Bea walks the row of idle mechs with her fists balled in her flight suit's pockets, down to where one of the other A-Wing pilots is sitting on one of her frame's deck boots — a strip of pilfered mirror-finish plastic propped against the machine's shin, touching up her buzzcut with clippers.
"Hey," Bea says, leaning against the frame's leg.
"Hey, Bitchless." The other pilot shuts off the clippers, runs a hand over her scalp, and pulls a joint from behind her ear, rolled slender and militarily precise. "'Sup?"
The words come out slowly, reluctantly. "Can I get some advice?"
Callsign Delphi; because she's always stoned, and she's always ready to talk.
"People hate my advice," Delphi says reasonably. "You sure?"
"I've got a problem."
Delphi flicks a cheap lighter until it reluctantly yields flame, then plays with it, rolling it between her fingers as she takes a drag. "Did they get tired of you hiding in the mechanics' mess and kick you out?" she says, and grins crookedly at Bea's twitch. "You ain't subtle."
"Fine. Fine." And no, she knows she's not. Not subtle, not like a high society upbringing teaches you to be. "So what do I do."
"Well, look." Delphi gestures in the air before her, sketching — well, whatever it is she can already see clearly. "You need to imagine — right, an electric field, okay?"
Bea puts her head back against the cool metal of the mech's leg. "I'm imagining an electric field," she lies.
"Okay. So. And particles, right? So you've got ions — it's a gradient. Or, like, a hill that things roll down." Delphi thumbs at the corner of her eye, squinting. "Wait, that analogy only works if some things roll uphill. Hang on. I guess you can reduce it to like a vector math problem but then it doesn't have the point about molecules—"
"Delphi."
"So imagine that there's hills, okay, but some kinds of rock naturally roll uphill—"
"Delphi."
"What?"
"How high are you?"
She grins. "On a scale of one to ten? I mean, I guess, it's not really a linear — think of an S-curve, okay? With normative on the x-axis, and 'oh, man, Delphi, what the fuck' at some subjective y equals some constant? But really that floats depending, it's not so much a constant as a constant per-interlocutor...."
"Delphi."
Delphi looks at where Bea's covered her face with her hands, take a deep drag on her joint, and blows a smoke ring to watch it drift away. "Do you know why I give awful advice, Bitchless?" she says abruptly.
"No."
"Because most people's problems are, like, complex numbers."
"Half imaginary?" Bea says bitterly.
"Oh, look who's smart! No, they're on a plane. And they're scaled big on the emotional complexity axis," Delphi makes a this big! gesture, arms out wide, "but on the practical recourse axis, the bandwidth is...." She pinches two fingers in front of her face. "And people get wildly lost in the emotional dimension, so they ask, but they don't wanna hear—"
She seems to get lost for a minute, staring pensively at the glowing end of her joint.
"Most peoples' problems, Bitchless," she says eventually, "they come down to talk to 'em. Or never talk to 'em again. Or one then the other."
"Yeah," Bea says. "I don't like your advice, either."
"You're welcome," Delphi says serenely, and picks up the clippers. "Get that bit at the back for me?"
"Sure." Bea takes them. "Thanks," she adds.
"Mhm." Delphi puts her head forward, offering up her nape. "You want some actual advice?" she says, slightly muffled. "If we sortied tomorrow and the Count blew her to pieces, you'd feel real shit."
Yeah.
"Shut up," Bea suggests.
