Chapter Two

Taylor’s first days in the machine were strange, a haze of half remembered emotions, of being shown to a little room and being given water, of having dozens of small creature become a part of her only to be pushed away by her own fleeting will.

She wasn’t sure how long had passed. A day, maybe two. The only real company she had was the rusty robot who would occasionally repeat her own words back to her. She knew that it was night when it grew colder, and that it was day when the temperature inside the machine reached the point where the air was so thick it was hard to breath.

They left her alone, for the most part. On the first day she woke up to find bandages wrapped around her missing right arm and a strange collar around her neck. Her costume had been torn up some more by grubby little hands, but she didn’t have anything worth stealing to begin with.

Still, she recovered. Some sleep, some water, a bit of gruel that tasted like spicy oatmeal and more sleep besides. After some time she was beginning to feel alive again.

“So, what are you?” she asked the robot.

“So, what are you?” it repeated in a low monotone.

It was a tall and rather imposing machine. Or it would have been if it didn’t look like it was a stiff breeze away from falling apart. “Are you trying to translate?” she asked it.

“Are you trying t--”

“Stop,” she said, and motioned with her hand with a cutting gesture. “It was cute at first, but now it’s just annoying.”

With a grunt of effort, she climbed onto her feet and had to bend back down to avoid hitting her head on the ceiling. Everything was built to the scale of creatures who were a good foot shorter than her. She was going to have to be careful around doorways. It didn’t help that the constant rumble and sway of the vehicle threw off her balance, like being aboard a boat on choppy water.

“I’m going exploring,” she said to the robot, just to see if it was starting to understand. She doubted it. Sighing at the machine, she started to move towards the door when its arm shot out with surprising speed and blocked her path.

The machine pointed at its neck with its other hand, then made a pre-recorded explosion sound.

Taylor touched the collar wrapped around her neck, feeling all the weird lumps and canisters on it. “It’s explosive?” she asked.

The robot stared at her, then pointed to her neck and made the exploding noise again.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she swore. “How does it activate?” she asked. “Is it remote controlled?”

The robot just stared, its unblinking red lights fixed on her.

Sighing, she pointed to the collar, then mimed walking out the door before making an exploding noise of her own. She felt rather ridiculous, but it seemed to get the point across.

The robot pointed to her collar, then to three points around the door where little cylinders were tack welded in place and fairly recently. He made walking motions with two fingers, pointed to her, the cylinders, then out the door. He repeated the exploding sound.

“If I cross the door, I explode,” she said.

He nodded.

She frowned, wondering when, exactly, she had decided that the robot was a he, and what she was going to do about her new necklace. She had better things to do than wait around on some little creatures to decide her fate. She had to find a way back to Earth, or at least back to Contessa. The woman’s power might have been bullshit, and maybe she was right to dump someone as dangerous as her on some desert rock to die, but that didn’t mean that she was going to lie down and take it.

“Can you remove the explosive?” she asked, pointing to her neck, then making a one handed gesture that she hoped the robot understood as removing the collar.

The robot shook its head, then pointed to the thing on its chest.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

What followed were a few minutes of playing charades with a surprisingly intelligent robot, though she had the impression that it was growing frustrated with her.

“That thing on your chest,” she said, pointing to make sure it understood. “Is stopping you from helping me.”

“Stop helping,” the robot said.

Taylor almost jumped out of her skin. For nearly half an hour already she had been the only one talking. To hear another voice, even one that had be be loud enough to be heard over the rumble of the vehicle’s engines, had surprised her.

“You learn quick, huh?” she asked it. “How? I get the stop part. There was context there, but the help bit. But you knew a lot of languages. You’re learning as I speak, aren’t you?” She bit her lip. If he could learn to speak in a few days or hours then she could communicate. That was one issue out of the way. All it needed was time.

He didn’t have anything to say about that.

She pointed to the tiny mattress she had been sleeping on. It was too small to stretch out on and uncomfortable besides. “Mattress,” she said. She mimicked sleeping, adding a bit of a snore to it. “Sleep.” She gestured to the whole of the bed. “Bed.”

On and on it went, with her pointing to an item, then calling it out. Her cell, because if she was locked in there it certainly wasn’t just a room, was tiny and spartan, and the few items in it were forein besides. Soon enough she was miming eating, talking, seeing and feeling. Every gesture and body part she could point to she named and the robot just watched with its glowing red eyes.

She hoped she wasn’t too much of a fool, but at least it was something to do.

***

Taylor woke up to a mechanical hand shaking her shoulders.

She was instantly awake and searching for a weapon. Her arm reached out and grabbed a pipe, one that she had torn off from a broken fitting on the ceiling the night before and got ready to fight.

The robot was above her, arms held away from her as he slowly backed away and to his corner. Then he turned his head and started chittering and squeaking in the strange tongue of the locals.

There was one of them in the entrance, a tall one with white bandoleers across his brown robes. It chattered back at the robot and then looked her way. The little creature gestured at her, as if asking something but Taylor couldn’t make heads or tails of what it was saying.

The robot turned to look her way, then pointed to the creature. “Translation: Jawa. Taylor help.”

She raised an eyebrow at that. “He wants me to help?” she pointed between herself and the creature, the Jawa.

“Yes,” the robot said.

“Why?” she asked.

The robot and the Jawa conferred for a moment while Taylor rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. It was surprisingly difficult to do one handed.

“Translation: Jawa hurt. Jawa explosion, pain, hurt. Jawa bad... Tusken Raider. Hurt Jawa.” The robot seemed just as frustrated as she was at the lack of decent communication.

“Someone is hurting the Jawa? A...” She hesitated before repeating the unfamiliar word. “A Tusken Raider. Is that another clan of Jawa? Another group, a family of them?”

The robot shook its rusty head. “Answer: No.”

“Right, so it’s not a Jawa, but it can hurt the Jawa?” she asked.

It was then that she heard over the rumble of the vehicle, a distinct whining sound. She didn’t have anything to compare it to, but it was always followed by a hollow thud like something impacting against steel.

The entire vehicle shook, and it wasn't the usual rocking that they had been suffering through from the moment it took off.

The little Jawa was growing frantic, pointing and chattering louder and louder. “Translation: Help Jawa. Free. Collar.”

Taylor frowned. She didn’t know what was going on, or who was attacking them, but fighting was something she could do. Maybe. She wasn’t in the best of shape, even with over half a week to recover. Her missing arm still threw off her balance and she felt weak. Then again, the Jawa didn’t look all that strong.

“Sure, I’ll help.”

The robot was hardly done translating that the tall Jawa pulled out a device and pointed it to each cylinder around the door. They all beeped once.

“Is he turning off the collar?” she asked the robot.

“Yes,” was the machine’s quick reply.

Taylor was out of her bed and across the room in one stumbling, graceless motion. The room was long enough that staying at the far end meant that the Jawa was outside her range, and even if she stood by the door there was plenty of room for it to pass unmolested at the far end of the corridor, but her sudden burst of movement caught the creature flatfooted and it had hardly taken a step back that it was in her range.

Between two blinks she was in control of the Jawa

She grinned and had the impression that she didn’t look all that docile to the Jawa as she towered above it. Moving its body like an extension of her own, she disabled the other traps around the door, then had the Jawa move into the room.

“Can you have him disable that thing?” she asked, pointing to the medal on the robot’s chest.

The robot looked down, then back up. “Answer: No. Tool.”

“You need another tool for that?” she asked. The robot would be useful to have, if only to translate. It helped that he was a big hunk of hard steel that could probably take a battering for her. “What does it look like?”

The robot made helpful gestures while explaining in halting, one-word sentences. “Answer: Long. Metal. Ring. Buttons. Jawa have.”

“Right, I’ll keep an eye open for it. Can you follow me?”

The robot paused. “Answer: You can say to follow. Robot can not. Jawa can say to follow. Robot can.”

She had to parse that for a second, but as soon as she thought about it, it made sense. “What would the Jawa have to say, exactly, for you to be allowed to follow me and fight?”

The robot chattered in the Jawa’s strange tongue, and she had the creature next to her imitate the sounds. Its tongue was well suited to the strange words and they came easily to it. That was going to be a handy skill to have, if she ever encountered other devices that were voice activated.

“Okay, do you know of any other explosives?” She pointed to her collar. “Or how to remove this one?”

“Answer: No,” was the robot’s response.

It was all she was going to get, she figured. There were a few bugs in her range, mostly flies that gathered in the vehicle’s kitchens and a few of the sand scorpions she had grown familiar with. She started moving the latter towards the Jawa’s mobile fortress, skittering over the rocky terrain outside to get closer.

She didn’t know what a Tusken Raider was, or even if she wanted to help the creatures that had essentially imprisoned her, but she did have a debt to repay and a life to get back to, and none of that was going to happen if she sat back and let her new friends die.