"HELL ARE YOU DOING, VIN," Andi hollers up her.
Fran pauses in their stroll around the big empty plot behind the Planetary Settlement Centre, the one pencilled in on every PlanSet town layout for an Evangelical church, because terraforming is expensive and the fundies don't subsidise it out of the vestigial goodness of their little black hearts. Ain't enough people here to make it worth their while to put the thing up, not yet, so the locals use it to play kickball, and for the annual Pig Cook, and apparently Vin lets the whooping local kids climb all over Fran and takes the mech for a walk round the field like some kind of dumbshit.
Vin pops her cockpit open and gives a little wave. "Hi, Andi!"
"I SAID, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING."
Andi's never said a word to anyone outside of mandatory psych about the ground op on Spinnaker VI, frontline armoured infantry mechs nosing through carbonised cars and bombed-out buildings. The sideways glimpse of something in the rubble breaking under another mech's foot, as if it was a length of wood crunching under the weight; the one-two punch of realisations that the driftwood-looking debris was wrapped in once-colourful cloth (a sleeve), and then the comparative scale against the mech's toes (too small; too small for—)
She's not gonna start today.
"Aw, it's a bit of fun," Vin says, who likes kids.
"NO," Andi hollers, who—
Andi talked a lot about that, in mandatory psych. Andi nearly didn't get back in the field, because she talked about it.
—doesn't like kids.
Andi can see Vin's mutiny face, she can see her gearing up to Increase The Thing until someone gets—
Andi retreats. She retreats, it's a whole-ass word, it's not running, she just — she just needed to shut herself in one of the public-access chem-toilet shacks so it wasn't her shoes she lost her lunch on. After the first bout, she fishes out her Swiss Army knife and wedges the shitty door lock with the Thing for Getting Stones out of Fishes' Hooves, for when Vin starts rattling the door and trying to jimmy the bolt from the outside.
"Andi," Vin says, with what might be concern on anyone else. On Vin, it's mostly — well, maybe it's still concern, but at least it ain't from some civilian fuck.
Andi checks whether she's in range to connect her phone to her mech's internet uplink, finds the one business on the planet so far selling boating supplies, in one of the more coasterly settlements, orders a dozen children's life harnesses, and emails the receipt to Vin.
"Andi," Vin says, a couple of minutes later, "I'm gonna knock the pins out of these hinges if you don't unlock the door."
"I'm pissing," Andi says gruffly.
"You can't piss for twenty minutes straight," Vin says.
"Well, I ain't straight."
Vin says something inaudible, then starts trying to knock the pins out, so Andi unspikes the lock and opens the door.
"Saints," she says sourly, slouching out into sunlight that feels too bright. "I can't piss on my own?"
Vin heaves a breath in a way that's very nearly a sigh. "If you want me to pretend I believe you were pissing for twenty minutes," she says, "wash your fucking hands."
