Chapter One - Servitors

Alexis Lambda-3 wasn't someone that was trusted with very many tasks, but taking care of the servitors? Even Servitor Overseer Ash-Theta was impressed by how good she was with the average servitor.

That was... pretty much all she was good at.

Alexis Lambda-3 hummed to herself as she checked over one of her friends. This was 054-648, a Mars-Pattern Task Servitor, and he was in a pinch of trouble. "Tsk tsk, Oh-Five-four! Look at this!" Alexis said as she bent down and wiggled something free from the servitor's treads. When she rose, she held a small piece of some sort of hard plastic in her hand. "Where did you find this? And how did you get it lodged up in there?"

054-648 stared at her, blank. Like most servitors, his range of expressions was... well, he didn't have any. His eyes were human, a pale blue, and she imagined that he'd been quite handsome once, before being lobotomized and half-turned into a cyborg.

"You need to be more careful, sweetpea," she said as she gave his head a pat. "I know that you can't move your neck to look at where you're going sometimes, but that just means that you need to be extra careful."

She looked over the bit of plastic, then tossed it into a trash receptacle. It was just a piece of a packing crate of some sort. Trash like that often ended up cluttering the sides of major passages on the ship.

"Okay, a few tests, to make sure it's all good, then I'll oil up your treads! Don't tell Servitor Overseer Ash-Theta, but I got my hands on some of that good oil. Made on Mars! He won't miss it much, since we'll be there in just a few weeks, right?"

She hummed some more, singing the wordless notes of a ditty that was caught in her head. It was the same music her mom used to hum.

A few minutes later, the servitor was able to roll across the floor of her workstation, and she grinned. "Perfect. Wait here for a bit, I'll look after a few others, then sign you all out at once."

054-648 sent her a confirmation through the local command array. She had to skip over to the workbench and pick up a dataslate to read it.

One day, she'd get a direct connection to the command array, especially if she wanted to become a proper tech adept and maybe a servitor overseer. That was... a ways off, however.

"Who's next?" she asked, even if she knew the answer. Industrial Servitor K84-321 was next! He was a big guy. A chest with bulging muscles and a squat head covered by an iron dome. He had short, stubby legs, and a pair of heavy mechanical arms, designed to grab onto items and move them around.

"Let's see... what made the tech priest down by the engines send you to me, hm?" she asked as she plugged her dataslate in. Almost immediately, she went cross-eyed. The tech priest on the other end of this one-sided conversation had replied in binharic.

Alexis Lambda-3 stared, then grit her teeth and slowly started to work through the long strings of ones and zeroes. She had been taught binharic from a young age, then again at a less young age, then again... pretty much every few months, whenever she was forced to sing a cant near a senior tech priest.

She had often been threatened about it. Her accent and ability to mangle cants had angered many a machine spirit, and more than a few seniors, and some of them suggested that she be turned into one of the servitors that she loved so much.

It was hardly her fault! The numbers always started swimming around! Letters were better, those stayed in place when she looked at them.

And when it came to doing math...

She was hoping that a pilgrimage to Mars might help. There had to be other prospective adepts that had the same issue as her, right?

Eventually, she got her ones and zeroes sorted out, and she sighed. "Wow, poor thing, you haven't had regular maintenance in forever, huh? Let's see what we can do to fix you up!"

It was the work of an hour to get K84-321 back into tip-top shape. Mostly the servos in his arms and legs were gummed up. Some people thought that just applying more sacred oil would fix anything, but there was such a thing as too much.

The next servitor was Medicae Servitor KYS, a tall lady, with a thin waist and six arms, each one ending in a different medical implement. Those needed replacing, and there was a slight jitter in the motion of her saw.

This wasn't one of the ad mech servitors, but rather one that belonged to The Broken Scale's rather large medical decks.

Alexis had Medicae Servitor KYS partially disassembled an hour later, the servitor's head and upper chest on a gantry so that she could better access the machine's interior. That's about when someone opened the door into her workspace.

It wasn't much of a workspace. Really, it was meant to be a closet, so the ventilation was... non-existent, and the lighting wasn't very good, but Alexis didn't mind so much. "Hello! One second, I'm nearly done here."

"Tsk, you better be," a familiar voice replied, one that made her wince. Rho-17 Kaster.

Alexis looked up from her work. "Can I help you?" she asked.

"Lunch is being served," Rho said, then he sneered. It was particularly ugly, seeing as how his lower jaw was all titanium. "But not for you. You can eat once you're done."

"I'm nearly done!" she said.

He glared, then looked at what she was doing. "Are you painting that servitor?"

"Yeah? It's a medicae servitor. I have read several reports that indicate that people heal better when in brightly-lit, comfortable environments." She turned and looked at the art she'd added to Medicae Servitor KYS's chassis. It was mostly a splash of pale pink and some warning-sign yellow flowers.

"01001001 01100100 01101001 01101111 01110100," Rho-17 swore at her before half-closing the door. "You'll never be anything if this kind of stupidity is all you do."

She pouted at the door, then worked out what he'd said in binharic. "Hey! I'm not an idiot!"

Sighing, she turned back to her work, just about at the same time as her tummy rumbled.

"The flesh is weak and hungry, Miss Medicae Servitor KYS," she complained.

The servitor made a faint, approving noise with a small vox implanted in its throat, and Alexis laughed.

Then she paused. There was a slight shift in the air. She wasn't born on a ship, and hadn't spent all that much time on them, but even so, the way the entire vessel seemed to creak felt off to her. Then the loose things on her workbench started to slide across the room, and so did she. Were the gravitational dampeners being overloaded?

They were in the warp. A calm, quiet part, on a known route towards Holy Terra, but it was the warp nonetheless. She'd heard stories, even if she wasn't supposed to.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"It's fine," she said to her friends. The servitors looked at her with empty gazes, but that was fine too. It was hard to read them, but that didn't make it impossible.

Then the lights flickered, the gravity shot off, and between one blink and the next, Alexis Lambda-3 was flung across the room.

She rammed into the far wall, then screamed as she saw all of the tools in the space rushing towards her.

Somehow, when the lights flickered back on and she crashed into the floor, she was unharmed. Or mostly unharmed. The strike against the wall was going to leave a bruise, she was sure of that, but bruises she could live with.

Covering her, with several metal implements sticking out of their backs, were Medicae Servitor KYS and K84-321.

"Oh," she said.

Instantly, she felt tears welling in her eyes. "You... you didn't have to!"

054-648 rolled over, and with surprising gentleness, helped her to her feet.

The other servitors in the room had been tossed around, and instantly, she ran over to one of them and helped them up.

An alarm started to ring across the ship, or at least her part of it. It was too little, too late, and she couldn't understand the quick binharic anyway. Shaking her head, Alexis stumbled over to some of her other friends and righted them. None were dead, which was great. She wasn't sure if they weren't concussed, but was also not sure if she'd be able to tell anyway.

The door to her workshop burst open. For a moment, she expected Rho-17 again, but no, it was someone far larger. Servitor Overseer Ash-Theta. "Alexis Lambda-3," he said. "You live?"

"I'm alive!" she chirped. "I'm... going to start fixing things."

"No," he said. "We need every hand. Even the lesser flesh of the acolytum. The ship has been damaged."

"By what? Are we under attack?" she asked.

"Enough questions," he said, his vox-cast voice fizzing at the edges. "Follow."

She glanced to her servitor friends, then smiled, to try and reassure them. "Stay here! I'll be right back, promise!"

Running after the Servitor Overseer, she followed him into the main servitorium, the space reserved for creating and repairing servitors. She winced at what she saw. The sudden jerk hadn't been only in her corner. It was everywhere. Entire walls had buckled, and tools were scattered across the room, some of them spitting sparks and hissing in angry machine code.

The spirits were going to take a lot of effort to be appeased. "What happened?" she asked again.

"Later," Ash-Theta said.

They crossed a body. It was another acolyte.

She stopped, staring, then was jerked forwards by one of the overseer's mechadendrites.

"The Omnissiah has blessed us this day," he said.

"H-how can you say that?" she asked.

"We lived."

They moved into one of the main corridors. The servitorium was deep within the bowels of the ship, near the rearmost sections, and relatively low, near the prow. Ahead of them were a gaggle of tech priests and adepts. Two, maybe three dozen of them, most in familiar red robes.

They were crowded around one of the larger, more protected doors. She noticed lots of bent limbs and a bit of blood, so they had been thrown around as well, but the average servant of the Omnissiah was tougher than most people.

Servitor Overseer Ash-Theta wasn't a high-ranking officer, but his presence was enough to make some room, and she managed to squeeze in behind him.

The door led into one of the more important rooms of the ship, or at least, this section. It was one of the main power rooms. She hadn't ever been allowed within. That was something reserved for people of a higher rank, though she had serviced some servitors that worked within.

There was a conversation going on above her in rapid bursts of vox and encoded binharic. She had the impression that she wasn't supposed to be here.

Then Servitor Overseer Ash-Theta turned towards her. "We need you," he said.

She straightened. "Sir?"

"Do you know this place?"

"It's one of the power systems," she said.

He nodded. "A nuclear engine. It is damaged. The task would fall to the ship's Enginseer Prime. He has been disabled. The next enginseers are either inoperable, dead, or busy. We need to repair and appease the machine spirit of this core or it will fail. If it does so, the power provided will be insufficient."

"Aren't there backups?" she asked, then winced as one of the other tech priests smacked her behind the head.

"There are. Two are disabled. The other remains functional. Two of the four must be in prime condition to provide power to the Geller device and Warp Drive. If this one fails both will remain active, but several auxiliary systems will need to be powered down."

"Ah," she said. She didn't know as much as maybe she should have, but there were a lot of things on a ship that simply couldn't be powered down. "And we need someone to fix it?"

"To repair the servitors to repair the core," he said.

"Oh... I can do that. Um, can I go get my tools? What's the damage like? I can help!"

She stumbled back with an oomph as he pushed a bag full of tools into her chest. It was his own. These were better than anything she had, by a lot.

She looked up to him. It was dawning on her that this wasn't a good spot to be in.

"If you succeed, you will exit this place as a Tech Acolyte in full," he said.

Someone protested, and he cursed them out in rapid binharic. She didn't catch all of that, but... enough.

"You can't... no, nevermind." She was going to ask why he couldn't, but she'd seen the state of the ship. If it was all like this, then thousands of servitors would need repairs.

She looked back. For a moment, her eye caught that of Rho-17, at the back of the pack. He had the same expertise as her. More, even. He looked away.

How many would die if...

She swallowed, stood taller, then walked forwards.

No one stopped her, which was strange. Usually she had to slip around robes and sneak by the more senior members.

On reaching the entrance proper, she found herself alone. No one was crossing the invisible threshold on the ground.

She entered.

The door closed behind her, then another opened ahead.

The first thing she noticed was the light. The core was burning bright, pipes all around it glowing with unvented heat. The next thing she noticed were the servitors. A dozen of them, tossed around the room. Then the taste. It was like licking batteries, mixed with the dangerous odour of burning plastics.

Alexis Lambda-3 shook, her eyes filled with tears... then she stepped deeper into the room.

If she didn't do it, someone else would have to.

If she didn't succeed, then many would die.

Her lips trembled as she hummed her song, but she got to work.

***

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