Chapter 173 – Explorations, Without and Within

"Be mindful, takin' in what ya hear, boy. Be wise, siftin' what don't belong. Be still, lettin' the quiet settle. Ain't no truth in lettin' crowds drown out yer own knowin'—about yourself or about others.

"And solitude ain't loneliness—it's where a Listener scrubs their compass clean. Take that time, boy. See yerself plain, and other souls'll show plain too, not twisted up by what folks chatter about."

– Aunt 'Auntie Care' Carroll, giving advice to her young shadow after he complained about the boredom of a month of little but meditation, January 2057

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I kinda thought we were having a moment, what with Sonde focusing so intently on my face. But she froze again the moment her tummy bumped into mine, when she realized that the additional point of contact made it easier for her to lift her head high. It stopped her weight from swinging beneath my hands.

The little bud did recognize the physics at play, but she had no expertise for it. Through the Quanta's automated thought-frames I learned, or rather, simply knew, that she was querying my memory banks for data on my own aerial maneuvers.

Then Leah snuck a secret hand around my belly and dug her fingers into the thick fluff of her abdomen. That was a whole new experience too, another one Sonde had no familiarity with, and so it consumed her entire attention. She cranked her neck around again to stare at the hand and what it was doing, even as her antennae automatically zeroed in on it.

Leah, meanwhile, held still and blushed like a kid caught with her hand up the vending machine when I glanced at her from the corner of my eyes. It was hard to keep the giggles down. Sister Lana didn't bother.

Deciding that if my love got to give in to temptation, then I should too. I set Sonde down on my lap and carefully extricated my fingers from the talons only to sink them straight into the fluff.

The little bud only got more excited when she realized her legs were free.

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Warmth from the hand on her abdomen triggered Sonde's new thermoreceptors, and the mechanoreceptors wrapped around the follicles on her abdomen fired contact signals en masse.

And it was all going straight to her…her…brain! She had a brain! Her own! Without simulating it! The signals came to her and directly activated the curiosity circuits. She didn't even have to do it herself. So effortless! Is this what it was like to be the Tinea—

Tinea's fingers moved from her gripping claws and the temperature differential hit her sensory algorithms like a bomb.

It felt cold. But wasn't it just an absence? How could an absence of warmth translate into a presence of col—

Two more hands on her abdomen. They belonged to the Tinea. More warmth against her shell, accompanied by the sensation of ordered motion along the millions of airflow-sensing setae across her body.

It was a—lexical query: rich feast…smorgasbord—it was a smorgasbord of data that flowed into the drone's central nervous system, which was she.

So. Much. Stuff. Sonde thought she might have discovered pleasure.

The only reason the Quanta was fast enough to let her keep up with everything that was happening, was that she was alone in i—

Feet free! More degrees of motion!

Sonde carefully composed the flood of action potentials that bent the drone's neck at the right location to the right degree, and then she stared with both eyes and both antennae at the leg she was testing.

She sent mapping signals down the nerve bundles leading to it; weak ones, just enough to trigger small responses. Muscle fibers twitched, still disordered, and sensing nerves echoed, still meaninglessly so, and everything else with nerves in it did something she didn't know how to interpret. But it all told her where to start putting together the protocols for this limb.

Bit by bit, minute by minute, she learned how to move her body, and how to tie automated physical response protocols to specific nerve stimuli. Reflexes, that made the whole easier to control.

Much could go wrong there, from mild incoordination to seriously interrupted vital functions. And from the Tinea's admission of her own reflexes being nonstandard, Sonde understood that carelessness would lead to unintended actions.

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Observant silence continued to define the atmosphere in Leah's cabin. They were all watching the fluffy and rather hefty insectoid discovering itself on Tinea's lap. Nobody had anything left to talk about. Leah could tell that Lana was going to beg off soon, too.

She still sat in her pod, and Tinea with her drone still sat on her lap, but Leah was not at all as occupied with Sonde's efforts as the other two were.

Instead, her head was whirling with thoughts that needed sorting. The last hour had provided a contrast that forced her to confront certain aspects of her behavior that she'd happily ignored her entire adult life, and never even noticed she was doing so.

When Tinea had found her, Leah had been so utterly defenseless—broken, even—that the circumstances let the woman slip right past a guardedness that had defined her for years and years. A certain stiffness that had carried her all the way from her guilt over missing the signs of her little sister's terminal illness, to earning her caretaker certification at only fifteen.

Now, she suddenly felt unable to hug her girlfriend freely, just because somebody else had eyes on her. Because, on some level, she was returning to her normal life.

That hurt in an ugly way, deep down. Like she was betraying Tinea in some indefinable way…and like fetters had ambushed her own spirit.

Especially since the somebody with the eyes was a very good friend. Even if Lana hadn't been around when Leah was at her lowest, which, if she was honest with herself, made the urge to hide the intimacy only stronger.

That was poisonous. The bubbling discomfort was poisonous, and Leah couldn't fucking stand it.

Her eyes flicked up, and somehow, Lana was looking right at her. Leah didn't know if the Sister had noticed Leah's privately brewing turmoil, but…it felt like it. She felt seen, unwelcomely so.

Yet all Lana showed was an unpained smile so utterly free of judgment that it lifted Leah from the swampy mud of her own thoughts entirely by accident.

Leah…knew better. The Sister was exceptional in her ability to put people at ease, and equally exceptional in her ability to see right down to the soul.

"I gotta log off, you tw—three," the Sister said, and two heads with four antennae snapped towards her. Well, one did. The other slowly and carefully rotated itself at her, screwing itself upside down in the process. It would've been alien and menacing, if it wasn't goofy, fluffy, and adorable. Leah smiled, as a giggling Lana continued, "Ready room regulations do require a certain degree of restedness, and I'll risk noncompliance if I don't get my naps in. I'll gladly talk more another time."

Leah leaned on the airy mood to find a smile of her own, and gave her best of friends an easy thumbs-up. Tinea waved with a surprisingly chipper, "Later!" It seemed that the small brunette had found herself adopted into Lana's care just like everyone else in their circle, and was already flowering beneath it. Leah recognized the nun's signature social expertise in action, knew it for the signal of acceptance it was. Tinea was in, whether she'd noticed or not.

But be that as it may, Leah's arms still closed around Tinea and held her close the very moment the wall screen winked off.

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An hour later, Leah was still picking apart her thoughts and wondering how much of that guardedness might have had to do with her relative lack of romantic relationships prior to meeting Tinea, when the girl sent herself flying through the cabin once more.

She caught the drone moments before it would've darted into the wall face-first, tucked them both into a flying roll, and skillfully arrested her momentum with her feet against the wall.

The moment she unrolled and landed, the drone's wing went buzzing again. It jumped from Tinea's hug to start its gyrating acrobatics—until a discordant twitch sent it flying once more and Tinea had to catch it yet again.

Leah suspected the newborn lifeform piloting the drone was doing it intentionally, based on the fact that the incident rate had been spiking for the last few minutes even though Sonde had been displaying rapidly increasing coordination just minutes into her first forays into flying.

Seriously, it was kind of amazing. Just three minutes of thrashing around on her six legs, and the drone had been crawling across everything in the cabin. Then another ten minutes of incessant buzzing and uncontrolled flapping from Tinea's hands—Leah didn't mind really; she was used to worse from the orphanages—and the thing had taken its explorations into the third dimension.

Leah was still picking pieces of fuzz from her smiling face. Really, children and their antics always provided a most wonderful contrast to the more depressing parts of life.

"She did seem to be getting the hang of it, didn't she?" Leah asked, when the brunette next dropped to her feet again, fluffy moth-dragon-thing cradled in her arms. "Any reason she's suddenly risking crashes so much?"

Tinea giggled, petting Sonde even as she let it maneuver onto her hands for another takeoff. "She's trying the more complex stuff she doesn't have practical data for, mostly because I don't have wings myself yet. Sailing the Second Wind is quite different, and my dream flight training doesn't translate one-to-one to her body plan. She's adapting and finding her limits."

"I see."

"And then there's also the fact that it's time for her to return."

"To your brain?"

Tinea nodded. "Sonde grew up with me and my…existence. It has all imprinted on her, even in the sterility of the Quanta."

"And she needs that?"

"Yeah. Like an astronaut who doesn't do well forever isolated on a sterile station with no plants and no pets, she needs time in her natural habitat. No matter how fun the experiments are. She's getting in a last few minutes of hyperactivity before she's gotta come back to…Earth, you could say."

Leah shook her head. "Hella weird."

Tinea shrugged. "It's one of those things you can't really judge if you haven't experienced it, I think. It needs context. More to talk about with Tynea, too."

"I'm ready, if you'd like."

"We'll get to it. Fleet's doing okay, Leah?"

She checked her HUD again, but there were no alerts. Four Hatchets in the front running in a wide arc, four mirroring them in the back. Four Implacables chewing up the miles in between at seventy-five miles per hour.

"All nominal. Another six hours to go, if we don't slow down."

Tinea smiled for her. "Soon, then."

"Yeah."

Leah was looking forward to seeing her friends again. Immensely so, even if a certain niggling problem kept begging for a resolution.

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Sister Lana was having trouble falling asleep—the long conversation stayed with her. Much to think about, including some pretty heavy stuff.

Tinea, adorable as she was and gentle as she showed herself to be in certain ways, also left an impression of a fire-blackened soul. Secure in her capacity for violence with her relaxed body language. Lana thought the woman was one of those people with their innocence burned away such that it had once left terrible scars. It showed in the eyes—where they lingered, what they paid attention to. It betrayed what they expected to see, deep down.

In the case of Tinea, those expectations seemed to run along the predatory, considering that she'd spent far more time studying Lana's face and tone for signs of manipulation than she spent studying her…assets.

That didn't usually happen, not when she had a body designed to hold captive precisely that other kind of attention. Not unless she was talking to somebody who's had hypervigilance burned into their very soul.

For someone like Lana, people like Tinea—who resisted that pull without even trying—could make the very best friends. An exciting thought.

Even more so when she wondered whether Tinea would be willing to solve a certain hatefully familiar human trafficking issue that had been plaguing her peace of mind of late.

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