concentrating on something entirely virtual, which meant that she leaned back against Kas, her head lolling on Kas’s shoulder and her short hair tickling Kas’s nose. Kas had started out with her hands on the armrests, but Zhi had rested her own hands on top of them, and after a few embarrassed moments Kas had pulled hers away. For lack of anything better to do, she’d fastened them around Zhi’s midsection, as though they were riding a speeder bike. Whenever Zhi shifted or stretched, it did interesting things to the toned muscle under Kas’s fingers.
Gneisin had complained about not having had an in-flesh fuck for months. For Kas it had been . . . well, she wasn’t eager to compute the exact length of her abstinence, but considerably longer, since before her promotion from Scholar-Apprentice. Sim-flings were perfectly satisfying, and considerably less complicated than the alternative. So she’d always told herself, anyway. The degree to which Zhi’s warmth pressing against her made it hard to concentrate argued that perhaps the satisfaction wasn’t quite perfect.
It was with some difficulty, therefore, that she turned her attention to Alpha Zero’s code, and the hacked-together OS layer that Zhi was attempting to bolt on top of it. With her neural lace down and her jacks just barely operating—Kas still didn’t fully trust the shielding gel—she had none of the usual tools or visualizations she was used to. Instead, she had an image coming over the link from Zhi, sketchy and flickering, annotated with the girl’s cryptic explanations. It was an operating environment to make the most hardened software tech weep with frustration, and Kas had to keep reminding herself that Zhi was maintaining this construct in her actual brain. That was a feat that Kas herself certainly couldn’t have managed.
She was pleased to find that she could contribute, though. Zhi was obviously a self-taught coder, and a relatively good one, able to hack together the chunks of software tied from the various scraps Solomon had salvaged. Alpha Zero’s Third-Empire systems, however, were another matter altogether, arcane and indecipherable unless you were familiar with the coding standards and frameworks of the day. Which, as it happened, Kas was. So they quickly learned to operate in an efficient tandem, Zhi creating the links on the modern side, Kas showing her where to slide them into Alpha Zero’s operational layer to replace the warbot’s destroyed OS.
It was slow, painstaking work, made all the worse by the knowledge that if they were on a civilized planet, where Kas could use her implants and access a decent reference library, it could have been an order of magnitude faster. For that matter, it was quite possible there was a way to cleanly rebuild Alpha Zero’s original OS buried in a ROM, but without the ability to link into its deeper layers, there was no way to access it. As it was, by the end of the day they’d made considerable progress, but there was a long way to go before they had something that would function.
Zhi pulled the leads from her jacks, and Kas’s view of the codebase winked out. The girl stretched, her bottom shifting on Kas’s thighs, and got to her feet. Sweat ran out of her hair and trickled down her face, and her collar was soaked. Between the two of them and all the gear, the cockpit was a sauna, and Kas’s own undershirt was sticky against her skin.
“Well,” Zhi said, turning to look at her. “Not easy, but at least we’re getting somewhere, yeah?”
“Seems like it,” Kas said. She felt unaccountably out of breath.
Zhi grabbed the edge of the cockpit, hoisted herself smoothly up, and held out a hand. Kas took it, gratefully, and they stood together for a moment on Alpha Zero’s shoulder, luxuriating in the cooler air of the hangar.
“I should . . . get back,” Kas said. “I think Firidi’s given up on trying to make me behave, but if I stay away for too long they might send out a search party.”
“Right,” Zhi said. “And I don’t know about you, but I’m ravenous.”
“You’ve got enough food down here?” Kas said. She hadn’t thought, until now, about how Zhi was surviving cut off from the rest of scav society.
“Oh, yeah. I stocked my bolthole with plenty of water-an’-sludge.” Zhi paused. “You’ll be back tomorrow?”
Kas nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good. I ’ent sure I can finish this without you.” Zhi wiped sweat from her forehead. “You’ve got a real way with the old stuff, that’s for