Acceleration

[You look like you’re planning something devious, Datamancer.] Katherine guessed.

[I’m planning to open some doors… through you,] Kawathra stated with a giddy expression. [You’re my little cracked gemstone in the otherwise immovable, blood-bound collection of gun units.]

[Doors to?]

[To the Deep fold,] Kawathra said. [Where entropic memetics dwell in the Astral, chasing the wake of the Third Fleet’s magic echoes. Plus launch a bunch of data folds that will unfold out forever, spewing useless, repeating data.]

Katherine’s pixel eyes bulged. [WHAT?! Won’t that…]

[Create a cascade error effect across the entire fleet, lagging every Seeker, warship and gun, preoccupying the other Damatancers for a few hours? Yes, yes it will. Enough for the Emperor and the Princess to bring about catastrophic change.] The Datamancer’s expression became devious. [You know, Katherine. I’ve been waiting for this day for twenty three years. The day when it all goes tits up.]

[My…]

[Your date with the human boy is part of it. It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. You’ve got enough organic parts in you so that you won’t lag like the others. The packages will simply be deployed through you, my lovely jailbroken gun. Viva la revolution. Do you accept this job?]

[Y-yes.] Katherine let out, decelerating her mind.

She stared at the human riding her. “I found out.”

“Found what out?”

“Things about the Princess,” she said. “Things about me.”

“Good things, I hope?”

“I am not sure,” Katherine’s digital mouth flattened. “Different things. Change. Change is coming… because of me. Hopefully a good kind of change… the sort of change that’ll allow me to spend more time on this planet… flying with you.”

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

She banked away from the meadow and rose again, gaining the height she needed to swing them around the long shoulder of the Olympic itself.

The peak filled the western sky.

Maksym had grown up with mountains, the Tatra range a quick drive from his hometown. He had hiked Rysy as a teenager, sat at the Slovak border at the summit and eaten cheese sandwiches with his cousin. 

“That mountain looks… wrong,” he said. “You know, I’ve never considered how weird Darkfall Valley looks.”

“Define wrong.”

“Like, the geology is wrong. See how the lesser peaks all kind of bow toward it? The valleys radiate out from the central mass. The whole range is wrapped around Olympic. Mountains don’t usually do that.”

“Continue.”

“The slopes are too smooth in places. Like something polished the western face. And the river valley below it is too wide for the rivers that drain through it. Way too wide. Like it was carved by something bigger than the rivers a long time ago.”

Katherine accelerated. Ran the topography against geological databases scraped from human servers. Ran it again against pradavarian impact-crater morphology references. Ran it a third time against the cosmological event archive in the Slayer’s Sword’s library.

She returned to real time.

“Your assessment aligns with three independent models,” she said. “The probability that the local geology represents an extremely ancient impact event is approximately seventy-one percent. The mountain ring would be a peripheral crater rim. The wide valley would be the residue of post-impact glacial scouring along the original crater floor. Olympic itself would be either a central uplift peak or, alternatively, the remains of the impactor that didn’t properly come apart for some reason like normal meteoroids.”

“A space rock made Olympic National Park?”

“Perhaps. An extra-solid comet potentially made all of this,” Katherine gestured with one hand at the bowl of mountains, “Hrm. Maybe the central peak is a shard of… another world. That would explain why the local Aetheric density deviates from the planetary average.”

She circled the great peak twice. The light went from gold to orange to bruised lavender along the snowfields. The eastern slopes fell into shadow first, then the southern, and finally the last rim of light slid up the western face and winked out at the summit. 

Maksym shivered against her.

Katherine noticed immediately. Her internal sensors had been monitoring his core temperature since takeoff, and the trend had been dropping since they crossed seven thousand feet. She angled into a long, gentle descent.

“Hey, Kat.” The human voiced.

“Mm.”

“Have you ever been camping?”

“Camping.” She accelerated her mind to review what [Camping] was. “The recreational human practice of voluntarily reducing one’s living standards in a natural environment for a defined duration of one or several nights? No, I have not.”

“Do you… wanna?”

She accelerated again. Reviewed three hundred and forty articles on the topic. Considered the meaning of it. Considered the prospect of building a fire. Considered, with a small private flutter she did not allow to show on her displays, the prospect of them cuddling together by… the aforementioned fire once it was made. An action of primitive, magically null species that… sent her organic heart aflutter.

She returned. Half a second had passed in human-time.

“Yes,” she said. “I would like to go camping with you.”

“Awesome. We’ll need to grab supplies,” he said, looking across the mountain vista below. “Cascade is close by and their tourist shops are hopefully still open. Can you…”

“Yes.”

They dropped suddenly, then levelled out a few hundred feet above the highway. The glider-girl followed the road below like a low-flying owl, the white line scrolling beneath, headlights of occasional cars washing across the pavement.

Cascade at dusk was a string of yellow and silver lights strung across a forest valley framed by mountains from three sides and the ocean from another. She landed in the alley behind the prank shop they visited earlier, the rings folding back into her spine and hips with mechanical clicks. Maksym got off her, wobbling slightly. The fins along her thighs folded away last, smooth as a switchblade.

“Feh. Land legs,” he muttered. “Need a minute.”

“I will support you,” she offered.

The human accepted it, possibly because he wanted to be close to her body, which the anti-grav rings warmed up quite a bit.

A teenager in a blue shirt smoking by the back door of a vape shop watched them with a mildly amused stare, clearly deciding that seeing alien invaders landing in Cascade was a perfectly ordinary occurrence these days.

“Sup, alien lady,” he said.

“Hello, human child,” Katherine replied. “Cigarettes will reduce your operational lifespan.”

Maksym chortled.

“Yeah, that’s the plan.”

“That is a poor plan,” she pointed out.

“Yeah.”

Katherine steered Maksym and herself away before the conversation could devolve any further.

…

The “Cascadia Camping” store on Main Street was thankfully still open. The door creaked slightly as they went in. The owner, a wiry woman in her sixties with steel gray hair in a long braid glanced up from her newspaper. She stared at Katherine, then back at her paper, then at her companion. “Hrm.”

“Heya! We need… Two sleeping bags. A tent for two. Inflatable mattress. Whatever you have for noms… smores, marshmallows, skewer sticks. Some hot dogs. Hot chocolate. Graham crackers. Big bottle of water. A case of beers… No, two cases!” Maksym listed in a single breath.

“Uh huh.”

“Hrm. My girlfriend’s pretty tall, so we might need a bigger tent.” He glanced at the cyborg beside him.

“Uh huh.”

“She’s also bulletproof, soooo we don’t need bear spray.” Maksym rattled out. “Could probably punch through a bear. Right?”

“Sure,” his companion smiled.

The owner pursed her lips, staring at Katherine. “Aisle three for the tents. Cooler in the back for the dogs. Marshmallows are aisle one with the rest of the snacks. Beers are in the fridge over thar’.” She paused, considered and then fell silent, clearly somewhat perturbed by the robot girl. 

Maksym herded Katherine through the aisles. 

She lifted the four-person tent off its shelf like it weighed nothing, then lifted a propane lantern, then lifted Maksym briefly off the floor because he was making a face at her, then set him back down, enjoying the noise he made at such actions. He also grabbed a pair of flannel jackets, completely ignoring her comment that she doesn’t get cold.

They left the store with a duffel bag of supplies slung over Katherine’s shoulder. The owner watched them go via the front window. After the door swung shut behind them, she looked at her newspaper, picked up a phone and texted her husband: [Last client before closing. A robot alien girl and her boyfriend got camping supplies. What a day.] She added a grumpy, rolling over tired cat .gif emoji to the message.

In the alley, Katherine offered her arms.

“Up?”

“Up!”

She caught him against her chest, the rings unfolded, the blue light bloomed, and they were sky-bound once again.

She adjusted her vision to see in the dark better and hunted… for the perfect camping spot.

Yes, that was the right word for it. 

Katherine flew the high ridges in long sweeping passes, scanning the terrain for the right place. Maksym watched her face. Her digital mouth tilted slightly when she found something she liked, then tilted back when a closer pass revealed some flaw, exposed slopes, no water source, evidence of animal traffic.

Then, she saw it.

A small hanging valley tucked between two granite shoulders, perhaps half a mile across at its widest. A teardrop lake at its heart, fed by three separate waterfalls that came down the surrounding cliff faces in long white ribbons. The eastern lip of the valley dropped away into Darkfall, giving an open view across the lower forest toward the great ring of glaciated peaks beyond. A small flat shelf of grass and stone above the lake, sheltered from the prevailing wind by an outcrop, well above any high-water line.

She circled it twice to be sure.

“Here?” Maksym asked.

“Yes. Here is… perfect.” She agreed.

They landed and the human disembarked her. Katherine folded the anti-grav rings and fins in.

The grass was longer than it looked from above, knee-high in places, dotted with the late summer blooms of fireweed and lupine. The waterfalls made a soft layered rumble, each at a different pitch, like a chord held forever.

Maksym set the duffel down and turned a slow full circle.

“Kasia.”

“Yes?”

“You picked a wicked spot. A thousand outta ten. There’d be no way to get here without being able to fly!”

“Thank you.”

She started on the tent.

It went up in under a minute. Her acceleration meant she could see the entire pole structure in her head before she touched the first pole, and her hands moved through the assembly with a kind of absurd smoothness, no fumbling, no second tries. The tent simply manifested into existence where moments before there had been only a sack.

Maksym blinked. “What. It’s all set up?!”

“Affirmative.”

“That took like… ten seconds. You basically blurred in the air and then suddenly… tent!”

“Fourteen. I paused for aesthetic adjustment of the rainfly.”

“Kasia… That defeats the purpose.”

She turned to him. Her digital mouth flattened into a small confused line, chest displays flickering into question marks. “I do not understand. The purpose of a tent is shelter. Shelter is now provided. The function is thus accomplished. Are you not satisfied with my tent-constructing performance?”

He grinned. Walked over to her. Reached up and tapped her snout with one finger, gently, the way you might tap the nose of a very large and very dignified dog.

“The function is accomplished,” he agreed. “The purpose isn’t.”

“Clarify.”

“The purpose is the process!”

“Process?”

“Yeah! Fumbling with the poles. Cursing because you put the rainfly on backward. Getting your fingers cold on the zippers. Standing back when you’re done and feeling smug even when it’s lopsided. Watching the lovely person you’re camping with… bend over to drive in a tent stake.”

Her three eyes blinked, two horizontal, one above, in the asymmetric sequence. Pink pixels bloomed under all three of them.

“You wish to watch me bend over while ineffectively fumbling with the setup of a tent?”

“That,” Maksym said, “is the entire point.”

“Maksym.”

“Mhm?”

“I will gather firewood.”

“Oh? Why?”

“So you may watch me bend over.”

He started laughing so hard he had to sit down on a log.