Chapter Nineteen Aaron

In the morning, Vaun formally introduces Aaron and Arma to all of the techs that work in the lower prep bays. He already knows most of them, but she doesn’t. Vaun is really only there to hand the two of them off to the crew members, who are the more experienced space veterans out of all the guards. It’s fairly obvious Vaun is in no mood to instruct him anymore, let alone Arma. Don had something else going on, so they’re not going to be getting a pep-talk they were promised.

When Vaun takes off, all the techs start to circle around. They weren’t going to ask any of the actual questions they wanted to until he left. Everyone’s gotten the jist of what kind of robots they are by now, but no real details.

A smaller guy in an older jumpsuit he’s not met yet steps forward. “I heard you guys can’t be killed. What’s the deal with that?”

Aaron doesn’t even get to answer before another tech cuts in. “You can’t kill a robot dummy, they’re not alive. You just download em again.”

Someone else adds in. “I heard you were designed to act like people, so people can’t tell you’re robots until it’s too late, and that you murdered all the people that made you when you escaped Werker.”

Arma looks at Aaron with an expression of disbelief. He puts his face in his hand and sighs. There’s definitely going to be a few things he’ll have to get straight with them. He assumed the crew would’ve all been told the real story by Sy or someone months ago, so stupid stuff like this wouldn’t get spread around.

“Ok, you guys. I thought someone would’ve told you about all this when they… brought us in, but I guess not. So, first, we didn’t actually kill anyone from Werker. Well, anyone that was a… still human. However a couple of our friends who worked with Valeire at Werker did get killed. The rats are the ones who did that.”

Arma casually adds in “I killed a guy from Werker.”

He closes his eyes. “Yes, I suppose you did Arma. I forgot about Ray. For those of you that don’t know, that was Mikel’s life-long best bud, so please don’t run that around, ok.”

Shrugging her shoulders, Arma can’t help herself. “Ray killed Aaron, and that’s when we brought him back as a robot.”

He shorter guy’s eyes pop open. “I knew it! Mind copying right? That shit is way illegal. So you guys were people then, and you died?”

He does his best to be patient with the group. “Yeah, I lost my life, oh, I don’t know, maybe three, four months ago. Like less than a week before we showed up here. So yeah, I’m pretty fresh.”

As if bragging, Arma tries to wow them. “I’ve actually been murdered twice now. Five pretty much has too.”

“Well? Did it work then? Are you… you? What’s it feel like?”

It’s a bit of a sore subject for him, and he feels like being a smart-ass, but he decides to stay nice. “Right. So, the physical structures of our brains were recreated absolutely identically, down to the single synapse. So, depending on if you’re religious or not, we aren’t merely copies of who we once were. We are who we were, just in a different material form is all.” He sighs, and his shoulders slump. “At least that’s what I tell myself.”

As if straight from Five’s mouth, Arma takes over and helps them along. “If we end up getting killed, or say if our brains get destroyed, then that’s all the same as dead. Sure, we update our memory drives every now and again, but what doesn’t get saved would be lost for good. Unlike Aaron, Five and I didn’t get to keep our memories from our original lives. Our pasts are gone.” She puffs a breath across her flat palm, as if there were dust on it. “Not even the people who made us knew who we were. Clean slate.”

A smartass from the back speaks up. “So, did you kill all those people or what? All that shit on the news, and the internet, where like a hundred people got fukin massacred, that was you guys right?”

His face and tone pretty much let them know that story time is over. “Yeah, that was us.” He looks over at Arma, and she looks at him, knowing what he’s thinking.

“No one fucks with our family and gets away with it.”

“Now, you guys can work in some of these fun questions as we go along, but we’ve got to get moving on this thing.”

The smartass makes a joke again, but only a few people chuckle. “You need us to leave for that?

When Aaron looks like he’s going to go over and teach the guy some manners, the others start to posture a little. It seems they’re not the only one disgruntled by all his and Arma’s special treatment. He takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out. He can’t afford to run them all off on day one. It’s not good optics for him or Arma.

It seems the shorter guy, a senior guard by the age of his uniform, means to air his grievances. “So what makes the two of you so special anyway? I’ve been waiting for the green light to pilot for like ten years now. Then you show up, get your own damn ship and everything, in like a month. This is some bullshit”

Arma has no problem putting the man in his place. She’s a woman, and they wouldn’t dare cry to Sy about her intimidating them. “For one, we’re bigger than you, we’re stronger than you, and we can think faster than any of you. Way faster. Your outdated squishy little brains basically work on saltwater, and ours are pure electrical. We are many orders of magnitude faster that you are. We can move between your every thought. That, and it takes a bit more than a mere fart to kill us. Moving on?”

“I heard you’re like… what, three years old? What-ever.”

“You know what, you little shit!” She throws her hands up, and then points over to the small frame of the new shuttle. “You wanna do this? You wanna go all the way to Mars in that… coffin, it’s all yours. Cause that’s where this company is headed. It’s all yours. Gabriel’s got a new emergency brain processing kit he wants to try out anyway, and Five’s been egging to chop someone new up. Fukin brat.”

Aaron can’t hide his smirk this time. She gave them all the choice, but no way any of them are going to take it. He didn’t know she knew that much about how their brains work. There’s no doubt she’s a quick learner, and pays attention. She probably knows way more than he does, with how she and Five share everything.

Feeling the pressure to change the subject, the crew finally moves on to what they were supposed to be doing, familiarizing them with the main tactical shuttle there in the bay. The thing is big, but nothing like commercial launch shuttles. It’ll still fit on the larger of the two flatbed trucks, but not the tube at the mountain launch site. The thing is all black like everything else, has no windows, but has a much longer sleek body that is more flat than round. The stubby wings that taper out wide towards the back of the craft are folded upwards in the back so it can be moved around and still fit down the road.

Everyone, including him and Arma, are already in their clean lightweight jumpsuits, so they can go inside the vehicle, but only Selner will be guiding them in. He’s quite stern about how careful the two of them have to be before letting them climb inside. As they move on in, he points everything out for them. While most of the cab is traditionally a dull black, there are dull yellow light strips where they can step or hold onto, and red ones lining other things to stay clear of.

Compared to the smaller short-mission craft he was in last time, this one has a lot more going on inside, and yet somehow, even less free room inside. A lot of the bulk must be occupied by its weapon systems or something. He thought the thing looked intense on the outside, but it’s completely nuts in the cab. This ship is clearly for kicking some serious ass.

Like the other shuttle, the tidy cargo lockers are in the back, closest to the airlock. The doors on the cabinets are all clear, showing what’s inside of them. What immediately catches his eye, is the extensive arsenal onboard. Not only is there a tall cabinet stuffed with six standard rifles, but there’s another even bigger one with special weapons like the arc gun inside. Everything looks like it’s seen some use too. He imagines its crew storming out the back in suits, rifles all shouldered. It gives him an intense feeling.

There are six seats crammed inside without any aisle space in between them. They are hardly seats at that, but look more like something a crazy person would be restrained in. There are big harnesses all over them and pivoting displays everywhere else. The two pilot seats way up in front of the narrow nose are in tandem while the rear four are in side by side pairs.

Gary shows them how to get forward over the seats. He grabs one of the wide yellow bars on the ceiling and swings his legs up over the top of the seat and then drops down in it. He does the same thing over the next row and then waits for them to do the same. “The ceiling is the normal avenue for moving about, especially in flight. Do not kick anything”

When the two of them carefully do the same and drop down in their seats, Selner holds his hand out, for them to stay put. He’s not about to let them into the more advanced seats. The two they’re in are pretty basic, with only one monitor in front of them. The other four stations have controls and displays all over them. The front two seats have a little bit of room around the sides of them, but none overhead, since they’re crammed up front in the shallow nose of the ship.

With one flick of a switch, Gary turns on the cab window displays that wrap most of the way around the cab, like the other shuttle had. Arma turns about quickly, amazed at being able to suddenly see outside all around the shuttle. The displays are so clear and crisp, it looks like they’re made of glass. Arma waves at the other techs outside, not understanding that they can’t see them inside. Gary looks at her funny. He lets it slide this time, and continues on with showing them the ship.

“Alright, so, being the main pilot isn’t all that bad. You just kind of fly, and that’s important enough on its own. Often enough, that alone can take all of your concentration. The second pilot tho, that’s the another thing. Most importantly, they have to monitor everything the pilot can’t see with their own two eyes, and often times run the guns. If the pilot is incapacitated, they’ll have to take over flying too.”

Aaron sits up and looks at all the controls on the seats directly in front of him and Arma. “What about these guys?”

“They’ll have the same visibility on the tracking systems. Often times, there’s so much going on, you need a couple people to really be on top of it all. If needed, the copilot’s extra duties can be split up between these two if piloting gets crazy. Depending on who’s in the back, they might be responsible for the non-line-of-sight weapons too, like rockets n stuff. There’s more to what we do than guns and stuff though. The back seats would more normally be operating the tow cable, reentry gear, or work-stuff like that.”

“That’s sounds like an awful lot to do. It doesn’t usually take four guys to run the show does it? Isn’t any of this stuff automated, like incoming object tracking and notification?”

“It’s not always a shit show. It’s maybe fifty-fifty with this ship, depending on what orbital plane we’re in. It can get pretty busy. We’ve been attacked by multiple missiles at once a couple times. Anyone will take a jab at us if they think they have a chance, but no one likes to get their ass kicked after a failed ambush. Getting weapons in space is not cheap, and no one is going to risk it all just to pick a fight they know they’ll lose.”

“What about mines? Has anyone left mines out there for you? They’d be small.”

“Sure they have, but we’ve only come across maybe two or three, ever. Mines are sloppy, and the risk is pretty discouraging. Even fairly low orbit is extremely vast, being many times broader than the surface of the earth. You’d need millions of mines to make a useful boundary. No one would put up with that kind of shit. Even our enemies know to keep things tidy up there. We may push our luck sometimes, but we have an absolutely flawless record. No bystanders have ever been affected by our ops. We are clean, if not the standard.”

While they’re alone with Gary, and the others can’t hear them, Arma wants to know what he and the others really think. “Gary, me and Aaron both know we’ve jumped the line and all, but…”

Gary waves her off. “Look, I’ve been watching you guys, and even Five. None of you are little shits. You we’re right to say what you did. The two of you were made for this. Aaron, after hearing about you’re first snafu with that robot thing, I knew we could count on you. You guys are gonna do well. And if not, well, your ship costs a hell of a lot less to make and launch than any of the others anyway. You might learn the hard way if you have to. None of us get to learn the hard way.”

After they take their time to carefully climb back out, the crew leads them through the other three bays to explain how things normally go. The smaller ship he and Mikel were just in is being prepped again for the next mission to come. There are four shuttles total, usually one in three of the four bays at any given time, while the other is out in the field.

The shuttle in the third bay is going through a routine maintenance overhaul. Most of the seals on its internal systems, as well as some of the underside refractory is being replaced. A man and a woman are pulling the two rear ion engines out for inspection while another tech is replacing a small shield panel on the upper side of the hull. When he sees them walking through, he hops down off the wing and come over to them. The man doesn’t introduce himself, but instead points over to a big rolling toolbox at the rear of the shuttle. “Is that yours?”

His eyes drop as he nods with terribly guilty look on his face. His knife is standing up with its point stuck in a panel identical to the one the man was replacing. “Yeah, it’s mine.”

Arma looks at him with huge eyes. “Aaron, what did you do?”

The tech only glares at him for an awkwardly long moment before stomping off to finish his work. Everyone else is looking at him with unimpressed looks as well. Selner goes over and works the big tungsten knife out of the panel and brings it back with him. Arma didn’t even do anything, yet she still looks a little ashamed when Gary hands it over. “We’ve all kept this between ourselves, but yeah, this is one of those moments where we get to say you owe us.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’ve got my ass now. Thanks for not tattling. He sure does feel stupid about doing what he did. He could only imagine an entire crew going down in flames because there was a knife stuck in the back of their ship the whole time. If Vaun, Sy, or Don ever found out, it would’ve been really bad.

When they move into the fourth bay, where his shuttle is. It looks like someone has already started opening up some of the stretch wrapped crates. The main body frame has been set in the middle of the floor alone. The thing looks kind of like the fossilized skull of some giant prehistoric monster. The monolithic skeleton is thick and heavy duty.

At fifty feet, it’s almost as long as the main shuttle, but with half the bulk to it. It could even be considered to be a small craft. Including the long paper-airplane looking wings across the bottom of it, the ship is only going to be about fifteen feet wide. The fuselage couldn’t be more than ten feet tall at its thickest point in the back. There’s no way they’ll be able to stand up inside of it.

He can already imagine himself losing his mind. At best, the ship might have as much room inside as a minivan. The rectangular airlock door, sitting unwrapped on its own pallet, doesn’t even look big enough for a suit with a booster pack on it to get through. There are so many screens and displays stacked up in one of the boxes, he’s not sure where they could all possibly fit.

By the shape fo the frame, he imagines the shuttle looking something like a giant spear head. The bulky inner skeleton is made of something black, and has hundreds of gold colored rivet nuts inserted all over it. When he inspects the hefty frame material up close, it looks and feels like some kind of reinforced plastic. “What is this stuff?”

Selner peers at it closely, angling his face to see the subtle shimmer within its surface. “It’s hydrogenated silicon boride, the same stuff our suits are made of, but solid. It’s a structural radiation barrier, and it can actually handle bullets pretty well too.” He watches Aaron sliding his hand across the stuff. “Must be nice to be able to touch things without having to have gloves on.”

After walking around one of the larger crates, they find Don standing amongst everything with a screenboard, displaying the shipping manifest. He’s making sure they’ve received everything. Already familiar with him, Don only formally introduces himself to Arma, welcoming her to the team. “I’ll be training the two of you myself, and making sure you’re every bit as bad ass as SSS expects. Well… as soon as you finish building this ship, alone.”

Both he and Arma look at one another with raised eyebrows. It’ll take them a year to do that. He wonders if it’s Don’s way of cock-blocking them out of becoming pilots. He said it so nonchalantly too. Arma doesn’t seem to think one thing of it. If anything, she looks even more excited. She has no idea what it’s going to take to build a space faring vehicle from scratch. The idea is preposterous.

The techs all gather around with their arms folded, waiting for Don to maybe say something important. It’s not every day a new shuttle shows up. They know what kind of a job he and Arma have ahead of them. There’s a few smirks among them, but most of the group is there encouragingly. With perfect timing, Arma perks up and spoils the smug looks of the two less happy techs.

“I’m really excited. When do we get to start?” She looks around at everyone as if it’s the best thing in the whole world.

It reminds him that he needs to learn more patience. If he’s going to live forever, he can’t be wanting everything to move along so quickly. It’s becoming quite a conundrum. The shorter woman with light brown curly hair, who was working on the engines in the other room, walks up to the two of them carrying an armload of things in a box. Don waves everyone else off and introduces her.

“This is Britney. She oversees all of our quality control, logs everything, and signs off on it.” He winks at her “If it doesn’t have her signature, I won’t fly it.”

Britney leads them over to the makeshift computer station set up on a flat-top rolling tool cabinet, and plops the box down on it. “Here’s all your stuff. You’ve got parts lists, digital schematic, specs, job travelers, all of it.” She looks up at them, as if they’re physical manifestations of a migraine. “Keep this stuff in order you guys.”

She pushes the toolbox over to the nearest wall, loads up the holographic plans, and walks the two of them through navigating the build schedule. “Aaron, I’ve heard you’re at least mechanically savvy, so this shouldn’t be too bad. It’s just nuts n bolts, same as everything else. You won’t have to do any riveting or anything like that, it’s a complete kit. I am here to help you all the way till it’s done, but don’t ask me any questions until you absolutely cannot figure it out on your own.”

Don puts his hand on her shoulder and explains some of it to them. “You’ll be building this thing in short stages. Each stage needs to be inspected by her and approved, before you move forward. You’ll kind of be building it from the inside out, so you’re old work will continually get buried by panels and whatnot. Trust me, you don’t want to have to start all over again because you missed something early on.”

Aaron kind of has a blank look on his face. “How come no one else is working with us? I’m not whining, but shouldn’t the others see everything too, while it’s all apart?”

Don shrugs. “It’s kind of the way we do it. The others will poke in from time to time, to look, out of curiosity, but they won’t help you. If they want you to explain something to them, please do. Doing it this way is kind of tradition. Sy, Vaun, and I bought the last three ships like this, and we built them ourselves. We know where every little wire goes, and where every single seal is. When you’re all on your own up there, you’re gonna be glad you do too. Especially on long, or dangerous missions, there’s a good chance something’s going to happen. If you can’t fix it, you’re dead. You need to know this thing in and out, like it’s your lover.”

Britney’s eyes dart up at Don, after his lude comment, and gives him a look. While the other ships are apart, the techs will sometimes come out and get you, to show you their systems too. You need to understand all of our ships, not just this one. You guys can’t fuck this up ok. We’re putting you on the front lines like this because we trust that you’ll be able to keep your crew alive better than anyone else.”

Don is less safety oriented, and shares a business oriented view like Sy does. Don’t get yourselves killed, cause that’s a million dollars. Don’t get the ship destroyed, cause that’s way more than a million dollars. And if you blow it on a customer mission, it could ruin us.”

Feeling rather overwhelmed, he looks at Arma, who is still as pleased and confident as ever. He imagines what she might say. It makes him almost laugh, thinking about it. “Well, if these knuckle draggers can do it...”

Don doesn’t laugh, because he knows they’ll deliver. “Alright. I’ll leave you to it then.”

After Don leaves, Britney spends a little bit more time with them, orienting them on the shop’s rules, equipment, and eticut. When they circle back around to their little computer station, she pulls up the first stage of the build for them, and steps back. “Remember, don’t go past the first stage. When you’re done, come and get me. I’ll have to inspect all of your work, then you can start the next stage.” She puts her hands on her hips, trying to think if there’s anything she’s left out. “Don’t drop any damn parts or break anything ok. Good luck.”

As soon as Britney leaves, he turns to Arma, who is so pleased with herself, and lets out a long breath. As anxious as he is, he still counts himself rather lucky. The two of them will be able to work together around the clock without ever tiring. It’ll be the easiest way for them to make a real name for themselves. He could use a good long project like this anyway, to keep his mind off of what happened between him and Valerie. He’s damn glad Arma will be there with him through it all too. She’s his best friend, and he wouldn’t want to do it without her. He smiles at her and hugs her across her side. “Well, let’s see what we’ve got, huh.”

Not wanting to sound cocky, he didn’t tell Britney that he’s more than familiar with the technical format of all the instructions. Everyone thinks he’s just some touchy brute, but what they never seemed to quite understand, is what caliber of a robotics expert he was before all of this. Assembling everything will simply be a matter of labor hours.

As the two of them work, needing to explain every little thing to Arma does slow them down quite a bit, but he quickly finds that it’s what he enjoys the most. He absolutely loves talking with her, and teaching her everything he knows. She’s so enthusiastic and curious, it keeps a big smile on his face the whole time. Whenever he catches her eyes in his, he wants to kiss her, but with everyone else around, he feels a bit awkward about it. It’s probably too soon.

About every hour, throughout the day, Britney wanders into their bay to check on them, and putters around. She was probably expecting them to at least have some dumb questions right away, and was willing to hold their hands for a few hours, but they never end up asking her anything. They haven’t come across anything he would call remotely sophisticated yet. So far, most of what they’ve been doing is routing cable track and mounting brackets. Out of curiosity, they’ve even looked a ways ahead, to see what’ll be coming.

It’ll have some rather oversized ion engines for sure, and a myriad of interesting generative units for onboard power. Dealing with those will be quite a few sections away though. The amount of redundancies they’re already finding are encouraging. Even during a catastrophic damage event, it looks like they should be able to keep things going one way or another.

Since their ship came without most of its life support systems, they do have Britney walk them back and forth to the other shuttles to show them how those are built. If they’re going to fly any of the other shuttles, they’ll need to be familiar with the human systems just as well. As for their own, ship, no one but them will ever fly it.

There’s a considerable amount of free space inside the body of their new ship where the atmosphere equipment would’ve been for a human crew. The only thing they’ll bother keeping and using will be a pure nitrogen system, so they can have some kind of atmosphere in the shuttle. The rest of the available space will be used for more xenon fuel storage, beta-voltaic cells, and other long voyage necessities.

By the time Britney calls it quits and wants to go to bed, she confidently gives them permission to go through the next stage before needing to stop them. Through the night, the two of them take turns between explaining the details of the schematics while the other does the installation. Like don had mentioned, they find themselves quickly running out of room inside the chassis. Despite that, they have no problems contorting themselves any which way to get the work done, and without ever getting sore. If they were still humans. They would’ve been pretty beat up by now.

After snagging his jumpsuit on small edges of things here and there, he resorts to taking the whole thing off. It’s not like he’s going to be biologically contaminating anything. There really is no need for him to wear a suit at all. In great relief, Arma does the same thing, but she’s not wearing underwear underneath her suit like he was. They have to be careful to not scratch their skin on any of the little sharp things inside, but they can at least feel when they touch anything.

When they are done with the first stage of the build, they take a short break and then get right into running the main power cables throughout the ship. While lying flat on his back inside the ship frame he reaches both of his arms in through an access panel over his head, where they need to feed some heavy gage wire through a fairly tight bend. Arma crouches in under the ceiling of the frame above him, and pushed her end of the cables down to him so he can pull them through the bottom.

Frustratingly, he finds forearms being a bit big for a lot of the work. Not being able to get his arms up in behind the bulkhead is starting to get him a little mad. Arma is able to reach her slender arm in through the top no problem, but he can’t get his fingers up to the hole he needs to, to pull the plug head down through it. It keeps getting hung up. He can clearly see what she needs to do, but it’s not working. When he tries to pull his arms out, to switch places with her, his elbows get good and stuck on something.

“Uh, Arma, I need your help down here. I can’t get my f-ing elbows twisted back around.”

When she gets down to help him, she sits right in his lap and runs her hands up the backs of his arms. He’s really got his arms in there pretty tight. When she pushes in on his elbows, she inadvertently hunkers herself right down on his crotch. Her eyes get big with the shock of his girth pressing on her. He squirms underneath her, almost violently pulling his arms down. He’s going to cut himself if he keeps doing what he’s doing.

Frantically, she does what she has to, and keeps pushing on his elbows as he works his arms out. With all the jerking back and forth on top of him, it only escalates. She can feel him pressing between her, and his whole body is tightening up beneath her. Her mind starts racing to other places, as she loses control of her coherent thoughts.

“Arma!”

At the stern tone of his voice, she opens her eyes to find that her hands are clawing their way down his chest, and she’s almost worked his underwear all the way off. She can see half of his cock, sticking out from underneath her and she’s spreading herself on it. With a gasp, she pulls his briefs back up and grabs his elbows again. This time she get them free. She’s shocked, by herself, and by how fast it got out of hand. “Oh my god, I’m sorry Aaron. I don’t know what just happened. I… I…”

Before she can scramble off of him, he grabs her wrists and makes her look at him. “Hey, no, don’t, it’s... You just kind of had me trapped there.” He lets out a sharp breath. “Holy smokes, I almost thought it goin in there for a second, right on the shop floor.” He runs his hand through his hair and looks up, all the way around the balcony upstairs. Luckily it’s two in the morning and no one’s there. “I just don’t think this is, uh, where we can be getting carried away with ourselves.”

She looks around the bay too, surprised that somehow, not a single person is in sight. She reaches up above herself and grabs ahold of the cable track to steady herself. She presses her face into the side of her arm and lets herself hang there for a moment.

“I know, you’re right. It just… happened. I kind of lost myself there for a second.” She slowly lets out a deep breath and looks around again. Even now, she’s almost considering forcing herself on him. He’s still hard, right there underneath her, and no one is around. It takes everything she has to stay put, perfectly still, and not do it. It’s all she’d have to do, and he’d be hers.

He looks up at her, a little concerned. She’s looking pretty stressed out. “Hey, you’re a little shaky, you ok?”

“Yeah, I, I’m uh… I’ll be alright.” She has to shut her eyes away from his smooth lips and mare muscled chest as she gets up off of him.

Her hand is between her legs when she hops down out of the shuttle frame. As he climbs out himself, she starts quickly pulling her jumpsuit back on. He does the same thing too, trying to make her feel better. As soon as he has his suit zipped up, he corners her against the side of the ship and holds her there. She’s reluctant to look him in the eyes, but when she does, he kisses her like he’s been waiting forever to. “You are mine, and I am yours.”

When she blinks, a tear sheds form her glistening eyes. “Don’t you ever let me go Aaron.”