Eternal Sapphtember writing prompt — Girls who are cheap
Dixon whistles tunelessly, inching along under the starboard pulsetrain waveguide on her back, megger in hand and pencil tucked behind her ear. The wiring loom on this junker is rotted in hundreds of spots, insulation perishing on the kinks and pinches in the cables, oxygen, damp and time doing the rest. You could just order replacement sections online — the only way you actually save money by buzzing out the faults and patching them one by one is if you value your time low, and are prepared to spend it like sand through your fingers.
You have to be either a vehicle restoration hobbyist, or desperately broke, and Dixon is not doing this for fun.
A deck further below, the big cargo clamshell hatch clangs, and someone comes in, muttering to themself; throws their coat over a pipe with a characteristic swoosh; starts scaling the gangway ladder up to here. Dixon lets herself smile, feel the fondness pool warmly in her chest, while she’s safely tucked out of sight under a starship engine, then wipes her face blank and wriggles painstakingly in the direction of out.
“Hey,” Laurel says, reaching a hand down to help haul her out the last short distance and to her feet.
“You were due back Tuesday,” Dixon says gruffly, tucking the megger into its belt pouch. “You trip and fall into a warm girl or a two-day bender or what?”
“No!” Laurel says, with the sorrow of someone who’s deeply hurt at your misplaced mistrust, but also can’t say too much on account of both those having happened before. “No, Dix, I was trying my damnedest to find us that bot you wanted.”
“Told you,” Dixon says, wiping her hands on her coveralls, slightly sceptical still, for all how sincere Laurel sounds. “It’s a nice to have, but we ain’t likely to find one.”
Laurel always sounds sincere. Laurel always is sincere. It’s just that some of the time she’s saying things that are aspirational, instead of true. Like the times she tripped and fell into a two-day bender, or a girl, and told Dixon she totally hadn’t. Laurel would like to be robustly upstanding and trustworthy and reliable, and Dixon cannot get through to her that step one would be to stop lying when she falls short of it.
“I wanted to find one for you,” Laurel says.
Truthfully, without an engineering workbot, Dixon doesn’t know how they’re going to unmount the port pulsetrain. It’s a heavy, heavy job, and their four hands are not enough. Not even ‘not enough to do it safely’; just plain not enough.
“There were one or two on the market,” Laurel says, running her hand through her damnably pretty pixie cut. “But like you said, they really keep their value, and we’re — we ain’t quite flush with cash.”
Dixon shrugs.
“But I got thinking,” Laurel adds brightly, which is what finally douses the warmth of fondness with the cold water-bucket of suspicious dread.
“No,” she says. “No thinking. You thinking doesn’t go advisable places.”
“No, listen,” Laurel says, wheedling, in the way that confirms that whatever disaster idea she had, she already did it, and she’s just here to sell Dixon the aftermath, like Dixon has any choice. “So we cant afford a workbot because they keep their value, right? But there are plenty of ‘botics that don’t—”
“We ain’t gonna fix the drive with a third-hand automated frycook or whatever lemon some guy in a bar said was a great franchise investment after six beers together,” Dixon says, a trifle sharp.
“I know that,” Laurel says, patient, as if she’s being saintly. “I know. We need manual labour. So, you know, there was this estate sale, and they were selling off a manual labour bot swarm, and I know! I know! They ain’t engineering bots! But we can make up for that because if you’re bidding on something with fuck-all resale value, you can pick up the whole job lot! Many hands, light work, right?”
“What the hells kind of workbot has no resale value?” Dixon snaps, and Laurel nearly — very nearly, just for a flicker of a moment, looks uneasy or embarrassed or like she has a tenth of an ounce of shame distributed across her entire mass.
“Well—” she says, but Dixon’s already strode to the railing to stare down over the cargo floor, where a neat and extensive phalanx of robotgirls in maid’s uniforms are trooping up the boarding ramp.
