Flew the Coop

[Sarah McFarlen]

It was like seeing a dog without its coat, a beetle without its carapace. A patient iridescent thing. There would have been a time when it would have been a delight to circle the suit, to crawl over relays and servos, to match, point by painful point, supposition to reality.

Now she found it left her uncomfortable in a way she struggled to describe. The way it loomed patient and sharp as a scalpel, the way the surface of it seemed to devour light. There was some visceral part of her that twisted at the sight of it, uncomfortably sharp and inherently wrong, like exposed bone.

She had seen it before, of course. Dozens of times. But always, it had been James beneath it. Always, a smile or the warm crackle of a commset to soften the violence of it. Always, an addendum to James. A brutal one, certainly, but alone; devoid of the man, all that remained was the brutality.

She tried to ignore it.

It felt like ignoring a guillotine. She found she was tapping the points of her chopsticks together. She made herself look at James instead. Admitted, she had had to make do with far less welcome distractions.

"Right. Was thinking the same, on the Houses. Just - Cleaner, that way. Fewer databases. Fewer chances." Fewer cameras, fewer identity-checks, fewer chances for the fangs of yesteryear to rise up at a routine port call. That she could avoid the uncomfortable ache in her chest whenever Manhattan drifted by her viewport was mere coincidence. "Comes with its own messiness, though. Windward's not as proven as I'd like. Be nice to be somewhere someone'll hear, at least for a spell, if we blow a switchboard."

She listened as James outlined his options. She'd lived here, too. Knew the chances that his contracts were still breathing, findable, and friendly all at once were about as likely as summertime snow. Appreciated the effort, all the same.

"Uh-huh. Actually, thought maybe we could look to Pennsylvania. It's a little rockier than usual out there, and there's plenty of folks looking to -"

The suit talked.

She froze. It was a soft, lilting voice, remarkable only in how utterly unremarkable it was. She had heard its siblings in the recitations of a dozen flight computers, a hundred datapads. She had not heard it coming from her own living room. It was a chilling experience. Like a stranger had just stepped from behind the curtain.

She had heard of JADE. It had been impossible not to aboard the Galley. But it had always been at a comfortable remove, always someone else speaking of the AI. Never the system addressing her directly. Always some discussion of what it could do - And it could do a lot. Telemetry and trajectories, system monitoring and shutdown. Faultfinding and fixing. Targets and intercepts.

She remembered Leslie hankering after her own version for the ship and had been quietly relieved that it never came to pass. It would have been easier, of course. But that ship's systems had been hers. She'd come to know every flicker of that power grid like she knew the blood in her veins. Had known by the whine of the pumps and the heat of the coils when she was sick. Had known the weight of her; how she could turn, what would stretch her limits and what would break them. It would have felt too much like an invasion. Too much like -

Too much like finding a stranger in her house.

"It's listening?" The words clawed their own way out unbidden. Made blunt by surprise, a bluntness that she regretted as soon as it left her; a flicker of colour rising to her cheeks. She swallowed a mouthful of noodles with all the grace of a wayward rhinoceros and tried to recover. This was James' - Ally? Partner? She didn't even know what to call it. Didn't know where it fit.

The remark made James' face contort a fraction, as though actually hurt. It's gone as quickly as it appeared, but just for a heartbeat he'd looked like he was about to retort with something sharp. "Yeah, she is. I'm sorry, it's…" He pauses, as though trying to decide on something. "She's been with me for so long I plain forget she's there." He turns his light frown back to JADE. Trying to look in the eye of something that didn't visibly have any. "That's no excuse to not mind your manners, alright?" Silence, save for the cheery wink of a hairpin status light off the wrist. "Good enough," he grouses, around a pinch of noodles.

"Right." A release of breath. It wasn't comfortable, not by a long shot, but James' ease was catching. She'd done long hauls of her own, hadn't she? Had talked to things she had less reason to expect a reply from than James did from JADE. She told herself that was enough.

"It's fine. I- She's not wrong, though. Trials to be done, before we sail. Still need to spin up generation and propulsion. Could do worse than to have a second set of eyes when that comes, if you're offering. After that, figured we could make a start out Pennsylvania way, then clear house space for a while once we know her legs are good." A slow circle, traced with the point of a chopstick. "Could be a while before we're back. Have anywhere that needs seeing, before we go?"

There is a sudden tightening in the air, and James' prior ease disappears - freezes in the line of his shoulders. The bowl is, gingerly, set aside, after a moment. A reflexive stroke of a thumb, around a discolored patch of skin, a band circling his index finger. There's not just the one. A strange pattern of the little blotches - like a sunburn, almost - lined each joint on each finger.

"In a sense," he finally says, and James does not quite meet Sarah's eye. "Yes, I think there is a place I should see. I think-" The words trickle to a slow staccato, as though each was a costly effort. "You should maybe see it too. It might- You'd be doing me favor."

She'd stilled. It was impossible not to in the face of that chill. "Where's that, James?"

"Leeds," Terse and dense. Pain condensed into a single syllable, still as fresh as an open wound. "It would explain, a lot more than I can."

---

"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."

- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.

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