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The first time Ellen Ryder encountered the remtech bot in the lab, it scared the daylights out of her. The second time, it merely startled her. The third time, she literally ran into it.
The fourth time, to any and all who would listen, she threatened to strip it for parts.
“Ryder threatened to do that once,” said the short asari matron who had just this morning started there as the replacement for Ellen’s last field partner. “No, wait. Twice. First it was Poc and then it was Zap. Zap got the worst of it though—drop-kicked into a sinkhole on Elaaden. Never to be seen again.” She tilted her head in thought. “Then again, Poc almost took a lava bath. I kind of miss those two bots.”
Ellen couldn’t help her stare. Not when the few sentences the asari had spoken had gone in places she never would’ve foreseen. No one would have, for that matter. “A... lava bath?”
“Long story.” The asari loosely folded her arms and leaned a hip against the central table. “It involves an ex with questionable morals, a volcano, misuse of an escape pod, more remtech, and Ryder.”
“I would like to hear it, if you wouldn’t mind.”
The asari’s brilliant grin lit up her green eyes. “Are you kidding? Of course I don’t mind telling stories about my superhero mask days.”
“Your what?” This asari kept spouting these ridiculous statements that Ellen couldn’t help but believe, yet they were so incredulous at the same time and… she was intrigued. Very intrigued.
The asari drew a hand horizontally across her eyes. “Painted a black streak right across here every day for two decades, like a superhero mask.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I’d have to write a list and it’d be pretty long. Suffice to say that maidenhood was a trying time for me. Exciting, but difficult in ways I couldn’t name until a while after.” The asari glanced at the hovering bot and then back at Ellen. “So! Let me tell you about the volcano.”
By the end of the story, Ellen wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh, cry, or yell at the asari for what she’d gotten Sara involved in.
Though it was a strange thing to think when Sara was centuries dead and gone. Ellen had died—or had thought she had—yet had somehow outlived her children. It was a disconcerting feeling, as if she’d lived one life in the Milky Way with Alec, Scott, and Sara, and then now this other life, a second one in Andromeda. However, if there was an afterlife, this existence still felt like it.
A new galaxy.
Nothing the same.
Generations since those first Pathfinders and their teams.
No familiar faces except for memorials.
All Ellen had were memories. Every account of their actions had been told and retold, written in history books, the entries rendered largely impersonal over time. She’d read them all, eager to discover the lives her children had led while she’d been gone.
Stories of Scott’s life had been more detailed, more involved. From those accounts, Ellen knew without a shred of doubt that her son had been happy. Fulfilled. But Ellen lacked the same certainty about Sara. Stories about her held more distance, likely due to Sara’s preference for privacy, so unlike Scott’s love of being the center of attention. Ellen didn’t know if her daughter had been loved, if she’d loved in return, if she had been happy. Until Ellen knew the truth of her daughter’s happiness, it was difficult to contemplate her own and where she would fit in this new life.
But this asari’s story wasn’t in any written history, nor could the fondness and amusement in her voice as she recounted it be translated to print.
Maybe she had truly known Ellen’s children. Asari could live for a thousand years. The asari Pathfinder, Matriarch Sarissa, had been a Pathfinder since the asari ark’s first weeks in Andromeda. Yet, by all accounts, she was still alive and healthy.
“What’s your name?” asked Ellen.
The smile returned. “Which version do you want?”
“Which version?”
“There’s what my mother and sister called me, there’s what I insisted I be called for about a century, and there’s what people usually call me now unless they just found out it’s my bots they’ve been tripping over and none of those are nice things. So, your choices are Pelessaria, Peebee, Pella, Pel, or a whole bunch of insults. I’ll let you supply your own list for that last one.”
“You don’t look like a Peebee.”
“That’s because Peebee is my superhero persona.” The asari leaned across the table and whispered, “If I paint that mask on, I’ll look just like a Peebee. It’s a remarkable transformation.”
Ellen retained her skepticism. In her experience with asari, while matrons weren’t as compellingly serious as matriarchs, they weren’t as exhaustingly energetic and effervescent as maidens. And Peebee sounded very much like a maiden’s name.
But when the same asari matron appeared in the lab the next morning sporting a black smear of paint like a superhero mask across her eyes, Ellen laughed.
The asari smiled brilliantly. “Well?”
“You do look like a Peebee.” She did. She really did.
“I do,” Peebee said, her smile sticking around. “I still can’t believe I kept this up for decades, though. Goddess knows how I had the patience for it.”
“My guess is that it was more determination than anything else.”
“You’re probably right. Did you decide on what you’re going to call me? Because we’re going to be working together in the field for a while and it’ll get awkward if you keep referring to me as ‘that asari with the obnoxious bots.’ Also, it’s a bit of a mouthful.”
“I think I’ll go with Peebee.”
The smile broadened even more. “Somehow I figured you’d pick that. Makes me feel young.”
Young. She almost sighed. Asari. Peebee looked Ellen’s age or maybe even somewhat younger. “How old are you?”
“Five hundred and change,” she said as she unpacked her bag on the table. A bot flew from the bag and hovered over the stack of datapads. “A respectable age.”
Well, in Ellen’s opinion, with those misbehaving bots of hers, Peebee certainly didn’t act her age. “I think ‘respectable’ has more to do with behavior—good behavior, such as your bots keeping their jump scares to themselves.” Ellen pointed at the hovering bot to make herself absolutely clear.
“One time,” Peebee said, eyes flicking between the bot and Ellen, “Zap made Ryder jump so high that she hit her head on the ceiling.”
“Was that when Zap ended up in the sinkhole?”
“Oh, no. That was a few years later when Zap tangled up her feet while she was in a full sprint. Fell right on her face, got a mouthful of sand, and Zap got a biotics-boosted-boot into the closest sinkhole. Her trip was so spectacular that I wasn’t even mad.”
“Sara was, though,” Ellen said, likely a little too wistfully.
Peebee laughed. “I won’t repeat the things she said.” She considered Ellen for a moment. “You had a good kid. Of course, I was pretty much a kid back then too. But I stand by my judgment about Ryder.”
There it was. Ellen sat back in her chair as she studied Peebee again. “So you know Sara was my daughter?”
“Hard not to when everyone knows who the mother of the legendary second and third human Pathfinders is. But everyone treats you like your kids were legendary since the moment they were born. Me? I knew Sara when we were both just-this-short of screwups. You know, normal.” She pushed the bot aside, frowning when it immediately tried to float back into her face. Peebee leaned around it to make eye contact with Ellen. “So what should I call you?”
“Ellen would be fine.”
“Want to hear more stories about the dumb things your kid did?”
“You mean dumb things you did while dragging Sara along with you?”
“Something like that.” Peebee tried to nudge the bot in the other direction, but it flew back like the last time, drawing a brief scowl from Peebee before she turned a cheerful look toward Ellen. “Let’s see. There’s the time Ryder, Liam, and I tried to get a close up scan of the remnant abyssal—don’t worry, we all lost our nerve around the third time Vetra told us not to do it because it would be dumb and Lexi scolded us over comms the whole time—then there’s the time Ryder, Jaal, and I tried to ride a manta. Turns out their bioelectric thing is even stronger than the angaran one. Or there’s the time we—”
“It sounds like you were a terrible influence.”
“I tried to be. But, like I said, you had a good kid. She didn’t even kick me off the Tempest after I melted one of the escape pods.”
“Did she make you replace it?”
“Yes. I had to build a new one. Something about consequences for my actions. That and we did need a pod. And if I didn’t keep my room an escape pod,” Peebee said, lowering her voice in feigned seriousness, “they were going to make me participate in evacuation drills.”
Ellen gave her a neutral look. “The horror.”
But Peebee only smiled again. “Exactly!” Then she grabbed the troublesome bot by both sides and shoved it back into her bag, which started to hop around in an attempt to escape. “I think that one needs a redesign. We’ll leave it behind when we go into the field.”
Ellen considered the bag scooting toward the end of the table. “Actually, when we go to Elaaden, I wouldn’t mind if you brought it along.”
“You hear that?” Peebee said to the bag. “You don’t start behaving, Ellen’s going to throw you into a sinkhole and I won’t even feel bad.”
Peebee turned out to be one of the best field partners Ellen had ever had the opportunity to work with. It helped that she seemed to understand Ellen’s enthusiasm about examining the interaction of remtech with the possible ancient angaran network on the somewhat chilly Voeld, even if it meant hiking kilometers from their original site when they found one lead that led to several more. Nor did Ellen mind journeying in another direction when Peebee had a hunch because Peebee’s instincts turned out to be very good.
The ancient AI was more than a little frightening, however. After consulting with the Pathfinders and their various SAMs, it was agreed that the safest option was shutting the ancient AI down. Otherwise, the risk was too high for the cluster’s population.
On Havarl, Ellen and Peebee found an entire network of remtech branching out below pre-kett angaran settlements, often ending in AI nodes but with the AIs themselves long removed. However, a few meters beneath the ruined shell of an ancient angaran building, they found a shard of non-angaran skull that showed curious signs of hardware integration. However, everything had decomposed or disintegrated too much to retrieve any meaningful data beyond the discovery itself.
Not until a few months later did they run across anything more substantive.
Only a hundred meters from Elaaden’s secondary vault, Ellen and Peebee located the mummified remains of what could have been an organic jardaan augmented with remtech. A mere ten years ago, it had been buried by one of the immense equatorial sand dunes, remnants of Elaaden’s past as an entire moon desiccated and drowned in sodium silicate sand. Now, centuries after its main vault activation, only this narrowing desert sea in a land of green remained.
But its time, too, was winding down, the pink-leaved trees encroaching on each side advancing each year.
Ellen was fond of those trees, and each time she and Peebee broke for a meal, she picked their shade to sit under.
She felt a certain sort of peace there. And that peace was even more certain whenever Peebee joined her, sitting to Ellen’s left on the large rock.
The bot hovering just out of Ellen’s reach, however, she could do without.
Sara had made this future possible. Ellen supposed that Sara would’ve been proud, but the kind of adventures required of a Pathfinder had never been something Sara had wanted. Scott, yes. But not Sara. And the idea that Sara might’ve only had monuments like this to look back on for the happy moments of her life saddened Ellen, as her mother. Her daughter had accomplished great things, but that didn’t matter as much to her as it did Sara’s happiness with her life as a whole.
Ellen placed her water bottle down on her left. “Peebee, can I ask you a question?”
“If you answer two for me in return, sure.” Peebee scooted closer, giving Ellen her full attention.
“All right, deal.” Ellen hadn’t so much as finished saying the word ‘deal’ when the infernal bot zipped over and took up a position in front of her face. Scowling, she swatted at it, her scowl deepening when the bot flitted out of reach.
“Aw, it likes you,” said Peebee.
“If it likes me, it had better change its ways or it’s going to end up in pieces, in a sinkhole, or both.” The bot wisely stayed away, allowing Ellen to finally ask Peebee, “Was my daughter happy?”
Peebee tilted her head, puzzled. “Both your kids had kids and their kids had—well, you know how it works. You could ask them. Your family.”
“They’re twelve generations removed from me. I’m more an ancient ancestor than family.” Ellen wondered if that should have made her sad but it simply didn’t. She knew they were content with their lives in Andromeda and that was what mattered to her. Their lives were theirs. And her life was hers, she supposed. A life she hadn’t expected to have. And other things she hadn’t expected, such as the emerging feelings about her friend and research companion of several months.
“Oh, right. I forget about that with humans. With asari, it’s… I think one generation? Maybe.” Then Peebee hummed and thought about it for a while.
Ellen didn’t mind the quiet, enjoying the breeze slowly swirling the sand in front of them, the rustling the leaves, the company of the person next to her.
Then Peebee said, “I’d say yes. She spent a long time angry with her dad because she hadn’t wanted to be Pathfinder, but he didn’t give her a choice and she resented him for it. Eventually she... well, I wouldn’t say got over it. More like she adapted. Eventually passed SAM to her brother—who you already know was happy since everyone who’s anyone has written about him—and that’s when she finally had the chance to be happy. I think she stayed that way, after that. For the most part. No one’s happy all the time.”
Ellen smiled as she picked up her water, readying for their afternoon dig, and then briefly placed her free hand over Peebee’s. “Thank you for telling me. And for telling me the unhappy part, too. A lot of people would’ve kept that part back.”
“The happy means more when you know where it came from.” After a moment, Peebee said, “Can I ask my first question?”
“Fire away,” Ellen said as she unscrewed the cap on her water.
“Are you happy?”
Ellen’s hand stilled. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“You should. You’ve got a whole life in front of you.”
“You mean I’ve got you in front of me since you’re always darting ahead.” Ellen reached out and tried to wipe the smudge of dust from Peebee’s cheek but only succeeded in smudging it more. At least it seemed to suit her.
Peebee’s full smile touched her eyes. Or maybe it was the other way around. “I like to think that I’m pretty full of life. Maybe try out some happy new life things with me?”
“Are you trying to ask me out on a date?”
“Would you say yes if I was?”
“Where,” said Ellen, gesturing around them, “would we even go?”
“I was thinking we could sneak into the vault,” Peebee said, mischievousness glinting in her eyes as she motioned in that direction.
Her own smile emerging, Ellen looked from Peebee to the low metal structure of the vault entrance and back to Peebee. “I’d like that.”
“Good. Me too.” Peebee had gotten much closer, so close that their shoulders touched before Peebee faced her fully. “Can I ask you my second question?”
“Which is?”
She was only a few centimeters away. “What are your feelings about me kissing you?”
“My feelings are,” Ellen said as she leaned forward until only the thought of a breath remained between them, “that I hope you’ll kiss me back when I kiss you.” Then she closed the distance, pressing her lips to Peebee’s with more fervor than she’d imagined.
Fingers sliding through Ellen’s hair, Peebee enthusiastically returned her kiss.
And Ellen believed that she could be happy in this new life, too.