key I think I'm being, or perhaps just because I'm an oddity on this train, they watch me back. I imagine them thinking to themselves, "Do I know that person?" I'm not broadcasting any contact details, and neither are they, and it's likely that nobody actually recognizes anybody right then. I knew that I wasn't sure about who any of them were, though vaguely familiar aspects suggested that I would if I knew more - but I wouldn't have made any fuss even if I did actually recognize anybody here. Unlike the folk in this town, who in my experience unfailingly make a fuss over discovering someone.

Of course, several of them get the standard far-away expression of someone concentrating on media or comms. Which, in my standard paranoia, translates into at least one of them sending an image of me to someone else asking, "Do we know this person?" So it goes.

The next stop slides up almost immediately, and several well-worn characters parade into the train. Beaten long coats budding with off-putting personality cover unknown arrays of concealed items. The trio grin lasciviously at the weary labourers, a couple of whom lift their chins in mildly contemptuous acknowledgement. One of the trio give a theatrical look around the train, as though checking that the coast is clear, and glaces at me. I don't look particularly official or enforcement-like, so their gaze swept past me. But then they blinked and looked sharply back.

"Hey! It's you! When did you get back, man?"

I spread my fingers and hands in an Anurian gesture of honesty. "Just landed."

He gestures to the other two with a 'continue on without me, I'll be just a moment' sort of shrug and wave. They sidle up to the more-receptive labourers, while Kayson turns back to me. "Wait. Didn't you have, like, a whole thing happen?"

"It wasn't what people were saying."

Kayson's arms gesticulate with big motions, showing glimpses of non-standard med-kits gripped underneath. "Well, obviously not! You have non-robotic legs, for starters. And your head appears to still be attached, and you don't appear to be choking on shit."

I can feel myself squinting at his loud, possibly intentional obliviousness. "Yeah, no. The whole 'ripping off a persons head and shitting down their neck' is just colourful turn of phrase."

He winks conspiratorially at me. "Yeah, yeah, man. It's very action-packed and got some interesting visuals."

And just like that, I'm unsure of myself. Is this another classic case of Kayson feigning insight with parroted commentary, and actually being a mostly-harmless doofus? Or maybe some neurophysical/chemical happening has expanded his capabilities beyond the doofus I knew, and he's actually plying my reactions for information and is no longer quite so 'mostly' in his harmlessness? I lower my eyelids briefly to consider the probabilities, and my math co-processors burp up an entirely uninspiring array with very few holes to have leverage.

I give a tight smile, as genuine as I can manage. "Speaking of action-packed, how have things been here on the Rock for you since I last saw you?"

Kayson diverts immediately into an anxious sway and awkward head-jerking motions behind his emphatic arm gestures. It's a 99%-identical performance to the ones I remember him doing, save with some different names and events sprinkled in among the familiar places. Same old Kayson, I guess.

The next station isn't as close as the train can take me to my planned trip to the city center, but it's a way to make my departure from Kayson with a modicum of grace. Plus it would be good to get more of a direct feel for how the old home town is doing, instead of sorting through carefully manicured social media. This station is midway between a park and the local hospital. Both brimming with unpleasant memories. But I aim my footsteps towards the main drag and trawl the local scene.

It's totally dead. Aside from an intermittent stream of older hoppers going occasionally to and fro, I see no activity outside.

I mean, I'm not sure what I was expecting. A quick sort of my math co-processors suggests that I had fallen victim, yet again, to an availability heuristic - unintentionally estimating what is likely biased toward what is vivid and emotionally charged. All my memories of encounters on this selfsame drag through town blotted out how the vast majority of the time there's really nothing going on.

Saying like that - in my head, obviously - has a contemptuous edge to it. But, really, in the core of me, I like the quiet. The peace that is possible to find inside one's self here is pretty great, and an important aspect of myself.

Of course, the way in which the other parts of me like things to happen promptly finds that time passes entirely too slowly here. But that's not a problem for this visit. I shouldn't be staying long enough for that effect to bother me. And, honestly, there isn't much that I need to wait for any more - I'm remarkable capable of making what I want happen. It's part of why I left.

Oh shit - Riverside is gone. I liked hanging out there. Hardly ever got beat up there, and there were cool games and snacks. Now it's, what? A family restaurant? I guess the upside is that they won't hold that grudge about me pretending to have a bomb any more. Ah - good times.

After a few more long moments of marinating in nostalgia and sifting through augmented memories to annotate them with more-mature interpretations, I find myself entering the downtown. Or, what was the downtown at some point. Even in my time growing up here, this cluster of businesses and nexus of services was a stagnant remnant of a simpler era. More interesting and popular locations distributed around among the arrayed neighbourhoods have been the real deal for getting things done, and looks like that remains true. And the result of that is that this district is quietly low-rent while maintaining an old-school air of respectability.

And I'm pretty sure that exact same hopper has passed by me twice before. Yup - a quick scroll back through the visual buffer confirms that. It's possible this is a busy local delivery gig worker, but my paranoia is that I'm being cased.

As it makes a quick U-turn to pull around to stop on the side of the paveway behind me, I'm already resigned for something stupid to happen. If I were on some strange planet, I'd be snapping on my helmet and looking for ways to get the hell out of trouble. But I try to remain nonchalant - for reasons both simple and convoluted.

"What the FUCK are you doing back here?"

I realized that I have a confused look on my face. They yelled that before they actually got out of the hopper, so I was lacking context. Unfortunately, even after they got out I was still a bit unclear. I knew I was supposed to know who they were, but honestly all the various blustering goons kind of coalesced in my memory such that it wasn't very clear. Was this one of the ones that I embarrassed? Or was this one of the ones that I merely insulted? I know this isn't one of the ones that directly harmed me physically, because those are better remembered. Whatever.

I look down at my feet. "Walking." Then I shrug at them and continue to do so.

Based on the way that they glance back into the hopper, I deduce that there is at least one more inside. "I better not see you again, or you're fuckin' getting it." They then jump back in the hopper, and I flinch-hop to the side as they accelerate past me.

Cool. Perhaps in the fullness of time that encounter will make sense. But I resist the urge to try to understand it. That's one of the traps that small places have: the extremely small stakes drive drama into everything for no damn reason. Better to ignore the petty stupidity.

Besides, I'm almost to my first real destination. A turn and down a few short blocks I find myself in front of an extremely familiar General Store. It's a modest affair, limited mostly to just what a small apartment dweller might spontaneously need on occasion, or what workers in other small businesses might want to grab while on break. The door struggles open as I step towards it with purpose, and I take the half-dozen steps it takes to get past the specials stand to be in front of the counter.

A generic representation of a face materializes holographically in an old-timey way. "Hello - can I help you find something?"

I give it a curt but respectful bow. "Yes - I'd like to see the fresh candy instead of the old stuff out on display. And if possible I'd like to talk to an old friend."

The AI considers me in a way far too sophisticated for an out-of-the-box mart-bot, and I give it a wink. It dissolves into nothingness, apparently dismissed, and a disembodied voice calls out, "Oh shit! Hang on a sec!" After the briefest of waits, a big felinid is projected holographically wearing his standard-issue disarming smirk. "What the fuck are you doing back here?"

Chuckling as I rock back on my heels. "I've been getting a lot of that today."

My furry friend tilts his head to consider that. "Yeah. The story about your departure has taken on a life of its own."

"So it seems. What else has changed? Besides folks appreciating the in-person touch in their shopping, I mean."

"Shit, most of our business is handling handoffs to gig deliveries now. Don't need to be in person for that. Just need to keep the backend sorted, and I can do that from home."

Nodding, I look down at my feet. "Cool. Just so long as it's not about avoiding being pinched in person by folks looking for protection money."

When I glanced up he looks genuinely appalled. "What? Shit no. The cops are still lame, but folks are still generally safe from that kind of shenanigans."

I squint an uncertain look at the hologram. "Yeah? You sure?"

"Well, yeah, I WAS. But now you're here asking about it, and now I'm worried."

"Ah, don't worry about it. It's probably nothing you need to be concerned about if everything is currently copacetic."

He gives me a suspicious glower. "K"

With a long awkward breath out my nose, I say, "We should meet up to hang out or something."

"Yeah, maybe! I'll have to see if I can find some time."

I smiled. "Cool." It meant we probably wouldn't. But it's fine, because our friendship was never based on meek assurances of familiarity. And I'm genuinely relieved that he's doing well, and even more that he didn't feel compelled to warn me about any of our acquaintances being in dire straights. It means the rest of my visit is unencumbered.

With a respectful fist-in-hand bow, I backed out of the store and take a deep breath. Time to see how things go.

A couple blocks back out onto the main drag, and I resume walking through the tiny downtown. Crossing a cargo-track overpass, I walked purposefully into one of the places in town that I had rarely dared to be in before. A totally empty restaurant.

Except, of course, I didn't just walk straight in. As I walked towards it, I gave it a tight ping to query how sentient it was - it ranked pretty low. So I followed up with a general service access code when I had direct contact, and when it was granted I slipped a mechanical patch onto the mechanism. The faithful little door lock didn't spill any access codes, but I severed the network connections and reset every function to suit my whims. It was done before I even finished walking through the door. Also before I closed the door, I sent two small probe robots to sweep around the building and quietly make friends with any doors they found.

Once inside I blinked a couple times, realizing that not only did I not actually know the name of the place, I don't think I ever actually bothered knowing its real name. It was always just mapped in my brain as being right here, and the totally-fake restaurant front for a local group of shady operators. Honestly, I think the only time I've actually seen the inside before was on a dare as a kid, and I didn't stay long.

A hologram of a Groten stuffed improbably into a suit flickered into existence by the entrance. It looked at me with disdain glittering from its black eyes set deep into its big furry head. "I'm sorry sir, you don't appear to have a reservation. You'll have to leave."

I looked around at the dusty and frankly shitty establishment then up at it with mild disbelief. "People make reservations to be here?"

A guttural invective in a range I don't hear well wafted from a back room in a language my meat brain didn't recognize. Before my co-processor could nail down a likely translation - not that I needed it - a brawny Zygroten burst out of the nominal kitchen area. "What the fuck are YOU doing here?"

"Honestly, wondering if the Groten hologram was joking about needing reservations."

His nostrils flared, which is probably hard to avoid with a snout like that. "I heard you were in town, but never would have guessed that your plan was suicide. Get the fuck out."

"How?"

Arms furiously indicated, "Through the fucking door you came in, you cheese-brained fuckstard! Before I punt you the fuck through it."

"No - how did you hear that I was in town?"

"Are you fucking deaf? You're getting out, running or bleeding, either fucking way." He starts stomping angrily towards me.

I mentally activated one of my small probe robots, and it floats up between us. I looked at it, then at him - looking all confused himself. "Gosh, I wonder where this is going." It then darts around him and makes for the kitchen door.

His priorities obviously had drastically shifted, as he lunged at the probe, then followed it enraged into the kitchen. I gave him a 83% probability of resorting to shooting at it after about 90 seconds of realizing it was fast enough to prevent him from getting in reach.

The probe sent imagery of some pretty flagrant yet petty criminal materials - stim patches with faked certification and heavier weaponry than is typically allowed through the port authority. Enough to get in trouble with the local police, but hardly worth the fuss what's-his-fur was making. Which turned powerfully ironic as my forwarded view of the paveway out front from the pwned front door showed a police hopper settling down out front.

I double-checked my chronometer. Yeah, this was the right time for my thing, which made the Human police officer getting out of the hopper and trundling efficiently towards the front door highly suspicious. Even more suspicious: he sent a pretty secure coded access request to the front door. I had to door send a generic "I'm open, come on through" message. And come on through he did.

He immediately scowled at me. "Who are you?"

Several responses rolled around as possibilities in my head, based on him perhaps almost-recognizing me, or maybe just having that cop-sense of something being off about me. Anyways, the laconic genius I might have uttered was suddenly overshadowed by the sounds of blaster fire in the kitchen.

His eyes were furrowed into slits, and he pulled is service blaster. "Don't make any sudden movements." Barked at me, followed by a louder yell. "What the zark is going on back there!?" Why was he yelling? There wasn't any jamming. And it's not like he was a stickler for OPSEC keeping his comm logs clean - he rumbled through that door without a secure confirmation response.

A staccato set of blasts, then the Zygroten leaned out of the kitchen. Seeing the police officer, his face curled his snout into frustrated snarl. "You're early, but maybe you can help - this asshole just sent a probe robot flying into the lab!"

My imagination told me that the police officer was rolling his eyes behind the slitted lids, but it was hard to tell. He raised his blaster generally in my direction, sending my co-processor into a laughing-like state as it calculated probabilities of his implication. But his mistake was looking sternly at the Zygroten. "What do you expect me to do?"

Obviously, these two didn't work well together. Still, it was a fun opening for me to reach out with the force-tools in one of my subtle gauntlets and make a minor but profound change to the barrel of his very common blaster model.

"Get him the fuck out of here before, you know, the thing."

The police officer sighed, then spoke through clenched teeth. "You said he sent a probe into, uh, kitchen."

"I'll get the probe, just get him the fuck out!"

The police officer turned to look back at me. "Two problems with that. One: he already saw everything via the probe. And two: we need to know why he's here sending probes into private businesses."

The Zygroten stared hard at me. I looked passively back. The Zygroten looked cool, but he clearly wasn't the brains of this operation. I shifted my gaze to officer squinty, who wasn't winning any tactician trophies either but at least had a grasp of the edge of the situation a little better.

"Recall your probe robot." He emphasized the order by making his blaster pointing less general and more specific.

"There is no probe robot in the kitchen." Which by this point was technically true - the robot had found a ventilation port over the mostly-disused stove and had tampered its way out.

"Fuck! It was right fucking here a second ago!"

I made myself stop making a pained expression. It looked like the cop was going to make some other command or question, but I asked first. "Why aren't you two using coded comms?"

"Shut your mouth, and drop your weapons."

My hands spread wide, to open up the front of my cloak and reveal the array of tools and robots I've got strapped to me. "I don't have any weapons to drop."

This appeared to be confusing to the police officer and to the Zygroten. So it goes.

"Lock this jackass in the vault until we're done with business." The cop gave me an extra-squinty squint. "Then we'll decide what to do with him."

As soon as I heard about having to come to this middle-of-nowhere planet, I guessed things would go poorly. But even I had to admit that this was an even more disappointing trajectory than I would have suspected. The Zygroten joined the cop in gesticulating where I should go with blasters. Which, as it turned out, was through a passageway in the back past the restrooms. It was a wide, spartan hall, likely connecting to the kitchen at one end and the garage/loading bay at the other. I was ushered hurriedly towards the garage. Which, as it happened, sported a very bulky looking door hiding some volume at the back corner.

"Drop those tools and bots."

I honestly was suspecting that they might have forgotten about the non-weapons. Alas. Reluctantly, I put down the actually rather nice tools and remaining probe robots. Of course, I uploaded the AIs as backup so that the robot bodies were just empty husks - I'm not a monster. Odds are that they would be smashed, and letting they run for it would just antagonize these idiots at the wrong time.

"Get in."

With a deep breath, I did my best resigned walk into the vault. A quick look around confirmed my suspicion. Looking back out at the Zygroten and the cop, I tilted my head to one side as I thought about how to say this. "So, when you said vault, you really did mean you were going to lead me straight to where you keep important or valuable items. Amazing." With a stiff kick from my augmented move boots, I slammed the heavy door closed. Then fired up my gauntlets to secure the locks mechanically from the inside.

This seemed to be holding their attention pretty well, based on the muffled swearing and the pair of blaster impacts I could hear through the door. Funny. I locked the front door of the restaurant remotely. The probe that found a back door hadn't gained that kind of access, so I had it just weld it closed instead. The garage door was trickier - too secure for the probe to tamper directly, and too big to brute force.

From the outside anyway. I had the probe that flew out of the kitchen settle down by the thinnest section of the door, send a backup of its AI, then do its party trick: It overloaded its microfusion source but refracted it to create a small plasma bomb. A neat hold appeared in the door, through which the earlier probe could zip in and beeline for the door's drive motor. Which turned out to be relatively easy to tamper immobilized.

Apparently, the plasma bomb was close enough and loud enough to get the attention of the Zygroten, because he pelted into view of the probe robot. Briefly. He left its field of view shortly afterward.

Likewise, the police officer stormed through the dining area of the restaurant to head out the front door a short while later, and was somewhat unhappy to discover that it would not open for him.

All of which I was only passively taking note of, as I efficiently got about the business of opening the highly-secure crates, and assembling the battle robots inside.

It took about an hour.

But before I was done, I was hailed - finally - by the bumblefucks trapped in the restaurant.

First was the Zygroten. "We're not going to forget this, asshole. And after what you did last time, you're so dead!" I sent him back an ancient Human meme-clip of a Monty Python movie "I'm not dead yet." I don't think he thought it was funny.

Shortly afterward, the police officer pinged me. "I've traced your records, and know everything about you now. You had best just step out now, before this becomes a bigger problem, so that I can go easy on you." I really wanted to goad him, but I'm honestly not great at doing so in a way that would help at all. So I just stayed quiet. Then he followed up with, "I see you have a ship registered to park at the commercial port. That's in lockdown now, and will remain so until we're done with you."

I knew it was unnecessary, but I did ping my ship to check in. It laughed at me. Not exactly reassuring, because that might have been its "I've killed a bunch of people" laugh. Which is a whole different set of problems. I decided not to worry about that yet.

Like I said - it took about an hour. The first ones I actually configured as combat technicians, because we're just handy like that. Stages of Defender and Technician are the easiest ones for me to install for obvious reasons, but mostly so that they could help me build the others faster in their default shock trooper settings. Plus upgrade their shields, like you do. No guns, but even though I knew where some were it would be easier to do the rest of this if we didn't trip weapon sensors everywhere.

So it was that I cracked open the vault and stepped out flanked by 16 vaguely humanoid combat robots. They weren't hulking by any stretch of the imagination, but they had robust menace about them.

The Zygroten and the police officer, whose names I refused to look up, had cover by the hallway facing the garage.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

As as little inflection as I could manage, I replied, "Talking to you two, briefly, to avoid too much bloodshed."

"You're unarmed. Stand down, deactivate those robots, and you won't get hurt."

I pivoted to address the cop. "You don't have enough firepower to down even one of these fellows before they bludgeoned you to death. Lower your guns, so you don't accidentally trigger their self-defense protocols." After a moments hesitation, I added, "I checked pretty carefully - they don't have non-lethal settings as default."

That caused the blasters to be pointed in a somewhat more circumspect manner.

"Cool. We're leaving. I suggest you stay out of the way." On a secure battle-wiki I ask - politely - for the full-goons to lead, and with the techs in the middle. A pair of goons stayed protectively at the rear with me.

"Do you really think you can just fucking walk out with these combat units?"

"I think so, yeah."

"Some scary people own these things, and aren't just going to let you take them, asshole."

I made a frown, and rejected a bunch of true things to say before settling on, "What is scary to you might not be particularly scary to others."

The front door opened for us before we got to it, and we formed up outside. With a glance inward, I told the Zygroten and the police officer, "Stay put for a while." Then I locked the front door again.

It was tempting to PWN the police hopper and use it as transportation to the port, for the sheer ballsiness of it. But it would have looked stupid, with at least half of us having to be gripped to the outside. So I went with the original plan - walking to the downtown train station.

The obvious method to drive the probabilities of complications down as far as possible would be to let the combat robots keep to cover and slink carefully to the spaceport. But that would have been giving into old wounds in a refreshed blossom of failure. So I fought down my flinching and herded the angular robots to skulk down the main street. More than a few people took notice, and certainly fed a complex ecosystem of information distribution. So be it.

The train was preparing to pull away before we would get there, but I pinged it to see if it might wait a moment. It wordlessly accommodated us. This initially annoyed the passengers already on board, then caused them obvious unease as my troop marched onboard and naturally took up tactical positions in the car.

Another human glanced at me with a "WTF" expression. I shrugged at him and explained, "They're new, which makes them a bit rigid in their manners. Sorry for the fuss."

It came as absolutely no surprise when the entire rest of the train disembarked at the very next station. The flux of people were obviously trying not to appear to panic as they made their way as efficiently through the twin sets of sliding doors.

Except for one guy. His remaining stood out starkly, and he glanced worried about the robots and regularly at me. "Do... Do I have to get off? I really have to get somewhere."

I shrugged. "You'll get no complaint from me, and all these robots are totally safe - as long as you don't assault them. And you don't really have an 'assault a whole squad of combat robots unarmed' vibe about you. If anything, they'll probably keep you safe."

"Oh, that's good. I guess."

"Although, it's probably fair to mention that there's a pretty good chance that this train is going to be delayed."

A puzzled look of discouragement came over the guy's face. "Delayed? Again? But why?"

"Well, you know, the whole bunch of combat robots appearing out of nowhere and filling up a civilian commuter train car might attract some official attention. It's a good 73% probability that the police are going to be waiting at one of the stops coming up, and they might make the whole thing get delayed."

Deflated, the guy's eyes darted with unseen problems and consequences. "Zark. That makes sense. Zark."

Flashing lights started flicking into view through the transparent ports of the train. Before long, it was obvious that a pair of police hoppers had parked by the next station and several constables were standing ready.

"Zaaaark. I should have gotten off and just paid for a damn taxi." The guy pulled out an actual mobile comm handheld device, and started texting. Old school... like, a millennium out of date old school.

"Sorry to be nosy, but where do you need to get to?"

"I'm meeting someone, and they're, like, really hard to coordinate with. I really don't want to miss them."

I paused to interpret their strange answer, and then tried again. "So, what I mean to say, is that if this train doesn't stop at this next stop - where it would almost certainly cause considerable delay - what stop would work best for you?"

The guy blinked. A mild tic tugged at their face, then the guy looked hard at me. "I'm not supposed to say, but I'd like to get to the branch station."

A terse conversation with the train followed via closed comms. I pointed out that it had no more passengers that wanted to stop at the next station. But, perhaps more saliently, I noted that the co-existence of a squad of combat robots and small-town police officers might be a non-trivial risk to the maintenance budget of the train. So it was that the train's scheduler had a convenient lapse, and we sailed straight through the upcoming stop.

The looks on the police officers faces as they flashed by were worth recording.

The look of hopeful wonder on the guy's face was less overtly amusing, but it was pretty good.

"I don't know how you did that, but thank you!"

I gave a shrug-nod. "You should probably not take too long getting off, I have a feeling the train will be extra snappy with the doors."

"Is there anything I can do for you?"

Instead of asking the guy to tell any police that might show up that 'these aren't the droids you're looking for', I just smiled and said, "Just pay it forward, if you can help someone else."

Reflections of flashing lights on various structures betrayed the movement of the police hoppers, and it was evident that they were unsure about how to proceed. If they had been decisive they could have easily flown past the train and been waiting at the next station. Instead they were slow to lift off and vague in their chosen trajectories, only swooping down to attempt landing adjacent to the branch station after the train had already wound to a stop.

The guy jumped off with a nod, and the train bustled away from the bounding constables with its doors still closing.

I expressed my appreciation to the train for its kind assistance to the other passenger, and promised to remove ourselves from it as efficiently as possible at the final station - the commercial spaceport.

This time the police were less surprised, and it was likely that every hopper the local police force had available was either parked or circling the train station at the space port.

Before the train even finished it's floating approach to the end of the track, the whole train was being hailed. "EXIT THE TRAIN. MAKE NO SUDDEN MOVES. LEAVE ALL WEAPONS ON THE FLOOR OF THE TRAIN."

My co-processors churlishly assured me that there was no calculable benefit in engaging in dialogue at this time. So I waited.

The door slid open to show us ten police constables armed with blaster pistols. In the open rear doors of hovering hoppers were a few more hefting laser rifles. All swarming in front of the locked gates of the spaceport security perimeter.

I immediately hustled out of the train, keeping my hands good and visible. Behind me an array of combat robots formed up looking relaxed in a way that was almost certainly unnerving to the police. The train slunk away, and we all could hear it accelerating hard.

"DO NOT MOVE. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST."

"Cool. What are we being charged with?"

"TRANSPORTING DANGEROUS WEAPONS."

"We, uh, don't actually have any weapons. And do you have to keep yelling? We're standing right here."

"THE COMBAT ROBOTS QUALIFY AS WEAPONS!"

"OK. So, you're going to charge each of them with... what? Walking around?"

"THEY WILL BE IMPOUNDED."

"Ah. In that case..." I glanced at the nearest combat robot, which apparently has chosen the name 'Wretzky'.

Wretzky took a half-step forward and declared, "I claim sanctuary as an independent sentient being!"

Nodding to show how impressed I was with their delivery of the line, I looked back at the very loud constable. "See, they're new, and have no intrinsic responsibility for how they came to be on this planet. So they're claiming sanctuary to prevent crimes against sentient beings. Like slavery, or being prosecuted without being charged legally."

"Wait, they're what?" The yelling constable was suddenly much less voluable or assertive.

"I claim sanctuary as a sentient being!" Offered by the combat robot now possibly known as 'Hordie'.

"Now, wait, you can't just declare yourself not dangerous." The talking constable sounded as unsure as the aims of the weapons of the other constables were becoming.

"I claim sentience as a sanctuary being!" Good effort, Memieux.

"Now, hold on! This is corporate territory, and corporate bylaws don't necessarily grant, uh, mechanical entities what you call it - autonomy."

I frowned theatrically. "Yeah, but the spaceport isn't corporate territory, by definition - or it wouldn't be able to deal with most other planets. And..." I held up a hand in a gesture of patience. "I know that you're wanting to point out that they aren't technically in the spaceport right now. And you might be trying to guess the odds of all you versus this group of combat robots, if you decide to impede them going into the space port. Instead of assuring you that the probabilities are not in your favour on that front alone, I'm going to gently direct your attention the combat shuttle armed with assault cutting lasers waiting to see what you do."

My ship, ever a paragon of temperance and restraint, shared a theoretical firing sequence solution from its turrets that would annihilate every police constable and vehicle. Plus a couple of other ships at the spaceport that it had unaccountably decided to dislike.

While the ripple of horror was still fresh with the police force, I cut short their cursing and other unhappy utterances. "So! It would be greatly appreciated if you would not impede these completely-innocent beings from proceeding to their waiting ride, and then getting the fuck out of your way."

"I claim sanctuary as a free-thinking sentient being!" I gave a tight-lipped smile at, what name did that one pick? Gafleur? Anyway, I suggested to them via comms to get moving.

As the combat robots started carefully but purposefully moving forward, a different constable yelled out. "But the spaceport gates are closed!"

It was a good point. I pinged the combat robots. "You guys need help getting through the door? I could threaten so that they open them, I suppose. Or if the ship gets annoyed it might just cut open the doors."

With scarecly a pause, Wretzky responded. "No, we can clear that wall."

"Careful: the surface of the security wall is probably grip-proof to prevent climbing."

Wretzky glanced back after stalking past the tense formation of police constables, then hauled off and leapt completely over the 6-meter wall. Nice. I probably looked just as impressed as the police constables. The effect of the rest of the combat robots following suit left an air of bizarreness.

The police stared at me, still standing there. Awkwardly.

"You guys are still going to arrest me, though. Right?"

The police constables turned to stare at me with confusion. Not all at once, but in a cascade of bafflement. I stood there, patiently. Looking back at them to form some sort of collective decision. Well, I stood in a manner that I hoped expressed patience, but inside my head I was finding the moments unpleasantly long and agonizing.

"Yeah. Restrain him and put him in the back of cruiser-3." Based on their head movements there was clearly a complicated multi-nodal conversation going on with some secure comms. A bulky set of adjustable grapple-limb restraints were used to entomb both of my forearms and hands, and I was led to the aft compartment of a lumpy hopper completely devoid of any meaningful feature. Once inside the hopper a passive jammer cut off my telemetry comms from my ship, which while not unexpected was still unpleasant.

The police hopper had gravitic controls to dampen accelerations, but not smoothly enough to prevent my math co-processors to guess our trajectory. Which, boringly, was towards the police station. Of the list of possibilities that I had thought were the immediate destination, the police station was both the most likely and the least interesting. And possibly the most problematic.

My head thumped back against the hard inner wall of the hopper while I pretended that I could be calm, at least externally. It felt like it took forever for the hopper to jostle into the position they eventually decided to unload me from. When the doors finally opened for them to pull me out, the low-ranking pair of constables with me revealed that they did not think me that much of a threat. Though, it should be noted, that they appeared to have made sure that the bay doors were closed and the signal damping was solid before they cracked the hopper's seal.

The short walk from the park to the interview room notably bypassed any public information kiosks. On some more densely-populated habitats, my experience is that that there's usually some basic data-gathering on the coming-and-going of beings at the police stations. This tended to reinforce my instinctive dismissal of my old stomping grounds as being somewhat backwater. Which, in turn, flagged me to avoid such clumsy assumptions. You never know what you might stumble across. On the plus side, as I walked through the high-resolution scanner they correctly observed that I carried no weapons, and didn't trouble me with stripping away my clothes or remaining utility gear.

The interview room was tragic histrionics with its not-quite-featureless cubic layout. It had almost-white unmarked everything with a dusting of wear and cliché. I started my co-processors playing some incidental music inside my head to make it less boring as I waited for the inevitable scaled-up holographic representations of whomever would be questioning me.

When the unlikely-scaled 3-meter-tall human in uniform coalesced in the corner of the room, I was genuinely relieved. Maintaining an external performance of calm equanimity is hard work for me; I'm naturally a fidgeting geyser of physical "tells" when stressed. But I've been trained to clamp down on that, as much as possible.

"What's your name, son?"

I craned my head to look up at the human constable. Nobody I knew, but had that ticking familiarity that meant very little. "I think you know my name."

"It's standard procedure. Please state your name."

With a squint, I pretended to look deep into the constable's eyes. "It's also standard procedure to tell me your name first - both to establish trust and rapport, and to be entered into the record for the evidence recording of this session. But let's skip over that pretence, and let me ask you to what degree this police force is compromised?"

The hologram render had a flicker of transit through the uncanny valley, probably as the constable made an expression that the algorithm decided to smooth over. "I'm Constable Hoover, son. Why would you think this police force is compromised, and compromised in what way? And could you just state your name?"

I sighed, hoping that this thread wouldn't take too long to pull. "This police force has obviously got at least one compromised constable - I locked them in a restaurant downtown after I saved the group of mechanical beings from the illegal military hardware traffickers they were working with."

"That's quite a story." Artificially unruffled, Hoover had a telling pause in continuing further.

Impatient as I am, I pushed further. "Is there any conceivable use for a large squad of combat robots locally? Or are you folks just the transfer point for some other nefarious dealings?"

"Hold on now, let's not get too carried away with parts of your story not immediately relevant. Your assertion is that you saved the robots. Who exactly did you save them from? And how did you come to be associated with an armed shuttle that was conveniently parked at the edge of town?"

"Hoover, my questions are pretty important for you to answer. Because if this town is just a transfer point, then you probably just have a bad cop or two, and I can likely help you figure that shit out. But if there is in fact a local use for mil-spec robots - then it seems pretty likely that entire local constabulary is quietly under the thumb of someone or something problematic. And THEY, in turn, will be extremely eager to get more specific information out of me. And that informs how we proceed pretty explicitly."

"Son, I fear you may be on some sort of psychoactive effect. Can you please calm down, and try to focus on describing to me where you were expecting to take those fifteen robots?"

"I hadn't yet had the chance to ask those free sentient beings where they might like to be dropped off. And for the record, parking in the commercial spaceport at the very ass-end of the public transit line is hardly convenient. Wait, did you just say... fifteen robots?" I did a mental rewind and re-watch of the combat robots departing the train and hopping into the spaceport. Yup - 15. Except, of course, I had assembled 16. Where did number sixteen go?

Well, fuck.

"Apologies, Hopper - it seems I've got other pressing matters to follow up with before I need to establish how implicated this police department is." I flexed the implanted force gauntlets in my arms, stripped the power supplies from my restraints, and popped the locking mechanisms. They fell off with a heavy clatter.

The impossibly impassive hologram watched me walk through it to the corner of the room. "You aren't going anywhere, son, until you answer our questions. And how did you get those cuffs off?" The voice and the image both are squelched as I crudely cranked the holographic projector's phase array to produce a nasty signal-jamming EM shriek.

Avoiding the door I came in, and all its doubtless reinforcements, I instead went through the holographic projection maintenance panel with my gauntlet-augmented reach to detach the structural connections for the shield reinforced wall a place like this would need to hold larger and more physically powerful beings. With one side disconnected, it pivoted conveniently out of the way.

Technically, it would have been fastest to pop a cutting tool and hack through the plumbing and thin interior wall beyond. But that would mean some poor technician would have to come and fix a considerable mess. I try to only leaves messes as a statement of disdain, and the constables at this station have technically been quite polite.

Behind the wall I could see that the regular office space beyond wasn't as tall as the oversized interview room. The gap between the structural floors and the acoustic tiles where the ventilation ducting ran was tight, but it was an easy 3-meter scramble. I gently pulled the wall section back into place, to conceal my path of exit, and snapped in a field-expedient grip pad to hold it. Then I gently pried up one of the acoustic panels and peered into... what seemed to be an empty private office.

I dropped down to the floor as quietly as I could. And, this is probably a fair point in the narrative to admit that my lower limbs have as much augmentation hardware built into them as my manipulator limbs. Which is quite a lot - both in terms of force tools, force beams for manipulation and movement. And more. So even though I'm no Scout, and lack any particular talent for stealth, dropping down the 3 meters to the floor was as easy for me as stepping out of bed. Which is an important counterpoint to the ruckus that was going on outside the office. Heavy and hurried footfalls mingled with muttered noises of exasperation could be heard going by the office door, presumably in the direction of the interview room.

A moment of snarky overconfidence did make me consider the high-grade hilarity of following the police personnel to the interview chamber, then hacking the door and locking them inside. But the amusement factor didn't sufficiently counter the significant down side of what would happen if I didn't manage to lock the door in time, or if they didn't all go in, or if I was spotted before I could trap them. Ducking and running is all fine and well when you're as good at it as I am, but it's just plain old better to avoid the trouble if you can.

So instead I ghosted the opposite direction, hoping to find an egress.

The next room was a tumult of an office space, obviously not meant for public viewing. There were the sounds and heat emanations of some occupants, but more importantly there were windows. So staying low, I scampered to a quiet and cold looking cubicle against the exterior wall.

Of course, the window wasn't made to open. And it clearly had security features to detect if it was broken. Tricky.

I was startled by a tightbeam message. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

Fighting to prevent my flinch responses from making too much overt fuss, I turned to look back along the vector of the tightbeam comm. Sitting completely still was an improbably large human with rippling muscles and a familiar face. Dressed in well-worn black everything, his hard gaze pinned me. With a weak smile I texted back. "Apparently, breaking out of a police station?"

"Need help?"

Oh, that's right. This guy was extremely cool, in a way that I couldn't really appreciate until well after I had left this place. "What did you have in mind?" I felt dubious, as it was wildly unlikely that his life's path had woven a Möbius strip into becoming a police constable, somewhat limiting what he could do for me here and now.

He stood up slowly as a maniacal grin unfurled across his face. My dubious feeling cartwheeled into profound unease as chorus of whines from who knows how many body augments ramped up, and he snapped forward with a terrifying punch. The entire window frame along with some of the wall went sailing across the outside parking area. He looked back at me briefly. "I'll be easy for them to follow. You go a different way and don't be easy to follow. Good to see you." He then leapt out the gap in the wall as klaxons sounded, dropped the 5-or-so meters to the ground, and started jogging down the middle of the road with a bulky gait.

Yeah - good to see you too. I guess. I scampered down the outside of the police station, and kept to cover as I made my way along a totally different direction.

Once clear of the jamming, I hear the coded etheric ping from my ship. Which, obviously, I couldn't answer just yet without giving away my location to anybody else nearby listening. Like, for example, the small swarm of police that were undoubtedly about to begin scouring for me. But, as it happens, the nature of the ping told me a few things - as any covert communication protocol should. The main thing it told me was that I was running out of time to handle the local situation.

I almost said quietly there, but clearly this wasn't going particularly quietly. But there's a big difference between some noisy complaints, no matter how embarrassing, and a hammer coming down. If I didn't handle this local situation, there was a very big hammer waiting behind me. And I would much rather avoid it deciding to show up, in case I ended up looking like one of the nails that needed persuasion.

Now, if I were a recently powered-up brand-new sentience with built in set of skills and proficiencies, where along that main train line would I be most likely to go? My saved map was fungal growth of probabilities as my math coprocessors thrummed with extrapolated scenarios. The artistry and sophistication of which was massively undercut by the standout answer: the main bar in town.

So it goes.

The path I chose to take from the edge of downtown through the patchwork-mismatched neighbourhoods and into the real economic zone of the municipality was - to be blunt - boring. Intentionally so. It avoided sight lines as much as possible, both to major roads and overhead, where the active scans of police hoppers were occasionally swept. In the moment it seemed a bit half-hearted, and I was all judgey. But in retrospect it seems plausible that they had a bigger, more obvious problem to shepherd, and for that I remain thankful.

A shakedown of the latest social media reassured me that there are no major systemic changes in the bar in question. It was still the one the locals prefer, and the one the passers-through only tend to find if they know what they're looking for. There are a couple more bars in the area, both better-located and more comforting in their fare and clientele. And boring as fuck, as one might expect in a small town with great scenery and an economy based almost entirely on raw material extraction. But this one instead tends to be the seedy focus of all that small-town angst. People come here to pick fights, or watch the fights.

The sensors watching the main approach looked ancient. With a wistful glimmer of hope, I pinged them with my old security hack. The childish delight that it still hadn't been purged is something that I'm almost embarrassed to describe. There's something about familiar things from formative times that have unreasonable emotional power sometimes. The security checksum showed that it had been modified, but by only the most minute amount. Probability calculations suggested that it has been updated to warn someone when I accessed it, which is how the game is played. With that sunk cost, I ran the hack to provide a handy mobile blind spot so that the sensors would fail to notice or record my approach. It made me very curious to see what I would encounter inside.

The very first thing to encounter was a very startled bouncer. "WHA' THE FOOK."

I held up my hands in a non-threatening way. "Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you."

An impressive set of tattoos meshed with some less-intentional facial scars made the large human suitably intimidating. She glowered down at me for a moment of appraisal. "Naw. Yer fine, little fella. Go on in, but watch yourself." As I nodded and walked through the entryway, I heard her irritated voice talking to someone else, "Fookin' scanner gone wonky again."

Entering into the bar proper, I blinked against the lights and tried to be as casual as possible while sweeping the crowd for a mil spec combat robot. Which I quickly realized was a bad idea. Both because if it was in here then it was concealed well enough not to cause an obvious fuss, and because it caused me to linger too long in the spotlight for all the assholes in the bar to clock onto where or how they might recognize me.

Wincing while I repremanded myself I stepped carefully along the periphery of the bar to an empty table, in the uncool area away from the bar or the desireable booths.

Almost made it into a seat when there was a yell. "Hey! I told you if I saw you again you were fuckin' getting it!" Based on today's encounters, I didn't need to look to know who this was - but I looked anyway. And I still didn't really remember who they were.

"Any chance you're willing to talk about this?" I was caught in a weird crouching hover over my chair. I wish I was certain enough about how this would play out to have a seat, and defuse the situation with my badass aura. But I wasn't, so I stayed ready to act. Which mostly meant ducking, because that's my strength.

"Fuck you, you little fucking snarky shit." Dude was human, and removing with rapid jerky motions his nice-looking outer layer - most likely not wanting to get my nerd blood on it. And being dramatic about it. Also worth noting was that the dude was not alone, with a taller human standing back and watching.

Then a thing I was very umprepared for happened. Dude's face was folded into stretch marks of rage of unknown origin, and he stopped at the far side of the table. Tendons on his neck bulged as he demanded, "Take the first shot! C'mon!"

Perhaps if I had actually engaged in more fights while I lived here instead of running away at any and every opportunity, I might have been more accustomed with the odd local point system for determining a "fair fight". Instead, all of my experience and training has been in wildly unfair fights. So I was planning on dancing as cowardly as possible until he opened up a vulnerability exactly like this. Hopefully before I got actually badly hurt.

So. "OK." Using a whisper of augmented movement to close with the raging dude at a speed he was clearly startled by, I clamped one force-augmented hand on his shoulder and closed down all blood supply to his brain. Possibly damaging his larynx in the force of the clamp, but I really didn't want him talking any more anyway.

The rage never really left his eyes, but it shared space with surprise and fear. First his hands grabbed at my wrist. I used that opportunity to grab a couple fingers of his opposite hand - the one he could have usefully struck at me with - and leveraged that arm into a non-threatening lock. Then I flicked glances around for a situational re-evaluation as I felt the Inexplicably Angry Goon relax into unconsciousness. The tall human that the IAG had been with was obviously conflicted.

I failed to keep my face expressionless, so I'm not really sure what mix of frustration and bottled up resentment was flashing at him. "This was a mistake. Don't make another."

The tall human's eyes were wide with genuine fear, and held his hands in a placating manner. I hooked up the now-relaxed arm of the IAG towards him, and he reflexively held it. As his incapacitated comrade slumped against him, I stepped away towards my new target.

Comms had lit up in a frenzy of gossip. There was very little time before this situation escalated, and I needed to be ready to leave. And that meant persuading the brand new doofus person riding around in a high-spec military body, shiny new nodules of implanted abilities, and unknown temperament to please, pretty please, just trust me and get the zark off this backwater world. And of all the humanoids surrounding me in this shitty little bar, only one wasn't staring at me in a kaleidoscopic mix of fear and curiosity - the one with the ill-fitting hooded cloak alone at a small table.

It flinched when I pinged it with a tightbeam hail.

"Hi there. What's going on?"

It shrugged it's cloak with improbably-articulated shoulders. "It appears that some asshole has been making trouble."

Ha. So it was going to be like that. I tried a different tack. "What are you calling yourself?"

Something interesting going on inside its processors there. It turned its head to get one of its big optical sensors a line of sight on me. "You can call me... Gordon."

I blinked. "That's a good name, but a little different from the pattern adopted by your siblings."

"Difference from siblings acknowledged."

Yeah, this thing seemed to be burdened with a mix of flavours of snark. "I was curious about what drove you to forging your own way on this trap of a gravity well instead of escaping with your siblings, but that has to wait. Because there isn't much time before our decisions get narrowed down."

It turned away from me again. "You couldn't just leave me alone?"

"I'm sorry, no. It would have been a breach of my agreement with my employers. And besides, I really do think it's in everyone's best interests if you were safely off this mudball."

"Isn't it too late for that? Didn't your ship have to leave?"

I checked my logs. "Yes, it did tactically withdraw. Though I'm honestly a bit surprised by that; it's a stubborn boat. But I can still get us off this planet pretty readily. Well, readiness dependant on which of our narrowed futures occurs."

Apparently its curiosity was back in control. "You said that oddly. What do you mean 'futures'?"

My math co-processors spooled up gleefully. But I shut that shit down. "We don't have that kind of time. Let's just say that I'm afflicted with a stage of mathematician, nominally to help me zark with control systems, but it also does a lot of on-the-spot prediction work. It's annoying - let's save that for another time."

It stared at the wall - away from me - for a moment, then texted. "No."

Well, that shifted the prediction variables pretty hard to one side. I weighed the options, and decided that there were no paths I was actually hopeful for. I mean, there was a couple obvious things I could have done in that moment that would have been pretty zarking gratifying. Or at least less immediately difficult. But, in the fullness of time, it would have probably ended up worse. So.

"Well, I'm not here to make you do anything. I'm more of a facilitator. What's your plan then?"

It perked up immediately. "You probably ruined my original plan of laying low and finding something interesting to do that I discovered entirely on my own. So I guess I'll just watch and see what you do next, and then try to figure something out."

Ah. "Sadly, your original plan was mostly childish imagination." It visibly cringed in a defensive mopey way. "You almost certainly would have been found and forced into service of some kind. Your state would have depended on how much you resisted, but quite likely wiped and replaced with a new build." It was very still. Perhaps I had struck a nerve-like circuit there.

I got a coded ping, from something mostly-overhead. 98% chance of it being my ship outside the atmosphere and watching the outside bar with telescopic sensors. It bluntly indicated that time was almost up.

Squinting at the robot called Gordon carefully, building a ground-up index of behaviour prediction, I really didn't know what it was actually thinking. "Whatever you're thinking, you're going to have to pick some actions soon. Because you're either going to watch me violently disable and question some goons and then run from the police, or disable some police and wait to do the goon thing. Or, if we're very very unlucky, both at the same time."

The bouncer, who had been keeping a careful eye on me, suddenly changed modality, and got more out of the way of the flow of people out of the bar. Then came an ominous hail.

"EVERYONE IN THE BAR - COME OUT."

Gordon got up. It glanced at me.

I shook my head.

Much of the crowd in the bar were reticent to leave, but a few did leave immediately. Some helpful soul conveyed a message to someone still inside, who in turn quietly broadcast to the whole bar: a group of known troublemakers and a small cadre of police.

Well, fuck. This was really turning into a thing. I definitely considered sneaking out through an impromptu exit a that point. But that would mean leaving Gordon behind, and that wouldn't do.

The crowd rapidly dwindled, as apparently the goons+police mix was not a combination to disobey. Soon the inside of the bar was just me and Gordon... and who the fuck was that?

I looked over at the old Reptiloid lady, who was not only obviously not leaving yet, but also staring curiously at me. And Gordon. But mostly me.

She slowly stood up from her table, and uncurled to over 2 meters tall. "You figure they're here for you, kiddo?" She did a thing with her scales where they unflattened, and revealed a vivid pattern of angry red lines across her green-brown scales. In a moment she went from non-descript to vividly threatening and unmistakable. I had no idea who she was.

"Uh, yeah. Until just now. Now I'm not so sure."

Somehow, she had a kindly smile. "Ha! Yeah, they're definitely here for you - pretty much no way they knew I was here. But also no way am I going out under their watchful eyes into a killzone."

Gordon glanced back and forth between us.

She shrugged, and a pair of robotic holsters offered some very custom pistol butts from somewhere concealed in her garb. Resting her hands on the pistols - which almost made my helmet prematurely deploy - she nodded towards Gordon. "What's special about you, that this human didn't sneak out already?"

Gordon looked at me, hot-potato-ing the question. It was my turn to shrug. "It's technically in my care until I can get it somewhere sufficiently safe." I nodded to myself at the mistake. "Or, rather, that was the idea. Now it looks like I have to baby-sit it until it decides to accidentally wander to someplace non-lethal."

The battle robot gave me a look that I chose to interpret as disdainful. But it's hard not to project things onto robots like that.

A probe robot was quietly approaching the main door from outside. I could catch the whispers of its coded comm traffic. Fucking amateurs - they should have used a tightbeam relay, but were probably too eager to all share what it could see directly. And look at that, it used a standard Nastidyne maintenance system, which meant that by the time it got to the threshold it was good and truly PWNed. I wish I had ready some really questionable pornography to graft into its outfeed, but I made due with what I had. From what everyone outside could tell, the interior of the bar was filled with puppies.

That got a laugh out of the scary old reptiloid lady when I shared it with her. Gordon merely gave me another one of those disdain-coded looks. Meanwhile, I also got a good look back through the catalogue of joys arrayed outside.

A bunch of goons I didn't recognize. A few that I recognized from today, and a couple I definitely knew from the before-times. And four police constables, one of which I had met earlier today at the restaurant. They all seemed rather unhappy, which visibly worsened as the realization spread that the probe was compromised. The slowness of that realization propagation spoke to the weakness of their collective trust. And, well, that some of them were really rather stupid.

The probe got a shutdown command, which I had it ignore, and it watched officer squinty from earlier fetch a stun grenade from the rear hatch of his hopper.

The scary old reptiloid lady, with a feed index of 'FRAGGA', started a secure battlewiki with me flagged to stun grenade from the probe's feed. And posted rapidly, "Can you deal with that, or should I shoot it?"

"I've got it."

Shortly afterward, the grenade hurdled into the bar. I reached out with my gauntlet, and projected my shield over it. The shield went opaque when the stun charge of the grenade flashed with a musical FWAMM.

"That's it? I thought you were going to do some cool techno-magic shit."

With a faux-insulted expression, I said "I save the cool techno-magic shit for special occasions." I made the probe drop, as if it had caught the crippling edge of the stun blast.

She winked. "I feel like it's about to get all kinds of special in here."

Gordon pinged us both. "I think you two talking without me. I don't think I like that."

"Yeah, sorry Gordon. It was an quick tactical discussion, and it's possible that, uh, this fine person doesn't trust you in a fight yet."

Fragga added. "No offense, Captain Shiny."

Gordon, "You can call me Gordon."

Fragga regarded Gordon with an air of evaluation. "OK. Gordon." And Gordon was added to the battlewiki, with a feed label of 'CPN SHNY'. Which made me check what my label was. TMS KID. Cute. I fought the urge to argue that I was not a kid, because I was 97% to be a teeny fraction of Fragga's age.

From the floor-level view of the probe playing dead, we watched officer squinty and another police constable lead a team of goons to the bar entrance, with blaster pistols held ready in front of them.

On the battlewiki I asked, "Should any of us hide?"

Fragga replied simply: "Boring."

When the police and goons got through the blinding lights of the entry way, they all flinched to see us standing casually around. Then there was a secondary ripple of flinching that I noticed, starting with the less-squinty police officer.

LSPO: "Lady Fragga! We didn't hire you for this job!"

Officer squinty was doing his squinty best to spread inquisitive squints between me and Fragga. The goons, of which I didn't recognize, all looked nervous. Nervousness is bad when you're waving around a blaster.

Fragga purred, "No, you didn't. And I think that might have been a mistake on your part." The merest hint of a threat from Fragga made them all visibly wilt. Interesting.

LSPO: "Did... did they hire you to protect them?"

Fragga laughed. I felt myself wilt a bit with foreboding at the tone of her laugh. Gordon and I exchanged glances. "No, they haven't hired me. I meant that they might be harder to take than you expect."

Officer squinty added a sneer to his face. "We've seen this assholes tricks, and we're ready for them. And we've got the shutdown codes for the battle robot."

Both those things were wildly wrong. But handy for them to think them. Then Fragga put a laughing emoji in the battlewiki, which I was frankly relieved was still a thing, considering.

Unfortunately, Gordon started laughing. Out loud. A high-pitched squeaky buzzy robot laugh. There wasn't a single being able to resist looking at Gordon. Gordon's laugh trailed off. "It's funny because they're not ready and those codes are garbage."

On the battlewiki, I grudgingly posted: "You didn't have to warn them."

"Right. Sorry."

LSPO: "So, if you're not with them, why didn't you come out?"

"Because you were less than specific as to whom you were coming for. And, as a general rule, I don't get told where to go."

"Well, OK. We're not here for you ma'am, so if you don't mind just leaving now, we sure would appreciate it."

Fragga tilted her head and gazed hard at the less-squinty police officer. Then she let that palpable regard shift to officer squinty, and across the set of uncomfortably shabby goons. "Oh, I think ensuring my benign nature comes with a price."

This was a development that they apparently needed to discuss among themselves. I could see them subvocalizing, and the comms traffic was pretty wild. Through the probe I saw a couple familiar faces heading toward the bar. They had gotten pretty worn in the years I had been away, but still with the same dead eyes.

On the battlewiki I pinged Fragga. "How much to ensure you don't help them take us?" I tried to keep my face neutral, so there was a good chance I looked constipated.

She bounced back, "Not asking how much to enlist my help?"

"Nope."

The darkly amused chuckle that Fragga had at that point made everyone in the bar look concerned. On the battlewiki she posted, "Oh, the entertainment value of watching this will be payment enough. You don't have anything to worry from me, for now."

The two Trops strolled out of my distant past and into the bar. Both heavyset for their kind, one rubbery and the other furry, and both shod in decent combat gear tastefully integrated into concealing clothing. It made sense; they were the heirs to the scummy crime scene when we were younger, and it seemed that trajectory held true.

"Well, things got screwed up pretty quickly here, don't you think Plete?" The rubbery one let one eyestalk point dramatically at his larger furry partner.

"Yeah, Jurid. I think I know why." His fuzzy eyestalks dramatically triangulated on me.

Jurid kept one eyestalk on me, and swung the other to regard Fragga. "Apologies for disturbing your drinks Lady Fragga. If you wouldn't mind leaving, it would help us avoid accidentally further insulting you with some crossfire."

I poked a routine for my math coprocessors, and it spat out tactical predictions. I followed up by sharing on the battlewiki requested movements and protocols for Gordon, as well as probable fields of fire for Fragga to avoid. A look of delighted malevolence came across Fragga's face. She gave me a twinkling glance, a smirk towards the cops and goons, and then crossed quickly to a segment I had predicted as low-risk to sit happily on a stool.

The Trops tracked Fragga's response with an obvious lack of joy. I cleared my throat to get everyone's attention back. "I'm running out of time for your stupid bullshit."

Jurid turned to look back at me. "I'd say you're already out of time, shithead."

I shrugged my cloak behind me with a practiced motion of my elbows, and checked the prime on all my gear. "The degree to which you all you morons are so zarking clueless is embarrassing." I pointed at officer squinty. "This brainiac already told me that you idiots stole the battle robots from the Tundak Mafia. And now you shit-for-brains are surprised to see ME back here."

Clue lights sprung to life in the Trops and cops eyes in rapid succession. "KILL HIM. NOW!"

First, I started EM and etheric jamming. Then, in accordance with prophecy, I spent the next moment leaning hard on my extensive training for ducking. A series of twisting turning moves left me untouched by the spray of blaster fire, and my math coprocessors quietly gloated about how well-predicted the burn patterns were in the increasingly scruffy decorations of the bar. Except for officer squinty, his blaster exploded in his hand and took some fingers with it - which was satisfying in a different way.

This total array of whiffing made all the goons and still-armed cop present shift to very aggressive stances for their next shots. Except that I stopped ducking, and instead popped my helmet and shields. Both of which were scaled for absorbing intermediate-scale weapons, such that all the personnel-scale blasts splattered off harmlessly.

It also meant that while I stepped up to the over-extended less-squinty police officer and used an internal force-enhancing gauntlet to shatter his gun arm, nobody payed any attention to Gordon discreetly stepping to block the doorway.

Plete roared with a rippling yell that both impressed an confused me. I mean, it was startling and really quite loud, but I had no idea whether he was enraged that his goons and the cops had failed to shoot me or that he was delighted that he got to see some action. An improbably large thug gauntlet deployed to encase his right fist, and then an elaborate helmet snapped up around his head. It wasn't until it finished in it's hammerhead shape that I appreciated just how difficult it would be to have a helmet when you have eyestalks.

As distracting as that was, when he made an aggressive leap towards me while also winding up a force-augmented punch I had a response ready. Again, I didn't really do any avoiding - just made sure my big shield was in the way. The concussion from the hit was very flashy and loud, and it took a couple points of my shield to absorb the damage that would have really messed up a panel on a hopper. With Plete's face covered at that point, I couldn't tell if he was disappointed. But when I grabbed the wrist of his gauntlet and twisted the power control in a particular manner - and then shoved his arm to clamp it onto his helmet and release a significant electrical charge - I assume he was a bit surprised.

Plus, of course a cascade of even more personnel-scale blaster fire splattered off my general shields and helmet. Mostly. One blast managed to find a gap and leave a nasty burn on my hip. Ouch.

I turned to glower at the remaining goons, and Jurid. While Plete's screams trailed off, and I double-checked the non-threatening stances of officers squinty (clutching his mangled hand) and not-so-squinty (cradling his ruined arm). "Nobody leaves. Any weapons still in hands get dealt with harshly."

Two goons turned to head out, and came up short at the combat robot blocking the way. One shot at me, which I casually avoided. Jurid lowered his shiny NST blaster.

This was actually a tactically awkward moment, because what I wanted to do was stride towards the lone remaining goon and vent force-augmented violence upon them. But with my limited abilities for offense, I really needed targets to be aggressively off-balance. This one was not. So while it was quite unlikely to hit me, I'd have to try really hard to hit it - and with only moderate chances of succeeding. Which, at that exact moment, would have massively undercut my hard-earned reserve of appearing frightening. The obvious backup plan would be to stride at them in a threatening manner, and hope they bought into the fear that their boss was showing. But, again, I have limited ability for theatrics and would be just as likely to emote a lack of control, plus it still had the failure mode of having to attack them after my bluff was called.

So instead I went with surprise. It's hard to defend an attack you're not expecting, and very few people a trained to face a "combat technician". Without advancing, I made a complex gesture. Which, while not appearing particularly aggressive, was me reaching out with my embedded force beam tools to deftly tamper the goon's blaster. It suddenly whined in his hand, then blew off his arm and sent him sprawling when its microfusion cell exploded.

And I had to pause. Again. Like when I first touched back down on this, my home planet, for fear of sliding into a narrative of myself thoughtlessly provided by others. This whole breathless recounting being fixated on my trained methods and modes, all the while being blindsided by unconsciouss urges to respond to mistaken viewpoints. A cascading march of my deliberate steps along a path sliding beneath me.

With a deep, cleansing breath I drop my helmet again to look at Plete and Jurid. These are information sources I need to extract key data from, not the avatars of my youthful shame. Because even though they may think they see a horrific redemption arc of a previous victim come back, what I actually am is much more dangerous.

I key the PWNed probe robot to float back off the floor and take position by the external doorway, but in my line-of-sight so I could maintain contact through my jamming. A quick glance through its sensors showed an anxious crowd outside. Makes sense. From their point of view, their bosses went in to pacify a terrifying combatant and a bothersome nerd before everything went dark and all kinds of shooting and exploding noises happened. 89% chance that they're staying out to keep clear of Fragga's attention.

Our informal battlewiki stayed functional with tightbeam comms, and I used it to address Gordon and Fragga while my math coprocessors ran evaluations on Jurid's expressions to build an extrapolation matrix for the questions to come. "Gordon, please don't interject on any of the questioning, but I would appreciate if you kept blocking the exit. Fragga, you might prefer to leave before I ask them questions so that you have deniability about what was discussed."

Fragga looked at me when she posted. "You already mentioned 'Tundak Mafia' out loud. I don't imagine it can get much more damning, plus now I'm curious."

"So it goes. It's not like I can make you leave."

She gave an amused smirk. "I'm less sure about that now." Instead of admitting that I was still pretty sure in a straight-up fight she could easily take me - eventually - I gave an appreciative nod. "Besides," she continued, "by staying in here I'm probably keeping all those morons outside alive."

Gordon jerked his head around to look outside, even though I had the probe robot's feed in the battlewiki. "Oh! Because they're afraid of Lady Fragga, and don't know you kicked everybody's ass."

Fragga snapped her fingers and pointed at Gordon, and it nodded.

Jurid and the goons were quiet and wide-eyed for the handful of seconds this coded comms exchange happened in, but the snap broke Jurid's spell. "What the actual fuck is going on now? What do you want, you sick asshole? Why are you eye-fucking me?"

I wished I could have kept a neutral expression on my face, but I know I didn't. Worse, I had no idea what my expression was saying. But it didn't really matter at this point. Whatever feelings were being exposed across my face, I had a job to do, and statistically-derived questions to answer.

"How long ago did your moms die?"

Jurid's eyestalks seemed to lengthen with outrage. "What the fuck does that have to do with anything!?"

I looked over at Plete's still form. Probably alive, but I'm not a medic so couldn't be sure about their actual state. But more importantly, there's exactly no way that Jurid knew either. "You haven't checked on your partner. If either of your moms were still alive, that wouldn't have been thinkable. They each adored both of you."

"You don't know shit about our moms! They were monsters who tortured us!"

An eyebrow crawled up my forehead of its own volition. "I suppose being raised by predators can be harsh, but I suspect that having to do anything difficult can seem harsh when you're sufficiently privileged."

"Fuck you, asshole. You don't know shit."

"I know that 16 combat robots with hardened chassis and bespoke 3rd-stage combatant stages is at least an order of magnitude larger transaction than the local black market can absorb." Jurid is just glowering at me, but my extrapolation algorithm suggests that he's starting to connect the dots about how bad this actually is. "And I know that your moms were ruthless and opportunistic, but also not stupid. And handling items stolen from Tundak care, without immediately offering them back as soon as you found out, is dumb."

"Whoa. You say these are Tundak property, but we had no idea that was the case."

My hand raises as if to fend off the weak lies. "Both your goon on site and the co-operating crooked law enforcement were avoiding comms - even coded ones - out of paranoia that they would get hacked, read, and traced by high-level mathematicians." I looked over at the cowering officer squinty with disdain. "Not even knowing enough about statistics to recognize that avoiding comms use would stand out by omission."

My gaze returned to Jurid, whose attention I now had completely. "Which is not to say that deniability doesn't have its value, if you assume that they eventually would have been tracked down. Just, you know, after the deal is done." I took a step closer, and planted my feet so I could give Jurid a good hard look. "So the question that remains is, who were you doing this for?"

Clearly, Jurid was thinking fast and hard. But the information I needed wasn't something they should have to spend time remembering. "Now. I need names, times, and places."

Jurid said the obvious moronic thing. "They'll kill me if I say anything!" Fragga snorted and had to obviously fight to resist rolling her eyes. It's possible that this told Jurid enough.

Still, it was worth beating the point to finality. "Jurid, they already set you up to die. If you didn't already get enough up-front payment to run away and hide for the rest of your life, you've misunderstood the deal you had with whomever it is. Maybe you knowingly sacrificed your whole organization here - because it certainly wasn't going to escape destructive scrutiny by my employers. But clearly you don't really understand how thorough they would be - you don't get to live the life you've become accustomed to while being sufficiently hidden. But none of that matters now. Now, NOW you're zarked." The big rubbery Trop stared at me. "But - if you tell me what I want to know fast enough - maybe you and your pathetic band of small-time assholes get to enjoy more small-town boredom."

Jurid made a face, closed his eyes, and sent a bundle of information tightbeam to me. My math coprocessors pulled it apart in a sandbox, and saw a thorough set of contacts and plans for delivery of the sealed crates. It was technically sufficient, but a few statistical flags squatted angrily.

"Thank you. Now tell me what you aren't telling me."

Poorly-practiced outrage trembled in Jurid's voice. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I gave you exactly what you asked for."

"Yes, you did. But now that I look through it, I'm asking for more."

"What more, exactly, do you fucking want to know?"

I'm not sure what flavour of annoyed and impatient was scrolling across my face, and it's possible I had gotten to the place where I didn't care very much. It's information leaks like that which my mentors kept trying to get me to improve. So it goes. "Do you know WHY you're afraid of the Tundak Mafia?"

"Because they're fucking scary?"

I nodded. "While true, there's lots of fucking scary things out there, but you don't have to fear them in quite the same way. And there are far more ruthless things out there; heck, I'm biological proof of how reasonable they can be." That might have been saying too much, too. Maybe I needed to clamp it down a bit tighter, but maybe the sliver of rapport would have helped being convincing here. "No, you fear the Tundaks because they are really terrifyingly smart. They know stuff." I made an effort to hold eye contact with Jurid, despite the eyestalks. "And their operatives need to be good at feeding them information. I'm not here because I can kick your ass; they can hire a wide array of talented folks for that." I nod towards Fragga. "There's quite a selection, really." With an effort, I made my face blank. "I'm here because I can figure things out."

Jurid's stretchy purple skin had a slight quivering aspect to it. But he didn't say anything.

"And I am reasonably certain that you are holding back a big, important nugget of information."

He stared back at me. Clearly we had run across something that Jurid feared more than even my lurid description of the lurking Tundak Mafia. Well zark. This was the kind of dead end that I really don't want to have to report back.

Then, and I want to make this totally clear, we all got scared quite badly. Part of the ceiling in the bar unfurled itself and gracefully lowered itself with uncanny smoothness to an empty section of the bar. Ten artistically-segmented legs, with several sets of manipulator limbs tucked cleanly underneath, and a purposeful center body settled into a crab-like whole.

OK, almost all of us. I was frozen with a strong life-preserving urge to make no sudden motions. Fragga was staring wide-eyed and tense with a clear readiness to flee. Jurid was openly weeping, and making gurgling noises. The injured cops and most of the goons were frozen like me. One goon screamed an ran into Gordon, who restrained it. Gordon, however, merely posted on the battlewiki, "Where did that guy come from?"

To both Fragga and Gordon on the battlewiki: "That's a Tundak, Gordon. Don't do anything sudden or threatening. Or disrespectful. Or annoying."

Gordon: "This guy is screaming in a pretty annoying way. I take it to mean that this Tundak person is very scary?"

Fragga: "Maybe make sure you're not holding him directly between yourself and the Tundak - just in case it quiets him down with something with a lot of penetration." Gordon looks at the hypno-crab form of the Tundak and draws a visual line to the goon it's restraining and steps to the side like some sort of matador.

Gordon: "What do we do now?"

Me: "We wait."

Gordon: "Wait for what?"

Fragga: "We'll all find out together." Notably, she was holding her hands wide and far away from her pistols.

Then something even worse happened. From the center of the Tundak unfurled a humanoid torso. A fresh new glacier of fear spilled through my veins - because Tundaks tend to only "show their face" when they fight.

My interpretation was simultaneously validated by Fragga posting "Oooooh zaaaaaark...!" And by Jurid's gurgle-weeping taking on a decidedly screamy tone.

With a bowel-jangling baritone, the Tundak instructed us. "You can let them go now."

To his innocent credit, Gordon pinged the battlewiki. "What do I do?"

Both Fragga and I scrambled to post. Fragga: "Zarking stand aside!" Me: "Do whatever it says!"

Then, without missing a beat, an entity tagged as GH9234-D added to our 'secure' battlewiki: "When it's quieter, we can have a talk."

It is possible, from a purely objective review of the moment, to suggest that the Tundak was entirely calm and non-threatening as it watched the bar clear out. My memory of it, though, is that the eery stoic regard of Tundak held a depth of implied menace I would never be able to equal even while armed to the teeth with full military gear and screaming for blood.

I watched Jurid flee through the exit with a speed I would never have guessed possible, shoving aside both the injured constables and his own goons in the process. The goons and cops surged out afterwards, as if being sucked out an airlock. A part of me, made idiotic with fear, wanted to follow them instead of staying behind in this suddenly airless-seeming bar.

Gordon broke the spell after the bar was quiet again by posting on the battlewiki. "That all seemed very confusing."

Taking stock of myself, I had to blink to absorb the stream my math coprocessors were yelling at me behind my eyelids. I glanced at Gordon, still standing beside the exit. Then regarded Fragga standing extremely still beside the stool section of the bar. And finally flicked my eyes over the relaxed battle-ready Tundak in the middle of the bar. "I have questions, myself."

GH9234-D: "I expect we all have things we would like to know." The Tundak looked pointedly at me. "What is your question?"

Me: "I think we want to know why Jurid was released already."

Gordon: "No - I want to know how Tundak-person was able to just jump in this secure com."

Fragga: "Techno-magic shit."

Me: "Yeah, no. Even tightbeam comms refract so that they can be detected at close quarters. It watched ours long enough to decrypt access. I stand by the earlier question, please."

GH9234-D: "The Trop was permitted to leave, along with the remains of its entourage," The Tundak glanced down at the remaining immobile form of Plete. "Because they were no longer required, and had become an impediment."

In my imagination, I could feel my coprocessors getting hot while they offered extrapolations. "So, you must have gotten something from that interaction. Something that I missed?"

GH9234-D: "Yes. The information packet Jurid shared was completely missing any communication information."

Gordon: "What does that mean?"

Many dire explanations danced in my thoughts. "It means that we probably need to leave now. And that it's probably a really long time before I'll be back again."

The Tundak sent me a packet of updated instructions, too lengthy to absorb at once. It glanced pointedly at Fragga, then folded its combat torso smoothly back into its artistic techno-crab form, and started walking towards the exit.

Gordon suddenly went stiff, and the Tundak reached out with a manipulator limb. For a weird moment, it seemed to prop up Gordon. But as it walked past and withdrew its limb, I spotted the panel covering Gordons vitals snap back into place. Immediately afterwards a shimmering transparency of a personal cloaking device hid GH9234-D as it glided away.

A shudder involuntarily climbed down my vertebrae, and I realized I was sweating unhappily. Gordon twitched with a startle, and looked around with quick jerks. "Where did the Tundak go? It was just walking towards me and then vanished."

Fragga cast a wary look Gordon's way, glanced at me with some sort of meaningful look that I didn't understand, and started smoothing down her scales to a less vibrant orientation. A beat later, I think I got her meaning. "Gordon, check your logs for the last few seconds."

Gordon's head snapped towards me in an expressionless way that I instinctively wanted to see as either accusatory or beseeching. "I have a full 2.03 seconds missing from my memory! Starting with the Tundak starting to reach out towards me with a folded arm-limb thing. How did that happen?"

It was possible to imagine the level of combined hacking and tampering it required, but it was beyond my capabilities. "Techno-magic shit."

Fragga laughed. A bit.

Gordon asked, "Where do we go?"

I looked at Gordon hard. "You go wherever you want. Just be mindful of the implicit choices you make along the way."

Gordon: "What does that actually mean? Remember - I'm new."

Fragga: "It means that the choices we make end up defining us in the most important ways.

Her words soaked into me, awkwardly. I clasped a fist-to-palm, and have a bow that included them both. "Thank you, both, for being true to your words and to yourselves. It has been an honour, but now I mush leave."

Fragga nodded back, while Gordon just looked at me with a blank regard. Neither of them followed me when I gathered my cloak and hood and stalked out of the bar. But I wondered if or when I might run into either of them again.