<You can’t be serious.>
<I am very serious, Tsuga. You should take her.>
<I don’t know anything about terrans!>
<Then take this as an opportunity to learn.>

And so, once again, Tsuga found the little grey-stripe terran in her arms as they walked back to their quarters. They knew that Polyphylla had been right – that, of the three of them, They were the best choice to watch the injured terran – but that was a low standard as far as they were concerned.

True, Polyphylla was the expert on terrans, and Tsuga was expecting her to volunteer, but as the conversation with Nell went on, they couldn’t help but notice the faint beginnings of wilting at the edges of Polyphylla’s foliage. The cold had clearly affected her more than she was letting on, and she already had a floret to be caring for. Throwing a feral terran into the mix might be more than even she could handle at the moment.

Pisca, of course, was not an option. Tsuga knew that better than Polyphylla; in the short time they’d known the younger Affini, they’d already seen her rebloom once after an ill-advised expedition up a mountain face to secure a biological specimen led to her being buried in a landslide. As far as Tsuga could tell, the moment Pisca got even a little excited, all sense of self-preservation went completely out the airlock.

Which left Tsuga. Tsuga, who did not want a pet terran, had no intention of taking a pet terran, and who was already as tired of the cheerfully helpful Affini on Tillandsia as they had been of the ones on Karkenia. “You look so down,” they would say to Tsuga, “you need a floret to cheer you up.” Maybe relocating had been a bad idea. There was no escaping the Affini impulse to meddle.

“I’m afraid that my hab is not especially suited for terran use,” they said as they opened the door and strode inside. Their main living space was a jungle of foliage from a dozen different worlds they’d studied, most of them as cold-adapted as Tsuga themself. Flowering vines lined the walls, hanging pots held specimens they were cultivating, and even the sofa’s structure was seeded with little needle-leaf ferns. Tsuga set Cass down gently and stretched, letting their tightly wound vines slacken and readjust as they lengthened themself into a more comfortable configuration. Oh, they thought, that’s so much better.

It was only afterwards that they noticed Cass staring wide-eyed up at them. “You get bigger?”

“I would say I get taller,” Tsuga replied. Certainly, from a more normal height, Cass seemed even smaller, more vulnerable than she had before. Perhaps the reverse held true, and additional height made them seem more domineering and powerful. “Most infrastructure on front-line ships is built with younger Affini in mind, and on top of that I bloomed from a species known for reaching rather prodigious heights. This shape is comfortable enough, given the local gravity. Were it lighter, I could stretch out a bit more.”

“You’ve got to be over four meters!”

Tsuga nodded. “Yes, that sounds about right. I haven’t internalized your entire system of measurements, but I know that meters are the basic unit.” They looked around the living space – it was all sized to them, somewhat ungainly even for other Affini, and utterly useless for someone as small as Cass. “I think we may have to improvise when it comes to sleeping arrangements.”

“I can just take the couch,” Cass said, still eyeing Tsuga as if they were going to shoot up another meter if she looked away. “That is a couch, right? Not some kind of soft-looking fusion reactor?”

Tsuga laughed. Dirt, but she is adorable. “No, that is in fact a couch. But I think you’d have trouble getting up and down from it safely. Down especially, with your knee. I could lift you, but you seem the independent sort, and I worry you’d try to get down on your own without calling for me. No, I think the best thing to do is to make you a bed of your own. It won’t be a proper bed, I’m afraid,” they added. “The compiler’s not big enough for that. And it won’t be handmade, of couse, but these are exigent circumstances.”

A moment’s playing with their tablet, and the compiler hummed and produced an acceptable mass of cushions, stitched together in a rough circle with a raised rim, stylized to look like a blooming yellow flower. “There,” they said. “I think this will do.”

Cass was still staring, but now at the bed. “You’re joking, right?”

“…no? Is something wrong?” They hefted the bed and looked it over, and it seemed to match the picture they’d seen on the tablet when they’d searched for “terran bed soft.”

“It looks like something a dog sleeps in,” Cass said. Tsuga wasn’t certain, but the furrowing of the thick strips of fur above her eyes seemed to indicated frustration. What a dog was, of course, they had no idea.

“It’s… unacceptable, then?”

“To say the least. Don’t get me wrong, internally I’m screaming about how what you just did, making an object out of literally nothing in seconds, is physically impossible, unless you’re pulling some kind of trick on me, but that seems entirely pointless, so– look, that’s something a pet sleeps in, okay? I know making people into pets is, for some bizarre reason, your thing, but I’m not a pet, and I have no interest in being one. Couldn’t you just make, I don’t know, a hammock or something? Something a little more dignified.”

“I think that can be managed, yes.” A search for “hammock dignified” turned up a number of options (though “dignified” had to be excluded as a variable, since none of the hammock build files available on the network used that as a tag). Soon the compiler beeped and churned out a long sheet of colorful fabric anchored at each end by a fan of ropes and a ball that, according to the instructions, would adhere to the hab wall and was guaranteed not to come unstuck at an undesired time. “We’ll set this up in here,” Tsuga said, carrying the hammock and the pet bed towards their storage room. “Originally, this was meant to be a pet’s room anyway, but I’ve never used it as that, so… it may be a bit cluttered.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Cass said, staring up at the mountain of boxes, each labeled and sealed, each containing samples of biomes, copies of written reports on said biomes, and the like. Tsuga had scrapped the bed and all the other basic furniture long ago, and so there was nothing in the room save the box pyramid.

“It’s just for tonight, probably,” Tsuga said as they attached the hammock’s adhesive ball to one wall. “Though Arvense may want me to keep an eye on you for a few more days. I don’t know. We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

“It’s cross.”

“Hmm?” They looked up from attaching the other ball, the hammock automatically drawing itself taut across the breadth of the room.

“Cross that bridge when we come to it. Burning bridges is entirely different.”

“Ah.” Tsuga considered it. “That does make more sense, I suppose. Well…” They tested the hammock with one hand. “This seems like it should hold you. If you need me in the night, just tell the– oh. I should configure the hab to accept input in a language you speak.” <Hab, configure for Terran English language input.> Cass seemed conversant in it at least, better than Tsuga was at any rate, so it should serve.

<Please specify language options.>

Tsuga’s vines rippled. Options? <Default,> they said, hoping this wouldn’t end up being more complicated than they thought.

The hab made a chiming noise, and announced in a cheerful voice. “Hooray! Language settings set to Terran English! Just ask me if you need anything, cutie!”

Cass stared up at the ceiling, hands on her hips. “What was that?”

“It’s called saying hello, silly!”

“Is it always going to sound like that?” Cass asked Tsuga.

“Well, it’s not usually so… I suppose ‘upbeat’ is the term?” Tsuga said, copying the chin-rubbing gesture they’d seen others use around terrans to signify thinking. “Do you not like it?”

“Your hab isn’t self-aware, is it?” she said, crossing her arms. Was that a gesture of defiance? This seemed like defiance, which, considering Cass was feral, was unsurprising.

“No. Why would I make my hab self-aware?” The idea left Tsuga vaguely uncomfortable – she was having enough trouble with just one little terran in her hab, and the idea of her hab itself being a person made her want to shudder. The whole point of the hab was to have a space where she could be alone.

“Okay, I don’t have to worry about being rude, then,” Cass said, nodding. “Good. Because it’s really grating, to be honest. I’m a grown woman, not a toddler.”

“Toddlers are your…. hatchlings, yes?”

“… yeah, sure,” Cass said, shaking her head. Okay, not hatchlings. Tsuga thought. Larva, maybe? They don’t undergo metamorphosis, though… “You understand how this is a problem, right? Between the huge furniture and the house that sounds like a kid’s TV program?”

“… no, sorry,” Tsuga said. “I don’t really know much about terrans. I’ve only been in your galaxy about six months, and I’ve only been learning your language for about half that time. I’m here to study planetary ecology and assist ecological engineering efforts. Polyphylla’s the expert, at least from our working group. Hmm. She did mention that nostalgia was very important for terrans. Is childhood not nostalgic?”

Cass didn’t respond. She was staring off into space, her hand clutching her sleeve so tightly her fingers were starting to go white. Tsuga had seen Cass do this several times already, and like those times worried that they’d inadvertently touched on some trauma. They knelt down next to the little terran and moved into her line of sight. “Are you alright, Cass?”

“Huh?!” Cass blinked and took a step backwards. “… sorry, I was thinking.” She didn’t meet Tsuga’s eyes, choosing instead to stare down at the floor.

“Ah. About what?”

Cass took her time responding. “You’re from another galaxy,” she said quietly. “That’s– I was trying to do the math to get a rough idea how much energy a jump like that would involve.”

“Mmmm. I’m afraid that’s not my specialty, but you could look it up. It is rather a lot, though, yes – we use supermassive black holes for that.” Cass’s eyes widened again. This was not improving the situation “…maybe we should talk about this after you get some sleep?” She nodded mutely, still not looking up. “Well… again, the hab will get me if you need anything.” They set the pet bed down underneath the hammock, reasoning that Cass would prefer that to the floor if she rolled out in her sleep.

As the door shut behind them, Tsuga found themself lost in thought as well. They did not want a pet, but here they were, caring for a feral terran, and they were already tripping over their own roots. They had read through the curriculum, applied for all the proper clearances more to satisfy others that they weren’t avoiding the issue, but they were still woefully underprepared for this sort of thing. They’d expected to be dealing with nonsophont life and ecosystems that didn’t require the same standard of care that a sophont did – the sort of life that they were qualified to care for, no matter what their personnel file said.

They let their her limbs lose a bit of definition, fingers and forearms falling into drifting vines, as they considered the situation. Whether they liked it or not, they were responsible for Cass’s well-being. And they were, despite their reservations, likely entirely capable. Polyphylla told her, when Tsuga had explained themself to the limited degree they consented to when pressed on the issue, that ‘caring for sophonts is written into every cell in your body.’ And for other Affini, that certainly seemed to suffice. It would have to suffice for Tsuga as well, at least until Cass could care for herself again.

They made a mental inventory of everything they needed to do for Cass. They’d worked out shelter – that was solved, for now, but the next day she’d arrange for a proper bed and clear out the storage room. Hygiene! Frost it! She’d forgotten entirely about hygiene. That would have to wait for the morning, as they’d already put Cass to bed and she was clearly sleep-deprived, even to Tsuga’s inexperienced eyes. Food and water, ah! That was something they were forgetting that they could actually do something about.

Tsuga would need to cook, and they knew nothing about terran food. They pulled the tablet from their central cavity and began searching: “terran food breakfast.”

Ah. That would do.

The horizon to the south was on fire. The glow was bright enough to turn the twilight red, and streaks of fire rained down from the rapidly fading stars. The air smelled of smoke even here, where the fires had yet to reach. After she’d patched up the cut on her forehead, Cass had drenched a bandana in a stream and wrapped it around her nose and mouth to provide some kind of a barrier against airborne particulates, but she knew it would do little for the ultrafines.

The puddlejumper had survived the crash – with luck and a little repair, it might fly again, but for the moment it would have to rest where it had fallen. Cass had taken what supplies she could carry, especially the perishables, and stuffed them into her rucksack before setting out to the north, toward the foothills. She’d sighted Twin Creeks Station from the air just before– 

No. Best not to think about that.

But Twin Creeks Station couldn’t be far off, and she knew they had a repeater array. She could get in touch with other stations, start coordinating evacuation and relief efforts. Someone would have to, and she didn’t expect much help would be coming from– 

No. Still not thinking about it.

She found the road after a few hours, navigating by firelight. It was a small road, barely two lanes, laid down decades before and scarcely maintained. It connected Twin Creeks Station with the logistical centers of the farm belt down in the valley, and ultimately to Landfall isn’t there anymore.

Cass gritted her teeth as her feet found the asphalt. Inshallah, it won’t be as bad as it looks, she thought as she began to trudge uphill. There are always survivors of nuclear strikes. Was it a nuclear strike? The explosion hadn’t looked or behaved like a nuclear blast – no slowly rising mushroom cloud, just a pillar of blinding fire reaching up into the heavens – but she’d worry about that later. She began tumbling down lists of all the times atomic weapons had been used in anger, from their inception in the early Information Age to the brushfire wars of the First Collapse to what the Accord liked to euphemistically call the Unification Era. Now Solstice would be added to that list. The casualty list would be long, longer than she wanted to think about, but there would be people still left in Landfall. Hurt, probably being slowly poisoned by fallout, possibly trapped; they would need help, and unless she was much mistaken she was the only member of the Central Committee who hadn’t been in the city.

It fell to her to help them.

She bounced back and forth between the comfort of rote knowledge and the necessary grief of planning rescue and recovery. Underneath it all was the quiet affirmation that this would not be the end – they would fight on, even after such a monstrous, murderous attack by the Accord. They would rebuild, and plan for the inevitable invasion. They had time, Cass thought, for the Cosmic Navy would only take such action if they couldn’t afford to spend troops on quelling what they no doubt considered a minor labor revolt. They had done this to prevent an organized, dug-in, industrialized defense from developing on Solstice while they took care of things elsewhere. Perhaps the rumors of a war with xenos were true. Perhaps the Accord had bitten off more than it could easily handle. The details of the why didn’t matter, not right now.

So lost was she in thought that she didn’t notice the truck, its headlights casting twin shafts of light through the increasingly smoky air, until it was practically upon her. She squinted against the light as two dead men emerged from the cabin, one holding a gauss pistol on her.

“Hands up!” he shouted. At least, that’s what he was supposed to shout, Cass knew, but instead, when he opened his mouth, nothing but a choking, gurgling stream of blood poured out. A wide stain began to grow around the knife embedded in his chest, spreading across his khaki uniform, the darkness rendering it a black smear. The smell of smoke grew thicker, becoming almost overpowering, and Cass only noticed the hole in the man’s head as she woke up with a start and almost fell out of her hammock.

The storage room was dimly lit, and the door was shut, but still the smell of smoke was heavy in the air. Coughing, she carefully rolled out of the hammock and onto her feet – her knee was still numb, and she nearly overbalanced, but she caught herself at the last minute. Was there a fire? If so, the high ceilings kept the worst of it above her head, and she could hear fans somewhere working to purge the offending clouds. The door slid open as she approached, light from the common room flooding in along with a resurgent smell of smoke, along with the overwhelming scent of vanilla and maple syrup.

Tsuga was in the kitchen, where the smoke and the smell both seemed to be coming from. The entire thing was a mess, with bowls caked in thick gluey substances scattered all over. She was muttering to herself in her own language, glancing back and forth between her tablet and what looked like a baking tray. Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be any kind of a fire – even if this ship was orders of magnitude larger than a terran ship, open fires on a starship were a terrible idea.

“Is everything okay?” she said, her voice still thick with sleep.

Tsuga turned to look. “Oh. You’re awake. Well… yes, everything is fine, thank you,” she said. “I’m simply cooking for you.”

“Uh…thanks?” Cass made her way over to the kitchen with an awkward, rolling gait, careful of her unfeeling knee. Every step made it feel like it was about to go rubbery and give out, but the brace kept it straight, almost as if it knew to firm up at the perfect time. “What’s on the menu?”

“I am making a traditional terran breakfast called pan cakes,” Tsuga said. “Unfortunately, I have yet to make a batch that look precisely like the ones in the picture here, but chemically speaking they’re identical, and I’m certain they’re safe. Would you like some?”

“Sure,” Cass said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and looking around. “Should I just grab a spot of floor to eat on, then?”

“What? No, of couse not, sit at the– oh. Right. Hab, please produce a stool for Cass at the appropriate height for the countertop. Something dignified.”

“You got it!” the hab chirped, and the compiler Cass had seen in action last night began to hum and rumble. “All done!” it announced mere seconds later. Some of Tsuga’s vines delved into the compiler and pulled out the stool’s components, and began assembling them.

“So…how exactly am I supposed to get up on that?” Cass said when she beheld the final product. There was no earthly way she could climb up it – the seat of the stool was well above her head, and there were no footholds to speak of, certainly nothing she could climb on without toppling the whole thing.

“Hmm. I hadn’t considered that,” Tsuga admitted. “Well, you probably shouldn’t be climbing anyway. Here.” Her vines coiled around Cass and lifted her off the ground, depositing her in the chair’s seat. It felt uncomfortably like a high chair. Moments later, utensils arrived in front of Cass, followed by a plate heaped high with Not Pancakes. They were clearly trying to be pancakes, of course, but they were Not Pancakes. Pancakes were flat, fluffy, and a golden brown – these were more like lumps that had gotten the vague idea that flatness was a more appropriate state of being, and rather than being any uniform color they were pale in some parts and burnt black in others. They smelled powerfully of vanilla, and when Cass cut gingerly into one, she found raw batter and, inexplicably, dry and powdery flour.

Very carefully, she set down her silverware. “You’ve never cooked before, have you?” she said.

“No,” Tsuga admitted, “but cooking is just chemistry, and I’ve been an ecological engineer for longer than your species has been spacefaring. The recipe was not especially helpful, I have to say – none of the measurements were in your metric system, but in one of those older systems where there was no real sense of how much of anything was in a given unit. Pinches, and such. This one was full of tisps and cups. Cups was easy enough, I have plenty of cups, but I had to guess for tisps.”

“I think I see where you went wrong,” Cass said, pushing the plate away. “I appreciate the effort but…keep practicing. Does that thing make food?” she added, nodding at the compiler.

“Well, yes, it can, but the documentation I’ve read suggests that cooking from scratch is preferred,” Tsuga said. “I did compile the basic ingredients, of course. I couldn’t simply leave you here and go to the grocery.”

“I don’t care if it tastes off,” Cass said. “It cannot possibly be worse than the shit Osbourne-Clark fed us.”

“Language!” the hab chided.

Cass stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then finally (slightly) lowered her gaze to Tsuga and gave her one of her driest looks. “Seriously?”

“There is a general preference for terran pets not to use the obscenities they’re apparently so accustomed to,” Tsuga said as she tapped away at her tablet. “I did not know the hab was programmed to respond like that. Hab, a stack of pan cakes, please.”

“Coming right up!”

“And you wonder why being a pet doesn’t appeal?” Cass said, sighing. “You really need to change that. It’s gone from grating to just plain pissing me off.”

“I meant to during the night, but I got caught up in…well.” She gestured at the kitchen, then took a steaming plate of Actual Pancakes out of the compiler. “Rest assured, I will read the help file for this language setting and find a way to turn it off.”

“I would very much appreciate that. And, tell you what – why don’t I make the food tonight, and you can watch?”

As far as Cass could tell, everything about the Affini ship was designed to humiliate and degrade terrans. Everything far too large, necessitating Affini assistance. Hab AI that treated you like a five-year-old. The bathroom had been nothing short of a transcendent experience, to be sure – Cass had scrubbed herself cleaner than she’d been in years and luxuriated in the absurdity of a bath the size of a small swimming pool – but the clothing options afterward had been a long, hard slong through pages upon pages of the most embarrassing sartorial nonsense she’d ever seen. Everything with the Affini was some kind of offensively bright flower print that made her eyes want to retreat back into her skull. Tsuga compiled a mini-tablet for Cass to use, which did at least let them cover more ground, and let Cass turn the brightness way, way down, which offset the absurdly bright colors a bit.

The true humiliation, however, began after she and Tsuga managed to find a black tank-top and dark-blue slacks. (Tsuga said that the top was still pretty bright in the ultraviolet spectrum, but as Cass couldn’t see that, she didn’t much care.) After she’d put on the smooth, rich material and tied back her hair (softer and fluffier than it had been in a long, long time – she was going to have to trim it back), Tsuga had picked her up and carried her out of the hab.

At least she’d asked this time. It set her apart from practically every other Affini they met on the way to the grocer, the majority of whom immediately began cooing and trying to pet Cass the minute they saw her in Tsuga’s arms. Each time, cheeks burning, she had to fend off offending vines and branches while Tsuga patiently explained that Cass was not, in fact, a pet. By the time they reached the grocer, a massive building that obviously had to include dozens of other, unrelated businesses, Cass was fuming.

“Does your species just not understand the concept of personal space or something?” she grumbled as Tsuga set her down.

“No, it really doesn’t make sense to us,” Tsuga replied. “Obviously, we understand it conceptually, but it seems…I suppose unhealthy would be the right word. How is your leg? You’re certain you’re up to walking around?”

“The doc said I could as long as it wasn’t strenuous, and I don’t want to just lie around or be carried all day. Besides, I’m supposed to be looking around and forming an opinion about the ship, aren’t I?”

“I’m responsible for your well-being. That includes making sure you don’t aggravate an injury.”

“No,” Cass replied. “I’m responsible for my well-being, same as anyone else. You’re making sure I don’t have a bad drug reaction, which I appreciate, but as I have said so many times since yesterday, I am a grown woman and I can handle myself just fine. Most importantly, I am not your pet.”

“No,” Tsuga said. “You are not.”

There was something in the way she said those four words that tickled at the back of Cass’ mind. A little too quick, a little too vehement, perhaps. In a terran, experience taught her, that was a sign that she’d either pushed something too far, or had touched on something the other person didn’t want to talk about it. Granted, Tsuga wasn’t terran, but she seemed to be making one hell of an effort to seem terran-like, especially considering she’d been at it for less than six months.

What to say from here? She had options. Push more to see what happened, and get more information to help figure it out – her go-to when she was younger, but a tool that had fallen out of favor, as it tended not to yield good results. Not every problem was a nail, and she had more than a hammer to work with. Give ground – not something she wanted to get in the habit of here, or before she knew it she’d have a worm in her brain. Conciliate – that might work, if Tsuga was indeed frustrated over not being allowed to do what she perceived to be her job. If it didn’t, she’d have to dig deeper in the toolkit.

“Look,” she said, “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the incredibly delicious 3D-printed pancakes, or the huge bath, or the fresh clothes – there’s just a lot of culture shock going on, and I’m kind of a loner by nature. Why don’t we just… take some time apart? Just for a little bit, while we’re shopping, to cool off a bit. I can handle walking around that much, and if I can’t, well, I have this.” She pulled the mini-tablet out of her pocket. “You put your contact info into this, so I can get in touch with you if I need help. Okay, ‘Unearthed-Hope?’” Had she seriously changed her username to be about digging Cass out of a hole in the ground? Then again, based on what she’d seen of the Affini, it was exactly the kind of over-the-top thing they would do.

Tsuga thought about it for a moment. “That should be alright. I can pick up the nutrients and things that I need while you look for the things you need for– oh, what did you call it? Shack shaker?”

“Shakshouka,” Cass corrected her.

“Yes, that.” She hesitated. “I know you are a very independent human, and that asking for help is frequently difficult, but do not hesitate to do so if you need it.”

Cass scoffed. “Remind me to explain anarchism to you later,” she said. “Mutual aid is not a new concept for me.”

The entire building was a grocery. Cass simply stood there, staring, for at least five minutes, mini-tablet with her grocery list in her hand, trying to make sense of the scale of it – a sprawling, multilevel building dedicated to food. She had never seen anything remotely like it. On Earth, such plenty was utterly unknown, unless one were fortunate enough to live near the poles, and Cass had grown up almost as far away from the poles as one could get. On Solstice, meanwhile, under Osbourne-Clark, what food was grown in the agriculture belt had been shipped to Landfall for the almost exclusive use of the staff and guards, while prisoners were left with little more than stale Naval-surplus ration bricks and whatever they could steal from the food they’d grown themselves.

Things had gotten better, ever so briefly, after the revolution, and then had gotten even worse. Small surprise that Cass’s stomach rebelled at the idea of being full when there was so much to eat right in front of her. It seemed almost obscene for there to be this much food – this much fresh, good produce – just lying around. She was still trying to figure out how or where it had been grown, the logistics necessary to do so, and more when she felt a soft, warm hand on her elbow.

“Hey, are you…okay?” Cass startled and spun around, her numb leg wobbling unsteadily. The speaker was a young woman with long strawberry-blonde hair that fell around her shoulders and hung down her back, and pupils so wide her brown irises were crowded into a thin strip around them. She wore a sundress, gold with red splashes of color streaking across it, and she couldn’t have stood any taller than Cass’s shoulders. “You seem…kinda out of it?”

“It’s… it’s just a lot to look at,” Cass said. The woman’s voice was as fluid and limp as her movements – she was clearly high as a kite.

“You must be new, huh?” Cass watched her eyes light up in slow motion, a smile spread across her face like continental drift. “New girl hug time!” She laughed, dropped her basket full of odd canisters (the speed at which it fell shocking in contrast to the woman’s movements, no more so than the fact that the basket caught itself before it hit the floor), and glommed onto Cass, leaning into her. Cass froze, but blessedly the woman was content to simply hang on rather than moving her hands about for no reason like so many people liked to.

Still, it was unplanned-for touch. Not ideal. “You can let go now,” Cass said, gently disentangling herself from the woman’s arms.

“Awww, okay, short hugs,” she murmured pleasantly. “I love this look on you! Did your Mistress pick it out for you? Or Master. Or Mxstress. Whatever they like being called,” she finished with a giggle.

“I’m not a pet,” Cass said through gritted teeth. Even the terrans around here assumed she belonged to one of these xenos. She shouldn’t blame the poor thing, though – like as not she had a worm in her head, and wasn’t thinking for herself anymore.

“Ohhh,” she said, nodding with a languid ease. “Independent sophont? Wow, we don’t have many of those.”

“Well, don’t get used to it,” Cass said. “Once I finish observing this ship, I’m going back down to the planet to make my report, and so far I can’t see myself recommending this place as fit for inhabitation.”

The woman blinked a few times, her eyelids falling and rising in slow motion. “You don’t? Wow, you must be really new. Are you on the Orientation channel?” Her eyes slowly tracked over to the mini-tablet that Cass had, honestly, completely forgotten she was holding. “They were super helpful for me.”

“I don’t need orientation,” Cass said firmly. “I’m not sticking around.” She was being inundated with enough nonsense from the Affini – she did not need a gaggle of brainwashed terrans adding their own sockpuppeted nonsense to the pile.

“Well, then gimmie,” she said, grabbing the tablet with a speed that Cass hadn’t thought she was capable of and tapping away at it. “Oh you haven’t even set up a username for your chat app yet,” she said frowning. “Well, picking names is hard. It took me so long to settle on Leah. Buuuut that just gave Mistress more chances to call me cute things instead of using my old name, so it worked out! Ooh, I know, I’ll pick one for you for right now! How about… Big Tall Hot Lady?”

“My name is Cass. Give it back, that’s got my shopping list on it.”

“Cassie McCutieface?”

“No.”

“But you need a naaaaame.” She pouted with an astonishing degree of calculated cuteness that even Cass felt powerless against.

“Then put down, I don’t know….propaganda of the deed,” she said, shrugging. She’d used that on messaging apps when she was younger, before she realized what opsec was. “Just give it back.”

“Propa…ganda… of… the….Deed!” Leah said happily as she typed it in, followed by another flurry of tapping. “Okay!” She held the mini-tablet out to Cass, and when she took it she saw the (unnecessarily) colorful chat app on the screen with a message window open to someone called “random_seed.” Even the font was eye-searingly cutesy. Leah had already sent a single message:

<PropagandaOfTheDeed> Hiiiii!!! im the hot lady you saw in the grocery!!!! hope ur thinkin of me cause i kno who im thinkin of!!!!

“…random_seed?” she said, raising an eyebrow. She thumbed the app closed and stowed the mini-tablet in her pocket, where hopefully it’d remain safe from further tampering and identity fraud.

She let out a snerk. “Oh, that’s like…an in-joke. Don’t worry about it. But I expect lots of fun messages from you! Don’t go ghosting me!”

“Is it really ghosting you if I’ve only known you for five minutes?”

“Oooh, good point. We should do our shopping together, then!” She giggled and glommed onto Cass’s arm, leaning up against it and resting her head on Cass’s shoulder. “I’m making a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, so I need… bread, and cheese, and butter, and ham.” She started counting off on her fingers. “And anything else I want on it, Mistress said, since I’m cooking for myself tonight. I haven’t done that for a while, not since…” Her eyes glazed over momentarily. “…huh? Oh, right! I need sandwich stuff, and you need…?”

Cass sighed. Clearly, it wasn’t just the Affini that liked to meddle on this ship. Still, directions might not hurt – she could wander for hours in this place and still never find what she was looking for. “I’m making shakshouka, so onions, tomatoes, fresh eggs, a few different spices…lavash, if I can find it.”

“Ooooh, that sounds yummy! Whatever shakshouka is, you gotta make it for me sometime!”

The fact that Cass did not intend to stick around any longer than she absolutely had to seemed completely lost on Leah, but then again that seemed like the case for a lot of subjects. “Are you okay to cook? You seem a little…” Completely out of your gourd. “…a little high.”

“Oh, I’m way more sober than I was when I woke up,” Leah said reassuringly, patting Cass’s arm and sending little shivers up her spine. “I’ll have come down off the heavy stuff completely by dinnertime. You’re sweet to worry, though. Like if an Affini didn’t have leaves or bark or vines or anything.”

It took Cass quite some time to unravel that in her head – she did not much care for being compared to the xenos who, even if they had overthrown the Accord, had a society that seemed to revolve around treating humans like pets. Meanwhile, Leah chatted excitedly about practically everything that came into her head the entire time, individual subjects blurring into one another as Cass lost focus on the conversation entirely – but Leah more than ably filled the space. By the time she finally released her death grip on Cass’s arm and wandered off to find her “cheesy-cheese,” giving her a last reminder that she expected a dozen messages minimum by dinnertime, Cass’s own basket was full of everything she could possibly need, and Tsuga was waiting for her at the exit to the grocery.

“How’s your knee?” was the first thing she asked, kneeling down to be face to face with Cass.

“It’s fine. A little wobbly, but fine. Listen, how do we pay for this? Are there just tracker chips in these and the door deducts it from your account?” None of the few commissary shops on Solstice had worked that way, but she’d shoplifted from a few stores on Earth that had. A little copper mesh made for a big discount.

Tsuga hesitated, then, smiled. “Right. Money. You do that. Did that. We fixed it.”

“… I’m sorry, what?” Cass stared up at Tsuga – even kneeling down, she was still taller. “You’ve abolished money entirely? Even as a medium for tracking the flow of goods and labor?”

“It’s a pretty poor method of doing that when you have access to even basic computing technology,” Tsuga said. “You terrans could have done it even before we–” She paused, and frowned. “Why are you smiling? From what I’ve heard, most terrans get very disturbed when this subject comes up.”

It wasn’t a smile – it was an enormous shit-eating grin that Cass couldn’t possibly have restrained even if she’d wanted to. “I have some friends,” she said, “who are going to completely lose it – in the best possible way – when I tell them about this.” It was complicated, of course, and even if the Affini were communists of one stripe or another, they had unresolved problems that neither she nor many of her comrades could countenance. Still, it was an opening: once she gleaned a few more details and explained the history of terran socialism, maybe there could be a rapprochement with the Affini on mutually acceptable terms – terms that left Solstice independent and the masters of their own destiny.

After all, if Solstice was going to be run according to the same economic philosophy the Affini used, or one close enough for government work, was there really any need for the Affini to be involved?